Because 4 March 1917 was a Sunday, Woodrow Wilson began
his second term as President of the United States on March 5.
After two days of rain it was cold and windy.
The audience of 40,000 people could not hear his words,
and there was little or no applause at the end.
Wilson, reading his address aloud while standing in the wind,
caught a cold that lasted several days.
As usual Wilson’s words were very thoughtful,
and his speech could be read by many people in newspapers.
This is his entire second inaugural address:
My Fellow Citizens:
The four years which have elapsed since last I stood
in this place have been crowded with counsel
and action of the most vital interest and consequence.
Perhaps no equal period in our history has been so fruitful
of important reforms in our economic and industrial life
or so full of significant changes
in the spirit and purpose of our political action.
We have sought very thoughtfully to set our house in order,
correct the grosser errors and abuses of our industrial life,
liberate and quicken the processes
of our national genius and energy, and lift our politics
to a broader view of the people’s essential interests.
It is a record of singular variety and singular distinction.
But I shall not attempt to review it.
It speaks for itself and will be of increasing influence
as the years go by.
This is not the time for retrospect.
It is time rather to speak our thoughts and purposes
concerning the present and the immediate future.
Although we have centered counsel and action with such
unusual concentration and success upon the great problems
of domestic legislation to which we addressed ourselves
four years ago, other matters have more and more
forced themselves upon our attention—
matters lying outside our own life as a nation
and over which we had no control, but which,
despite our wish to keep free of them, have drawn us more
and more irresistibly into their own current and influence.
It has been impossible to avoid them.
They have affected the life of the whole world.
They have shaken men everywhere with a passion
and an apprehension they never knew before.
It has been hard to preserve calm counsel
while the thought of our own people swayed
this way and that under their influence.
We are a composite and cosmopolitan people.
We are of the blood of all the nations that are at war.
The currents of our thoughts as well as the currents
of our trade run quick at all seasons
back and forth between us and them.
The war inevitably set its mark from the first
alike upon our minds, our industries,
our commerce, our politics and our social action.
To be indifferent to it, or independent of it,
was out of the question.
And yet all the while we have been conscious
that we were not part of it.
In that consciousness, despite many divisions,
we have drawn closer together.
We have been deeply wronged upon the seas,
but we have not wished to wrong or injure in return;
have retained throughout the consciousness
of standing in some sort apart, intent upon an interest
that transcended the immediate issues of the war itself.
As some of the injuries done us have become intolerable
we have still been clear that we wished nothing
for ourselves that we were not ready to demand
for all mankind—fair dealing, justice, the freedom to live
and to be at ease against organized wrong.
It is in this spirit and with this thought that we have grown
more and more aware, more and more certain that
the part we wished to play was the part of those
who mean to vindicate and fortify peace.
We have been obliged to arm ourselves to make good
our claim to a certain minimum
of right and of freedom of action.
We stand firm in armed neutrality since it seems that
in no other way we can demonstrate what it is
we insist upon and cannot forget.
We may even be drawn on, by circumstances,
not by our own purpose or desire,
to a more active assertion of our rights
as we see them and a more immediate
association with the great struggle itself.
But nothing will alter our thought or our purpose.
They are too clear to be obscured.
They are too deeply rooted in the principles
of our national life to be altered.
We desire neither conquest nor advantage.
We wish nothing that can be had
only at the cost of another people.
We always professed unselfish purpose and we covet
the opportunity to prove our professions are sincere.
There are many things still to be done at home,
to clarify our own politics and add new vitality
to the industrial processes of our own life,
and we shall do them as time and opportunity serve,
but we realize that the greatest things that remain
to be done must be done with the whole world for stage
and in cooperation with the wide
and universal forces of mankind,
and we are making our spirits ready for those things.
We are provincials no longer.
The tragic events of the thirty months of vital turmoil
through which we have just passed
have made us citizens of the world.
There can be no turning back.
Our own fortunes as a nation are involved
whether we would have it so or not.
And yet we are not the less Americans on that account.
We shall be the more American if we but remain true
to the principles in which we have been bred.
They are not the principles
of a province or of a single continent.
We have known and boasted all along that
they were the principles of a liberated mankind.
These, therefore, are the things we shall stand for,
whether in war or in peace:
That all nations are equally interested in the peace
of the world and in the political stability of free peoples,
and equally responsible for their maintenance;
that the essential principle of peace is the actual
equality of nations in all matters of right or privilege;
that peace cannot securely or justly
rest upon an armed balance of power;
that governments derive all their just powers
from the consent of the governed and that no other powers
should be supported by the common thought,
purpose or power of the family of nations;
that the seas should be equally free and safe
for the use of all peoples, under rules set up by common
agreement and consent, and that, so far as practicable,
they should be accessible to all upon equal terms;
that national armaments shall be limited
to the necessities of national order and domestic safety;
that the community of interest and of power upon which
peace must henceforth depend imposes upon each nation
the duty of seeing to it that all influences proceeding
from its own citizens meant to encourage
or assist revolution in other states should be
sternly and effectually suppressed and prevented.
I need not argue these principles to you,
my fellow countrymen; they are your own part and parcel
of your own thinking and your own motives in affairs.
They spring up native amongst us.
Upon this as a platform of purpose
and of action we can stand together.
And it is imperative that we should stand together.
We are being forged into a new unity amidst the fires
that now blaze throughout the world.
In their ardent heat we shall, in God’s Providence,
let us hope, be purged of faction and division,
purified of the errant humors of party
and of private interest, and shall stand forth in the days
to come with a new dignity of national pride and spirit.
Let each man see to it that the dedication is
in his own heart, the high purpose of the nation
in his own mind, ruler of his own will and desire.
I stand here and have taken the high and solemn oath
to which you have been audience
because the people of the United States have chosen me
for this august delegation of power and have by their
gracious judgment named me their leader in affairs.
I know now what the task means.
I realize to the full the responsibility which it involves.
I pray God I may be given the wisdom and the prudence
to do my duty in the true spirit of this great people.
I am their servant and can succeed only as they sustain
and guide me by their confidence and their counsel.
The thing I shall count upon,
the thing without which neither
counsel nor action will avail, is the unity of America—
an America united in feeling, in purpose
and in its vision of duty, of opportunity and of service.
We are to beware of all men who would turn the tasks
and the necessities of the nation to their own private profit
or use them for the building up of private power.
United alike in the conception of our duty
and in the high resolve to perform it in the face of all men,
let us dedicate ourselves to the great task
to which we must now set our hand.
For myself I beg your tolerance,
your countenance and your united aid.
The shadows that now lie dark upon our path
will soon be dispelled, and we shall walk
with the light all about us if we be but true to ourselves—
to ourselves as we have wished to be known
in the counsels of the world and in the thought of all those
who love liberty and justice and the right exalted.1Four years later on 4 March 1921 the inaugural address
by the Republican President Warren Harding would be amplified by electricity
for the audience and would be heard by millions on radio as he spoke.
In the afternoon Wilson and his wife Edith reviewed
the inaugural parade by standing outside the White House.
After nine they were driven through the streets and were cheered.
On March 7 Wilson advised the French Ambassador
Jean Jules Jusserand that he wanted to see a scientific and just peace.
He realized that forming the league of nations would progress slowly.
About this time Wilson outlined for the
State Department the following Bases of Peace:1. Mutual guarantee of political independence,—
absolute in all domestic matters,
limited to external affairs only by the rights of other nations.
2. Mutual guarantee of territorial integrity.
3. Mutual guarantee against such economic warfare
as would in effect constitute an effort to throttle
the industrial life of a nation or shut it off
from equal opportunities of trade with the rest of the world.
4. Limitation of armaments, whether on land or sea,
to the necessities of internal order
and the probable demands of cooperation
in making good the foregoing guarantees.2
President Wilson called a special session of Congress
to vote on the treaty with Colombia.
Republicans led by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts
blocked ratification, and the Senate adjourned on March 16.
The German Admiralty had announced on March 2 that
submarines would be sinking all ships without warning.
American antiwar leaders still supported armed neutrality
as the best way to defend American commerce.
Secretary of State Robert Lansing met with Wilson on March 7,
and the next day Wilson conferred with the Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels.
They considered three policies:
1) armed merchant ships to shoot at submarines,
2) to do so only in war zones, and
3) require merchant ships to submit to searches
or resist unlawful attacks by submarines.
In Vienna the US Ambassador Frederick Penfield met with
Austria-Hungary’s Foreign Minister Ottokar Czernin again on March 13.
Emperor Karl I explained that it would take six weeks
to inform submarines of new orders.
Railroad workers were planning to begin a strike on March 17,
and the Wilson Administration managed to get them
to agree not to do so on March 19.
On that day the editor Frank I. Cobb said that Wilson told him,
War would mean that we should lose our heads
along with the rest and stop weighing right and wrong….
Once lead this people into war,
and they’ll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance.
To fight you must be brutal and ruthless,
and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very
fibre of our national life, infecting Congress, the courts,
the policeman on the beat, the man in the street.3
William Allen White reported that Wilson had told Cobb that
the vast majority expected him “to find a way to keep the country out of the war.”
Then Wilson said,
I do not want war, yet I do not know
that I can keep the country out of the War.
That depends on Germany,
and I have no control over Germany.
But I intend to handle this situation in such a manner
that every American citizen will know
that the United States Government
has done everything it could to prevent war.
Then if war comes, we shall have a united country,
and with a united country
there need be no fear about the result.4
The United States Ambassador David R. Francis in Petrograd
granted formal recognition of the Foreign Minister Paul Milyukov
and Minister of Justice Alexander Kerensky in Russia on March 22.
Wilson met with his Cabinet on March 20, and Secretary of State Lansing
described in his diary how each of the ten Department heads
spoke for war against Germany.
Lansing concluded,
I am sure that every member of the Cabinet felt
the vital importance of the occasion and spoke
with a full realization of the grave responsibility
which rested upon him as he advised the President
to adopt a course which if followed can only mean open
and vigorous war against the Kaiser and his Government.
The solemnity of the occasion as one after another spoke
was increasingly impressive and showed
in every man’s face as he rose from the council table
and prepared to leave the room.
Lane, Houston and Redfield, however, did not hide
their gratification, and I believe we all felt a deep sense
of relief that not a dissenting voice had been raised
to break the unanimity of opinion
that there should be no further parley or delay.
The ten councilors of the President had spoken as one,
and he—well, no one could be sure that
he would echo the same opinion and act accordingly.5
The next day President Wilson requested that the Congress meet on April 2
“to receive a communication concerning grave matters of national policy.”
On March 29 the Secretary of War Newton D. Baker submitted
a new army bill that called all of the National Guard into federal service
and authorized the first unit of 500,000 men “exclusively by selective draft.”
In March the loss of Allied and neutral shipping had been
about 600,000 tons and would be almost 900,000 in April.
On April 2 about 1,500 people from the Emergency Peace Federation
demonstrated in front of the Capital.
Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts got into a fight
with one of them, and Capitol police severely beat the protester.
Lodge said,
At my age there is a certain folly about the whole thing,
and yet I am glad that I hit him.
The Senators all appeared to be perfectly delighted
with my having done so.6
In the House of Representatives that day the 214 Democrats with
3 Progressives elected Champ Clark their Speaker again over 205 Republicans.
President Wilson came to the House Chamber in the evening
and spoke to the cheering Representatives from 8:32 to 9:11.
Here is the entire historic speech:
I have called the Congress into extraordinary session
because there are serious, very serious,
choices of policy to be made, and made immediately,
which it was neither right nor constitutionally permissible
that I should assume the responsibility of making.
On the 3rd of February last, I officially laid before you
the extraordinary announcement of the Imperial German
government that on and after the 1st day of February
it was its purpose to put aside all restraints of law
or of humanity and use its submarines to sink every vessel
that sought to approach either the ports of Great Britain
and Ireland or the western coasts of Europe
or any of the ports controlled
by the enemies of Germany within the Mediterranean.
That had seemed to be the object
of the German submarine warfare earlier in the war,
but since April of last year the Imperial government
had somewhat restrained the commanders
of its undersea craft in conformity with its promise
then given to us that passenger boats should not be sunk
and that due warning would be given to all other vessels
which its submarines might seek to destroy,
when no resistance was offered or escape attempted,
and care taken that their crews were given at least
a fair chance to save their lives in their open boats.
The precautions taken were meager and haphazard enough,
as was proved in distressing instance after instance
in the progress of the cruel and unmanly business,
but a certain degree of restraint was observed.
The new policy has swept every restriction aside.
Vessels of every kind, whatever their flag, their character,
their cargo, their destination, their errand,
have been ruthlessly sent to the bottom without warning
and without thought of help or mercy for those on board,
the vessels of friendly neutrals
along with those of belligerents.
Even hospital ships and ships carrying relief
to the sorely bereaved and stricken people of Belgium,
though the latter were provided with safe conduct
through the proscribed areas
by the German government itself
and were distinguished by unmistakable marks of identity,
have been sunk with the same reckless
lack of compassion or of principle.
I was for a little while unable to believe that
such things would in fact be done by any government
that had hitherto subscribed
to the humane practices of civilized nations.
International law had its origin in the attempt to set up some
law which would be respected and observed upon the seas,
where no nation had right of dominion
and where lay the free highways of the world.
By painful stage after stage has that law been built up,
with meager enough results, indeed,
after all was accomplished that could be accomplished,
but always with a clear view, at least,
of what the heart and conscience of mankind demanded.
This minimum of right the German government
has swept aside under the plea of retaliation and necessity
and because it had no weapons which it could use at sea
except these which it is impossible to employ
as it is employing them without throwing to the winds
all scruples of humanity or of respect for the understandings
that were supposed to underlie the intercourse of the world.
I am not now thinking of the loss of property involved,
immense and serious as that is, but only of the wanton
and wholesale destruction of the lives of noncombatants,
men, women, and children, engaged in pursuits
which have always, even in the darkest periods
of modern history, been deemed innocent and legitimate.
Property can be paid for;
the lives of peaceful and innocent people cannot be.
The present German submarine warfare
against commerce is a warfare against mankind.
It is a war against all nations.
American ships have been sunk, American lives taken
in ways which it has stirred us very deeply to learn of;
but the ships and people of other neutral
and friendly nations have been sunk
and overwhelmed in the waters in the same way.
There has been no discrimination.
The challenge is to all mankind.
Each nation must decide for itself how it will meet it.
The choice we make for ourselves must be made with
a moderation of counsel and a temperateness of judgment
befitting our character and our motives as a nation.
We must put excited feeling away.
Our motive will not be revenge or the victorious assertion
of the physical might of the nation,
but only the vindication of right, of human right,
of which we are only a single champion.
When I addressed the Congress
on the 26th of February last, I thought that
it would suffice to assert our neutral rights with arms,
our right to use the seas against unlawful interference,
our right to keep our people safe against unlawful violence.
But armed neutrality, it now appears, is impracticable.
Because submarines are in effect outlaws when used
as the German submarines have been used
against merchant shipping,
it is impossible to defend ships against their attacks
as the law of nations has assumed that
merchantmen would defend themselves against privateers
or cruisers, visible craft giving chase upon the open sea.
It is common prudence in such circumstances,
grim necessity indeed, to endeavor to destroy them
before they have shown their own intention.
They must be dealt with upon sight, if dealt with at all.
The German government denies
the right of neutrals to use arms at all
within the areas of the sea which it has proscribed,
even in the defense of rights which no modern publicist
has ever before questioned their right to defend.
The intimation is conveyed that the armed guards
which we have placed on our merchant ships
will be treated as beyond the pale of law
and subject to be dealt with as pirates would be.
Armed neutrality is ineffectual enough at best;
in such circumstances and in the face
of such pretensions it is worse than ineffectual:
it is likely only to produce what it was meant to prevent;
it is practically certain to draw us into the war
without either the rights or the effectiveness of belligerents.
There is one choice we cannot make,
we are incapable of making:
we will not choose the path of submission
and suffer the most sacred rights of our nation
and our people to be ignored or violated.
The wrongs against which we now array ourselves
are no common wrongs;
they cut to the very roots of human life.
With a profound sense of the solemn
and even tragical character of the step I am taking
and of the grave responsibilities which it involves,
but in unhesitating obedience to what
I deem my constitutional duty,
I advise that the Congress declare
the recent course of the Imperial German government
to be in fact nothing less than war
against the government and people of the United States;
that it formally accept the status of belligerent
which has thus been thrust upon it;
and that it take immediate steps, not only to put the country
in a more thorough state of defense
but also to exert all its power and employ all its resources
to bring the government of the German Empire
to terms and end the war.
What this will involve is clear.
It will involve the utmost practicable cooperation in counsel
and action with the governments now at war with Germany,
and, as incident to that, the extension to those governments
of the most liberal financial credits, in order that
our resources may so far as possible be added to theirs.
It will involve the organization and mobilization of all
the material resources of the country
to supply the materials of war and serve
the incidental needs of the nation in the most abundant
and yet the most economical and efficient way possible.
It will involve the immediate full equipment of the Navy
in all respects but particularly in supplying it with
the best means of dealing with the enemy’s submarines.
It will involve the immediate addition to the armed forces
of the United States already provided for by law
in case of war at least 500,000 men, who should,
in my opinion, be chosen upon the principle
of universal liability to service, and also the authorization
of subsequent additional increments of equal force
so soon as they may be needed
and can be handled in training.
It will involve also, of course, the granting
of adequate credits to the government, sustained,
I hope, so far as they can equitably be sustained
by the present generation, by well-conceived taxation.
I say sustained so far as may be equitable by taxation
because it seems to me that
it would be most unwise to base the credits
which will now be necessary entirely on money borrowed.
It is our duty, I most respectfully urge, to protect our people
so far as we may against the very serious hardships
and evils which would be likely to arise
out of the inflation which would be produced by vast loans.
In carrying out the measures by which these things
are to be accomplished, we should keep constantly in mind
the wisdom of interfering as little as possible
in our own preparation and in the equipment
of our own military forces with the duty,—
for it will be a very practical duty,—
of supplying the nations already at war with Germany
with the materials which they can obtain
only from us or by our assistance.
They are in the field, and we should help them
in every way to be effective there.
I shall take the liberty of suggesting, through
the several executive departments of the government,
for the consideration of your committees,
measures for the accomplishment
of the several objects I have mentioned.
I hope that it will be your pleasure to deal with them
as having been framed after very careful thought
by the branch of the government upon which
the responsibility of conducting the war
and safeguarding the nation will most directly fall.
While we do these things,
these deeply momentous things,
let us be very clear, and make very clear to all the world,
what our motives and our objects are.
My own thought has not been driven
from its habitual and normal course
by the unhappy events of the last two months,
and I do not believe that the thought
of the nation has been altered or clouded by them.
I have exactly the same things in mind now
that I had in mind when I addressed
the Senate on the 22nd of January last;
the same that I had in mind when I addressed the Congress
on the 3rd of February and on the 26th of February.
Our object now, as then, is to vindicate the principles
of peace and justice in the life of the world
as against selfish and autocratic power
and to set up among the really free and self-governed
peoples of the world such a concert of purpose and of action
as will henceforth ensure the observance of those principles.
Neutrality is no longer feasible or desirable
where the peace of the world is involved
and the freedom of its peoples,
and the menace to that peace and freedom
lies in the existence of autocratic governments backed
by organized force which is controlled wholly by their will,
not by the will of their people.
We have seen the last of neutrality in such circumstances.
We are at the beginning of an age in which
it will be insisted that the same standards of conduct
and of responsibility for wrong done shall be observed
among nations and their governments that are observed
among the individual citizens of civilized states.
We have no quarrel with the German people.
We have no feeling toward them
but one of sympathy and friendship.
It was not upon their impulse
that their government acted in entering this war.
It was not with their previous knowledge or approval.
It was a war determined upon as wars used to be
determined upon in the old, unhappy days
when peoples were nowhere consulted by their rulers,
and wars were provoked and waged in the interest
of dynasties or of little groups of ambitious men who were
accustomed to use their fellowmen as pawns and tools.
Self-governed nations do not fill their neighbor states
with spies or set the course of intrigue to bring about
some critical posture of affairs which will give them
an opportunity to strike and make conquest.
Such designs can be successfully worked out
only under cover and where no one
has the right to ask questions.
Cunningly contrived plans of deception or aggression,
carried, it may be, from generation to generation,
can be worked out and kept from the light
only within the privacy of courts
or behind the carefully guarded confidences
of a narrow and privileged class.
They are happily impossible where
public opinion commands and insists upon
full information concerning all the nation’s affairs.
A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained
except by a partnership of democratic nations.
No autocratic government could be trusted to keep faith
within it or observe its covenants.
It must be a league of honor, a partnership of opinion.
Intrigue would eat its vitals away;
the plottings of inner circles who could plan
what they would and render account to no one
would be a corruption seated at its very heart.
Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honor
steady to a common end and prefer the interests of mankind
to any narrow interest of their own.
Does not every American feel that assurance has been
added to our hope for the future peace of the world
by the wonderful and heartening things that
have been happening within the last few weeks in Russia?
Russia was known by those who knew it best
to have been always in fact democratic at heart,
in all the vital habits of her thought,
in all the intimate relationships of her people that spoke
their natural instinct, their habitual attitude toward life.
The autocracy that crowned the summit
of her political structure, long as it had stood
and terrible as was the reality of its power,
was not in fact Russian in origin, character, or purpose;
and now it has been shaken off,
and the great, generous Russian people
have been added in all their naive majesty and might
to the forces that are fighting
for freedom in the world, for justice, and for peace.
Here is a fit partner for a League of Honor.
One of the things that has served to convince us that
the Prussian autocracy was not and could never be
our friend is that from the very outset of the present war
it has filled our unsuspecting communities
and even our offices of government with spies
and set criminal intrigues everywhere afoot against
our national unity of counsel, our peace within and without,
our industries and our commerce.
Indeed, it is now evident that
its spies were here even before the war began;
and it is unhappily not a matter of conjecture
but a fact proved in our courts of justice that
the intrigues which have more than once
come perilously near to disturbing the peace
and dislocating the industries of the country
have been carried on at the instigation, with the support,
and even under the personal direction
of official agents of the Imperial government
accredited to the government of the United States.
Even in checking these things and trying to extirpate them,
we have sought to put the most generous interpretation
possible upon them because we knew that their source lay,
not in any hostile feeling or purpose of the German people
toward us (who were no doubt as ignorant of them
as we ourselves were)
but only in the selfish designs of a government
that did what it pleased and told its people nothing.
But they have played their part in serving to convince us
at last that that government entertains
no real friendship for us and means to act
against our peace and security at its convenience.
That it means to stir up enemies against us
at our very doors the intercepted note
to the German minister at Mexico City is eloquent evidence.
We are accepting this challenge of hostile purpose
because we know that in such a government,
following such methods, we can never have a friend;
and that in the presence of its organized power,
always lying in wait to accomplish
we know not what purpose, there can be no assured security
for the democratic Governments of the world.
We are now about to accept gauge of battle
with this natural foe to liberty and shall,
if necessary, spend the whole force of the nation
to check and nullify its pretensions and its power.
We are glad, now that we see the facts
with no veil of false pretense about them,
to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world
and for the liberation of its peoples,
the German peoples included:
for the rights of nations great and small
and the privilege of men everywhere
to choose their way of life and of obedience.
The world must be made safe for democracy.
Its peace must be planted
upon the tested foundations of political liberty.
We have no selfish ends to serve.
We desire no conquest, no dominion.
We seek no indemnities for ourselves,
no material compensation for the sacrifices
we shall freely make.
We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind.
We shall be satisfied
when those rights have been made as secure
as the faith and the freedom of nations can make them.
Just because we fight without rancor
and without selfish object, seeking nothing for ourselves
but what we shall wish to share with all free peoples,
we shall, I feel confident, conduct our operations
as belligerents without passion and ourselves observe
with proud punctilio the principles of right
and of fair play we profess to be fighting for.
I have said nothing of the governments
allied with the Imperial government of Germany
because they have not made war upon us
or challenged us to defend our right and our honor.
The Austro-Hungarian government has, indeed, avowed
its unqualified endorsement and acceptance
of the reckless and lawless submarine warfare adopted now
without disguise by the Imperial German government,
and it has therefore not been possible for this government
to receive Count Tarnowski, the ambassador
recently accredited to this government
by the Imperial and Royal government of Austria-Hungary;
but that government has not actually engaged in warfare
against citizens of the United States on the seas,
and I take the liberty, for the present at least, of postponing
a discussion of our relations with the authorities at Vienna.
We enter this war only where we are clearly forced into it
because there are no other means of defending our rights.
It will be all the easier for us to conduct ourselves
as belligerents in a high spirit of right and fairness
because we act without animus,
not in enmity toward a people or with the desire
to bring any injury or disadvantage upon them,
but only in armed opposition to an irresponsible government
which has thrown aside all considerations of humanity
and of right and is running amuck.
We are, let me say again,
the sincere friends of the German people,
and shall desire nothing so much as
the early reestablishment of intimate relations
of mutual advantage between us,—
however hard it may be for them, for the time being,
to believe that this is spoken from our hearts.
We have borne with their present government
through all these bitter months because of that friendship,—
exercising a patience and forbearance
which would otherwise have been impossible.
We shall, happily, still have an opportunity
to prove that friendship in our daily attitude and actions
toward the millions of men and women of German birth
and native sympathy who live among us and share our life,
and we shall be proud to prove it toward all
who are in fact loyal to their neighbors
and to the government in the hour of test.
They are, most of them, as true and loyal Americans
as if they had never known any other fealty or allegiance.
They will be prompt to stand with us
in rebuking and restraining the few
who may be of a different mind and purpose.
If there should be disloyalty, it will be dealt with
with a firm hand of stern repression;
but, if it lifts its head at all,
it will lift it only here and there and without countenance
except from a lawless and malignant few.
It is a distressing and oppressive duty,
gentlemen of the Congress,
which I have performed in thus addressing you.
There are, it may be, many months
of fiery trial and sacrifice ahead of us.
It is a fearful thing
to lead this great peaceful people into war,
into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars,
civilization itself seeming to be in the balance.
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 governments,
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 itself 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.
God helping her, she can do no other.7
On April 4 the Senators Robert La Follette of Wisconsin
and George W. Norris of Nebraska spoke against the war.
The Senate passed the war resolution 82 to 6,
and on the 6th the House approved it 373 to 50.
The United States announced by telegraph and wireless radio that it was at war.
President Wilson signed the proclamation and met with his Cabinet.
The government took control of radio stations,
and 91 German ships in American ports were taken into custody.
On April 13 President Wilson used an executive order to establish
the Committee on Public Information (CPI), and on the 15th
he issued “An Appeal to the American People” that
was printed in the New York Times the next day.
My Fellow-Countrymen:
The entrance of our own beloved country into the grim
and terrible war for democracy and human rights
which has shaken the world creates so many problems
of national life and action which call for immediate
consideration and settlement that I hope you will permit me
to address to you a few words of earnest counsel
and appeal with regard to them.
We are rapidly putting our navy upon an effective war
footing and are about to create and equip a great army,
but these are the simplest parts of the great task
to which we have addressed ourselves.
There is not a single selfish element, so far as I can see,
in the cause we are fighting for.
We are fighting for what we believe
and wish to be the rights of mankind
and for the future peace and security of the world.
To do this great thing worthily and successfully
we must devote ourselves to the service
without regard to profit or material advantage
and with an energy and intelligence
that will rise to the level of the enterprise itself.
We must realize to the full how great the task is
and how many things, how many kinds and elements
of capacity and service and self-sacrifice, it involves.
These, then, are the things we must do, and do well,
besides fighting, the things without which
mere fighting would be fruitless:
We must supply abundant food for ourselves
and for our armies and our seamen not only,
but also for a large part of the nations
with whom we have now made common cause,
in whose support and by whose sides we shall be fighting….
It is evident to every thinking man that our industries,
on the farms, in the shipyards, in the mines, in the factories,
must be made more prolific and more efficient than ever
and that they must be more economically managed
and better adapted to the particular requirements
of our task than they have been;
and what I want to say is that the men and the women
who devote their thought and their energy to these things
will be serving the country and conducting the fight
for peace and freedom just as truly and just as effectively
as the men on the battlefield or in the trenches.
The industrial forces of the country, men and women alike,
will be a great national, a great international,
Service Army, a notable and honored host
engaged in the service of the nation and the world,
the efficient friends and saviors of free men everywhere.
Thousands, nay, hundreds of thousands, of men otherwise
liable to military service will of right and of necessity be
excused from that service and assigned to the fundamental,
sustaining work of the fields and factories and mines,
and they will be as much part of the great patriotic forces
of the nation as the men under fire….
Let me suggest, also, that everyone who creates
or cultivates a garden helps, and helps greatly,
to solve the problem of the feeding of the nations;
and that every housewife who practices strict economy
puts herself in the ranks of those who serve the nation.
This is the time for America to correct her
unpardonable fault of wastefulness and extravagance.
Let every man and every woman assume the duty
of careful, provident use and expenditure as a public duty,
as a dictate of patriotism which no one can now expect
ever to be excused or forgiven for ignoring.
In the hope that this statement of the needs of the nation
and of the world in this hour of supreme crisis
may stimulate those to whom it comes
and remind all who need reminder of the solemn duties
of a time such as the world has never seen before,
I beg that all editors and publishers everywhere
will give as prominent publication
and as wide circulation as possible to this appeal.
I venture to suggest, also, to all advertising agencies
that they would perhaps render a very substantial
and timely service to the country
if they would give it widespread repetition.
And I hope that clergymen will not think the theme of it
an unworthy or inappropriate subject
of comment and homily from their pulpits.
The supreme test of the nation has come.
We must all speak, act, and serve together!8
On April 18 President Wilson ordered government censorship
of cables, telephones, and telegraph lines,
and he approved the Navy’s use of wireless radio.
On April 21 Wilson’s executive order designated
“an interdepartmental” War Trade Committee.
On May 10 Wilson established the Red Cross
War Council to coordinate their services.
On May 14 Treasury Secretary William McAdoo made it known that
the Liberty Loan of 1917 would offer the public two billions in a bond issue.
On May 17 Wilson extended a discussion of censorship issues
to the Committee on Public Information (CPI),
and he gave this Preliminary Statement to the Press:
I can imagine no greater disservice to the country
than to establish a system of censorship that would
deny to the people of a free republic like our own
their indisputable right to criticize their own public officials.
While exercising the great powers of the office I hold,
I would regret in a crisis
like the one through which we are now passing
to lose the benefit of patriotic and intelligent criticism.9
Wilson appointed the muckraker George Creel to head the CPI
which Secretary of War Baker said was for “mobilizing the mind.”
Creel in his book How We Advertised America:
The First Telling of the Amazing Story of the Committee on
Public Information that Carried the Gospel of Americanism
to Every Corner of the Globe wrote,
The trial of strength was not only between massed bodies
of armed men, but between opposed ideals,
and moral verdicts took on
all the value of military decision.”10
CPI organized 75,000 speakers who gave over 750,000 speeches
including many four-minute talks between reels at movie theaters.
CPI claimed that there were about 300,000 foreign agents in the United States.
These Four Minute Men made short speeches in various public places
with some using Yiddish, Italian, Polish, Lithuanian, Armenian, and other languages.
On May 18 Wilson signed the Selective Service Act,
and his proclamation called for “all male persons
between the ages of 21 and 30” to register for the draft.
He wrote,
The whole Nation must be a team in which
each man shall play the part for which he is best fitted.
To this end, Congress has provided that
the Nation shall be organized for war by selection
and that each man shall be classified for service in the place
to which it shall best serve the general good to call him.11
On that day Wilson declined to accept Theodore Roosevelt’s
offer to create volunteer divisions.
Secretary of War Newton D. Baker announced that one division
would go to France led by Major General John J. Pershing,
and on May 24 Wilson sent Pershing to Europe with thousands of troops.
On May 19 Wilson provided Relief Commissioner Herbert Hoover
with specific powers to lead the Food Administration to meet the needs
of the war on prices, stocks, costs, practices, requisitioning,
licensing, and prohibiting hoarding and waste.
The United States at first pledged to export 20 million bushels of wheat,
and they managed to send 141 million.
Americans restrained their consumption of sugar
so that they could send 500,000 tons to Europe.
Albert M. Briggs on March 30 had founded the
American Protective League (APL) which would claim
250,000 members in 600 cities by 1919 when the APL
began to be used by the Justice Department and
J. Edgar Hoover’s General Intelligence Unit.
In the South the Ku Klux Klan recruited members from the APL.
Thomas Crockett, who was related to the famous “Davy,”
had fought Filipinos in 1906, and he commanded an APL unit.
In Chicago the utility Commonwealth Edison provided an office suite
to help Briggs and Crockett spread chapters throughout the country.
Members were generally white men, and
a colored man was rejected in San Francisco.
APL provided membership cards and a silver shield similar
to those of police officers, and they proclaimed that they were
organized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) which
was supported by about 2,000 APL members,
2,350 army and navy men, and more than 200 police officers.
Seattle’s APL chapter claimed that they had more than 10,000 investigations
and arrested 1,008 people for “Seditious Utterances,”
being “Disloyal Citizens,” and a few “Aliens” and people without support.
In over 2,000 cases under the Espionage Act only ten involved accusations
of spying for Germany, and none were discovered by the APL.
To celebrate Memorial Day on May 30 Wilson spoke
at Arlington Cemetery and suggested that America
has the duty to support those who “love liberty everywhere.”
He concluded that America “was born to serve mankind.”12
On May 31 in the first Liberty Loan drive Wilson invested $10,000.
On June 5 the young men of draft age were required to
register at polling places, and those failing to do so
could be punished with up to one year in prison.
Thousands of temporary marshals were deputized to guard the polling places.
Newspapers reported there were four anti-draft demonstrations,
and only four men were arrested.
They counted 10,264,896 who registered including
1,290,527 African Americans who were segregated.
There would be two more registration days, and the total would rise
to 23,900,000 of which 6,400,000 did military service
with 2,700,000 of them in the Army.
An additional 1,500,000 men enlisted giving the Army 4,200,000.
About half of those went to France.
The US Navy under Secretary Josephus Daniels increased from 65,000
to 500,000, and they transported the troops abroad without losing a ship.
During the war 768 US soldiers and sailors would be lost at sea.
Also on June 5 about 2,500 Irish and Finish miners
in Butte, Montana marched to protest the draft.
A fire began in a mine and burned for several days as at least 163 men died.
To celebrate Flag Day on June 14 Wilson gave a speech
near the Washington monument in which he mostly blamed the
“military masters of Germany” for the war and
explained how Austria-Hungary joined with them.
On June 15 the US Congress passed the Espionage Act which
was based on the Sedition Act under President John Adams.
The law criminalized “false, scandalous, and malicious writing,”
and offenders could be fined up to $10,000
and get as much as 20 years in prison.
On June 23 Wilson conferred with the Federal Trade Commission
to fix prices especially on coal.
That day the House of Representatives passed the Food bill that
was amended to prohibit using food materials in manufacturing liquor
during the war, and it authorized the President to
take command of stocks of distilled spirits.
On June 26 Wilson issued a bulletin that
explained how exports would be controlled.
Also on the 26th police were patrolled at the White House
and arrested suffragettes who were later released on bail.
That day War Secretary Baker informed the President that
Governor General Francis Burton Harrison of the Philippines
in a cable had offered to provide one infantry division of Filipinos.
Wilson approved transferring the matter to the Senate Committee
on Military Affairs so that a law would authorize those troops.
On June 30 President Wilson authorized taking over enemy ships
in the jurisdiction of the United States.
British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour telegraphed Wilson
asking for more small ships to fight against submarines.
On July 1 people protested the war in Boston by parading on the Common.
Those opposing them attacked the marchers.
Police did little to break up the riot of 20,000 people,
and they arrested only ten peace demonstrators.
On July 2 in East St. Louis a mob attacked the black community,
and thirty people died.
Phelps, Dodge & Co. and other mining companies owned
a massive lode of copper in the hills around Bisbee, Arizona.
Rifle cartridges used copper, and the war raised the price.
Bisbee’s mines began operating 24 hours a day, and copper profits rose.
In late June miners there organized through the
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) a.k.a. “Wobblies,” and they began a strike.
John Greenway had fought with Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders,
and Greenway and Phelps, Dodge persuaded the Bisbee sheriff to form
a vigilante posse with over 2,000 people wearing white armbands.
They raided the homes of striking copper workers.
On July 12 about 2,000 armed vigilantes led by a car
with a mounted machine gun captured 1,186 striking copper miners,
put them on freight and cattle cars, and took them to New Mexico.
After two days without food they were put in a stockade
where they were released in the desert.
Those who returned to Bisbee were arrested,
and a special pass was required to enter or leave the town.
In many places vigilantes forced people to buy war bonds,
and they called those who would not do so “bond slackers.”
University of California students at Berkeley burned the
tabernacle tent of a pacifist church and some wooden cottages.
In Seattle a mob caused $15,000 in damages to the presses
that had printed socialist and IWW newspapers.
The IWW activist Frank Little had been arrested in three states,
and he came to Butte, Montana.
He told a large crowd that they were not interested in the war,
and he called American soldiers “scabs in uniform.”
Little was threatened and eventually hanged.
In Washington the Vice President Thomas Marshall
cynically quipped, “A Little hanging goes a long way.”13
On July 12 President Wilson released a statement to the
American people on prices that began this way:
My Fellow Countrymen:
The Government is about to attempt to determine the prices
at which it will ask you henceforth to furnish
various supplies which are necessary
for the prosecution of the war and various materials
which will be needed in the industries
by which the war must be sustained.
We shall of course try to determine them justly
and to the best advantage of the nation as a whole;
but justice is easier to speak of than to arrive at,
and there are some considerations which I hope
we shall all keep steadily in mind
while this particular problem of justice is being worked out.
I therefore take the liberty of stating very candidly
my own view of the situation and of the principles
which should guide both the government
and the mine owners and manufacturers of the country
in this difficult matter.
A just price must, of course, be paid
for everything the government buys.
By a just price I mean a price which will sustain
the industries concerned in a high state of efficiency,
provide a living for those who conduct them,
enable them to pay good wages,
and make possible the expansions of their enterprises
which will from time to time become necessary
as the stupendous undertakings of this great war develop.
We could not wisely or reasonably
do less than pay such prices.
They are necessary for the maintenance
and development of industry;
and the maintenance and development of industry
are necessary for the great task we have in mind.14
On July 17 President Wilson sent a letter from Postmaster General
Burleson justifying canceling the mailing privileges of the New Masses
edited by Max Eastman to Amos Pinchot whose letter had protested this
and was signed by him, Eastman, and John Reed.
Wilson said he knew the editors and asked
Burleson to let the radicals “blow off steam.”
The editors appealed to the courts,
and that took the case away from the President.
The New Masses was shut down by the Espionage Act in 1918.
Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, and Upton Sinclair also pleaded
with Wilson to be more tolerant of radical dissent.
On July 28 Wilson wrote a letter to Secretary of Agriculture
D. F. Houston and the National Volunteer Committee on the
Preserving of Fruit and Garden Products as an Official Bulletin that begins:
I very earnestly desire to commend your plans
and to second your efforts to secure the conservation
of surpluses of perishable food products.
Out of the depths of their patriotism the farmers
of the Nation gave an immediate and effective response
to my appeal to increase production.
Providence favored them, and we have not only
the prospect of increased crops of a number of staples,
but also the certainty
of a large production of fruits and vegetables.
But increased production, important as it is,
is only a part of the solution of the food problem.
It is of the first importance that we take care of what
has been raised and make it available for consumption.
This task is of peculiar urgency
with reference to our perishable farm products.
It is essential not only that adequate measures be taken
to secure their conservation, but also that
the Department of Agriculture redouble its efforts
to assist producers in the matter of marketing.
I am informed that in many sections in which fruits
and vegetables have been produced in abundance
the people already are canning
and drying them in large quantities.
But we should be content with nothing short
of the perfection of organization
and should be unwilling that anything should be lost.
In this hour of peril I am concerned, as I know you are,
with the necessity of avoiding waste.
Every bushel of potatoes properly stored,
every pound of vegetables properly put by for future use,
every jar of fruit preserved,
add that much to our insurance of victory,
add that much to hasten the end of this conflict.
To win we must have maximum efficiency in all directions.
We cannot win without complete
and effective concentration of all our efforts.15
On July 19 Wilson pardoned all the militant suffragists
who had been sentenced to the workhouse.
They refused the pardon at first and then were persuaded to leave.
On July 20 the United States advanced $85 million dollars
to the British bringing the total debt to $770 million.
President Wilson met with his cabinet on July 24, and afterward
he signed the Aviation bill that appropriated $640 million.
Wilson had sent Elihu Root as the leader of a commission to Russia in June.
The Russian Provisional Government was organized on July 17
as the Russian Republic with Alexander Kerensky
as Minister-Chairman of the Russian Provisional Government.
Root promised them American financial aid if they fought against Austrian forces.
Their offensives against the Austrians failed by July 16.
On the 19th the Germans and Austro-Hungarians counter-attacked.
The Russians retreated 240 kilometers by July 23.
Two days later they abandoned Tarnopol and Stanislau.
On August 2 they deserted Czernowitz.
Root returned to the United States and met with President Wilson on August 8.
Also on August 8 Wilson wrote to Samuel Gompers about a telegram
he had received from the Arizona State Federation of Labor
in which their convention asked if Wilson was going to
act in restoring law and order in Cochise County, Arizona,
and return to their homes the deported men of Bisbee.
Are we to assume that Phelps Dodge interests
are superior to the principles of democracy?16
Gompers on the 10th wrote to Wilson apologizing for the tone
of the telegram and acknowledging his “high sense of justice and
consuming purpose to protect the rights and the needs of our people.”17
On August 11 Wilson boarded the dreadnought Pennsylvania
and gave the sailors a pep talk saying,
I have come here to have a look at you
and to say some things that perhaps may be intimately said
and, even though the company is large, said in confidence.
Of course, the whole circumstance of the modern time
is extraordinary, and I feel that,
just because the circumstances are extraordinary,
there is an opportunity to see to it
that the action is extraordinary….
Now, the point that is constantly in my mind, gentlemen,
is this: this is an unprecedented war and, therefore,
it is a war in one sense for amateurs.
Nobody ever before conducted a war like this
and therefore nobody can pretend
to be a professional in a war like this….
The experienced soldier—experienced in previous wars—
is a back number so far as his experience is concerned;
not so far as his intelligence is concerned.
His experience does not count, because he never fought
a war as this is being fought, and, therefore
he is an amateur along with the rest of us.
Now, somebody has got to think this war out.
Somebody has got to think out the way,
not only to fight the submarine,
but to do something different from what we are doing.
We are hunting hornets all over the farm
and letting the nest alone.
None of us knows how to go to the nest and crush it,
and yet I despair of hunting for hornets all over the sea
when I know where the nest is and know that the nest
is breeding hornets as fast as I can find them.
I am willing for my part, and I know you are willing
because I know the stuff you are made of—
I am willing to sacrifice
half the navy Great Britain and we together have
to crush that nest, because if we crush it, the war is won….
Thus we have got to throw tradition to the wind.
Now, as I have said, gentlemen, I take it for granted
that nothing that I say here will be repeated
and therefore I am going to say this:
Every time we have suggested anything
to the British Admiralty the reply has come back
that virtually amounted to this,
that it had never been done that way.
And I felt like saying,
“Well, nothing was ever done so systematically
as nothing is being done now.
Therefore, I should like to see something unusual happen,
something that was never done before.” …
Do not stop to think about what is prudent for a moment.
Do the thing that is audacious
to the utmost point of risk and daring,
because that is exactly the thing
that the other side does not understand.
And you will win by the audacity of method
when you cannot win by circumspection and prudence….
I have come down here to say also that
I depend on you, depend on you for brains
as well as training and courage and discipline.18
On August 14 China declared war against Germany and Austria-Hungary.
On the 16th an Official Bulletin announced that the Food Administration
by the President’s authority had formed a grain corporation with $50 million
of stock held by the Federal Government with Herbert Hoover
as chairman and Julius Barnes as president.
On August 17 in shipyards in the New York area
3,400 mechanics employed by the government began a strike.
On August 18 six militant suffragettes,
who had been arrested in front of the White House, refused to pay fines
and were sentenced to one month in the Occoquan Workhouse.
Also on that day British airplanes dropped
28,000 pounds of explosives on the enemy.
On August 27 President Wilson responded to the peace challenge
that Pope Benedictus XV had posed on August 1,
with a telegram signed by Secretary of State Robert Lansing
that concludes with this paragraph:
We cannot take the word of the present rulers of Germany
as a guarantee of anything that is to endure,
unless explicitly supported by such conclusive evidences
of the will and purpose of the German people themselves
as the other peoples of the world
would be justified in accepting.
Without such guarantees treaties of settlement,
agreements for disarmament,
covenants to set up arbitration in the place of force,
territorial adjustments, reconstitutions of small nations,
if made with the German Government,
no man, no nation could now depend on.
We must await some new evidence of the purposes
of the great peoples of the Central Powers.
God grant it may be given soon and in a way to restore
the confidence of all peoples everywhere in the faith
of nations and the possibility of a covenanted peace.19
President Wilson approved the raids by hundreds of law enforcement officers
of various kinds on all the 48 offices of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW),
and they arrested about 300 “Wobblies.”
In Chicago 166 were put on trial.
In the next two years about 400 more IWW members were arrested.
The Espionage Act was used to take away the mailing permits
of 44 American
periodicals including The Nation in New York and The Public in Chicago.
They also stopped the mailing of many pamphlets by the
National Civil Liberties Bureau that later became
the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
On September 7 the New York Times reported that an annual meeting
of the American Bar Association condemned “all attempts,
in Congress and out of it, to hinder and embarrass the Government of the
United States in carrying on the war” because they considered them “pro-German.”
On October 5 President Wilson wrote in a letter to the journalist David Lawrence:
My whole feeling is this:
I think you newspaper men can have no conception
of what fire you are playing with
when you discuss peace now at all,
in any phase or connection.
The Germans have in effect realized
their programme of Hamburg to Bagdad,
could afford to negotiate as to all the territorial fringes,
and, if they could bring about a discussion of peace now,
would insist upon discussing it upon terms
which would leave them in possession
of all that they ever expected to get.
It is, therefore, very indiscreet in my judgment
and altogether against the national interest
to discuss peace from any point of view
if the administration is brought in in any way.20
On October 25 Wilson replied to a delegation of suffragettes
from the state of New York, writing,
I am free to say that I think the question of woman suffrage
is one of those questions which lie at the foundation.
The world has witnessed a slow political reconstruction,
and men have generally been obliged
to be satisfied with the slowness of the process.
In a sense it is wholesome that it should be slow,
because then it is solid and sure;
but I believe that this war is going so to quicken
the convictions and the consciousness of mankind
with regard to political questions that
the speed of reconstruction will be greatly increased.
And I believe that just because we are quickened
by the questions of this war we ought to be quickened
to give this question of woman suffrage
our immediate consideration.
As one of the spokesmen of a great party,
I would be doing nothing less than obeying the mandates
of that party if I gave my hearty support to the question
of woman suffrage which you represent,
but I do not want to speak merely
as one of the spokesmen of a party.
I want to speak for myself and say that
it seems to me that this is the time
for the states of this Union to take this action.
I perhaps may be touched a little too much
by the traditions of our politics, traditions which
lay such questions almost entirely upon the states,
but I want to see communities declare themselves
quickened at this time
and show the consequence of the quickening.
I think the whole country has appreciated the way
in which the women have risen to this great occasion.
They not only have done what they have been asked to do
and done it with ardor and efficiency,
but they have shown a power to organize for doing things
of their own initiative which is quite a different thing
and a very much more difficult thing,
and I think the whole country has admired the spirit
and the capacity and the vision
of the women of the United States….
I, therefore, am very glad to add my voice to those
which are urging the people of the great state of New York
to set a great example by voting for woman suffrage.21
Italy had entered the World War in a bargain
that would give them more territory,
and on October 30 the United States extended $230 million in credit to Italy.
Also on that day the Assistant Secretary of the Navy
Franklin D. Roosevelt sent President Wilson the Memorandum
“Proposed measures to close English Channel and North Sea
against submarines by mine barrage.”
On November 6 the Bolsheviks took over Russia
from the liberal government of Kerensky.
President Wilson on November 7 issued this Thanksgiving Proclamation:
It has long been the honored custom of our people to turn
in the fruitful autumn of the year in praise and thanksgiving
to Almighty God for His many blessings
and mercies to us as a nation.
That custom we can follow now
even in the midst of the tragedy
of a world shaken by war and immeasurable disaster,
in the midst of sorrow and great peril, because
even amidst the darkness that has gathered about us
we can see the great blessings God has bestowed upon us,
blessings that are better than mere peace of mind
and prosperity of enterprise….
And while we render thanks for these things let us pray
Almighty God that in all humbleness of spirit
we may look always to Him for guidance;
that we may be kept constant
in the spirit and purpose of service; that by His grace
our minds may be directed and our hands strengthened;
and that in His good time liberty and security and peace
and the comradeship of a common justice
may be vouchsafed all the nations of the earth.
Wherefore, I, Woodrow Wilson,
President of the United States of America, do hereby
designate Thursday, the twenty-ninth day of November next
as a day of thanksgiving and prayer,
and invite the people throughout the land
to cease upon that day from their ordinary occupations
and in their several homes and places of worship
to render thanks to God, the great ruler of nations.22
President Wilson on November 9 appealed to the people
of the United States to join the American Red Cross writing,
Ten million Americans are invited
to join the American Red Cross
during the week ending with Christmas Eve.
The times require that every branch
of our great National effort shall be loyally upheld
and it is peculiarly fitting that at the Christmas season
the Red Cross should be the branch through which
your willingness to help is expressed.
You should join the American Red Cross because it alone
can carry the pledges of Christmas good-will to those
who are bearing for us the real burdens of the world war
both in our own Army and Navy and the nations upon whose
territory the issues of the world are being fought out.
Your evidence of faith in this work
is necessary for their heartening and cheer.
You should join the Red Cross because
this arm of the National service is steadily and efficiently
maintaining its overseas relief in every suffering land,
administering our millions wisely and well,
and awakening the gratitude of every people.23
On November 12 Wilson addressed the
American Federation of Labor Convention in Buffalo and said,
The war was started by Germany.
Her authorities deny that they started it,
but I am willing to let the statement I have just made
await the verdict of history.
And the thing that needs to be explained is
why Germany started the war….
There was nothing in the world of peace that
she did not already have, and have in abundance….
While we are fighting for freedom we must see,
among other things, that labor is free;
and that means a number of interesting things.
It means, not only that we must do
what we have declared our purpose to do—
see that the conditions of labor are not rendered
more onerous by the war—
but also that we shall see to it that the instrumentalities
by which the conditions of labor are improved
are not blocked or checked….
Nobody has a right to stop the processes of labor
until all the methods of conciliation
and settlement have been exhausted….
Everybody on both sides has now got to transact business,
and a settlement is never impossible
when both sides want to do the square and right thing.24
On that day an American agent in Cairo telegraphed Wilson that
before the Russian Revolution occurred, the Allies had agreed
on dismembering the Ottoman Empire by partitioning its various parts.
On November 13 Wilson wrote in a letter to his friend Frank Clark,
I have not lost faith in the Russian outcome by any means.
Russia, like France in a past century,
will no doubt have to go through deep waters
but she will come out upon firm land on the other side,
and her great people, for they are a great people,
will in my opinion take their proper place in the world.25
On November 15 Col. House telegraphed Wilson
that the military situation was critical.
British Prime Minister Lloyd George formed a
Supreme War Council to confer monthly.
House advised against a civil council and recommended
General Bliss for the military conference.
The philanthropist Cleveland Dodge sent a letter to President Wilson
advising that the United States not declare war against Turkey and Bulgaria
because of the effect it would have on missionary activities.
On December 5 Wilson wrote to Dodge:
Just a line to say that I sympathize with every word
of your letter of the second about war with Turkey
and am trying to hold the Congress back from following
its inclination to include all the allies of Germany
in a declaration of a state of war.
I hope with all my heart that I can succeed.26
On December 6 Rumania accepted a truce.
On December 10 Wilson was guided by advice to take over the railroads.
The next day his Cabinet discussed the railroad problem,
and that day President Wilson declared a state of war
between the United States and Austria-Hungary.
On December 15 the Bolsheviks at Brest-Litovsk signed a preliminary
peace with Germany and called for a conference of all the belligerent nations.
That treaty would enable 350,000 German soldiers to rejoin forces in France.
On December 26 Wilson nationalized the railroads, and the
United States Railroad Administration ran them from the 28th until 1 March 1920.
On December 29 Leon Trotsky made public his address
to the peoples and governments of the Allied nations,
and he urged them to negotiate peace with Germany.
He believed that would be “an enormous step forward.”
He urged the Allies to state their aims.
Then he warned,
If the Allied Governments in blind obstinacy,
which characterizes the falling and perishing classes,
again refuse to participate in the negotiations,
then the working class will be confronted
with the iron necessity of tearing the power out of the hands
of those who cannot or will not give peace to the nations.27
At the end of 1917 the Americans had 177,000 soldiers in France.
Treasury Secretary McAdoo used two Liberty Loans in 1917
and two in 1918 to raise almost $17 billion.
In the two fiscal years that began on 1 July 1917 the
United States Government spent $24.3 billion.
The Treasury raised $4.5 billion with a Victory Loan in 1919.
The Allies borrowed $9.5 billion from the United States.
On 4 December 1917 President Wilson delivered his Annual Message
on the State of the Union.
This is his complete speech:
Gentlemen of the Congress:
Eight months have elapsed
since I last had the honor of addressing you.
They have been months crowded with events
of immense and grave significance for us.
I shall not undertake to detail
or even to summarize those events.
The practical particulars of the part
we have played in them will be laid before you
in the reports of the executive departments.
I shall discuss only our present outlook
upon these vast affairs, our present duties,
and the immediate means of accomplishing
the objects we shall hold always in view.
I shall not go back to debate the causes of the war.
The intolerable wrongs done and planned against us
by the sinister masters of Germany have long since
become too grossly obvious and odious
to every true American to need to be rehearsed.
But I shall ask you to consider again
and with a very grave scrutiny our objectives
and the measures by which we mean to attain them;
for the purpose of discussion here in this place is action,
and our action must move straight toward definite ends.
Our object is, of course, to win the war;
and we shall not slacken
or suffer ourselves to be diverted until it is won.
But it is worthwhile asking and answering the question,
When shall we consider the war won?
From one point of view it is not necessary
to broach this fundamental matter.
I do not doubt that the American people know
what the war is about and what sort of an outcome
they will regard as a realization of their purpose in it.
As a nation we are united in spirit and intention.
I pay little heed to those who tell me otherwise.
I hear the voices of dissent—who does not?
I bear the criticism and the clamor
of the noisily thoughtless and troublesome.
I also see men here and there fling themselves
in impotent disloyalty against the calm,
indomitable power of the Nation.
I hear men debate peace who understand neither
its nature nor the way in which we may attain it
with uplifted eyes and unbroken spirits.
But I know that none of these speaks for the Nation.
They do not touch the heart of anything.
They may safely be left
to strut their uneasy hour and be forgotten.
But from another point of view I believe that
it is necessary to say plainly what we here
at the seat of action consider the war to be for
and what part we mean to play
in the settlement of its searching issues.
We are the spokesmen of the American people, and
they have a right to know whether their purpose is ours.
They desire peace by the overcoming of evil,
by the defeat once for all of the sinister forces
that interrupt peace and render it impossible,
and they wish to know how closely
our thought runs with theirs and what action we propose.
They are impatient with those who desire peace by any sort
of compromise deeply and indignantly impatient—
but they will be equally impatient with us
if we do not make it plain to them what our objectives are
and what we are planning for
in seeking to make conquest of peace by arms.
I believe that I speak for them when I say two things:
First, that this intolerable thing of which
the masters of Germany have shown us the ugly face,
this menace of combined intrigue and force
which we now see so clearly as the German power,
a thing without conscience
or honor of capacity for covenanted peace,
must be crushed and, if it be not utterly brought to an end,
at least shut out from the friendly intercourse of the nations;
and second, that when this thing and its power are indeed
defeated and the time comes that we can discuss peace
when the German people have spokesmen whose word
we can believe and when those spokesmen are ready
in the name of their people to accept the common judgment
of the nations as to what shall henceforth be the bases
of law and of covenant for the life of the world—
we shall be willing and glad to pay the full price for peace,
and pay it ungrudgingly.
We know what that price will be.
It will be full, impartial justice—justice done at every point
and to every nation that the final settlement must affect,
our enemies as well as our friends.
You catch, with me,
the voices of humanity that are in the air.
They grow daily more audible,
more articulate, more persuasive,
and they come from the hearts of men everywhere.
They insist that the war
shall not end in vindictive action of any kind;
that no nation or people shall be robbed or punished
because the irresponsible rulers of a single country
have themselves done deep and abominable wrong.
It is this thought that has been expressed in the formula,
“No annexations, no contributions, no punitive indemnities.”
Just because this crude formula expresses the instinctive
judgment as to right of plain men everywhere,
it has been made diligent use of by the masters of German
intrigue to lead the people of Russia astray and the people
of every other country their agents could reach,
in order that a premature peace might be brought
about before autocracy has been taught
its final and convincing lesson,
and the people of the world
put in control of their own destinies.
But the fact that a wrong use has been made
of a just idea is no reason why
a right use should not be made of it.
It ought to be brought under
the patronage of its real friends.
Let it be said again that
autocracy must first be shown the utter futility
of its claim to power or leadership in the modern world.
It is impossible to apply any standard of justice
so long as such forces are unchecked and undefeated
as the present masters of Germany command.
Not until that has been done can right be set up
as arbiter and peacemaker among the nations.
But when that has been done,—
as, God willing, it assuredly will be,—
we shall at last be free to do an unprecedented thing,
and this is the time to avow our purpose to do it.
We shall be free to base peace on generosity and justice,
to the exclusions of all selfish claims to advantage
even on the part of the victors.
Let there be no misunderstanding.
Our present and immediate task is to win the war,
and nothing shall turn us aside from it
until it is accomplished.
Every power and resource we possess,
whether of men, of money, or of materials,
is being devoted and will continue to be devoted
to that purpose until it is achieved.
Those who desire to bring peace about
before that purpose is achieved
I counsel to carry their advice elsewhere.
We will not entertain it.
We shall regard the war as won only
when the German people say to us,
through properly accredited representatives, that
they are ready to agree to a settlement based upon justice
and reparation of the wrongs their rulers have done.
They have done a wrong to Belgium
which must be repaired.
They have established a power over other lands
and peoples than their own,—
over the great empire of Austria-Hungary,
over hitherto free Balkan states,
over Turkey and within Asia,—which must be relinquished.
Germany’s success by skill, by industry,
by knowledge, by enterprise
we did not grudge or oppose, but admired, rather.
She had built up for herself a real empire of trade
and influence, secured by the peace of the world.
We were content to abide
by the rivalries of manufacture, science and commerce
that were involved for us in her success,
and stand or fall as we had or did not have
the brains and the initiative to surpass her.
But at the moment when she had conspicuously
won her triumphs of peace,
she threw them away to establish in their stead
what the world will no longer permit to be established,
military and political domination by arms,
by which to oust where she could not excel
the rivals she most feared and hated.
The peace we make must remedy that wrong.
It must deliver the once fair lands
and happy peoples of Belgium and Northern France
from the Prussian conquest and the Prussian menace,
but it must deliver also the peoples of Austria-Hungary,
the peoples of the Balkans and the peoples of Turkey,
alike in Europe and Asia, from the impudent and alien
dominion of the Prussian military and commercial autocracy.
We owe it, however, to ourselves, to say that
we do not wish in any way to impair
or to rearrange the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
It is no affair of ours what they do with their own life,
either industrially or politically.
We do not purpose or desire to dictate to them in any way.
We only desire to see that
their affairs are left in their own hands,
in all matters, great or small.
We shall hope to secure
for the peoples of the Balkan peninsula
and for the people of the Turkish Empire
the right and opportunity to make their own lives safe,
their own fortunes secure against oppression or injustice
and from the dictation of foreign courts or parties.
And our attitude and purpose
with regard to Germany herself are of a like kind.
We intend no wrong against the German Empire,
no interference with her internal affairs.
We should deem either the one or the other
absolutely unjustifiable, absolutely contrary to the principles
we have professed to live by and to hold most sacred
throughout our life as a nation.
The people of Germany are being told by the men
whom they now permit to deceive them
and to act as their masters that they are fighting
for the very life and existence of their empire, a war
of desperate self-defense against deliberate aggression.
Nothing could be more grossly or wantonly false,
and we must seek by the utmost openness and candor
as to our real aims to convince them of its falseness.
We are in fact fighting for their emancipation from the fear,
along with our own,—from the fear as well as from the fact
of unjust attack by neighbors or rivals
or schemers after world empire.
No one is threatening the existence or the independence
of the peaceful enterprise of the German Empire.
The worst that can happen to the detriment
of the German people is this,
that if they should still, after the war is over,
continue to be obliged to live under ambitious and intriguing
masters interested to disturb the peace of the world,
men or classes of men whom the other peoples of the world
could not trust, it might be impossible
to admit them to the partnership of nations
which must henceforth guarantee the world’s peace.
That partnership must be a partnership of peoples,
not a mere partnership of governments.
It might be impossible, also,
in such untoward circumstances, to admit Germany
to the free economic intercourse which must inevitably
spring out of the other partnerships of a real peace.
But there would be no aggression in that;
and such a situation, inevitable, because of distrust,
would in the very nature of things sooner or later
cure itself, by processes which would assuredly set in.
The wrongs, the very deep wrongs,
committed in this war will have to be righted.
That, of course.
But they cannot and must not be righted by the commission
of similar wrongs against Germany and her allies.
The world will not permit the commission of similar wrongs
as a means of reparation and settlement.
Statesmen must by this time have learned that
the opinion of the world is everywhere wide awake
and fully comprehends the issues involved.
No representative of any self-governed nation
will dare disregard it by attempting
any such covenants of selfishness and compromise
as were entered into at the Congress of Vienna.
The thought of the plain people
here and everywhere throughout the world,
the people who enjoy no privilege and have very simple
and unsophisticated standards of right and wrong,
is the air all governments must henceforth breathe
if they would live.
It is in the full disclosing light of that thought
that all policies must be received and executed
in this midday hour of the world’s life.
German rulers have been able to upset the peace
of the world only because the German people
were not suffered under their tutelage
to share the comradeship of the other peoples
of the world either in thought or in purpose.
They were allowed to have no opinion of their own
which might be set up as a rule of conduct
for those who exercised authority over them.
But the Congress that concludes this war will feel
the full strength of the tides that run now
in the hearts and consciences of free men everywhere.
Its conclusions will run with those tides.
All those things have been true
from the very beginning of this stupendous war;
and I cannot help thinking that
if they had been made plain at the very outset
the sympathy and enthusiasm of the Russian people might
have been once for all enlisted on the side of the Allies,
suspicion and distrust swept away,
and a real and lasting union of purpose effected.
Had they believed these things
at the very moment of their revolution,
and had they been confirmed in that belief since,
the sad reverses which have recently marked the progress
of their affairs towards an ordered and stable government
of free men might have been avoided.
The Russian people have been poisoned
by the very same falsehoods
that have kept the German people in the dark,
and the poison has been administered
by the very same hands.
The only possible antidote is the truth.
It cannot be uttered too plainly or too often.
From every point of view, therefore, it has seemed to be
my duty to speak these declarations of purpose,
to add these specific interpretations to what
I took the liberty of saying to the Senate in January.
Our entrance into the war has not altered our attitude
towards the settlement that must come when it is over.
When I said in January that the nations of the world
were entitled not only to free pathways upon the sea,
but also to assured and unmolested access
to those-pathways, I was thinking, and I am thinking now,
not of the smaller and weaker nations alone
which need our countenance and support,
but also of the great and powerful nations
and of our present enemies as well as
our present associates in the war.
I was thinking, and am thinking now, of Austria herself,
among the rest, as well as of Serbia and of Poland.
Justice and equality of rights
can be had only at a great price.
We are seeking permanent, not temporary,
foundations for the peace of the world,
and must seek them candidly and fearlessly.
As always, the right will prove to be the expedient.
What shall we do, then, to push this great war
of freedom and justice to its righteous conclusion?
We must clear away with a thorough hand
all impediments to success,
and we must make every adjustment of law
that will facilitate the full and free use
of our whole capacity and force as a fighting unit.
One very embarrassing obstacle that stands in our way
is that we are at war with Germany but not with her allies.
I, therefore, very earnestly recommend that
the Congress immediately declare the United States
in a state of war with Austria-Hungary.
Does it seem strange to you that
this should be the conclusion of the argument
I have just addressed to you? It is not.
It is in fact the inevitable logic of what I have said.
Austria-Hungary is for the time being not her own mistress
but simply the vassal of the German Government.
We must face the facts as they are
and act upon them without sentiment in this stern business.
The Government of Austria and Hungary
is not acting upon its own initiative
or in response to the wishes and feelings of its own peoples,
but as the instrument of another nation.
We must meet its force with our own
and regard the Central Powers as but one.
The war can be successfully conducted in no other way.
The same logic would lead also
to a declaration of war against Turkey and Bulgaria.
They also are the tools of Germany,
but they are mere tools and do not yet stand
in the direct path of our necessary action.
We shall go wherever the necessities of this war carry us,
but it seems to me that we should go only
where immediate and practical considerations lead us,
and not heed any others.
The financial and military measures
which must be adopted will suggest themselves
as the war and its undertakings develop,
but I will take the liberty of proposing to you
certain other acts of legislation which seem to me
to be needed for the support of the war
and for the release of our whole force and energy.
It will be necessary to extend in certain particulars
the legislation of the last session
with regard to alien enemies, and also necessary,
I believe, to create a very definite and particular control
over the entrance and departure
of all persons into and from the United States.
Legislation should be enacted defining
as a criminal offense every willful violation
of the presidential proclamation relating to alien enemies
promulgated under section 4067 of the revised statutes
and providing appropriate punishments;
and women, as well as men, should be included under
the terms of the acts placing restraints upon alien enemies.
It is likely that as time goes on many alien enemies
will be willing to be fed and housed
at the expense of the Government in the detention camps,
and it would be the purpose of the legislation
I have suggested to confine offenders among them
in the penitentiaries and other similar institutions
where they could be made to work as other criminals do.
Recent experience has convinced me that
the Congress must go further in authorizing
the Government to set limits to prices.
The law of supply and demand, I am sorry to say,
has been replaced by the law of unrestrained selfishness.
While we have eliminated profiteering
in several branches of industry,
it still runs impudently rampant in others.
The farmers for example,
Complain with a great deal of justice that,
while the regulation of food prices restricts their incomes,
no restraints are placed upon the prices
of most of the things they must themselves purchase;
and similar inequities obtain on all sides.
It is imperatively necessary that the consideration
of the full use of the water power of the country,
and also of the consideration of the systematic
and yet economical development
of such of the natural resources of the country
as are still under the control of the Federal Government
should be immediately resumed and affirmatively and
constructively dealt with at the earliest possible moment.
The pressing need of such legislation
is daily becoming more obvious.
The legislation proposed at the last session
with regard to regulated combinations among our exporters
in order to provide for our foreign trade
a more effective organization and method of co-operation
ought by all means to be completed at this session.
And I beg that the members
of the House of Representatives will permit me
to express the opinion that it will be impossible
to deal in any but a very wasteful and extravagant fashion
with the enormous appropriations of the public moneys
which must continue to be made
if the war is to be properly sustained,
unless the House will consent to return
to its former practice of initiating and preparing
all appropriation bills through a single committee,
in order that responsibility may be centered,
expenditures standardized and made uniform,
and waste and duplication as much as possible avoided.
Additional legislation may also become necessary
before the present Congress again adjourns
in order to effect the most efficient co-ordination
and operation of the railways
and other transportation systems of the country;
but to that I shall, if circumstances should demand,
call the attention of Congress upon another occasion.
If I have overlooked anything that ought to be done
for the more effective conduct of the war,
your own counsels will supply the omission.
What I am perfectly clear about is that
in the present session of the Congress
our whole attention and energy should be concentrated
on the vigorous, rapid and successful prosecution
of the great task of winning the war.
We can do this with all the greater zeal and enthusiasm
because we know that for us this is a war of high principle,
debased by no selfish ambition of conquest or spoliation;
because we know, and all the world knows,
that we have been forced into it to save the very institutions
we live under from corruption and destruction.
The purpose of the Central Powers strikes straight
at the very heart of everything we believe in;
their methods of warfare outrage every principle
of humanity and of knightly honor;
their intrigue has corrupted the very thought
and spirit of many of our people;
their sinister and secret diplomacy has sought
to take our very territory away from us
and disrupt the union of the states.
Our safety would be at an end,
our honor forever sullied and brought into contempt,
were we to permit their triumph.
They are striking at the very existence
of democracy and liberty.
It is because it is for us
a war of high, disinterested purpose,
in which all the free peoples of the world
are banded together for the vindication of right,
a war for the preservation of our nation,
of all that it has held dear, of principle and of purpose,
that we feel ourselves doubly constrained to propose
for its outcome only that which is righteous
and of irreproachable intention,
for our foes as well as for our friends.
The cause being just and holy,
the settlement must be of like motive and equality.
For this we can fight,
but for nothing less noble or less worthy of our traditions.
For this cause we entered the war
and for this cause will we battle until the last gun is fired.
I have spoken plainly because this seems to me the time
when it is most necessary to speak plainly, in order that
all the world may know that, even in the heat and ardor
of the struggle and when our whole thought
is of carrying the war through to its end,
we have not forgotten any ideal or principle
for which the name of America has been held in honor
among the nations and for which it has been our glory
to contend in the great generations that went before us.
A supreme moment of history has come.
The eyes of the people have been opened, and they see.
The hand of God is laid upon the nations.
He will show them favor, I devoutly believe,
only if they rise to the clear heights
of His own justice and mercy.28
On 1 January 1918 the Wilson family of 15 gathered in the small dining room
because the East Room used for State Dining was not heated to save coal.
Robert Cecil of the British War Cabinet reported concern over military material
at Vladivostok that the Bolsheviks might seize and take to Petrograd.
They suggested a force mainly of Japanese,
and they asked the United States to send a contingent.
The American consul at Vladivostok agreed, and the US State Department
responded that the USS Brooklyn was ordered to Yokohama.
On January 2 Secretary of State Robert Lansing sent President Wilson
a letter with Leon Trotsky’s appeal made on December 29.
Lansing asked if the Bolsheviks had “the right to speak for the Russian people,”
and he advised making no reply.
On January 4 Wilson addressed a joint session of the Congress
to inform them that he was taking control of all the railroads in the country.
He said,
I have asked the privilege of addressing you
in order to report to you that
on the twenty-eighth of December last,
during the recess of the Congress,
acting through the Secretary of War and under the authority
conferred upon me by the Act of Congress
approved August 29, 1916, I took possession
and assumed control of the railway lines of the country
and the systems of water transportation under their control.
This step seemed to be imperatively necessary
in the interest of the public welfare,
in the presence of the great tasks of war
with which we are now dealing.
As our own experience develops difficulties
and makes it clear what they are,
I have deemed it my duty to remove those difficulties
wherever I have the legal power to do so.
To assume control of the vast railway systems
of the country is, I realize, a very great responsibility,
but to fail to do so in the existing circumstances
would have been much greater.
I assumed the less responsibility rather than the weightier.
I am sure that I am speaking the mind
of all thoughtful Americans when I say that
it is our duty as the representatives of the nation
to do everything that it is necessary to do to secure
the complete mobilization of the whole resources of America
by as rapid and effective means as can be found.
Transportation supplies all the arteries of mobilization.
Unless it be under a single and unified direction,
the whole process of the nation’s action is embarrassed….
I would suggest the average net railway operating income
of the three years ending June 30, 1917.
I earnestly recommend that these guarantees
be given by appropriate legislation,
and given as promptly as circumstances permit….
The Secretary of War and I easily agreed that,
in view of the many complex interests
which must be safeguarded and harmonized,
as well as because of his exceptional experience and ability
in this new field of governmental action,
the Honorable William G. McAdoo was the right man
to assume direct administrative control
of this new executive task.
At our request, he consented to assume the authority
and duties of organizer and Director General
of the new Railway Administration.
He has assumed those duties
and his work is in active progress.29
On January 8 President Wilson addressed both Houses of Congress
presenting his “Fourteen Points.”
This is that entire historic speech:
Gentlemen of the Congress:
Once more, as repeatedly before, the spokesmen
of the Central Empires have indicated their desire
to discuss the objects of the war
and the possible bases of a general peace.
Parleys have been in progress at Brest-Litovsk
between Russian representatives and representatives
of the Central Powers to which the attention
of all the belligerents has been invited for the purpose
of ascertaining whether it may be possible to extend
these parleys into a general conference
with regard to terms of peace and settlement.
The Russian representatives presented
not only a perfectly definite statement of the principles
upon which they would be willing to conclude peace
but also an equally definite program
of the concrete application of those principles.
The representatives of the Central Powers, on their part,
presented an outline of settlement which,
if much less definite, seemed susceptible
of liberal interpretation until their specific program
of practical terms was added.
That program proposed no concessions at all
either to the sovereignty of Russia or to the preferences
of the populations with whose fortunes it dealt, but meant,
in a word, that the Central Empires were to keep
every foot of territory their armed forces had occupied,—
every province, every city, every point of vantage,—
as a permanent addition to their territories and their power.
It is a reasonable conjecture that the general principles
of settlement which they at first suggested originated
with the more liberal statesmen of Germany and Austria,
the men who have begun to feel the force
of their own peoples’ thought and purpose,
while the concrete terms of actual settlement
came from the military leaders who have no thought
but to keep what they have got.
The negotiations have been broken off.
The Russian representatives were sincere and in earnest.
They cannot entertain such proposals
of conquest and domination.
The whole incident is full of significance.
It is also full of perplexity.
With whom are the Russian representatives dealing?
For whom are the representatives
of the Central Empires speaking?
Are they speaking for the majorities of their
respective parliaments or for the minority parties,
that military and imperialistic minority which
has so far dominated their whole policy
and controlled the affairs of Turkey and of the Balkan states
which have felt obliged to become
their associates in this war?
The Russian representatives have insisted, very justly,
very wisely, and in the true spirit of modern democracy,
that the conferences they have been holding
with the Teutonic and Turkish statesmen
should be held within open, not closed, doors,
and all the world has been audience, as was desired.
To whom have we been listening, then?
To those who speak the spirit and intention
of the Resolutions of the German Reichstag
of the ninth of July last, the spirit and intention
of the liberal leaders and parties of Germany,
or to those who resist and defy that spirit and intention
and insist upon conquest and subjugation?
Or are we listening, in fact, to both,
unreconciled and in open and hopeless contradiction?
These are very serious and pregnant questions.
Upon the answer to them depends the peace of the world.
But, whatever the results of the parleys at Brest-Litovsk,
whatever the confusions of counsel and of purpose
in the utterances of the spokesmen of the Central Empires,
they have again attempted to acquaint the world
with their objects in the war and have again challenged
their adversaries to say what their objects are and what
sort of settlement they would deem just and satisfactory.
There is no good reason why that challenge should not be
responded to, and responded to with the utmost candor.
We did not wait for it.
Not once, but again and again, we have
laid our whole thought and purpose before the world,
not in general terms only, but each time with sufficient
definition to make it clear what sort of definitive terms
of settlement must necessarily spring out of them.
Within the last week Mr. Lloyd George has spoken
with admirable candor and in admirable spirit
for the people and Government of Great Britain.
There is no confusion of counsel
among the adversaries of the Central Powers,
no uncertainty of principle, no vagueness of detail.
The only secrecy of counsel,
the only lack of fearless frankness, the only failure
to make definite statement of the objects of the war,
lies with Germany and her Allies.
The issues of life and death hang upon these definitions.
No statesman who has the least conception
of his responsibility ought for a moment to permit himself
to continue this tragical and appalling outpouring of blood
and treasure unless he is sure beyond a peradventure
that the objects of the vital sacrifice are part and parcel
of the very life of society and that the people for whom
he speaks think them right and imperative as he does.
There is, moreover, a voice calling for these definitions
of principle and of purpose which is, it seems to me,
more thrilling and more compelling
than any of the many moving voices
with which the troubled air of the world is filled.
It is the voice of the Russian people.
They are prostrate and all but helpless,
it would seem, before the grim power of Germany,
which has hitherto known no relenting and no pity.
Their power, apparently, is shattered.
And yet their soul is not subservient.
They will not yield either in principle or in action.
Their conception of what is right,
of what it is humane and honorable for them to accept,
has been stated with a frankness, a largeness of view,
a generosity of spirit, and a universal human sympathy
which must challenge the admiration
of every friend of mankind;
and they have refused to compound their ideals
or desert others that they themselves may be safe.
They call to us to say what it is that we desire, in what,
if in anything, our purpose and our spirit differ from theirs;
and I believe that the people of the United States
would wish me to respond,
with utter simplicity and frankness.
Whether their present leaders believe it or not,
it is our heartfelt desire and hope that
some way may be opened whereby we may be privileged
to assist the people of Russia to attain
their utmost hope of liberty and ordered peace.
It will be our wish and purpose
that the processes of peace, when they are begun,
shall be absolutely open and that they shall involve and
permit henceforth no secret understandings of any kind.
The day of conquest and aggrandizement is gone by;
so is also the day of secret covenants
entered into in the interest of particular governments
and likely at some unlooked-for moment
to upset the peace of the world.
It is this happy fact,
now clear to the view of every public man whose thoughts
do not still linger in an age that is dead and gone,
which makes it possible for every nation whose purposes
are consistent with justice and the peace of the world
to avow now or at any other time the objects it has in view.
We entered this war because violations of right had
occurred which touched us to the quick and made the life
of our own people impossible unless they were corrected
and the world secured once for all against their recurrence.
What we demand in this war, therefore,
is nothing peculiar to ourselves.
It is that the world be made fit and safe to live in;
and particularly that it be made safe for every peace-loving
nation which, like our own, wishes to live its own life,
determine its own institutions, be assured of justice
and fair dealing by the other peoples of the world
as against force and selfish aggression.
All the peoples of the world
are in effect partners in this interest,
and for our own part we see very clearly that
unless justice be done to others it will not be done to us.
The program of the world’s peace, therefore
is our program; and that program,
the only possible program, as we see it, is this:
I. Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at,
after which there shall be
no private international understandings of any kind,
but diplomacy shall proceed
always frankly and in the public view.
II. Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas,
outside territorial waters, alike in peace and in war,
except as the seas may be closed in whole or in part
by international action for the enforcement
of international covenants.
III. The removal, so far as possible,
of all economic barriers
and the establishment of an equality of trade conditions
among all the nations consenting to the peace
and associating themselves for its maintenance.
IV. Adequate guarantees given and taken
that national armaments will be reduced
to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety.
V. A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial
adjustment of all colonial claims,
based upon a strict observance of the principle that
in determining all such questions of sovereignty
the interests of the populations concerned must have
equal weight with the equitable claims of the government
whose title is to be determined.
VI. The evacuation of all Russian territory
and such a settlement of all questions affecting Russia
as will secure the best and freest cooperation
of the other nations of the world in obtaining for her
an unhampered and unembarrassed opportunity
for the independent determination
of her own political development and national policy
and assure her of a sincere welcome into the society
of free nations under institutions of her own choosing;
and, more than a welcome, assistance also of every kind
that she may need and may herself desire.
The treatment accorded Russia by her sister nations
in the months to come will be the acid test of their good will,
of their comprehension of her needs
as distinguished from their own interests,
and of their intelligent and unselfish sympathy.
VII. Belgium, the whole world will agree,
must be evacuated and restored,
without any attempt to limit the sovereignty
which she enjoys in common with all other free nations.
No other single act will serve as this will serve
to restore confidence among the nations in the laws
which they have themselves set and determined
for the government of their relations with one another.
Without this healing act the whole structure
and validity of international law is forever impaired.
VIII. All French territory should be freed
and the invaded portions restored,
and the wrong done to France by Prussia in 1871
in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine, which
has unsettled the peace of the world for nearly fifty years,
should be righted, in order that peace may
once more be made secure in the interest of all.
IX. A readjustment of the frontiers of Italy should
be effected along clearly recognizable lines of nationality.
X. The peoples of Austria-Hungary, whose place
among the nations we wish to see safeguarded and assured,
should be accorded the freest opportunity
of autonomous development.
XI. Rumania, Serbia, and Montenegro should be evacuated;
occupied territories restored;
Serbia accorded free and secure access to the sea;
and the relations of the several Balkan states to one another
determined by friendly counsel along historically established
lines of allegiance and nationality;
and international guarantees of the political
and economic independence and territorial integrity
of the several Balkan states should be entered into.
XII. The Turkish portions of the present Ottoman Empire
should be assured a secure sovereignty,
but the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule
should be assured an undoubted security of life
and an absolutely unmolested opportunity
of autonomous development,
and the Dardanelles should be permanently opened
as a free passage to the ships and commerce
of all nations under international guarantees.
XIII. An independent Polish state should be erected
which should include the territories inhabited
by indisputably Polish populations, which
should be assured a free and secure access to the sea,
and whose political and economic independence
and territorial integrity should be guaranteed
by international covenant.
XIV. A general association of nations must be formed
under specific covenants for the purpose
of affording mutual guarantees of political independence
and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.
In regard to these essential rectifications of wrong
and assertions of right we feel ourselves to be
intimate partners of all the governments and peoples
associated together against the Imperialists.
We cannot be separated in interest or divided in purpose.
We stand together until the end.
For such arrangements and covenants we are willing
to fight and to continue to fight until they are achieved;
but only because we wish the right to prevail
and desire a just and stable peace such as can be secured
only by removing the chief provocations to war,
which this program does remove.
We have no jealousy of German greatness,
and there is nothing in this program that impairs it.
We grudge her no achievement or distinction of learning
or of pacific enterprise such as
have made her record very bright and very enviable.
We do not wish to injure her or to block in any way
her legitimate influence or power.
We do not wish to fight her either with arms
or with hostile arrangements of trade
if she is willing to associate herself with us
and the other peace-loving nations of the world
in covenants of justice and law and fair dealing.
We wish her only to accept a place of equality
among the peoples of the world,—
the new world in which we now live,—
instead of a place of mastery.
Neither do we presume to suggest to her
any alteration or modification of her institutions.
But it is necessary, we must frankly say, and necessary as
a preliminary to any intelligent dealings with her on our part,
that we should know whom her spokesmen speak for
when they speak to us, whether for the Reichstag majority
or for the military party and the men
whose creed is imperial domination.
We have spoken now, surely, in terms too concrete
to admit of any further doubt or question.
An evident principle runs through
the whole program I have outlined.
It is the principle of justice to all peoples and nationalities,
and their right to live on equal terms
of liberty and safety with one another,
whether they be strong or weak.
Unless this principle be made its foundation
no part of the structure of international justice can stand.
The people of the United States
could act upon no other principle;
and to the vindication of this principle
they are ready to devote their lives,
their honor, and everything that they possess.
The moral climax of this the culminating and final war
for human liberty has come,
and they are ready to put their own strength,
their own highest purpose,
their own integrity and devotion to the test.30
The Committee on Public Information (CPI) made four million copies
of Wilson’s “14 Points” speech, and it was translated into Russian and German.
In Petrograd 300,000 handbills shared the 14 Points.
On January 11 Herbert Hoover, Director of the
United States Food Administration, called for more food saving
so that more meat and wheat could go to the Allies.
Harry Augustus Garfield, Supervisor of the US Fuel Administration,
warned that economy needed to be practiced
because of a coal shortage of 38 million tons.
President Wilson sent a letter asking Senator John H. Bankhead
of Alabama to improve the coal mining situation there.
On January 17 Garfield ordered some
manufacturing plants to shut down to save coal.
On January 18 Wilson signed a proclamation
urging people to conserve more food.
The next day 30,000 plants in New York City
were ordered to close down to save coal.
Lansing got a telegram from the Bolshevik government which had announced
that they would hold the American Ambassador responsible for the lives
of the activists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman who were in jail for
urging people not to register for the new draft
and for the imprisoned labor leader Thomas Mooney.
On January 30 Secretary of War Newton D. Baker announced that
American troops had occupied a small part of the Western Front.
British and French generals wanted the US troops to be part of their armies.
President Wilson sent a message to the Farmers’ Conference
at Urbana, Illinois on January 31 writing,
I can only send you a very earnest message
expressing my interest and the thoughts which such
a conference must bring prominently into every mind.
I need not tell you, for I am sure you realize
as keenly as I do, that we are as a Nation
in the presence of a great task which demands
supreme sacrifice and endeavor of every one of us.
We can give everything that is needed
with the greater willingness, and even satisfaction,
because the object of the war in which we are engaged
is the greatest that free men have ever undertaken.
It is to prevent the life of the world from being determined
and the fortunes of men everywhere affected
by small groups of military masters,
who seek their own interest
and the selfish dominion throughout the world
of the Governments they unhappily for the moment control.
You will not need to be convinced that it was necessary
for us as a free people to take part in this war.
It had raised its evil hand against us.
The rulers of Germany had sought to exercise their power
in such a way as to shut off our economic life
so far as our intercourse with Europe was concerned,
and to confine our people within the Western Hemisphere
while they accomplished purposes
which would have permanently impaired and impeded
every process of our national life
and have put the fortunes of America
at the mercy of the Imperial Government of Germany….
In the field of agriculture we have agencies
and instrumentalities, fortunately,
such as no other government in the world can show.
The Department of Agriculture is undoubtedly the greatest
practical and scientific agricultural organization in the world.
Its total annual budget of $46,000,000 has been increased
during the last four years more than 72 per cent.
It has a staff of 18,000, including a large number
of highly trained experts, and alongside of it
stand the unique land-grant colleges,
which are without example elsewhere,
and the 69 state and federal experiment stations.
These colleges and experiment stations have
a total endowment of plant and equipment of $172,000,000,
and an income of more than $35,000,000,
with 10,271 teachers, a resident student body of 125,000,
and a vast additional number
receiving instruction at their homes.
County agents, joint officers
of the Department of Agriculture
and of the colleges, are everywhere cooperating
with the farmers and assisting them.
The number of extension workers under the Smith-Lever Act
and under the recent emergency legislation
has grown to 5,500 men and women working regularly
in the various communities and taking to the farmer
the latest scientific and practical information….
In the fall of 1917 a wheat acreage of 42,170,000
was planted, which was … seven millions greater
than the preceding five-year average.31
On 11 February 1918 President Wilson spoke to a joint session
of the Congress to discuss the responses by the Germans and Austrians
to the latest statement of the Allied war aims.
He said,
I mean only that those problems
each and all affect the whole world;
that unless they are dealt with in a spirit of unselfish
and unbiased justice, with a view to the wishes,
the natural connections, the racial aspirations, the security,
and the peace of mind of the peoples involved,
no permanent peace will have been attained.
They cannot be discussed separately or in corners.
None of them constitutes a private or separate interest
from which the opinion of the world may be shut out.
Whatever affects the peace affects mankind,
and nothing settled by military force,
if settled wrong, is settled at all.
It will presently have to be reopened.
Is Count von Hertling not aware that he is speaking
in the court of mankind, that all the awakened nations
of the world now sit in judgment on what every public man,
of whatever nation, may say on the issues of a conflict
which has spread to every region of the world?
The Reichstag resolutions of July themselves
frankly accepted the decisions of that court.
There shall be no annexations,
no contributions, no punitive damages.
Peoples are not to be handed about from one sovereignty
to another by an international conference
or an understanding between rivals and antagonists.
National aspirations must be respected;
peoples may now be dominated and governed
only by their own consent.
“Self-determination“ is not a mere phrase.
It is an imperative principle of action,
which statesmen will henceforth ignore at their peril.
We cannot have general peace for the asking,
or by the mere arrangements of a peace conference.
It cannot be pieced together out of
individual understandings between powerful states.
All the parties to this war must join in the settlement
of every issue anywhere involved in it;
because what we are seeking is a peace
that we can all unite to guarantee and maintain
and every item of it must be submitted to the common
judgment whether it be right and fair, an act of justice,
rather than a bargain between sovereigns….
This war had its roots in the disregard of the rights
of small nations and of nationalities which lacked the union
and the force to make good their claim to determine
their own allegiances and their own forms of political life.
Covenants must now be entered into
which will render such things impossible for the future;
and those covenants must be backed
by the united force of all the nations that love justice
and are willing to maintain it at any cost….
After all, the test of whether it is possible
for either government to go any further
in this comparison of views is simple and obvious.
The principles to be applied are these:
First, that each part of the final settlement must be based
upon the essential justice of that particular case
and upon such adjustments as are
most likely to bring a peace that will be permanent;
Second, that peoples and provinces are not to be
bartered about from sovereignty to sovereignty
as if they were mere chattels and pawns in a game,
even the great game, now forever discredited,
of the balance of power; but that
Third, every territorial settlement involved in this war
must be made in the interest and for the benefit
of the populations concerned,
and not as a part of any mere adjustment
or compromise of claims amongst rival states; and
Fourth, that all well-defined national aspirations shall be
accorded the utmost satisfaction that can be accorded them
without introducing new or perpetuating old elements
of discord and antagonism that would be likely in time
to break the peace of Europe and consequently of the world.
A general peace erected upon such foundations
can be discussed.32
On March 11 Wilson wrote this message to the
Fourth All-Russia Congress of the Soviet:
May I not take advantage of the meeting of the Congress
of the Soviet to express the sincere sympathy which
the people of the United States feel for the Russian people
at this moment when the German power has been thrust
in to interrupt and turn back the whole struggle for freedom
and substitute the wishes of Germany
for the purposes of the people of Russia.
Although the Government of the United States is unhappily
not now in a position to render the direct and effective aid
it would wish to render, I beg to assure the people of Russia
through the Congress that it will avail itself
of every opportunity that may offer to secure for Russia
once more complete sovereignty and independence
in her own affairs and full restoration to her great role
in the life of Europe and the modern world.
The whole heart of the people in the United States
is with the people of Russia in the attempt to free
themselves forever from autocratic government
and become the masters of their own life.33
On March 19 Wilson signed the Daylight Saving Bill,
and it went into effect
for the first time on March 31 by moving clocks forward one hour.
On March 20 the President began meeting on Wednesdays with his
“war cabinet” that included Edward N. Hurley who recently had been chairman
of the Federal Trade Commission for seven months, Bernard M. Baruch who
since January 1918 was the chairman of the War Industries Board,
Harry Augustus Garfield of the Fuel Administration,
Herbert Hoover of the Food Administration, and Vance C. McCormick
who was chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
On their discussions Hurley commented,
Frequently, if some member discussed a matter
and continued “going around in a circle,”
instead of arriving at the point, the President would say,
“Well, I must confess I am up a blind alley.”
This usually had a wholesome effect.34
On the 20th Wilson issued a proclamation taking over
68 Dutch ships in United States territorial waters.
The British seized Dutch ships in their waters.
Also on March 20 Wilson sent a letter to Democrats in New Jersey writing,
Men everywhere are searching democratic principles to their
hearts in order to determine their soundness, their sincerity,
their adaptability to the real needs of their life,
and every man with any vision must see that
the real test of justice and right action
is presently to come as it never came before.
The men in the trenches, who have been freed
from the economic serfdom to which some of them
had been accustomed, will, it is likely, return to their homes
with a new view and a new impatience of all mere political
phrases and will demand real thinking and sincere action.
Let the Democratic party in New Jersey therefore
forget everything but the new service
which it is to be called upon to render.
The days of political and economic reconstruction
which are ahead of us no man can now definitely assess,
but we know this:
That every program must be shot
through and through with utter disinterestedness;
that no party must try to serve itself,
but every party must try to serve humanity,
and that the task is a very practical one, meaning that
every program, every measure in every program,
must be tested by this question and this question only:
Is it just; is it for the benefit
of the average man, without influence or privilege;
does it embody in real fact the highest conception
of social justice and of right dealing
without respect of person or class or particular interest?
This is a high test.
It can be met only by those who have genuine sympathy
with the mass of men and real insight into their needs
and opportunities and a purpose which
is purged alike of selfish and of partisan intention.
The party which rises to this test will receive
the support of the people, because it deserves it.35
On March 21 the Germans began a major offensive in France,
and in a week they advanced forty miles.
The Supreme War Council of the Allies on the 26th at Doullens
promoted General Ferdinand Foch of France to Marshall
and put him in command of the Allied armies.
On March 27 Secretary of War Newton Baker wired Wilson that
General Pershing agreed to place all the American soldiers at the disposal
of the French General Philippe Pétain and British General Douglas Haig.
Then Col. House telegraphed British Foreign Secretary
A. J. Balfour that the President had agreed.
Also on the 27th British Prime Minister Lloyd George sent a message to
the Chief Justice of England Reading, who was a special Ambassador
in Washington, for communication to the President and the American public saying,
We are at the crisis of the War … time is vital.
It is impossible to exaggerate the importance
of getting American reinforcements across the Atlantic
in the shortest possible space of time.36
Wilson agreed to send 120,000 infantry to France in April.
On April 3 at the Beauvais Conference the French Prime Minister
Georges Clemenceau confirmed that Foch
was the Commander of the Western Front.
The German offensive had opened up a gap of 50 miles
between French and British forces.
The British were outnumbered three to one and
had 164,000 casualties and 90,000 captured.
On April 11 British General Haig ordered his men to fight for justice to the end.
On April 18 President Wilson issued a proclamation concerning the
War Labor Conference Board that had been appointed on March 29.
He approved and affirmed them and then wrote,
The powers, functions, and duties
of the National Labor Board shall be:
To settle by mediation and conciliation controversies
arising between employers and workers
in fields of production necessary for the conduct of the war,
or in other fields of national activity,
delays and obstructions which might,
in the opinion of the National Board,
affect detrimentally such production;
to provide, by direct appointment or otherwise,
for committees or boards to sit in various parts
of the country where controversies arise
and secure settlement by local mediation and conciliation;
and to summon the parties to controversies for hearing
and action by the National Board in event of failure
to secure settlement by mediation and conciliation.37
On the 18th he also proclaimed April 26 Liberty Day for the sale of war bonds.
On May 11 President Wilson proclaimed May 30 a day of fasting and prayer.
On May 16 he signed the amended Sedition Act.
Congress repealed it on 13 December 1920, and in 1921
Wilson granted clemency to most of those convicted under the Sedition Act.
On May 18 in New York he made a major speech to promote
the second Red Cross fund, saying,
Friendship is the only cement
that will ever hold the world together.
And this intimate contact of the great Red Cross
with the peoples who are suffering the terrors
and deprivations of this war is going to be
one of the greatest instrumentalities of friendship
that the world ever knew;
and the center of the heart of it all, if we sustain it properly,
will be this land that we so dearly love….
It fills my imagination, ladies and gentlemen,
to think of the women all over this country
who are busy tonight, and every night and every day,
doing the work of the Red Cross,
busy with a great eagerness to find out
the most serviceable things to do, busy with a forgetfulness
of all the old frivolities of their social relationships,
ready to curtail the duties of the household in order that
they may contribute to this common work
that all hearts are engaged in and in doing which
their hearts become acquainted with each other.
When you think of this, you realize how the people
of the United States are being drawn together
into a great intimate family whose heart is being used
for the service of the soldiers not only,
but for the service of civilians where they suffer
and are lost in the maze of distresses and distractions.38
On May 23 Wilson sent a message to the Italian people
on the third anniversary of their being in the war.
He wrote,
I am sure that I am speaking for the people
of the United States in sending to the Italian people
warm fraternal greetings upon this the anniversary
of the entrance of Italy into this great war in which
there is being fought out once for all the irrepressible conflict
between free self-government and the dictation of force.
The people of the United States have looked
with profound interest and sympathy upon the efforts
and sacrifices of the Italian people, are deeply and sincerely
interested in the present and future security in Italy,
and are glad to find themselves associated with a people
to whom they are bound by so many personal and intimate
ties in a struggle whose object is liberation, freedom,
the rights of men and nations to live their own lives
and determine their own fortunes,
the rights of the weak as well as of the strong,
and the maintenance of justice by the irresistible force
of free nations leagued together in the defense of mankind.
With ever increasing resolution and force we shall
continue to stand together in this sacred common cause.
America salutes the gallant Kingdom of Italy
and bids her Godspeed.39
The third battle at Chemin des Dames by the Aisne River began on May 27,
and by June 6 there had been 157,000 casualties.
The Germans moved 35 miles closer to Paris and
suffered 3,000 more casualties than the Allies.
Marshal Foch ordered five American divisions to defend the Marne River.
On May 23 Treasury Secretary McAdoo asked for a higher tax on profits
from
war industries, an increased tax on unearned incomes, and a heavy tax on luxuries.
The gross national product would increase from $60 billion in 1917 to $75 billion
in 1918 while the annual deficit jumped from $1.1 billion to $9 billion.
President Wilson brought McAdoo’s proposals to the Congress on May 27, saying,
Enormous loans freely spent in the stimulation of industry
of almost every sort produce inflations and extravagances
which presently make the whole
economic structure questionable and insecure,
and the very basis of credit is cut away.
Only fair, equitably distributed taxation
of the widest incidence and drawn chiefly from the sources
which would be likely to demoralize credit
by their very abundance can prevent inflation and keep
our industrial system free of speculation and waste.
We shall naturally turn, therefore, I suppose, to war profits
and incomes and luxuries for the additional taxes.
But the war profits and incomes upon which
the increased taxes will be levied will be
the profits and incomes of the calendar year 1918….
That is the situation, and it is the situation
which creates the duty; no choice or preference of ours.
There is only one way to meet that duty.
We must meet it without selfishness
or fear of consequences.
Politics is adjourned.
The elections will go to those who think least of it;
to those who go to the constituencies
without explanations or excuses, with a plain record
of duty faithfully and disinterestedly performed.
I, for one, am always confident that the people
of this country will give a just verdict upon the service
of the men who act for them when the facts are such
that no man can disguise or conceal them.
There is no danger of deceit now.
An intense and pitiless light beats upon every man
and every action in this tragic blot of war
that is now upon the stage.
If lobbyists hurry to Washington to attempt to turn
what you do in the matter of taxation to their protection
or advantage, the light will beat also upon them.
There is abundant fuel for the light in the records
of the Treasury with regard to profits of every sort.
The profiteering that cannot be got at by the restraints
of conscience and love of country can be got at by taxation.
There is such profiteering now, and the information
with regard to it is available and indisputable.
I am advising you to act upon this matter of taxation now,
gentlemen, not because I do not know that you can see
and interpret the facts and the duty they impose
just as well and with as clear a perception
of the obligations involved as I can,
but because there is a certain solemn satisfaction
in sharing with you the responsibilities of such a time.
The world never stood in such case before.
Men never before had so clear
or so moving a vision of duty.40
On May 28 the United States First Army Division supported
the French army scaling the heights of Cantigny.
The Allies had 318 killed and suffered about 200 more casualties
than the Germans, and they captured 250 German soldiers.
In June the US Secretary of War Baker announced that
one million American soldiers were in France.
On June 7 Wilson talked to Mexican editors at the White House
and explained his policy toward Mexico and Latin America, saying,
My own policy, the policy of my administration,
towards Mexico was at every point
based upon this principle, that the internal settlement
of the affairs of Mexico was none of our business;
that we had no right to interfere with or to dictate to Mexico
in any particular with regard to her own affairs.
Take one aspect of our relations which at one time
may have been difficult for you to understand:
When we sent troops into Mexico,
our sincere desire was nothing else than to assist you
to get rid of a man who was making the settlement
of your affairs for the time being impossible.
We had no desire to use our troops for any other purpose,
and I was in hopes that by assisting in that way
and then immediately withdrawing
I might give substantial proof of the truth of the assurances
that I had given your Government
through President Carranza….
Some time ago, as you probably all know,
I proposed a sort of Pan-American agreement.
I had perceived that one of the difficulties
of our relationship with Latin America was this:
The famous Monroe Doctrine was adopted
without your consent, without the consent
of any of the Central or South American States….
So I said, “Very well, let us make an arrangement
by which we will give bond.
Let us have a common guarantee, that all of us will sign,
of political independence and territorial integrity.
Let us agree that if any one of us,
the United States included, violates the political
independence or the territorial integrity of any of the others,
all the others will jump on her.”
I pointed out to some of the gentlemen
who were less inclined to enter into this arrangement
than others that that was in effect giving bonds
on the part of the United States,
that we would enter into an arrangement
by which you would be protected from us.
Now, that is the kind of agreement
that will have to be the foundation
of the future life of the nations of the world, gentlemen.
The whole family of nations will have to guarantee
to each nation that no nation shall violate
its political independence or its territorial integrity.
That is the basis, the only conceivable basis,
for the future peace of the world,
and I must admit that I was ambitious to have the states
of the two continents of America show the way
to the rest of the world as to how to make a basis of peace.
Peace can come only by trust.
As long as there is suspicion
there is going to be misunderstanding,
and as long as there is misunderstanding
there is going to be trouble.
If you can once get a situation of trust,
then you have got a situation of permanent peace.41
On June 13 Wilson wrote this letter to Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt,
President of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance:
My Dear Mrs. Catt:
May I not thank you for transmitting to me
the very interesting memorial of the French Union
for Woman Suffrage addressed to me
under the date of February first, last?
Since you have been kind enough to transmit
this interesting and impressive message to me,
will you not be good enough to convey
to the subscribers this answer:
“I have read your message with the deepest interest,
and I welcome the opportunity to say that I agree
without reservation that the full and sincere democratic
reconstruction of the world for which we are striving,
and which we are determined to bring about at any cost,
will not have been completely or adequately attained
until women are admitted to the suffrage,
and that only by that action can the nations of the world
realize for the benefit of future generations the full
ideal force of opinion or the full humane forces of action.
The services of women during this supreme crisis
of the world’s history have been
of the most signal usefulness and distinction.
The war could not have been fought without them,
or its sacrifices endured.
It is high time that some part of our debt of gratitude
to them should be acknowledged and paid,
and the only acknowledgment they ask
is their admission to the suffrage.
Can we justly refuse it?
As for America, it is my earnest hope that
the Senate of the United States will give an unmistakable
answer to this question by passing the suffrage amendment
to our federal Constitution before the end of this session.42
In the first 26 days of June two US Army divisions
and a brigade of US Marines led by General Pershing
defeated five German divisions at Belleau Wood.
Each side suffered about 10,000 casualties.
The Allies had 1,811 killed, and they captured 1,600 Germans.
The Americans filled the gap that had been
in between the British and French lines.
On June 19 President Wilson met with the Czech spokesman
Thomas Masaryk who told him that 70,000 Czech soldiers
had defeated Austrian and German prisoners of war.
The Allies wanted the Japanese to do the fighting in Siberia
and accepted that they might take over some of Asiatic Russia.
Wilson would oppose that.
President Wilson on June 30 in a conversation
with his brother-in-law Dr. Axson said,
The next President will have to be able
to think in terms of the whole world.
He must be internationally minded.
Now as a matter of fact, the only really
internationally minded people are the labor people.
They are in touch with world movements.
The world is going to change radically,
and I am satisfied that governments will have to do things
which are now left to individuals and corporations.
I am satisfied for instance that the government
will have to take over all the great natural resources.
What does that mean?
That means it will have to take over all the water power;
all the coal mines; all the oil fields, etc.
They will have to be government-owned.
If I should say that outside,
people would call me a socialist, but I am not a socialist.
And it is because I am not a socialist
that I believe these things.
I think the only way we can prevent communism
is by some such action as that.
Now that is going to involve vast problems,
and the next President must be a man who will be able
not only to do things, but, after having taken counsel
and made a full survey, he must be able to retire alone,
behind his own closed door,
and think through the processes, step by step.43
Also on June 30 Eugene V. Debs in Cleveland was arrested
and charged with violating the Espionage Act.
Spanish influenza was reported in England.
On 4 July 1918 President Wilson gave an address at Mount Vernon and said,
Gentlemen of the Diplomatic Corps and my Fellow Citizens:
I am happy to draw apart with you to this quiet place
of old counsel in order to speak a little of the meaning
of this day of our nation’s independence….
There can be but one issue.
The settlement must be final.
There can be no compromise.
No halfway decision would be tolerable.
No halfway decision is conceivable.
These are the ends for which the associated peoples
of the world are fighting and which must be conceded
them before there can be peace:
I. The destruction of every arbitrary power anywhere
that can separately, secretly, and of its single choice
disturb the peace of the world;
or, if it cannot be presently destroyed,
at the least its reduction to virtual impotence.
II. The settlement of every question, whether of territory,
of sovereignty, of economic arrangement, or of political
relationship, upon the basis of the free acceptance
of that settlement by the people immediately concerned,
and not upon the basis of the material interest or advantage
of any other nation or people
which may desire a different settlement
for the sake of its own exterior influence or mastery.
III. The consent of all nations to be governed
in their conduct towards each other
by the same principles of honor and of respect
for the common law of civilized society
that govern the individual citizens of all modern states
in their relations with one another;
to the end that all promises and covenants
may be sacredly observed,
no private plots or conspiracies hatched,
no selfish injuries wrought with impunity,
and a mutual trust established upon
the handsome foundation of a mutual respect for right.
IV. The establishment of an organization of peace
which shall make it certain that the combined power
of free nations will check every invasion of right
and serve to make peace and justice the more secure
by affording a definite tribunal of opinion to which
all must submit and by which every international
readjustment that cannot be amicably agreed upon
by the peoples directly concerned shall be sanctioned.
These great objects can be put into a single sentence.
What we seek is the reign of law,
based upon the consent of the governed
and sustained by the organized opinion of mankind.
These great ends cannot be achieved by debating
and seeking to reconcile and accommodate
what statesmen may wish, with their projects
for balances of power and of national opportunity.
They can be realized only by the determination of what
the thinking peoples of the world desire,
with their longing hope for justice
and for social freedom and opportunity.44
The Americans had a million soldiers in France by July 4.
To celebrate the holiday Wilson wrote “Four-Minute Men” that
was distributed as an Official Bulletin and was read by four-minute
men in 5,300 community meetings on July 4.
This is that Four-Minute Speech:
You are met, my fellow citizens, to commemorate
the signing of the Declaration of Independence
which marked the awakening
of a new spirit in the lives of nations.
Since the birth of our Republic,
we have seen this spirit grow.
We have heard the demand and watched the struggle for
self-government spread and triumph among many peoples.
We have come to regard the right to political liberty
as the common right of humankind.
Year after year, within the security of our borders,
we have continued to rejoice in the peaceful increase
of freedom and democracy throughout the world.
And yet now, suddenly we are confronted with a menace
which endangers everything that we have won
and everything that the world has won.
In all its old insolence, with all its ancient cruelty
and injustice, military autocracy has again
armed itself against the pacific hopes of men.
Having suppressed self-government among its own people
by an organization maintained in part
by falsehood and treachery, it has set out
to impose its will upon its neighbors and upon us.
One by one, it has compelled every civilized nation
in the world either to forego its aspirations
or to declare war in their defense.
We find ourselves fighting again for our national existence.
We are face to face with the necessity of asserting anew
the fundamental right of free men to make their own laws
and choose their own allegiance, or else permit humanity
to become the victim of a ruthless ambition
that is determined to destroy what it cannot master.
Against its threat the liberty-loving people of the world
have risen and allied themselves.
No fear has deterred them,
and no bribe of material well-being has held them back.
They have made sacrifices such as the world
has never known before, and their resistance
in the face of death and suffering has proved that
the aim which animates the German effort
can never hope to rule the spirit of mankind.
Against the horror of military conquest,
against the emptiness of living in mere bodily contentment,
against the desolation of becoming part of a State
that knows neither truth nor honor,
the world has so revolted that even people
long dominated and suppressed by force
have now begun to stir and arm themselves.
Centuries of subjugation have not destroyed
the racial aspiration of the many distinct peoples
of eastern Europe, nor have they accepted
the sordid ideals of their political and military masters.
They have survived the slow persecutions of peace
as well as the agonies of war and now demand recognition
for their just claims to autonomy and self-government.
Representatives of these races are with you to-day,
voicing their loyalty to our ideals
and offering their services in the common cause.
I ask you fellow citizens, to unite with them
in making this our Independence Day the first
that shall be consecrated to a declaration of independence
for all the peoples of the world.45
On July 6 President Wilson agreed to meet the
British and French requests for American soldiers.
On that day Wilson’s advisor Col. House learned that Japan
was debating whether to follow German or American civilization,
and in a letter House wrote to Wilson the following:
I pointed out the advantage to his country
of following international ideals set forth by you.
If Japan would do this, I thought she would find
America ready to help her extend her sphere of influence.
He was very receptive, and said that the foundation
of your policy was justice to all nations,
and that he hoped Japan was to be included.
He stated that within recent years there had been
a growing tendency upon the part of Russia
to exclude the Japanese from Siberia, although
they continued to let Koreans and other Asiatics go in.
He thought that the position of Japan
would become intolerable
if her citizens were to be deprived of such an outlet.
I expressed my sympathy with this view and believed
he would find the United States cooperating
with the Japanese to bring about a more liberal policy.
If this could be done, he was sure that
Japan would be willing to follow our lead in any policy
that might be determined upon regarding Siberia.
It has been my opinion for a long time that
unless Japan was treated with more consideration
regarding the right of her citizens
to expand in nearby Asiatic, undeveloped countries,
she would have to be reckoned with—and rightly so.46
Also on the 6th the Navy Secretary Daniels sent Admiral Knight
on the flagship Brooklyn the following telegram:
This Government desires Vladivostok kept available
as a base for the safety of Czechs and as a means
of egress for them should the necessity arise.
In order to accomplish this and to indicate our sympathy
and support you are authorized to utilize the force
at your disposal and to request similar action
by Allied naval forces in holding the city.
Avoid any action tending to offend Russian sentiment
or to become involved in any political question.47
During a war cabinet meeting on July 10 Mrs. J. Borden Harriman
brought in Madame Botchkarova, Colonel of
the Russian woman’s Battalion of Death.
Mrs. Harriman described what happened.
Botchkarova started off her story
in a fairly matter-of-fact way;
then suddenly she began to tell the tale of the sufferings
of her people and her tongue went like a runaway horse.
She would hardly wait for her interpreter
to put what she was saying into English.
Her face worked.
Suddenly she threw herself on the floor
and clasped her arms about the President’s knees
begging him for help, for food,
for troops to intervene against the Bolshviki.
The President sat with tears streaming down his cheeks,
and assured her of his sympathy.
The little party finally got away from the White House,
all very much shaken.48
In mid-July the Japanese ambassador told the United States that
Japan would not interfere with Russian politics or take over territory.
Wilson advised the Allies that American soldiers would
guard military stores to aid the Czech Legion.
German General Erich Ludendorff had been making surprise attacks,
and on July 15 he led an attack against Reims.
This time at Château-Thierry the Allies led by General Pershing
with French and Belgians had been informed from German prisoners,
and with 58 divisions to the Germans’ 52 they defeated
the Germans and captured nearly 30,000 by July 18.
The Allies suffered 1,908 casualties while the Germans had 5,328.
This action in the Second Battle of the Marne
would be a turning point in the war.
On July 17 Wilson wrote a Memorandum that
Secretary of State Lansing sent to the allied ambassadors.
The whole heart of the people of the United States
is in the winning of this war.
The controlling purpose of the Government
of the United States is to do everything
that is necessary and effective to win it.
It wishes to cooperate in every practicable way
with the allied governments, and to cooperate ungrudgingly;
for it has no ends of its own to serve
and believes that the war can be won only by
common counsel and intimate concert of action….
The United States is at a great distance
from the field of action on the western front;
it is at a much greater distance
from any other field of action.
The instrumentalities by which it is to handle its armies
and its stores have at great cost
and with great difficulty been created in France.
They do not exist elsewhere.
It is practicable for her to do a great deal in France;
it is not practicable for her to do anything
of importance or on a large scale upon any other field.
The American Government, therefore, very respectfully
requests its Associates to accept its deliberate judgment
that it should not dissipate its force
by attempting important operations elsewhere.
It regards the Italian front as closely coordinated
with the western front, however, and is willing
to divert a portion of its military forces from France to Italy
if it is the judgment and wish of the Supreme Command
that it should do so….
It is the clear and fixed judgment
of the Government of the United States,
arrived at after repeated and very searching
reconsiderations of the whole situation in Russia,
that military intervention there would add
to the present sad confusion in Russia rather than cure it,
injure her rather than help her, and that it would be
of no advantage in the prosecution of our main design,
to win the war against Germany.
It cannot, therefore, take part in such intervention
or sanction it in principle….
Military action is admissible in Russia,
as the Government of the United States
sees the circumstances, only to help the Czecho-Slovaks
consolidate their forces and get into successful cooperation
with their Slavic kinsmen and to steady any efforts
at self-government or self-defense in which the Russians
themselves may be willing to accept assistance….
At the same time the Government of the United States …
hopes to carry out the plans for safeguarding
the rear of the Czecho-Slovaks operating from Vladivostok
in a way that will place it and keep it in close cooperation
with a small military force like its own from Japan,
and if necessary from the other Allies, and that
will assure it of the cordial accord of all the allied powers;
and it proposes to ask all associated in this course of action
to unite in assuring the people of Russia
in the most public and solemn manner that
none of the governments uniting in action either in Siberia
or in northern Russia contemplates any interference
of any kind with the political sovereignty of Russia,
any intervention in her internal affairs,
or any impairment of her territorial integrity either now
or hereafter, but that each of the associated powers has
the single object of affording such aid as shall be acceptable,
and only such aid as shall be acceptable,
to the Russian people in their endeavor to regain control of
their own affairs, their own territory, and their own destiny.
It is the hope and purpose
of the Government of the United States to take advantage
of the earliest opportunity to send to Siberia
a commission of merchants, agricultural experts,
labor advisers, Red Cross representatives,
and agents of the Young Men’s Christian Association
accustomed to organizing the best methods of spreading
useful information and rendering educational help
of a modest sort, in order in some systematic manner
to relieve the immediate economic necessities of the people
there in every way for which opportunity may open.
The execution of this plan will follow
and will not be permitted to embarrass
the military assistance rendered in the rear
of the westward-moving forces of the Czecho-Slovaks.49
On July 26 President Wilson issued a
“Statement Denouncing Mob Action” as an “Official U. S. Bulletin” that begins,
My Fellow Countrymen:
I take the liberty of addressing you upon a subject
which so vitally affects the honor of the Nation
and the very character and integrity of our institutions
that I trust you will find me justified
in speaking very plainly about it.
I allude to the mob spirit which has recently
here and there very frequently shown its head amongst us,
not in any single region, but in many
and widely separated parts of the country.
There have been many lynchings,
and every one of them has been a blow at the heart
of ordered law and humane justice.
No man who loves America, no man who really cares
for her fame and honor and character,
or who is truly loyal to her institutions,
can justify mob action while the courts of justice are open
and the governments of the States and the Nation
are ready and able to do their duty.
We are at this very moment fighting lawless passion.
Germany has outlawed herself among the nations
because she has disregarded the sacred obligations of law
and has made lynchers of her armies.
Lynchers emulate her disgraceful example.
I, for my part, am anxious to see every community
in America rise above that level with pride
and a fixed resolution which
no man or set of men can afford to despise.50
By August 8 Germany’s General Erich Ludendorff realized
that his army’s fighting power was declining.
On August 15 President Wilson and his wife Edith went on a vacation
to the seaside residence of Col. House, and he worked on a draft
for a League of Nations that a British cabinet committee had sent to him.
Using the Espionage Act of 1917 the Justice Department
arrested 165 members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).
In the trial of 97 leaders and IWW members by a United States court
in August all were convicted on four counts by the jury.
Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis sentenced them to a total of 807 years
in prison and fines adding up to over $2 million.
Big Bill Haywood was sentenced to 20 years.
Others got 10 years or 5 years, and only two spent less than a year in prison.
In a confidential letter to Edward Nash Hurley on August 29 Wilson wrote,
The English, I need not tell you, are making
a great many determined efforts to see to it not only that
they are not put at an economic disadvantage after the war,
but that they secure now by as tight arrangements
as possible every economic advantage
that is within their reach.
They are stimulated to do this by their consciousness that
our shipbuilding program will give us a very considerable
advantage over them in the carrying trade,
and therefore in world commerce, after the struggle is over.
I therefore write to suggest that it is wise for us
not to talk now or publicly plan now
the use we shall make of our shipping after the war,
because while it is true, contrary to the English impression,
that we do not intend to seek any unfair advantage
of any kind or to shoulder anybody out, but merely
to give the widest possible currency to our own goods,
the impression made by past utterances has been that we,
like the English, are planning to dominate everything
and to oust everybody we can oust….
My object is to give them not even the slightest color
of provocation or excuse for what they are doing.51
On August 31 Wilson wrote to Rabbi Stephen Samuel Wise,
former President of the Provisional Zionist Committee this letter:
My Dear Rabbi Wise:
I have watched with deep and sincere interest
the reconstructive work which the Weitzman Commission
has done in Palestine
at the instance of the British Government,
and I welcome an opportunity to express the satisfaction
I have felt in the progress of the Zionist movement
in the United States and in the Allied countries
since the declaration by Mr. Balfour
on behalf of the British Government,
of Great Britain’s approval of the establishment in Palestine
of a national home for the Jewish people,
and his promise that the British Government would use its
best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of that object,
with the understanding that nothing would be done
to prejudice the civil and religious rights
of non-Jewish people in Palestine
or the rights and political status
enjoyed by Jews in other countries.
I think that all Americans will be deeply moved
by the report that even in this time of stress
the Weitzman Commission has been able to lay
the foundation of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem,
with the promise that that bears of spiritual rebirth.52
On 27 September 1918 President Wilson began the
Fourth Liberty Loan campaign with a speech in which he said,
We accepted the issues of the war as facts,
not as any group of men either here or elsewhere
had defined them, and we can accept no outcome
which does not squarely meet and settle them.
Those issues are these:
Shall the military power of any nation or group of nations
be suffered to determine the fortunes of peoples over whom
they have no right to rule except the right of force?
Shall strong nations be free to wrong weak nations
and make them subject to their purpose and interest?
Shall peoples be ruled and dominated,
even in their own internal affairs, by arbitrary
and irresponsible force or by their own will and choice?
Shall there be a common standard of right and privilege
for all peoples and nations or shall the strong do as they will
and the weak suffer without redress?
Shall the assertion of right be haphazard
and by casual alliance or shall there be a common concert
to oblige the observance of common rights?
No man, no group of men,
chose these to be the issues of the struggle.
They are the issues of it; and they must be settled,—
by no arrangement or compromise
or adjustment of interests, but definitely and once for all
and with a full and unequivocal acceptance
of the principle that the interest of the weakest
is as sacred as the interest of the strongest.
This is what we mean
when we speak of a permanent peace,
if we speak sincerely, intelligently, and with a real
knowledge and comprehension of the matter we deal with.
We are all agreed that there can be no peace
obtained by any kind of bargain or compromise
with the governments of the Central Empires,
because we have dealt with them already
and have seen them deal with other governments
that were parties to this struggle,
at Brest Litovsk and Bucharest.
They have convinced us that
they are without honor and do not intend justice.
They observe no covenants,
accept no principle but force and their own interest.
We cannot “come to terms” with them.
They have made it impossible.
The German people must by this time be fully aware
that we cannot accept the word
of those who forced this war upon us.
We do not think the same thoughts
or speak the same language of agreement.
It is of capital importance that we should also be
explicitly agreed that no peace shall be obtained
by any kind of compromise
or abatement of the principles we have avowed
as the principles for which we are fighting.
There should exist no doubt about that.
I am, therefore, going to take the liberty
of speaking with the utmost frankness about
the practical implications that are involved in it.
If it be in deed and in truth the common object
of the governments associated against Germany
and of the nations whom they govern, as I believe it to be,
to achieve by the coming settlements
a secure and lasting peace, it will be necessary that
all who sit down at the peace table shall come
ready and willing to pay the price, the only price,
that will procure it; and ready and willing, also,
to create in some virile fashion the only instrumentality
by which it can be made certain that
the agreements of the peace will be honored and fulfilled.
That price is impartial justice in every item
of the settlement, no matter whose interest is crossed;
and not only impartial justice but also the satisfaction
of the several peoples whose fortunes are dealt with.
That indispensable instrumentality is a league of nations
formed under covenants that will be efficacious.
Without such an instrumentality,
by which the peace of the world can be guaranteed,
peace will rest in part upon
the word of outlaws and only upon that word.
For Germany will have to redeem her character,
not by what happens at the peace table but by what follows.
And, as I see it, the constitution of that League of Nations
and the clear definition of its objects must be a part,
is in a sense the most essential part,
of the peace settlement itself.
It cannot be formed now.
If formed now, it would be merely a new alliance confined
to the nations associated against a common enemy.
It is not likely that it could be formed after the settlement.
It is necessary to guarantee the peace;
and the peace cannot be guaranteed as an afterthought.
The reason, to speak in plain terms again,
why it must be guaranteed is that there will be parties
to the peace whose promises have proved untrustworthy,
and means must be found
in connection with the peace settlement itself
to remove that source of insecurity.
It would be folly to leave the guarantee
to the subsequent voluntary action of the Governments
we have seen destroy Russia and deceive Romania.
But these general terms do not disclose the whole matter.
Some details are needed to make them
sound less like a thesis and more like a practical program.
These, then, are some of the particulars,
and I state them with the greater confidence
because I can state them authoritatively
as representing this Government’s interpretation
of its own duty with regard to peace:
First, the impartial justice meted out must involve
no discrimination between those to whom we wish to be just
and those to whom we do not wish to be just.
It must be a justice that plays no favorites
and knows no standard
but the equal rights of the several peoples concerned;
Second, no special or separate interest
of any single nation or any group of nations
can be made the basis of any part of the settlement
which is not consistent with the common interest of all;
Third, there can be no leagues or alliances
or special covenants and understandings within
the general and common family of the League of Nations.
Fourth, and more specifically, there can be
no special, selfish economic combinations within the League
and no employment of any form of economic boycott
or exclusion except as the power of economic penalty
by exclusion from the markets of the world
may be vested in the League of Nations itself
as a means of discipline and control.
Fifth, all international agreements and treaties
of every kind must be made known
in their entirety to the rest of the world.
Special alliances and economic rivalries and hostilities
have been the prolific source in the modern world
of the plans and passions that produce war.
It would be an insincere as well as insecure peace
that did not exclude them in definite and binding terms.
The confidence with which I venture to speak
for our people in these matters
does not spring from our traditions merely
and the well-known principles of international action
which we have always professed and followed.
In the same sentence in which I say that
the United States will enter into no special arrangements
or understandings with particular nations
let me say also that the United States is prepared to assume
its full share of responsibility for the maintenance
of the common covenants and understandings
upon which peace must henceforth rest.
We still read Washington’s immortal warning
against “entangling alliances”
with full comprehension and an answering purpose.
But only special and limited alliances entangle;
and we recognize and accept the duty of a new day
in which we are permitted to hope for a general alliance
which will avoid entanglements and clear the air
of the world for common understandings
and the maintenance of common rights.53
On September 30 President Wilson delivered this appeal
for woman suffrage as an address to the United States Senate:
The unusual circumstances of a world war
in which we stand and are judged in the view
not only of our own people and our own consciences
but also in the view of all nations and peoples will, I hope,
justify in your thought, as it does in mine,
the message I have come to bring to you.
I regard the concurrence of the Senate
in the constitutional amendment proposing
the extension of the suffrage to women as vitally essential
to the successful prosecution of the great war
of humanity in which we are engaged.
I have come to urge upon you the considerations
which have led me to that conclusion.
It is not only my privilege, it is also my duty to apprise you
of every circumstance and element involved
in this momentous struggle which seems to me
to affect its very processes and outcome.
It is my duty to win the war and to ask you to remove
every obstacle that stands in the way of winning it.
I had assumed that the Senate would concur
in the amendment because no disputable principle
is involved but only a question of the method
by which the suffrage is to be extended to women.
There is and can be no party issue involved in it.
Both of our great national parties are pledged,
explicitly pledged, to equality of suffrage
for the women of the country.
Neither party, therefore, it seems to me, can justify
hesitation as to the method of obtaining it,
can rightfully hesitate to substitute federal initiative
for state initiative, if the early adoption of the measure
is necessary to the successful prosecution of the war
and if the method of state action
proposed in the party platforms of 1916
is impracticable within any reasonable length of time,
if practicable at all.
And its adoption is, in my judgment, clearly necessary
to the successful prosecution of the war
and the successful realization of the objects
for which the war is being fought.
That judgment I take the liberty of urging upon you
with solemn earnestness for reasons which I shall state
very frankly and which I shall hope will seem
as conclusive to you as they seem to me.
This is a peoples’ war and the peoples’ thinking
constitutes its atmosphere and morale,
not the predilections of the drawing room
or the political considerations of the caucus.
If we be indeed democrats
and wish to lead the world to democracy,
we can ask other peoples to accept in proof of our sincerity
and our ability to lead them whither they wish to be led
nothing less persuasive and convincing than our actions.
Our professions will not suffice.
Verification must be forthcoming
when verification is asked for.
And in this case verification is asked for—
asked for in this particular matter.
You ask by whom?
Not through diplomatic channels; not by Foreign Ministers.
Not by the intimations of parliaments.
It is asked for by the anxious, expectant, suffering peoples
with whom we are dealing and who are willing
to put their destinies in some measure in our hands,
if they are sure that we wish the same things that they do.
I do not speak by conjecture.
It is not alone the voices of statesmen
and of newspapers that reach me,
and the voices of foolish and intemperate agitators
do not reach me at all.
Through many, many channels I have been made aware
what the plain, struggling, workaday folk are thinking upon
whom the chief terror and suffering of this tragic war falls.
They are looking to the great, powerful,
famous Democracy of the West to lead them to the new day
for which they have so long waited;
and they think, in their logical simplicity, that democracy
means that women shall play their part in affairs
alongside men and upon an equal footing with them.
If we reject measures like this, in ignorance or defiance
of what a new age has brought forth,
of what they have seen but we have not,
they will cease to believe in us;
they will cease to follow or to trust us.
They have seen their own governments
accept this interpretation of democracy—
seen old governments like that of Great Britain,
which did not profess to be democratic,
promise readily and as of course this justice to women,
though they had long before refused it,
the strange revelations of this war having made many things
new and plain, to governments as well as to peoples.
Are we alone to refuse to learn the lesson?
Are we alone to ask and take the utmost
that our women can give—
service and sacrifice of every kind—
and still say we do not see what title that gives them
to stand by our sides in the guidance
of the affairs of their nation and ours?
We have made partners of the women in this war;
shall we admit them only to a partnership
of suffering and sacrifice and toil
and not to a partnership of privilege and right?
This war could not have been fought,
either by the other nations engaged or by America,
if it had not been for the services of the women—
services rendered in every sphere—
not merely in the fields of effort in which
we have been accustomed to see them work,
but wherever men have worked
and upon the very skirts and edges of the battle itself.
We shall not only be distrusted
but shall deserve to be distrusted
if we do not enfranchise them
with the fullest possible enfranchisement,
as it is now certain that
the other great free nations will enfranchise them.
We cannot isolate our thought or our action in such a matter
from the thought of the rest of the world.
We must either conform
or deliberately reject what they propose
and resign the leadership of liberal minds to others.
The women of America are too noble and too intelligent
and too devoted to be slackers
whether you give or withhold this thing that is mere justice;
but I know the magic it will work in their thoughts and spirits
if you give it them.
I propose it as I would propose to admit soldiers
to the suffrage, the men fighting in the field for our liberties
and the liberties of the world, were they excluded.
The tasks of the women lie at the very heart of the war,
and I know how much stronger that heart will beat
if you do this just thing and show our women that
you trust them as much as you in fact
and of necessity depend upon them.
Have I said that the passage of this amendment
is a vitally necessary war measure,
and do you need further proof?
Do you stand in need of the trust of other peoples
and of the trust of our own women?
Is that trust an asset or is it not?
I tell you plainly, as the commander-in-chief of our armies
and of the gallant men in our fleets,
as the present spokesman of the people in our dealings
with the men and women throughout the world
who are now our partners,
as the responsible head of a great government
which stands and is questioned day by day
as to its purposes, its principles, its hopes,
whether they be serviceable to men everywhere
or only to itself,
and who must himself answer these questionings
or be shamed, as the guide and director of forces
caught in the grip of war and by the same token
in need of every material and spiritual resource
this great nation possesses—
I tell you plainly that this measure which I urge upon you
is vital to the winning of the war
and to the energies alike of preparation and of battle.
And not to the winning of the war only.
It is vital to the right solution of the great problems
which we must settle, and settle immediately,
when the war is over.
We shall need them in our vision of affairs,
as we have never needed them before,
the sympathy and insight
and clear moral instinct of the women of the world.
The problems of that time will strike to the roots
of many things that we have not hitherto questioned,
and I for one believe that
our safety in those questioning days,
as well as our comprehension of matters
that touch society to the quick, will depend upon the direct
and authoritative participation of women in our counsels.
We shall need their moral sense to preserve
what is right and fine and worthy in our system of life
as well as to discover just what it is
that ought to be purified and reformed.
Without their counsellings we shall be only half wise.
That is my case. This is my appeal.
Many may deny its validity, if they choose,
but no one can brush aside or answer
the arguments upon which it is based.
The executive tasks of this war rest upon me.
I ask that you lighten them and place in my hands
instruments, spiritual instruments,
which I do not now possess, which I sorely need, and which
I have daily to apologize for not being able to employ.54
The American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) had been established
on 5 July 1917, and they began fighting their longest battle in the
Argonne Forest by the Meuse River on 26 September 1918.
Their First and Second Armies fought with France’s Fourth and Fifth Armies
and 850 Siamese in a total force of 1,200,000 soldiers.
The Americans had 26,277 killed and 95,786 wounded;
the French had about 70,000 casualties, and 19 Siamese were killed.
The Germans had three armies with 450,000 soldiers, and
they suffered some 28,000 dead and 42,000 wounded.
The French captured 30,000 German prisoners of war,
and the Americans took 26,000 POWs.
The Allies took over 485,000 square miles from the enemy,
and they ended the war with the Armistice on November 11.
In this first World War the Allies had over 5,525,000 military killed
along with more than 4 million civilians.
The Russians lost 1,811,000 soldiers, the French 1,400,000,
the British 885,000, and the Americans 116,708.
The Central Powers lost at least 8,086,000 military dead
and more than 3,700,000 civilians.
The total number of people who died in the war was about 20 million.
The influenza pandemic that was called the “Spanish flu”
killed at least 25 million people between February 1918 and April 1920.
By 2 October 1918 the influenza epidemic was in 43 states,
and public measures were being taken in large cities
such as New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia.
Influenza killed about 195,000 Americans in October.
In the United States about 28% of the people would be
infected by the flu, and at least 500,000 died.
On October 6 Treasury Secretary William McAdoo
was soliciting subscriptions for the Fourth Liberty Loan.
President Wilson doubled his previous investment by subscribing
for $20,000, and he paid by an installment plan.
Also on the 6th the German government issued this first note requesting peace:
The German Government requests
the President of the United States of America
to take steps for the restoration of peace,
to notify all belligerents of this request,
and to invite them to delegate plenipotentiaries
for the purpose of taking up negotiations.
The German Government accepts,
as a basis for the peace negotiations, the program
laid down by the President of the United States
in his message to Congress of January 8, 1918,
and in his subsequent pronouncements
particularly in his address of September 27, 1918.
In order to avoid further bloodshed the German Government
requests to bring about the immediate conclusion
of a general armistice on land, on water, and in the air.55
On October 7 a second Austro-Hungarian note was sent to the
Swedish minister and addressed to the President of the United States.
That monarchy suggested concluding with him and the Allies an armistice
on land, at sea, and in the air by entering immediately negotiations for peace
on the foundation of the fourteen points and the four principles from
Wilson’s address on 11 February 1918 as well as the
viewpoints the President expressed on September 27.
On October 8 President Wilson sent this response
to the German note sent by way of the Swiss chargé:
Before making reply … and in order that
that reply shall be as candid and straightforward
as the momentous interests involved require,
the President of the United States deems it necessary
to assure himself of the exact meaning
of the note of the Imperial Chancellor.
Does the Imperial Chancellor mean that
the Imperial German Government accepts the terms
laid down by the President in his address to Congress
on the eighth of January last and in subsequent addresses
and that its object in entering into discussions would be
only to agree upon practical details of their application?
The President feels bound to say with regard
to the suggestion of an armistice that
he would not feel at liberty to propose a cessation of arms
to the Governments with which
the Government of the United States is associated
against the Central Powers so long as
the armies of those powers are upon their soil…..
The President also feels that he is justified in asking
whether the Imperial Chancellor is speaking merely
for the constituted authorities of the Empire
who have so far conducted the war.56
On October 12 Wilson marched at the head of the American Division
in the Liberty Day parade through the decorated streets of New York.
On that day he received the second German note that accepted
his terms based on his January 8 and other addresses.
On the next day the former President Theodore Roosevelt
from Oyster Bay released this statement:
I most earnestly hope that the Senate of the United States
and all other persons competent to speak
for the American people will emphatically repudiate
the so-called fourteen points
and the various similar utterances of the President….
To do as the President has done in this case … becomes
dangerously close to being treacherous diplomacy.57
That statement was published by the New York Times on October 14.
On that day Wilson’s reply in a letter signed by Secretary of State Lansing
to the second German note included these words:
It must be clearly understood that the process
of evacuation and the conditions of an armistice
are matters which must be left to the judgment
and advice of the military advisers of the Government
of the United States and the Allied Governments,
and the President feels it is his duty to say that
no arrangement can be accepted
by the Government of the United States which does not
provide absolutely satisfactory safeguards and guarantees
of the maintenance of the military supremacy of the armies
of the United States and of the Allies in the field.
He feels confident that he can safely assume that
this will also be the judgment
and decision of the Allied Governments.
The President feels that it is also his duty to add
that neither the Government of the United States
nor, he is quite sure, the Governments with which
the Government of the United States is associated
as a belligerent will consent to consider an armistice
so long as the armed forces of Germany continue the illegal
and in humane practices which they still persist in.
At the very time that the German Government approaches
the Government of the United States
with proposals of peace its submarines
are engaged in sinking passenger ships at sea,
and not the ships alone, but the very boats in which their
passengers and crews seek to make their way to safety;
and in their present inforced withdrawal
from Flanders and France the German armies
are pursuing a course of wanton destruction
which has always been regarded as in direct violation
of the rules and practices of civilized warfare.
Cities and villages, if not destroyed, are being stripped of
all they contain not only, but often of their very inhabitants.
The nations associated against Germany cannot be expected
to agree to a cessation of arms while acts of inhumanity,
spoliation, and desolation are being continued which they
justly look upon with horror and with burning hearts.58
By October 16 the Germans were retreating from western Belgium
pressured by Allied forces as villages rejoiced.
On the 18th the Czechoslovak Declaration of Independence was made public
by President Thomas G. Masaryk who delayed the announcement
until Wilson gave his answer to Austria.
The German Reichstag accepted the Constitution
that the Bundesrath had approved on October 15.
On October 26 the German Field Marshal Ludendorff was dismissed.
In Croatia’s capital Zagreb the National Council of Croats, Serbs,
and Slovenes declared their independence from Austria-Hungary on October 29.
On December 1 Serbia’s Prince Alexander would proclaim
the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.
Those who were not Serbs preferred the union of equals they called “Yugoslavia.”
President Wilson had made a short speech on October 25
asking voters to give him a Democratic Congress, and
Republican leaders in the Congress criticized him for doing that.
During the Spanish influenza epidemic there was a low turnout.
In the election on November 5 the Republicans took six seats away
from the Democrats in the United States Senate giving them a 49-47 advantage.
The House of Representatives was almost equally divided by party since 1916,
and in 1918 the Republicans gained 25 seats giving them a 240-216 majority.
On November 4 the Allied Supreme War Council approved
the military terms for an armistice with Germany.
On the 5th Wilson sent this short message that was translated
for the peoples of the constituent nations of Austria-Hungary:
May I not say, as speaking for multitudes
of your most sincere friends, that it is the earnest hope
and expectation of all friends of freedom everywhere
and particularly of those whose present and immediate task
it is to assist the liberated peoples of the world
to establish themselves in genuine freedom,
that both the leaders and the peoples of the countries
recently set free shall see to it that the momentous changes
now being brought about are carried through with order,
with moderation, with mercy as well as firmness,
and that violence and cruelty of every kind
are checked and prevented, so that nothing inhumane
may stain the annals of the new age of achievement.
They know that such things would only delay
the great things we are all striving for,
and they therefore confidently appeal to you to restrain
every force that may threaten either to delay
or to discredit the noble processes of liberty.59
The German Chancellor Maximilian of Baden,
called for a cessation of hostilities on November 7,
and then Emperor Wilhelm II abdicated on November 9.
The Armistice ending the first World War was signed on November 11
at five in the morning.
The Allies signed it at Compiégne, France at 11 a.m.
President Wilson introduced to the public the terms of the Armistice
that detailed the countries from which German troops would be withdrawing
so that they would be as they were on 1 August 1914.
Here are some highlights from the 5-page Armistice agreement
that Wilson read to a joint session of the Congress:
I. Military Clauses on Western Front.
One. Cessation of operations by land and in the air
six hours after the signature of the armistice.
Two. Immediate evacuation of invaded countries:
Belgium, France, Alsace Lorraine, Luxemburg, so ordered
as to be completed within fourteen days
from the signature of the armistice….
Three. Repatriation beginning at once and to be completed
within fourteen days of all inhabitants
of the countries above mentioned,
including hostages and persons under trial or convicted.
Four. Surrender in good condition by the German armies
of the following equipment: Five thousand guns …
thirty thousand machine guns … two thousand airplanes …
Evacuation by the German armies
of the countries on the left bank of the Rhine….
Six. In all territory evacuated by the enemy
there shall be no evacuation of inhabitants;
no damage or harm shall be done
to the persons or property of the inhabitants….
Nine. The right of requisition shall be exercised by the
Allied and the United States armies in all occupied territory.
Ten. An immediate repatriation without reciprocity
according to detailed conditions which shall be fixed,
of all Allied and United States prisoners of war….
Eleven. Sick and wounded who cannot be removed
from evacuated territory will be cared for
by German personnel who will be left
on the spot with the medical material required….
II. Disposition Relative to the Eastern Frontiers
of Germany.
Twelve. All German troops at present in any territory
which before the war belonged to Russia, Roumania
or Turkey shall withdraw within the frontiers of Germany
as they existed on August first, 1914.
Thirteen. Evacuation by German troops to begin at once
and all German instructors, prisoners, and civilian
as well as military agents, now on the territory of Russia
(as defined before 1914) to be recalled….
Fifteen. Abandonment of the treaties of Bucharest
and Brest-Litovsk and of the supplemental treaties.
Sixteen. The allies shall have free access to the territories
evacuated by the Germans on their eastern frontier …
III. Clause Concerning East Africa.
Seventeen. Unconditional capitulation of all German forces
operating in East Africa within one month.
IV. General Clauses.
Eighteen. Repatriation, without reciprocity,
within a maximum period of one month …
Nineteen. The following financial conditions are required:
Reparation for damage done….
V. Naval Conditions.
Twenty. Immediate cessation of all hostilities at sea
and definite information to be given as to the location
and movements of all German ships….
Twenty-one. All naval and mercantile marine
prisoners of war of the Allied and Associated Powers
in German hands to be returned without reciprocity.
Twenty-two. Surrender to the Allies and the United States
of America of one hundred and sixty German submarines …
Twenty-three. The following German surface warships
which shall be designated by the Allies and the United States
of America shall forthwith be disarmed and thereafter
interned in neutral ports….
Twenty-four. The Allies and the United States of America
shall have the right to sweep up all mine fields
and obstructions laid by Germany
outside German territorial waters,
and the positions of these are to be indicated….
Twenty-five. Freedom of access to and from the Baltic
to be given to the naval and mercantile marines
of the Allied and Associated Powers….
Twenty-six. The existing blockade conditions
set up by the Allies and Associated Powers are
to remain unchanged and all German merchant ships
found at sea are to remain liable to capture….
Twenty-nine. All Black Sea ports
are to be evacuated by Germany;
all Russian war vessels of all descriptions
seized by Germany in the Black Sea are to be handed over
to the Allies and the United States of America …
Thirty-five. This armistice to be accepted or refused
by Germany within seventy two hours of notification.60
Wilson after reading the Armistice to the Congress made this speech:
The war thus comes to an end; for,
having accepted these terms of armistice, it will be
impossible for the German command to renew it.
It is not now possible to assess
the consequences of this great consummation.
We know only that this tragical war,
whose consuming flames swept from one nation to another
until all the world was on fire, is at an end
and that it was the privilege of our own people
to enter it at its most critical juncture in such fashion
and in such force as to contribute in a way of which
we are all deeply proud to the great result.
We know, too, that the object of the war is attained;
the object upon which all free men had set their hearts;
and attained with a sweeping completeness
which even now we do not realize.
Armed imperialism such as the men conceived who were
but yesterday the masters of Germany is at an end,
its illicit ambitions engulfed in black disaster.
Who will now seek to revive it?
The arbitrary power of the military caste of Germany
which once could secretly and of its own single choice
disturb the peace of the world is discredited and destroyed.
And more than that,—
much more than that,—has been accomplished.
The great nations which associated themselves to destroy it
have now definitely united in the common purpose
to set up such a peace as will satisfy the longing
of the whole world for disinterested justice,
embodied in settlements which are based upon something
much better and much more lasting than
the selfish competitive interests of powerful states.
There is no longer conjecture
as to the objects the victors have in mind.
They have a mind in the matter, not only, but a heart also.
Their avowed and concerted purpose is
to satisfy and protect the weak
as well as to accord their just rights to the strong.
The humane temper and intention
of the victorious Governments
has already been manifested in a very practical way.
Their representatives in the Supreme War Council
at Versailles have by unanimous resolution assured
the peoples of the Central Empires that everything
that is possible in the circumstances will be done
to supply them with food and relieve the distressing want
that is in so many places threatening their very lives;
and steps are to be taken immediately to organize
these efforts at relief in the same systematic manner
that they were organized in the case of Belgium.
By the use of the idle tonnage of the Central Empires
it ought presently to be possible to lift the fear
of utter misery from their oppressed populations
and set their minds and energies free for the great
and hazardous tasks of political reconstruction
which now face them on every hand.
Hunger does not breed reform;
it breeds madness and all the ugly distempers
that make an ordered life impossible.
For with the fall of the ancient governments
which rested like an incubus upon the peoples
of the Central Empires has come political change not merely,
but revolution; and revolution which seems as yet
to assume no final and ordered form
but to run from one fluid change to another,
until thoughtful men are forced to ask themselves,
With what governments, and of what sort, are we
about to deal in the making of the covenants of peace?
With what authority will they meet us,
and with what assurance that their authority will abide
and sustain securely the international arrangements
into which we are about to enter?
There is here matter for no small anxiety and misgiving.
When peace is made, upon whose promises
and engagements besides our own is it to rest?
Let us be perfectly frank with ourselves
and admit that these questions
cannot be satisfactorily answered now or at once.
But the moral is not that there is little hope
of an early answer that will suffice.
It is only that we must be patient and helpful
and mindful above all of the great hope and confidence
that lie at the heart of what is taking place.
Excesses accomplish nothing.
Unhappy Russia has furnished abundant recent proof of that.
Disorder immediately defeats itself.
If excesses should occur,
if disorder should for a time raise its head,
a sober second thought will follow and
a day of constructive action, if we help and do not hinder.
The present and all that it holds belongs to the nations
and the peoples who preserve their self-control
and the orderly processes of their governments;
the future to those who prove themselves
the true friends of mankind.
To conquer with arms is
to make only a temporary conquest;
to conquer the world by earning its esteem is
to make permanent conquest.
I am confident that the nations that have learned
the discipline of freedom and that have settled
with self-possession to its ordered practice
are now about to make conquest of the world
by the sheer power of example and of friendly helpfulness.
The peoples who have but just come out
from under the yoke of arbitrary government
and who are now coming at last into their freedom
will never find the treasures of liberty they are in search of
if they look for them by the light of the torch.
They will find that every pathway that is stained
with the blood of their own brothers leads to the wilderness,
not to the seat of their hope.
They are now face to face with their initial test.
We must hold the light steady until they find themselves.
And in the meantime, if it be possible, we must establish
a peace that will justly define their place among the nations,
remove all fear of their neighbors
and of their former masters,
and enable them to live in security and contentment
when they have set their own affairs in order.
I, for one, do not doubt their purpose or their capacity.
There are some happy signs that they know and will choose
the way of self-control and peaceful accommodation.
If they do, we shall put our aid at their disposal
in every way that we can.
If they do not, we must await with patience and sympathy
the awakening and recovery
that will assuredly come at last.61
On 18 November 1918 President Wilson announced that
he would be attending the Peace Conference in France in person.
On November 29 he appointed Secretary of State Robert Lansing,
his confidential adviser Edward M. House, the diplomat Henry White
who had served in Italy and France, and General Tasker H. Bliss
as the four commissioners to serve with him.
On 2 December 1918 Wilson gave his sixth Annual Message
to Congress on the state of the union.
He noted that they had sent 1,950,513 men overseas in the war.
Of the 758 who were lost at sea by an enemy attack 630 were killed
when an English transport was sunk near the Orkney Islands.
He also gave credit to the women who served with
their intelligence and in the systematic economies.
He hoped that the Senate would ratify the treaty of friendship
and adjustment with the Republic of Colombia.
He discussed various domestic issues.
He pleaded for special help for the desperate needs of Belgium and France.
He suggested that the taxes in 1920 be reduced from $6 billion to $4 billion.
He concluded,
I welcome this occasion to announce to the Congress
my purpose to join in Paris the representatives
of the governments with which we have been associated
in the war against the Central Empires
for the purpose of discussing with them
the main features of the treaty of peace.
I realize the great inconveniences that
will attend my leaving the country, particularly at this time,
but the conclusion that it was my paramount duty to go
has been forced upon me by considerations which I hope
will seem as conclusive to you as they have seemed to me.
The Allied governments have accepted
the bases of peace which I outlined
to the Congress on the eighth of January last,
as the Central Empires also have,
and very reasonably desire my personal counsel
in their interpretation and application,
and it is highly desirable that I should give it in order that
the sincere desire of our Government to contribute
without selfish purpose of any kind to settlements
that will be of common benefit to all the nations concerned
may be made fully manifest.
The peace settlements which are now to be agreed upon
are of transcendent importance
both to us and to the rest of the world,
and I know of no business or interest
which should take precedence of them.
The gallant men of our armed forces on land and sea
have consciously fought for the ideals
which they knew to be the ideals of their country;
I have sought to express those ideals;
they have accepted my statements of them
as the substance of their own thought and purpose,
as the associated governments have accepted them;
I owe it to them to see to it, so far as in me lies,
that no false or mistaken interpretation is put upon them,
and no possible effort omitted to realize them.
It is now my duty to play my full part in making good
what they offered their life’s blood to obtain.
I can think of no call to service which could transcend this.
I shall be in close touch with you and with affairs
on this side the water, and you will know all that I do.
At my request, the French and English governments
have absolutely removed the censorship of cable news
which until within a fortnight they had maintained,
and there is now no censorship whatever
exercised at this end except upon
attempted trade communications with enemy countries.
It has been necessary to keep an open wire constantly
available between Paris and the Department of State
and another between France and the Department of War.
In order that this might be done with the least possible
interference with the other uses of the cables,
I have temporarily taken over the control of both cables
in order that they may be used as a single system.
I did so at the advice of the most experienced cable officials,
and I hope that the results will justify my hope
that the news of the next few months may pass
with the utmost freedom and with the least possible delay
from each side of the sea to the other.
May I not hope, Gentlemen of the Congress,
that in the delicate tasks
I shall have to perform on the other side of the sea,
in my efforts truly and faithfully to interpret
the principles and purposes of the country we love,
I may have the encouragement
and the added strength of your united support?
I realize the magnitude and difficulty
of the duty I am undertaking;
I am poignantly aware of its grave responsibilities.
I am the servant of the nation.
I can have no private thought or purpose of my own
in performing such an errand.
I go to give the best that is in me
to the common settlements which
I must now assist in arriving at in conference with
the other working heads of the associated governments.
I shall count upon your friendly countenance
and encouragement.
I shall not be inaccessible.
The cables and the wireless will render me available
for any counsel or service you may desire of me,
and I shall be happy in the thought that
I am constantly in touch with the weighty matters
of domestic policy with which we shall have to deal.
I shall make my absence as brief as possible
and shall hope to return with the happy assurance
that it has been possible to translate into action
the great ideals for which America has striven.62
On December 4 President Wilson, Secretary of State Robert Lansing,
and diplomat Henry White sailed on a German ship that had been renamed
the S.S. George Washington which arrived at Brest-Litovsk on December 13.
The other US Commissioners to the Peace Conference, Col. Edward House
and
General Tasker Bliss, were waiting for them when they arrived at Paris on the 14th.
On December 17 Lansing advised Col. House to urge
Wilson to accept a League of Nations and an international court
with codified principles of international law.
This was Wilson’s first speech in Europe he gave
at the University of Paris on December 21:
Mr. President, Mr. Recteur:
I feel very keenly the distinguished honor which has been
conferred upon me by the great University of Paris,
and it is very delightful to me also to have the honor
of being inducted into the great company of scholars
whose life and fame have made the history
of the University of Paris a thing admired
among men of cultivation in all parts of the world.
By what you have said, sir, of the theory of education
which has been followed in France,
and which I have tried to promote in the United States,
I am tempted to venture upon a favorite theme.
I have always thought, sir, that the chief object of education
was to awaken the spirit, and that inasmuch as
literature whenever it touched its great and higher notes
was an expression of the spirit of mankind,
the best induction into education was to feel the pulses
of humanity which had beaten from age to age
through the utterances of men
who had penetrated to the secrets of the human spirit.
And I agree with the intimation which has been conveyed
to-day that the terrible war through which we have
just passed has not been only a war between nations,
but that it has been also a war between systems of culture—
the one system, the aggressive system,
using science without conscience,
stripping learning of its moral restraints,
and using every faculty of the human mind
to do wrong to the whole race;
the other system reminiscent of the high traditions of men,
reminiscent of all those struggles, some of them obscure
but others clearly revealed to the historian,
of men of indomitable spirit everywhere struggling toward
the right and seeking above all things else to be free.
The triumph of freedom in this war means that
spirits of that sort now dominate the world.
There is a great wind of moral force
moving through the world, and every man
who opposes himself to that wind will go down in disgrace.
The task of those who are gathered here,
or will presently be gathered here,
to make the settlements of this peace is greatly simplified
by the fact that they are masters of no one;
they are the servants of mankind,
and if we do not heed the mandates of mankind
we shall make ourselves the most conspicuous
and deserved failures in the history of the world.
My conception of the league of nations is just this,
that it shall operate as the organized moral force of men
throughout the world, and that whenever or wherever
wrong and aggression are planned or contemplated,
this searching light of conscience will be turned upon them
and men everywhere will ask, “What are the purposes that
you hold in your heart against the fortunes of the world?”
Just a little exposure will settle most questions.
If the central powers had dared to discuss the purposes
of this war for a single fortnight,
it never would have happened, and if, as should be,
they were forced to discuss it for a year,
war would have been inconceivable.
So I feel that this war is, as has been said more than once
to-day, intimately related with the university spirit.
The university spirit is intolerant of all the things
that put the human mind under restraint.
It is intolerant of everything that seeks to retard
the advancement of ideals, the acceptance of the truth,
the purification of life;
and every university man can ally himself with the forces
of the present time with the feeling that now at last
the spirit of truth, the spirit to which universities
have devoted themselves, has prevailed and is triumphant.
If there is one point of pride that I venture to entertain,
it is that it has been my privilege in some measure
to interpret the university spirit in the public life
of a great Nation, and I feel that in honoring me to-day
in this unusual and conspicuous manner
you have first of all honored the people whom I represent.
The spirit that I try to express I know to be their spirit,
and in proportion as I serve them
I believe that I advance the cause of freedom.
I, therefore, wish to thank you, sir,
from the bottom of my heart for a distinction which has
in a singular way crowned my academic career.63
On December 23 Secretary of State Lansing gave Wilson
this letter he marked “Secret and Urgent”:
The plan of guaranty proposed for the League of Nations,
which has been the subject of discussion,
will find considerable objection from other Governments
because, even when the principle is agreed to,
there will be a wide divergence of views
as to the terms of the obligation.
This difference of opinion will be seized upon by those,
who are openly or secretly opposed to the League,
to create controversy and discord.
In addition to this there will be opposition in Congress
to assuming obligations to take affirmative action
along either military or economic lines.
On constitutional grounds,
on its effect on the Monroe Doctrine,
on jealousy as to Congressional powers etc.,
there will be severe criticism which will materially weaken
our position with other nations, and may,
in view of senatorial hostility, defeat a treaty
as to the League of Nations or at least render it impotent.
With these thoughts in mind and with an opposition
known to exist among certain European statesmen
and already manifest in Washington,
I take the liberty of laying before you a tentative draft
of articles of guaranty which I do not believe
can be successfully opposed either at home or abroad.64
Lansing also enclosed a memoranda “The Constitutional Power
to provide Coercion in a Treaty” that included these concerns:
The Constitution confers upon Congress
the right to declare war.
This right, I do not believe, can be delegated,
and it certainly cannot be taken away by treaty.
The question arises, therefore, as to how far a provision
in an agreement as to a League of Nations,
which imposes on the United States the obligation
to employ its military or naval forces in enforcing
the terms of the agreement, would be constitutional….
As to this my mind is less clear.
The Constitution in delegating powers to Congress
includes the regulation of commerce.
Does non-intercourse fall within the idea of regulation?
Could an embargo be imposed without an act of Congress?
My impression is that it could not be done without legislation
and that a treaty provision agreeing in a certain event
to impose an embargo against another nation
would be void.65
At this time Wilson had a draft of the proposed Covenant
which included this sentence:
The Contracting Powers accept without reservation
the principle that the peace of the world is superior
in importance to every question
of political jurisdiction or boundary.66
By December 30 Lansing had heard so much about granting self-determination
that he became concerned how that could be abused by many groups
of varying sizes for various reasons such as religion and language.
On December 31 France’s Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau spoke
to the Chamber of Deputies and expressed his support for a
concert of Great Powers to provide a balance of power,
and he promised to be guided by that at the Peace Conference.
After Woodrow Wilson returned from his triumphant tour to Rome
on 7 January 1919, Secretary of State Lansing gave him some articles on
“Peaceful Settlements of International Disputes” that he had written
that would provide a League of Nations with an International Council
and a Supervisory Committee to supervise investigation, mediation,
and an Arbitral Tribunal for a judicial settlement.
The South African General Jan Christian Smuts, who had interacted
with the nonviolent methods of Mohandas Gandhi, suggested that
the League of Nations could use a system of mandates to replace imperial ways.
Smuts had agreed to Wilson’s principle of self-determination,
and Wilson adopted the mandates into his plan.
Wilson added to his Covenant this paragraph:
As successor to the Empires, the League of Nations
is empowered, directly without right of delegation,
to watch over the relations inter se of all new
independent states arising or created out of the Empires,
and shall assume and fulfill the duty of conciliating
and composing differences between them with a view to
the maintenance of settled order and the general peace.67
Also on January 7 Lansing advised Col. House that letting the Five Great Powers
of Britain, France, Italy, Japan, and the United States control smaller states
as mandates was against Wilson’s principles,
and the United States was the only Great Power to reject that.
On January 10 Wilson met with the American Commissioners.
Lansing drew attention to several objectionable provisions,
and he wrote that Wilson was not willing to discuss them.
Lansing suggested they work on a preliminary treaty focusing on general principles.
He wanted to negotiate the peace treaty before taking up the League of Nations.
On 11 January 1919 President Wilson sent this cable to the Appropriations
Committee Chairmen Senator Thomas S. Martin and Rep. Swagar Sherley:
I cannot too earnestly or solemnly urge upon
the Congress the appropriation for which Mr. Hoover
has asked for the administration of food relief.
Food relief is now the key to the whole European situation
and to the solution of peace.
Bolshevism is steadily advancing westward,
has overwhelmed Poland, and is poisoning Germany.
It cannot be stopped by force, but it can be stopped by food,
and all the leaders with whom I am in conference agree
that concerted action in this matter
is of immediate and vital importance.
The money will not be spent for food for Germany itself,
because Germany can buy its food,
but it will be spent for financing the movements of food
to our real friends in Poland and to the people
of the liberated units of the Austro-Hungarian Empire
and to our associates in the Balkans.
I beg that you will present this matter
with all possible urgency and force to the Congress.
I cannot see how we can find definite powers
with whom to conclude peace unless this means
of stemming the tide of anarchism be employed.68
The lawyer Robert Lansing as the United States Secretary of State
since June 1915 had worked closely with President Wilson on peace issues.
He had opposed Wilson’s idea that a League of Nations should be able to
use international force to make a nation respect the rights of others.
Instead Lansing urged using judicial settlements
to resolve international conflicts without violence.
He noted that after Wilson’s speech on 27 September 1918
both the British and the French suggested judicial settlements.
As a member of the Peace Conference Commission he criticized Wilson
and described how the President’s influence and prestige declined
because of many mistakes he believed he was making.
Here is Lansing’s summary:
The President, as we review his career
as a peace commissioner at Paris, stands forth
as one of the great dominating figures of the Conference,
who reached the zenith of his power over the public mind
of Europe, over the delegates and over the negotiations
at the first plenary session of the Conference.
The reasons for his decline in power, a fact which
can hardly be questioned, may be one or more of many.
First, the loss of his superior position by
intimate personal intercourse with the European statesmen,
which could have been avoided
if he had remained in the United States
or if he had declined to sit as a delegate at Paris.
Second, his evident lack of experience as a negotiator
and his failure to systematize the work
of the American Commission and to formulate a program.
Third, his seclusiveness and apparent determination
to conduct personally almost every phase of the negotiations
and to decide every question alone and independently.
Fourth, his willingness to arrange all settlements
behind closed doors with the three other heads of states
present at the Conference.
Fifth, his unavoidable lack of knowledge
of the details of some of the simple as well
as the intricate problems to be solved.
Sixth, his insistence on the adoption
of the covenant of the League of Nations, as drafted,
and the overcoming of opposition by concessions to national
aspirations, the justice of which was at least disputable.
Seventh, his loss of the initiative
in the formulation of the provisions of the treaties.
Eighth, his apparent abandonment of the smaller nations
and his tacit denial of the equality of nations
by consenting to the creation of an oligarchy
of the Great Powers at the Conference
and in a modified form in the covenant.
And, ninth, the impression, which greatly increased
after his return from the United States in March,
that the American people were not a unit
in support of his aims as to a league of nations,
as those aims were disclosed
by the report made to the Peace Conference.69
On January 18 the Peace Conference opened as the French republic’s
President Raymond Poincaré noted that exactly 48 years ago
the German Empire had been proclaimed by an army which had invaded the
Chateau at Versailles after stealing the French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine.
He said,
Born in injustice, it has ended in opprobrium.
You are assembled in order to repair the evil
that it has done and to prevent a recurrence of it.
You hold in your hands the future of the world.70
Then Wilson stood up and nominated France’s Prime Minister
Georges Clemenceau to be chairman of the conference.
At a meeting of the Council of Ten that included the
heads of state and foreign ministers of the Five Powers
Lansing proposed his plan that was generally approved.
Wilson had rejected the ideas verbally,
and he now asked Lansing to complete his draft.
This is Lansing’s plan that was presented on January 22 before it was
discussed by the American Commissioners who made minor changes.
Resolved that the Conference makes
the following declaration:
That the preservation of international peace is
the standing policy of civilization and to that end
a league of nations should be organized
to prevent international wars;
That it is a fundamental principle of peace that all nations
are equally entitled to the undisturbed possession
of their respective territories,
to the full exercise of their respective sovereignties,
and to the use of the high seas
as the common property of all peoples, and
That it is the duty of all nations
to engage by mutual covenants—
To safeguard from invasion the sovereign rights
of one another;
To submit to arbitration all justiciable dispute
which fail of settlement by diplomatic arrangement;
To submit to investigation by the league of nation
all non-justiciable disputes which fail of settlement
by diplomatic arrangement; and
To abide by the award of an arbitral tribunal
and to respect a report of the league of nations
after investigation;
That the nations should agree upon—
A plan for general reduction of armaments
on land and sea;
A plan for the restriction of enforced military service
and the governmental regulation and control
of the manufacture and sale of munitions of war;
Full publicity of all treaties
and international agreements;
the equal application to all other nations
of commercial and trade regulations
and restrictions imposed by any nation; and
The proper regulation and control of new states
pending complete independence and sovereignty.71
Lansing sent a draft of the completed resolution to President Wilson on January 31.
On 23 January 1919 Georges Clemenceau suggested disarmament,
and David Lloyd George proposed:
That a Commission be appointed with two representatives
apiece from each of the five Great Powers,
and five representatives to be elected by the other Powers
represented at the Conference:—
1. to advise an immediate and drastic reduction
in the armed forces of the enemy:
2. to prepare a plan in connection with the League
of Nations for a permanent reduction in the burden
of military, naval and aerial forces and armaments.72
Woodrow Wilson on January 25 at the second plenary session
of the Peace Conference made a speech that included these appeals:
We have assembled here for the purpose of doing
very much more than making the present settlement.
We are assembled under
very peculiar conditions of world opinion.
I may say without straining the point that
we are not representatives of Governments,
but representatives of peoples.
It will not suffice to satisfy governmental circles anywhere.
It is necessary that
we should satisfy the opinion of mankind.
The burdens of this war have fallen in an unusual degree
upon the whole population of the countries involved.
I do not need to draw for you the picture of how the burden
has been thrown back from the front upon the older men,
upon the women, upon the children,
upon the homes of the civilized world,
and how the real strain of the war has come
where the eye of government could not reach,
but where the heart of humanity beats.
We are bidden by these people to make a peace
which will make them secure.
We are bidden by these people to see to it that
this strain does not come upon them again,
and I venture to say that it has been possible for them
to bear this strain because they hoped that those who
represented them could get together after this war,
and make such another sacrifice unnecessary.
It is a solemn obligation on our part, therefore,
to make permanent arrangements
that justice shall be rendered and peace maintained.
This is the central object of our meeting.
Settlements may be temporary, but the action of the nations
in the interests of peace and justice must be permanent.
We can set up permanent processes.
We may not be able to set up permanent decisions….
The enemy whom we have just overcome had
at his seats of learning some of the principal centers
of scientific study and discovery, and he used them
in order to make destruction sudden and complete;
and only the watchful, continuous cooperation of men
can see to it that science, as well as armed men,
is kept within the harness of civilization….
In coming into this war the United States
never for a moment thought that she was intervening
in the politics of Europe, or the politics of Asia,
or the politics of any part of the world.
Her thought was that all the world had now
become conscious that there was a single cause
which turned upon the issues of this war.
That was the cause of justice
and of liberty for men of every kind and place.
Therefore, the United States should feel that its part
in this war had been played in vain if there ensued
upon it merely a body of European settlements.
She would feel that she could not take part in guaranteeing
those European settlements unless that guarantee involved
the continuous superintendence of the peace of the world
by the associated nations of the world.
Therefore, it seems to me that we must concert
our best judgment in order to make this League of Nations
a vital thing—not merely a formal thing,
not an occasional thing, not a thing sometimes called into life
to meet an exigency, but always functioning
in watchful attendance upon the interests of the nations—
and that its continuity should be a vital continuity;
that it should have functions that are continuing functions
and that do not permit an intermission of its watchfulness
and of its labor; that it should be the eye of the nations
to keep watch upon the common interest,
an eye that does not slumber,
an eye that is everywhere watchful and attentive….
Gentlemen, select classes of mankind
are no longer the governors of mankind.
The fortunes of mankind are now
in the hands of the plain people of the whole world.
Satisfy them, and you have justified
their confidence not only, but established peace.
Fail to satisfy them, and no arrangement that you can make
will either set up or steady the peace of the world….
We would not dare abate a single part of the program
which constitutes our instructions.
We would not dare compromise upon any matter
as the champion of this thing—this peace of the world,
this attitude of justice, this principle that
we are the masters of no people but are here to see that
every people in the world shall choose its own master
and govern its own destinies,
not as we wish but as it wishes.
We are here to see, in short,
that the very foundations of this war are swept away.
Those foundations were the private choice
of small coteries of civil rulers and military staffs.
Those foundations were the aggression
of great Powers upon small.
Those were the holding together of empires
of unwilling subjects by the duress of arms.
Those foundations were the power of small bodies of men
to work their will upon mankind
and use them as pawns in a game.
And nothing less than the emancipation of the world
from these things will accomplish peace.73
On January 29 Col. House advised Wilson to direct
the American experts to cooperate with the British.
The next day the British Prime Minister Lloyd George informed the
Council of Ten that Britain had accepted the mandatory principle,
though its Dominions only accepted reluctantly to avoid a catastrophe.
The French and American delegates often clashed over various issues,
and French newspapers began criticizing Wilson and making fun of his wife Edith.
On 6 February 1919 in Seattle, Washington labor unions organized a
general
strike supported by 60,000 employees that was peaceful and ended after five days.
During 1919 about four million American workers would go on a strike.
In Portland, Oregon a thousand socialists and union workers
attended the first meeting of a “soviet.”
On February 3 Wilson presented the revised draft of the Covenant of the
League of Nations to the American Commissioners, and it would be the basis
of their report to the Conference on February 14.
Also on the 3rd the Greek delegates led by Prime Minister Eleutherios Venizelos
presented Greece’s case to the Supreme Council.
He wanted Greece to have North Epirus, which was in southern Albania,
and Thrace along with islands and a large part of Asia Minor as far as Smyrna.
On February 8 Wilson in the Council of Ten proposed establishing a
Supreme Economic Council with two civilian representatives to the
Permanent Armistice Commission from each associated Government to consult
with the Allied High Command and report to the Supreme Economic Council.
Almost a century earlier liberal nations of Europe had helped
the Greeks gain independence from the Ottoman Empire.
Arab provinces were also gaining independence.
The Albanians would appeal to the Supreme Council on February 24.
On February 13 Makino Nobuaki of Japan proposed
an amendment to the preamble of the Covenant which read:
The equality of nations being a basic principle
of the League of Nations, the High Contracting Parties
agree to accord, as soon as possible, to all alien nationals
of States members of the League equal and just treatment
in every respect, making no distinction, either in law
or in fact, on account of their race or nationality.74
On 14 February 1919 Wilson presented his draft for a Covenant of the
League of Nations in the third plenary session of the Peace Conference in Paris.
He introduced his proposal this way:
I have the honor and as I esteem it the very great privilege
of reporting in the name of the commission
constituted by this conference on the formulation
of a plan for the league of nations.
I am happy to say that it is a unanimous report,
a unanimous report from the representatives of
fourteen nations—the United States, Great Britain, France,
Italy, Japan, Belgium, Brazil, China, Czecho-Slovakia,
Greece, Poland, Portugal, Rumania, and Serbia.
I think it will be serviceable and interesting
if I with your permission, read the document
as the only report we have to make.
COVENANT
Preamble—In order to promote international cooperation
and to secure international peace and security
by the acceptance of obligations not to resort to war,
by the prescription of open, just and honorable
relations between nations, by the firm establishment
of the understandings of international law
as the actual rule of conduct among governments,
and by the maintenance of justice and a scrupulous respect
for all treaty obligations in the dealings of organized peoples
with one another, the Powers signatory to this Covenant
adopt this constitution of the League of Nations.
Article 1—The action of the High Contracting Parties
under the terms of this Covenant shall be effected
through the instrumentality of meetings
of a Body of Delegates representing
the High Contracting Parties, of meetings
at more frequent intervals of an Executive Council,
and of a permanent international Secretariat
to be established at the Seat of the League.
Article 2 is on the Meetings of the Body of Delegates.
Article 3—The Executive Council shall consist of
representatives of the United States of America,
the British Empire, France, Italy and Japan,
together with representatives of four other States….
Article 4 has meetings of Delegates or the Executive Council
regulated by a majority of the States.
Article 5 states that the Secretariat shall have secretaries and staff directed
and controlled by a Secretary-General with confirmation by the Executive Council.
Article 6 gives Representatives and League officials diplomatic immunities.
Article 7 requires that States admitted must be
self-governing countries, dominions, or colonies.
Article 8 recognizes that peace requires the reduction of national armaments
as low as consistent with national safety.
The Executive Council may advise how to reduce armaments and their manufacture.
Article 9 authorizes a permanent Commission
to advise on military and naval questions.
Article 10—The High Contracting Parties undertake
to respect and preserve as against external aggression
the territorial integrity and existing political independence
of all States members of the League.
In case of any such aggression or in case of any threat
of danger of such aggression the Executive Council shall
advise upon the means by which
this obligation shall be fulfilled.Article 11—Any war or threat of war, whether
immediately affecting any of the High Contracting Parties
or not, is hereby declared a matter of concern
to the League, and the High Contracting Parties
reserve the right to take any action that may be deemed
wise and effectual to safeguard the peace of nations.
It is hereby also declared and agreed to be
the friendly right of each of the High Contracting Parties
to draw attention of the Body of Delegates
or of the Executive Council to any circumstances affecting
the international intercourse which threaten to disturb
international peace or the good understanding
between nations upon which peace depends.
Article 12—The High Contracting Parties agree that
should disputes arise between them which
cannot be adjusted by the ordinary processes of diplomacy,
they will in no case resort to war without previously
submitting the questions and matters involved
either to arbitration or to inquiry by the Executive Council
and until three months after the award by the arbitrators
or a recommendation by the Executive Council;
and that they will not even then resort to war
as against a member of the League which complies
with the award of the arbitrators
or the recommendations of the Executive Council.
Article 13—allows the Executive Council to propose
steps in the event of any failure to accept arbitration.
Article 14—The Executive Council shall formulate plans
for the establishment of a Permanent Court
of International Justice, and this Court shall,
when established, be competent to hear and determine
any matter which the parties recognize as suitable for
submission to it for arbitration under the foregoing Article.
Article 15 tells how to handle cases when states do not submit to arbitration.
The Executive Council may refer a dispute to the Body of Delegates.
Article 16—Should any of the High Contracting Parties
break or disregard its covenants under Article 12,
it shall thereby ipso facto be deemed to have committed
an act of war against all the other members of the League,
which hereby undertake immediately to subject it
to the severance of all trade or financial relations,
the prohibition of all intercourse between their nationals
and the nationals of the covenant-breaking State,
and the prevention of all financial, commercial,
or personal intercourse between the nationals
of the covenant-breaking State and the nationals of any
other State whether a member of the League or not.
It shall be the duty of the Executive Council in such case
to recommend what effective military or naval force
the members of the League shall severally
contribute to the armed forces to be used
to protect the covenants of the League….
Article 17 describes in more detail how cases
involving disputes are to be handled.
Article 18—The High Contracting Parties agree that
the League shall be entrusted with the general supervision
of the trade in arms and ammunition
with the countries in which the control of this traffic
is necessary in the common interest.
Article 19 is a very long discussion of what is to be done for colonies
and territories that have been liberated from States.
The tutelage of such peoples is to be entrusted to more advance nations
as mandates, and the mandatory states are to make annual reports to the League.
Article 20 urges fair and humane working conditions for men, women, and children.
Article 21 suggests providing free transit and trade with members of the League.
Article 22 has the League allow international bureaus to establish
general treaties under the League’s control.
Article 23 requires treaties made by members to be registered
with the Secretary-General who is to publish them.
Article 24 suggests the Body of Delegates may advise
member States to reconsider inapplicable treaties.
Article 25 has the High Contracting Parties agreeing to
abrogate all previous obligations inconsistent with the Covenant.
Article 26—Amendments to this Covenant will take effect
when ratified by the States whose representatives compose
the Executive Council and by three-fourths of the States
whose representatives compose the Body of Delegates.
Wilson also said this:
Armed force is in the background in this program,
but it is in the background,
and if the moral force of the world will not suffice,
the physical force of the world shall.
But that is the last resort, because this is intended
as a constitution of peace, not as a league of war.75
Wilson left Paris on February 14, and he arrived at Boston
on February 24 and was welcomed by Governor Calvin Coolidge.
In a speech Wilson talked about the Peace Conference and said,
What we are doing is to hear the whole case,
hear it from the mouths of the men most interested,
hear it from those who are officially commissioned
to state it, hear the rival claims, hear the claims
that affect new nationalities,
that affect new areas of the world,
that affect new commercial and economic connections
that have been established
by the great world war through which we have gone.
And I have been struck by the moderateness
of those who have represented national claims.
I can testify that I have nowhere seen the gleam of passion.
I have seen earnestness;
I have seen tears come to the eyes of men
who plead for downtrodden people
whom they were privileged to speak for,
but they were not tears of anger,
they were tears of ardent hope.
And I do not see how any man
can fail to have been subdued by these pleas,
subdued to this feeling that he was not there
to assert an individual judgment of his own
but to try to assist the cause of humanity….
Speaking with perfect frankness in the name of the people
of the United States I have uttered as the objects
of this great war ideals, and nothing but ideals,
and the war has been won by that inspiration.
Men were fighting with tense muscle and lowered head
until they came to realize those things,
feeling they were fighting for their lives and their country,
and when these accents of what it was all about
reached them from America they lifted their heads,
they raised their eyes to heaven,
then they saw men in khaki coming across the sea
in the spirit of crusaders, and they found these
were strange men, reckless of danger not only,
but reckless because they seemed to see something
that made that danger worthwhile.
Men have testified to me in Europe that our men
were possessed by something
that they could only call religious fervor.
They were not like any of the other soldiers.
They had vision; they had dream,
and they were fighting in dream; and fighting in dream
they turned the whole tide of battle, and it never came back.
And now do you realize that this confidence
we have established throughout the world
imposes a burden upon us—if you choose to call it a burden.
It is one of those burdens which any nation
ought to be proud to carry….
Europe that I left the other day was full of something
that it had never felt fill its heart so full before.
It was full of hope.
The Europe of the second year of the war—
the Europe of the third year of the war—
was sinking to a sort of stubborn desperation.
They did not see any great thing to be achieved
even when the war should be won.
They hoped there would be some salvage;
they hoped they could clear
their territories of invading armies;
they hoped they could set up their homes
and start their industries afresh.
But they thought it would simply be a resumption
of the old life that Europe had led—led in fear;
led in anxiety; led in constant suspicion and watchfulness.
They never dreamed that it would be a Europe
of settled peace and justified hope.
And now these ideals have wrought this new magic
that all the peoples of Europe are buoyed up
and confident in the spirit of hope, because they believe
that we are at the eve of a new age in the world,
when nations will understand one another;
when nations will support one another in every just cause;
when nations will unite every moral
and every physical strength to see that right shall prevail.
If America were at this juncture to fail the world,
what would come of it?...
Arrangements of the present peace
cannot stand a generation unless they are guaranteed
by the united forces of the civilized world.
And if we do not guarantee them
can you not see the picture?
Your hearts have instructed you
where the burden of this war fell.
It did not fall upon national treasuries;
it did not fall upon the instruments of administration;
it did not fall upon the resources of nations.
It fell upon the voiceless homes everywhere,
where women were toiling in hope
that their men would come back.
When I think of the homes upon which
dull despair would settle if this great hope is disappointed,
I should wish for my part
never to have had America play any part whatever
in this attempt to emancipate the world….
The nations of the world have set
their heads now to do a great thing,
and they are not going to slacken their purpose.
And when I speak of the nations of the world
I do not speak of the governments of the world.
I speak of peoples who constitute the nations of the world.
They are in the saddle, and they are going to see to it
that if their present governments do not do their will
some other governments shall.
The secret is out, and present governments know it.
There is a great deal of harmony
to be got out of common knowledge….
When I sample myself I think I find that
I am a typical American, and if I sample deep enough
and get down to what probably is the true stuff of the men,
then I have hope that it is part of the stuff
that is like the other fellow’s at home.
And, therefore, probing deep in my heart
and trying to see things that are right without regard to
the things that may be debated as expedient,
I feel that I am interpreting the purpose
and thought of America; and in loving America
I find I have joined the great majority
of my fellow men throughout the world.76
In February the Yugoslavs were given an opportunity to speak to the
Supreme Council, and on the 18th the Serb delegate Milenko Vesnić
apologized for not having a memorandum to present to the powers,
and he explained their difficulties.
On February 28 Wilson told the Democratic National Committee,
“We cannot rescue Russia without having a united Europe.”77
Also in February the African-American W. E. B. Du Bois helped
organize the first Pan African Congress in Paris.
He also studied how the black American soldiers were being treated.
He was aware of the Peace Conference and criticized the mandate system.
In the May issue of The Crisis magazine he would endorse the
League of Nations, saying it was necessary for the salvation of the Negro race
and that it would help African nations and could prevent the world
from falling into a “Great War of the Races.”
On March 3 Wilson gave the welcoming address to a Conference
of Governors and Mayors called to consider Reconstruction Problems.
He said,
The primary duty of caring for our people
in the intimate matters that we want to discuss here,
of course, falls upon the States and upon the municipalities,
and the function of the Federal Government is to do
what it is trying to do in a conference of this sort—
draw the executive minds of the country together so that
they may profit by each other’s suggestions and plans,
and so that we may offer our services to coordinate their
efforts in any way that they may deem it wise to coordinate.
In other words, it is the privilege of the Federal Government
in matters of this sort to be the servants of the executives
of the States and municipalities and counties,
and we shall perform that duty with the greatest pleasure
if you will guide us with your suggestions….
The thing that has impressed me most, gentlemen,
not only in the recent weeks when I have been
in conference on the other side of the water, but
for many months before I went across the water, was this:
We are at last learning that the business of government
is to take counsel for the average man.
We are at last learning that the whole matter
of the prosperity of peoples runs down into the great body
of the men and women who do the work of the world,
and that the process of guidance is not completed
by the mere success of great enterprises—
it is completed only by the standard of the benefit
that it confers upon those who in the obscure ranks of life
contribute to the success of those enterprises.
The hearts of the men and women and children of the world
are stirred now in a way that has never been known before.
They are not only stirred by their individual circumstances,
but they are beginning to get a vision
of what the general circumstances of the world are,
and there is for the first time in history
an international sympathy which is quick and vital—
a sympathy which does not display itself merely
in the contact of Governments,
but displays itself in the silent intercourse of sympathy
between great bodies that constitute great nations,
and the significance of a conference like this is that
we are expressing in it, and will, I believe,
express in the results of this conference,
our consciousness that we are servants
of this great silent mass of people
who constitute the United States,
and that as their servants it is our business,
as it is our privilege, to find out how we can best assist
in making their lives what they wish them to be,
giving them the opportunities that they ought to have,
assisting by public counsel in the private affairs
upon which the happiness of men depends.
And so I am the more distressed that I cannot take part
in these councils because my present business
is to understand what plain men everywhere want.
It is perfectly understood in Paris that
we are not meeting there as the masters of anybody—
that we are meeting there as the servants of,
I believe it is, about 700,000,000 people,
and that unless we show that we understand
the business of servants we will not satisfy them,
and we will not accomplish the peace of the world….
And so it is with this profound feeling of the significance
of the things you are undertaking that I bid you welcome,
because I believe you have come together in the spirit
which I have tried to indicate,
and that we will together concert methods of cooperation
and individual action which will really accomplish what
we wish to see accomplished in steadying and easing and
facilitating the whole labor processes of the United States.78
On that day Foch’s committee advised that the German army
should be limited without a general staff or tanks.
Commanding Marshal Foch wanted Germany
to be much smaller, and the peacemakers agreed.
President Wilson needed to be in Washington for the end of the
Congressional session on March 4, and on that day he issued a
very short statement on the adjournment of the Congress.
Some senators were urging him to make certain changes in the
League of Nations such as recognizing the Monroe Doctrine,
allowing nations to withdraw, and to remove domestic issues
from the disputes requiring international jurisdiction.
The second on the right to withdraw and the third
on domestic issues would be easily accepted.
On March 4 Wilson gave a long speech at the Metropolitan Opera House
in New York City in support of the League of Nations.
William Howard Taft also spoke there for the League of Nations.
Wilson said,
Every man in that conference knows the treaty of peace
in itself will be inoperative, as Mr. Taft has said,
without this constant support and energy of a great
organization such as is supplied by the League of Nations.
And men who, when I first went over there,
were skeptical of the possibility of forming
a league of nations, admitted that if we could but form it
it would be an invaluable instrumentality through which
to secure the operation of the various parts of the treaty.
And when that treaty comes back, 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 structure of peace will not be vital
without the League of Nations….
Mr. Taft was speaking of Washington’s
utterance about entangling alliances,
and if he will permit me to say so,
he put the exactly right interpretation upon what
Washington said—the interpretation
that is inevitable if you read what he said,
as most of these gentlemen do not.
And the thing that he longed for was
just what we are now about to supply—an arrangement
which will disentangle all the alliances in the world….
God give us the strength and vision to do it wisely!
God give us the privilege of knowing that
we did it without counting the cost,
and because we were true Americans,
lovers of liberty and of the right!79
Thomas Gregory had been the United States Attorney General
since 29 August 1914, and he helped write the Espionage Act that
criminalized dissent starting in June 1917 and the Sedition Act that
extended the offenses to opinions in May 1918.
Gregory had over 2,000 people charged under the Espionage Act.
On March 4 Wilson replaced Gregory with Pennsylvania’s Quaker
Congressman A. Mitchell Palmer who had declined to be Secretary of War.
He persuaded the President to grant pardons to more than a
hundred people who had been imprisoned under the Espionage Act.
His law enforcement of these acts against anarchists, communists
and even
socialists from November 1919 to January 1920 would be called the “Palmer raids.”
Wilson left from New York on 5 March 1919,
and he returned to Paris on March 14.
The Council of Ten on March 5 had received from Herbert Hoover this statement:
The chaotic political and economic conditions
in the states of the old Austrian Empire
render the solution of the food problems extremely difficult.
The newly constituted governments jealously guard their
own supplies of food and coal and have created artificial
barriers in the distribution of such native products as exist,
and have made the distribution of imported foodstuffs
extremely difficult by the disintegration of railway
management and barriers on coal movements.80
Wilson, according to the Secret Minutes of the Council of Ten,
countered the French objection that Germany’s assets must not be
used to provide supplies was described this way:
President Wilson expressed the view that
any further delay in this matter [of feeding Germany] might
be fatal as it meant the dissolution of order and government.
They were discussing an absolute and immediate necessity.
So long as hunger continued to gnaw,
the foundations of government would continue to crumble.
Therefore, food should be supplied immediately,
not only to our friends, but also to those parts of the world
where it was to our interest
to maintain a stable government.
He thought they were bound to accept the concerted counsel
of a number of men who had been devoting
the whole of their time and thought to this question.
He trusted the French Finance Department would withdraw
their objection as they were faced with the great problems
of Bolshevism and the forces of dissolution
which now threatened society.81
About that time his meetings as part of the Council of Four with
Premier Clemenceau, Prime Minister Lloyd George,
and Prime Minister Orlando were kept secret.
US Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin had opposed the war in 1917,
and in 1918 he criticized the invasion of Russia by the Allies.
When he learned that Wilson was meeting in secret, he noted the hypocrisy
of the man whose 14 points included “open covenants openly arrived at.”
On March 13-14 allied delegates met with Germans at Brussels,
and they agreed on the new provisioning agreement
that Wilson had proposed on February 7.
On March 15 Ray Stannard Baker urged Wilson to release a statement
showing that the Peace Conference on 25 January 1919 had approved
the League of Nations as “an integral part of the Treaty of Peace,
and should be open to every civilized nation which
can be relied upon to promote its objects.”82
On March 8 Lloyd George asked Clemenceau to stop using obstructive
tactics that kept food away from the Germans, and the Secret Minutes
of the Council of Ten recorded this response by Clemenceau:
M. Clemenceau explained that his country
had been ruined and ravaged; towns had been destroyed;
over two million men had lost their lives,
mines had been rendered unworkable,
and yet what guarantees had France that anything
would be received in payment for all this destruction?
She merely possessed a few pieces of gold, a few securities,
which it was now proposed to take away in order
to pay those who would supply food to Germany;
and that food would certainly not come from France.
In a word he was being asked to betray his country,
and that he refused to do.83
On March 18 the Rumanian commission divided Banat with a third
in the west for Yugoslavia and over half for Rumania.
They also gave Yugoslavia a quarter of the Baranya
and half of Backa in the western end of the Banat.
The American experts wanted the Hungarians around the city of Szeged
to stay in Hungary, and the Supreme Council would approve these
recommendations on June 21 over protests by Rumanians.
Nearly 60,000 Serbs would still be in Rumania, and Yugoslavia would have
74,000 Rumanians and about 400,000 Hungarians.
Bulgarians relied on the American because Wilson admired them,
and they agreed with his self-determination principles.
On March 22 Wilson proposed to amend Article 10 by adding this paragraph:
Nothing in this covenant shall be deemed to affect or deny
the right of any American State or States to protect
the integrity of American territory and the independence
of any American Government whose territory is threatened,
whether a member of the League or not,
or in the interest of American peace, to object to or prevent
the further transfer of American territory or sovereignty
to any power outside the Western Hemisphere.84
Because the Council of Ten was being distracted
by many participants
and observers, Wilson suggested private meetings with the four main
representatives of France, Britain, Italy, and the United States.
The “Big Four” of Clemenceau, Lloyd George, Orlando, and Wilson
began meeting as the Council of Four of March 23.
Both the Councils of Ten and the Four
worked on a program for limiting armaments.
Wilson suggested the following six ideas:
1. Armaments were to be used for only two purposes:
first, to preserve “domestic safety” within the nations and,
second, to meet the requirement of maintaining
international order by force if any member
of the family of nations refused to respect
the general laws and decisions.
2. Nothing definite could be accomplished immediately;
only principles could be laid down to be worked out later
by another body (an organ of the League)
after the settlement of the peace.
3. Disarmament must entail the complete abolition
of compulsory military service
(a deep-rooted Anglo-Saxon aversion).
4. Manufacture of munitions by private enterprise
or for private profit must be abolished.
5. Publicity would take care of any possible departure
from the schedules of armament finally agreed upon.
6. There must be unanimous agreement
by the “Governments signatory to this Covenant.”85
On March 23 some socialists in the government of Hungary
freed the Communist leader Béla Kun from prison and
overthrew the liberal government of the wealthy Mihály Károlyi.
The next day Kun proclaimed Hungary a Soviet Republic.
He confiscated property and began killing thousands of people.
Commander Foch wanted to deploy an armed line
of Allied troops across Eastern Europe.
Wilson replied that was a bad idea, and he suggested sending food.
Lloyd George was a liberal like Wilson, and George worked with his
secretary Philip Henry Kerr in formulating the Fontainebleau Memorandum
for a League of Nations as “the effective guardian of international right
and international liberty throughout the world.”
On March 24 Wilson began having intense sessions with Clemenceau
and Lloyd George, and sometimes they were joined
by Orlando and Makino Nobuaki of Japan.
The official interpreter Paul Mantoux said,
I never saw him lose his calm.
The relations of President Wilson with his associates
were constantly the most courteous,
whatever the difference of opinion might have been
at certain moments and on certain points.86
William Bullitt with the journalist Lincoln Steffens had met with Vladimir Lenin,
but Bullitt could not persuade Wilson to recognize the Bolshevik regime on March 25.
On that day Wilson argued that permanent peace would
benefit the whole world, and he asked Clemenceau,
Don’t you see that the very program that
you propose to impose, carrying with it
an excessive burden of taxation for generations,
would be the greatest encouragement
that could be held out to the German people
to go over to Bolshevism?87
On March 26 Wilson asked Herbert Hoover to write a memorandum
on the Soviet problem, and two days later Hoover
gave him the policy paper that included these ideas:
As the result of Bolshevik economic conceptions,
the people of Russia are dying of hunger and disease
at the rate of some hundreds of thousands monthly
in a country that formerly supplied food
to a large part of the world….
Politically, the Bolsheviki most certainly represent
a minority in every country where they are in control,
and as such they constitute a tyranny
that is the negation of democracy, for democracy as I see it
must rest on the execution of the will of the majority
expressed by free and unterrified suffrage.
As a tyranny, the Bolshevik has resorted to terror,
bloodshed and murder to a degree long since abandoned
even amongst reactionary tyrannies….
I think we have also to contemplate what would
actually happen if we undertook military intervention
in, say, a case like Hungary.
We should probably be involved in years of police duty,
and our first act would probably in the nature of things
make us a party to reestablishing the reactionary classes
in their economic domination over the lower classes.
This is against our fundamental national spirit,
and I doubt whether our soldiers under these circumstances
could resist infection with Bolshevik ideas.88
The Council of Four began discussing this on March 27.
Clemenceau warned against compromising their victory.
Because Germans had destroyed French mining in the war,
he began demanding that France should have access to
the coal in the Saar that was part of Germany.
Wilson said to Clemenceau,
Now if the policies are to be carried out
which you are advocating,
and which wrong the German people,
the world must naturally turn against you and France,
and through sympathy alone
it may be likely to forget Germany’s crimes.89
The next day Wilson said that they owed it to the
peace of the world to provide a treaty founded on justice.
On March 27 he predicted that their great error would give Germans reasons
for taking revenge because excessive demands would sow the seeds of war.
Lloyd George told Wilson that if Britain was not paid
for some of its losses, he might not sign the treaty.
George realized the Germans would not be able to pay
what the great powers were demanding, and Wilson replied,
Nothing would be finer than to be put out of office
during a crisis of this kind of for doing what was right.
I could not wish a more magnificent place in history.90
On April 2 the Four discussed putting Kaiser Wilhelm II on trial
and hanging him, and Wilson opposed the punishment.
On April 3 King Albert I of Belgium visited President Wilson.
On that day the Four argued about reparations.
The French were expecting to get $120 billion, the British $120 billion,
and the Americans $4.4 billion.
Wilson told Orlando that Italy should not take over Fiume.
Also on the 3rd Wilson became ill, and his temperature rose to 103.
He was diagnosed as having had a minor stroke.
He may have had the influenza, though his doctor
Grayson denied it for the Washington Post.
Wilson had diarrhea, and Grayson managed to get
Wilson to stop coughing so that he could sleep.
A young American had died of influenza.
Wilson’s primary servant Ike Hoover said, “One thing is certain.
He was never the same after this little spell of sickness.”91
Wilson recovered by April 6.
On that day he had a message sent to summon
the S. S. George Washington to France.
This was taken as a preparation to leave the conference.
On the 7th Wilson got a letter from Navy Secretary Daniels that
Lloyd George had said that he would give up the League of Nations
if the United States kept building warships.
Wilson explained that the League would prevent naval rivalry
and that America was devoted to that ideal.
On April 8 the Big Four met in Wilson’s bedroom
and discussed the Kaiser and the Germans.
Because of the British and French treaties that affected Syria,
Wilson proposed an Allied commission go there with an equal number
of
French, British, Italian, and American representatives to look at the facts objectively.
To make peace quickly the Four decided that Turkey would get nothing
until mandates were decided by the League of Nations.
Wilson appointed the able Americans Charles R. Crane and
Oberlin College President Henry Churchill who were in Europe.
Their report would be kept secret until August 1919 after Wilson had left France.
To please a majority of Syrians they recommended that the Mandate
for all of Syria be given to the United States or to the British.
Wilson proposed a Monroe Doctrine amendment on April 10
that avoided making an exception of the United States with this language:
Nothing in this Covenant shall be deemed to affect the
validity of international engagements, such as treaties of
arbitration or regional understandings like the Monroe
Doctrine, for securing and maintaining peace.92
This amendment was debated in two sessions of the Council of Four.
On the 11th in a discussion of the Covenant’s Preamble
the Japanese made another plea for words affirming racial equality.
They wanted all League members to be treated equally.
This was supported by leaders of Italy, Greece, Czechoslovakia, France, and China.
The commissioners voted 11 to 6 for the amendment;
Wilson declared it failed because it was not unanimous.
Wilson believed the League was based on the equality of nations,
and he was concerned that the issue of racial prejudice would hurt the League.
Bolsheviks were gaining influence in Hungary and Bavaria.
Although Poland’s borders were still unresolved on April 13,
France’s demands had been satisfied.
They decided to invite the Germans to complete the last phase of the peacemaking,
and on April 14 they announced that the meeting would be at Versailles.
They also approved the French occupation of the Saar on April 14.
Wilson and Lloyd George proposed a compromise with a civilian government there.
George agreed to form a treaty with France to protect them against
German aggression during the period until the League becomes functional.
When Wilson noted that the Saar region had 650,000 Germans,
Clemenceau said that he was pro-German.
Wilson was upset and began thinking of going home.
An aide urged Clemenceau to talk to Wilson, and the French leader replied,
Talk to Wilson! How can I talk to a fellow
who thinks himself the first man in two thousand years
who has known anything about peace on earth?
Wilson imagines that he is a second Messiah.
He believes he has been sent to give peace to the world
and that his preconceived notions
are the only notions worth having.93
Lloyd George wrote in his memoirs that Wilson said,
Why … has Jesus Christ so far not succeeded in inducing
the world to follow His teachings in these matters?
It is because he taught the ideal
without devising any practical means of attaining it.
That is the reason why I am proposing
a practical solution to carry out these aims.94
On April 14 Wilson sent to the Italian delegation a memorandum
proposing the Italian claims on the Adriatic.
It is commonly agreed, and I very heartily adhere
to the agreement, that the ports of Trieste and Pola,
and with them the greater part of the Istrian Peninsula,
should be ceded to Italy, her eastern frontier running along
the natural strategic line established by
the physical conformation of the country,
a line which it has been attempted to draw
with some degree of accuracy on the attached map.
Within this line on the Italian side will lie
considerable bodies of non-Italian population,
but their fortunes are so naturally linked by the nature
of the country itself with the fortunes of the Italian people
that I think their inclusion is fully justified.
There would be no such justification, in my judgment,
in including Fiume or any part of the coast lying to the south
of Fiume within the boundaries of the Italian kingdom.
Fiume is by situation and by all the circumstances
of its development not an Italian but an international port,
serving the countries to the east
and north of the Gulf of Fiume.
Just because it is an international port and cannot
with justice be subordinated to any one sovereignty
it is my clear judgment that it should enjoy
a very considerable degree of genuine autonomy and that,
while it should be included no doubt
within the customs system of the new Jugo-Slav State,
it should nevertheless be left free in its own interest
and in the interest of the States lying about it
to devote itself to the service of the commerce which
naturally and inevitably seeks an outlet or inlet at its port.
The States which it serves will be new States.
They will need to have complete confidence
in their access to an outlet on the sea.
The friendships and the connections of the future will largely
depend upon such an arrangement as I have suggested;
and friendship, cooperation, freedom of action,
must underlie every arrangement of peace
if peace is to be lasting.
I believe that there will be common agreement that
the Island of Lissa should be ceded to Italy
and that she should retain the port of Volna.
I believe that it will be generally agreed that
the fortifications which the Austrian Government established
upon the islands near the eastern coast of the Adriatic
should be permanently dismantled
under international guarantees, and that the disarmament
which is to be arranged under the League of Nations
should limit the States on the eastern coast of the Adriatic
to only such minor naval forces as are necessary
for policing waters of the islands and the coast.95
Wilson worked to avoid doing an injustice to the Yugoslavs
to prevent them from being vulnerable to Russian Bolsheviks.
He advised the council that the Slavic people
were a substantial portion of Asia’s population.
On April 19 Orlando and Sidney Sonnino demanded that Italy get territory
north of the Swiss border including the port of Trieste on the Adriatic,
the Dalmatian islands, and part of Yugoslavia’s shore.
Wilson’s 14 Points had granted the Austrian Tyrol to Italy.
In the secret Treaty of London in 1915 the British and the French
had promised Italy the Adriatic port of Fiume.
They argued that treaties should be respected.
Wilson opposed giving Fiume to Italy because the region was
inhabited by 500,000 Slavs and an enclave of only 24,000 Italians.
He believed the Italians were too emotional,
and he made a public appeal to the Italian people.
Two days later the Italian delegates threatened to leave the peace conference.
Wilson published his Italian statement on April 23,
and the next day the Italian delegation left Paris.
On April 25 Wilson expressed to the Council of Four
his concern for the Germans saying,
The Treaty would hit them very hard
since it would deprive them of their Mercantile Marine;
would affect their international machinery for commerce;
would deprive them of their property in other countries;
would open their country by compulsion to enterprising
citizens to try and recover their position in foreign countries.
He did not think that the fact had been sufficiently faced
that Germany could not pay in gold
unless she had a balance of trade in her favor.
This meant that Germany must establish
greater foreign commerce than she had before the war
if she was to be able to pay.
Before the war the balance of trade in Germany’s favor
had never equaled the amounts
which she would now have to pay.
If too great a handicap was imposed
on Germany’s resources we should not be able
to get what Germany owed for reparation.
Moreover, if the business world realized that
this was the case the securities on which the payment
of reparation would depend would have no value.
If this reasoning was sound,
it provided a formidable argument.
He only looked towards reaching a peace and in doing so
putting Germany in the position to build up a commerce
which would enable her to pay what she ought to pay
in order to make good
the robbery and destruction she had perpetrated.96
The Germans were to arrive on April 29, and
Clemenceau did not want them to see the Allies divided.
On April 28 Wilson’s arm was trembling while he was shaving.
He also had a respiratory infection and had trouble
signing letters because of the minor stroke.
On the 28th at the fifth plenary session the revised text of the Covenant
of the League of Nations was presented, and amendments were approved.
Then Conference President Clemenceau declared
that the Covenant passed unanimously.
According to the Secret Minutes of the Council of Four on April 29
Lloyd George warned Wilson that the French military were plotting
a Rhine
rebellion led by General Mangin, commander of France’s Army of Occupation.
They planned to issue a manifesto on May 24.
Clemenceau sent an under-secretary to investigate,
and he sent the report to Wilson on June 1.
On that day Clemenceau sent a long letter to Mangin that recalled him.
This threat was also countered by general strikes
at Cologne on May 27 and at Coblenz on June 2.
On April 30 Wilson cabled to his secretary Joseph Tumulty
this explanation how the Japanese-Chinese conflict had been resolved:
The Japanese-Chinese matter has been settled in a way
which seems to me as satisfactory as could be got out of
the tangle of treaties in which China herself was involved,
and it is important that the exact facts should be known.
I therefore send you the following for public use at such
time as the matter may come under public discussion.
In the treaty all the rights at Kiao-Chau
and in Shantung Province belonging to Germany
are to be transferred without reservation to Japan,
but Japan voluntarily engages, in answer to questions
put in conference, that it will be her immediate policy
“to hand back the Shantung Peninsula
in full sovereignty to China,
retaining only the economic privileges granted to Germany
and the right to establish a settlement
under the usual conditions at Tsingtao.
Owners of the railway will use special police
only to insure safety for traffic.
They will be used for no other purpose.
The police will be composed of Chinese,
and such Japanese instructors as the directors of the railway
may select will be appointed by the Chinese Government.”
It was understood in addition that inasmuch as
the sovereign rights receded to China
were to be unqualified, all Japanese troops
remaining on the peninsula should be withdrawn
at the earliest possible time.
Japan thus gets only such rights as an economic
concessionaire as are possessed by one or two other
great powers and are only too common in China,
and the whole future relationship between the two countries
falls at once under the guarantee of the League of Nations
of territorial integrity and political independence.
I find a general disposition to look with favor
upon the proposal that at an early date
through the mediation of the League of Nations
all extraordinary foreign rights in China
and all spheres of influence should be abrogated
by the common consent of all the nations concerned.
I regard the assurances given by Japan as
very satisfactory in view of the complicated circumstances.
Please do not give out any of the above
as a quotation from me, but use it in some other form
for public information at the right time.97
May 1 was May Day, and protests in Cleveland, Ohio turned into riots.
In Paris a march by workers in a one-day strike was broken up by cavalry.
In Glasgow, Scotland people raised a red flag at city hall,
and the British government used six tanks and 8,000 troops to break it up.
In the United States the Consumer Price Index was rising over 40% from 1917 to 1920.
Food prices rose more than 50% and household items nearly 100%.
On May 3 Wilson was advised by the American embassy in Rome
that no Italian government could withstand losing Fiume.
The Fifth Great Power Japan had occupied extensive territory in China,
and they wanted to keep the Shandong (Shantung) peninsula.
They were assured they could take over Germany’s former islands north of the Equator.
The Japanese promised Wilson that they would
not take over more of China than Germany.
China’s ambassador Wellington Koo said that China could not
give up Shandong because it was the birthplace of Confucius.
Wellington Koo said he would decline to sign the treaty.
Eventually a compromise proposed by Wilson was worked out.
Shandong was transferred from Germany to Japan which promised to withdraw
their troops and turn Shandong over to China as soon as possible.
The Versailles Treaty went to the printer on May 4.
On that day a popular demonstration in China against giving
Shandong to Japan grew into the May Fourth Movement.
Wilson explained to Chinese delegates that the property leased to Japan
in Shandong would soon be under an international trusteeship.
On May 5 Wilson wrote this to Lloyd George:
America has, in my judgment, always been ready
and will always stand ready to do her
full share financially to assist the general situation.
But America has grave difficulties of her own.
She has been obliged within two years to raise by means
of war loans and taxes the sum of forty billion dollars.
This has been a very heavy burden,
even for our well-to-do commonwealth, especially in view
of the fact of the short period during which
such sums of money had to be raised,
and our Treasury informs me that our investing public
have reached, and perhaps passed, the point
of complete saturation in respect of investments.
Such is our situation.
You have suggested that we all address ourselves
to the problem of helping to put Germany on her feet,
but how can your experts or ours be expected to work out
a new plan to furnish working capital to Germany
when we deliberately start out
by taking away all Germany’s present capital?
How can anyone expect America to turn over to Germany
in any considerable measure new working capital
to take the place of that which
the European nations have determined to take from her?98
The American Commissioner Maurice Hankey learned that
Clemenceau had added two insertions to the Treaty.
Wilson had them removed.
John Foster Dulles and Bernard Baruch found more tampering,
and Wilson remarked, “The French seem to be always up to some skullduggery;
the word ‘honesty’ does not seem to mean anything to them.”99
On May 6 Wilson, Lloyd George, and Clemenceau granted Smyrna to Greece.
This provoked violence between Turks and Greeks, and about 450 were killed.
Kemal Atatürk led the national resistance of the Turks.
On May 9 Wilson in Paris spoke to the International Law Society and said,
May I say that one of the things that has disturbed me
in recent months is the unqualified hope that
men have entertained everywhere
of immediate emancipation from the things
that have hampered and oppressed them.
You cannot in human experience rush into the light.
You have to go through the twilight into the broadening day
before the noon comes and the full sun is on the landscape;
and we must see to it that
those who hope are not disappointed, by showing them
the processes by which that hope must be realized—
processes of law, processes of slow disentanglement
from the many things that have bound us in the past.
You cannot throw off the habits of society immediately
any more than you can throw off the habits
of the individual immediately.
They must be slowly got rid of, or,
rather they must be slowly altered.
They must be slowly adapted,
they must be slowly shaped to the new ends
for which we would use them.
That is the process of law, if law is intelligently conceived….
In the new League of Nations we are starting out
on uncharted seas, and therefore we must have,
I will not say the audacity, but the steadiness of purpose
which is necessary in such novel circumstances.
And we must not be afraid of new things, at the same time
that we must not be intolerant of old things.
We must weave out of the old materials the new garments
which it is necessary that men should wear.
It is a great privilege if we can do that kind of thinking
for mankind—human thinking, thinking that
is made up of comprehension of the needs of mankind.
And when I think of mankind, I must say
I do not always think of well-dressed persons.
Most persons are not well dressed.
The heart of the world is under very plain jackets,
the heart of the world is at very simple firesides,
the heart of the world is in very humble circumstances;
and, unless you know the pressure of life
of the humbler classes, you know nothing of life whatever….
It is hard to be just to those with whom you are intimate;
how much harder it is to conceive the problems of those
with whom you are not intimate, and be just to them.
To live and let live, to work for people and with people,
is at the bottom of the kind of experience
which must underlie justice….
In a sense the old enterprise of national law is played out.
I mean that the future of mankind depends more upon
the relations of nations to one another, more upon
the realization of the common brotherhood of mankind,
than upon the separate and selfish development
of national systems of law; so that the men who can,
if I may express it so, think without language,
think the common thoughts of humanity,
are the men who will be the most serviceable
in the immediate future.100
On May 14 South Africa’s Jan Christian Smuts
had criticized the Versailles Treaty, and to Wilson he wrote,
Under this Treaty Europe will know no peace.
I pray you will use your unrivalled power and influence
to make the final Treaty a more moderate
and reasonable document.”101
Smuts wrote “A Practical Suggestion” proposing member nations
in a general assembly, an executive council, a secretariat,
methods for settling international disputes, and mandates
for colonies and others needing governmental guidance.
Wilson accepted that German objections should be considered,
and on the 16th he replied,
I am in entire agreement with you that
real consideration should be given to the objections
that are being raised against it by the Germans,
and I think I find a growing inclination
to treat their representations fairly.
As it happens, they have so far addressed their criticisms
only to points which are substantially sound.
I feel the terrible responsibility of this whole business,
but invariably my thought goes back
to the very great offense against civilization
which the German State committed and the necessity
for making it evidence once and for all that
such things can lead only to the most severe punishment.
I am sure you know the spirit in which I say these things
and that I need not assure you that I am just as anxious
to be just to the Germans as to be just to anyone else.102
Wilson did his best to protect Jews in Poland and Palestine.
The Treaty recognized the unity of Czechs and Slovaks and combined
Serbia and Montenegro with Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs along
with most of Dalmatia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina into Yugoslavia.
Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Transylvania from the
Hapsburg Empire were merged into Romania.
The British and French in the Sykes-Picot Treaty
had pre-empted settlements in the Mideast.
The Versailles Treaty made Syria and Lebanon mandates of France
and Palestine and Jordan mandates under Britain.
Iraq in Mesopotamia was divided by the
religious factions of the Shi’a, Sunnis, and Kurds.
Economist John Maynard Keynes was a delegate of the British Treasury
at the Paris Peace Conference, and his book
The Economic Consequences of the Peace
would be published in October 1919.
He criticized the Big Four this way:
It is an extraordinary fact that
the fundamental economic problems of a Europe
starving and disintegrating before their eyes,
was the one question in which
it was impossible to arouse the interest of the Four.
Reparation was their main excursion
into the economic fields, and they settled it as a problem
of theology, of politics, of electoral chicane,
from every point of view except that of economic futures
of the States whose destiny they were handling.103
Keynes also wrote,
The President’s attitude to his colleagues
had now become: I want to meet you so far as I can;
I see your difficulties, and I should like
to be able to agree to what you propose;
but I can do nothing that is not just and right,
and you must first of all show me that
what you want does really fall within the words
of the pronouncements which are binding on me.
Then began the weaving of that
web of sophistry and Jesuitical exegesis
that was finally to clothe with insincerity
the language and substance of the whole treaty….
The subtlest sophisters and most hypocritical draftsmen
were set to work and produced many ingenious exercises
which might have deceived for more than an hour
a cleverer man than the President.
Thus instead of saying that German-Austria is prohibited
from uniting with Germany except by leave of France
(which would be inconsistent
with the principle of self-determination),
the Treaty, with delicate draftsmanship, states that
“Germany acknowledges and will respect strictly
the independence of Austria, within the frontiers which
may be fixed in a Treaty between the State
and the Principal Allied and Associated powers;
she agrees that this independence shall be inalienable,
except with the consent of
the Council of the League of Nations,”
which sounds, but is not, quite different.
And who knows but that the President forgot that
another part of the Treaty provides that for this purpose
the Council of the League must be unanimous.
Instead of giving Danzig to Poland, the Treaty established
Danzig as a “Free” City, but includes this “Free” City
within the Polish customs frontier, entrusts to Poland
the control of the river and railway system,
and provides that “the Polish Government
shall undertake the conduct of the foreign relations
of the Free City of Danzig as well as the diplomatic
protection of citizens of that city when abroad.”
In placing the river system of Germany
under foreign control, the Treaty speaks of
declaring international those “river systems which naturally
provide more than one State with access to the sea,
with or without transshipment from one vessel to another.”
Such instances could be multiplied.
The honest and intelligible purpose of French policy,
to limit the population of Germany
and weaken her economic system, is clothed,
for the President’s sake in the august language
of freedom and international equality.104
On May 7 the leaders of the Allied Powers met with
the defeated Germany’s new leaders of the Weimar Republic.
The Foreign Minister Brockdorff-Ranizau led the German delegates,
and he said that the people had been told Germany was waging a defensive war.
Clemenceau handed him the 413-page Versailles Treaty
that had French on one side and English on the other.
They were given 15 days to respond in writing.
The treaty called for Germany to surrender one-eighth
of its territory with one tenth of the population.
They must also demobilize, disarm, and destroy fortifications.
They were obligated to replace the cargo and fishing ships they had destroyed.
Their colonies were to become wards of the British Empire.
They were to lose the coal mines in the Saar for 15 years,
and they were required to provide coal for France, Belgium, and Italy.
Germany was deemed responsible for all of the war’s damages
and losses caused by the Central Powers.
On May 22 Brockdorff-Ranizau filed protests against what was due.
Clemenceau, Wilson, and Lloyd George said they would reinstate
the blockade of Germany if they refused to sign the treaty.
Clemenceau urged publishing the new Treaty for the public,
and he told the Germans that they would have two weeks
to examine the peace terms before signing.
The German response in 150 pages complained that the treaty violated
many of Wilson’s principles that both sides had accepted,
and they believed that what they were expected to pay was beyond their means.
The naval blockade against Germany was still in place.
US Senator La Follette wrote a magazine article that
the Germans had the choice to “Sign or Starve.”
The British Parliament and the American Senate
had been demanding to see the text.
On May 12 the Council of Four decided not to give the text to their legislatures.
They consulted experts to improve their decisions,
but they did not consult with Germany, Austria, Hungary, Turkey, or Bulgaria.
Wilson was relying on the fact that in November 1918 France, Britain, and Italy
had promised America that the peace would be based on Wilson’s Fourteen Points.
Wilson and Lloyd George proposed a commission
of two experts from each of the four great powers.
Italy’s Orlando was opposed to consulting the specialists
while Wilson wanted to learn from the French, British, and Italian experts.
George agreed with Wilson that the League of Nations was the first priority.
Russia’s White Admiral Kolchak led from a base in eastern Siberia
and the Allies extended partial recognition to his government on May 23.
On that day generals made a report on limiting armaments for small states.
In late June the Red armies pushed through the center
of White forces who retreated hundreds of kilometers.
On May 30 the Four still had unresolved problems.
Central Europe was very unstable, and Wilson proposed that they send a note
to advise the Yugoslavs not to resort to arms
against the authority of the Peace Conference.
The Treaty of Versailles had 85,000 words of text and many maps.
Germany was to cede 5,600 square miles in Alsace-Lorraine to France,
and to Poland 22,000 square miles including West Prussia
and 382 square miles from Luxembourg and Holland.
Germany was obligated to recognize the independence of Austria,
Czechoslovakia, and all the territories in what had been the Russian Empire.
Germany was to reduce its army to 100,000 soldiers and the navy to 15,000 sailors
with 36 war ships, six small battleships, and no submarines.
Many nations were created from the
Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire.
The Germans found the Treaty unacceptable
and responded with 119 pages on May 28.
In celebration of Memorial Day on May 30 President Wilson gave
an emotional speech at the Suresnes Cemetery near Paris in memory
of the thousands of American soldiers who had died in the war.
He said,
If we do not know our age,
we cannot accomplish our purpose,
and this age is an age which looks forward, not backward;
which rejects the standards of national selfishness
that once governed the counsels of nations and demands
that they shall give way to a new order of things
in which the only questions will be: “Is it right?”
“Is it just?” “Is it in the interest of mankind?”
This is a challenge that no previous generation
ever dared to give ear to.
So many things have happened, and they have happened
so fast, in the last four years, that I do not think
many of us realize what it is that has happened.
Think how impossible it would have been to get a body
of responsible statesmen seriously to entertain the idea
of the organization of a League of Nations four years ago.
And think of the change that has taken place!
I was told before I came to France that
there would be confusion of counsel about this thing,
and I found unity of counsel.
I was told that there would be opposition,
and I found union of action.
I found the statesmen with whom I was about to deal
united in the idea that we must have a League of Nations,
that we could not merely make a peace settlement
and then leave it to make itself effectual,
but that we must conceive some common organization
by which we should give our common faith
that this peace would be maintained and the conclusions
at which we had arrived should be made as secure
as the united counsels of all the great nations
that fought against Germany could make them.
We have listened to the challenge, and that is the proof
that there shall never be a war like this again.105
In the United States on 2 June 1919 at night
eight bombs exploded in different cities.
One of them damaged the home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer,
though he and his family were not hurt.
Palmer reacted by forming an intelligence division, and he hired 24-year-old
J. Edgar Hoover to run the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation.
In the next two years his agents would compile files on some
60,000 aliens and radicals, and they would arrest 10,000.
On 1 June 1919 British Lloyd George asked
Wilson to talk to Clemenceau to persuade him.
George said he might leave if Clemenceau did not change his mind.
The next day the Big Four met. George worked for concession,
but Clemenceau would not change anything.
George warned that if British demands were not met
and the Germans did not sign, that he would oppose resuming the fighting.
On June 2 in a ceremony the peace terms for what had been
the Austrian Empire were presented to the Austrian delegates
in a great hall at St.-Germain-en-Laye outside Paris.
Wilson called the American delegation together for a free discussion
on June 3 and explained the problem.
He said the current arrangement violated the League of Nations
and was not economically sound.
He said,
The great problem of the moment
is the problem of agreement, because the most fatal thing
that could happen, I should say, in the world, would be that
sharp lines of division should be drawn
among the allied and associated powers.
They ought to be held together, if it can reasonably be done,
and that makes a problem
like the problem of occupation look almost insoluble,
because the British are at one extreme,
and the French refusal to move is at the opposite extreme.
Personally, I think the thing will solve itself
upon the admission of Germany to the League of Nations.
I think that all the powers feel that
the right thing to do is to withdraw the army.
But we cannot arrange that in the treaty,
because you cannot fix the date
at which Germany is to be admitted to the League.
It would be an indefinite one….
What is necessary is to get out of this atmosphere of war,
get out of the present exaggerated feelings
and exaggerated appearances, and I believe that
if we can once get out of them into the calmer airs,
it would be easier to come to satisfactory solutions.106
Also on June 3 Wilson met with a group of technical advisors
from the American Commission to Negotiate Peace.
On June 6 a committee reported that England, France, and Italy
did not have the private credits and resources to help the Germans.
The Council was working on the Treaty so that the German delegation would sign.
On June 9 the Secret Minutes of the Council of Four
described Wilson’s general policy this way:
President Wilson: He was warned …
by his Economic experts that
if peace was not signed very soon
most serious results would follow throughout the world,
involving not only the enemy but all States.
Commerce could not resume
until the present treaty was signed and settled.
After that it was necessary to steady finance,
and the only way to do this was
by establishing some scheme of credit.
He wished to say most solemnly that if enough liquid assets
were not left to Germany together with a gold basis,
Germany would not be able to start her trade again,
or to make reparations.
His own country was ready to provide
large sums for the purpose of reestablishing credit.
But Congress would not vote a dollar under existing
circumstances and he could not ask the United States
bankers to give credits if Germany had no assets.
Bankers had not got the taxpayers behind them
as Congress had, and consequently
they must know what Germany’s assets were.
The United States War [Finance] Corporation
was prohibited by law from granting credits
unless they were covered by assets.
Hence, if commerce was to begin again,
steps must be taken to reestablish credit,
and unless some credit could be supplied for Germany’s use,
the Allies would have to do without reparation.107
The Americans persuaded the British and the French to compromise
on the army of occupation as Clemenceau made minor concessions on June 10.
Wilson found a way to limit the cost of the occupying army,
and Clemenceau, George, and Wilson agreed on June 16.
On that day they received the German response in 80 pages.
On the 18th it became known that Marshal Foch
was visiting the Allied camps on the Rhine.
There 600,000 French, British, American, and Belgian troops were preparing
to head toward Berlin if Germany rejected the Peace Treaty.
On June 19 Italy’s Parliament forced out Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando.
Sonnino and two others replaced him at the Peace Conference,
and they would sign the Peace Treaty.
Germany’s Chancellor Philipp Scheidemann resigned on June 20
and was replaced by Gustav Bauer.
On June 21 Vice Admiral Ludwig von Reuter had 74 German warships scuttled
that the British had captured and kept at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands.
Chancellor Bauer announced that Germany was ready to sign the Peace Treaty,
and they met on June 22.
The Allies warned that they must accept or reject the Treaty by 7 p.m.
on the 23rd, or Marshal Foch’s armies would advance.
The Germans felt they had no choice and accepted the Peace Treaty.
On June 17 three representatives of the Turks led by Prime Minister
Damad Ferid pleaded with the great powers leaders and their foreign ministers
to allow the Ottoman Empire to survive and be a member of the League of Nations.
On June 23 the British ordered Atatürk to return to Constantinople.
The new German Foreign Minister Hermann Müller and
the Colonial Minister Johannes Bell arrived at Versailles on June 27.
The next day in the Hall of Mirrors where Chancellor Otto von Bismarck
had proclaimed the German Empire in 1871 the Peace Treaty was signed
exactly 5 years after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife
that sparked the beginning of the World War in which 23 nations
mobilized about 65 million soldiers for a war that
killed about 17 million people with nearly half civilians.
Wilson refused to let the Chinese sign with reservations regarding Shandong,
and Wellington Koo said China would not sign.
What would happen to the former Ottoman Empire was still not decided.
The Americans suggested that the Germans should pay
120 million gold marks for reparations, and this was accepted.
Finally it was decided in London in 1921 that the Germans were
to pay 132 billion marks ($33 billion), and by 1932 they would pay $4.5 billion.
The Versailles Treaty gave Japan control over the Shandong province temporarily.
The Saint-German Treaty had ceded to Italy the Austrian Tyrol.
Both those treaties denied Austria the right to be united with Germany.
Russia was being allowed to control Estonia, Latvia,
Lithuania, Ukraine, Georgia, and Azerbaijan.
Critics such as Keynes and Harold Nicholson noted that the Peace Conference
had done most of its work privately, that freedom of the seas was not secured,
that German colonies had been transferred in a way that was
“neither free, nor open-minded, nor impartial.”
New boundaries did not please all nations or populations.
Yet the Treaty did fulfill the Fourteen Points fairly well.
Belgium became independent.
Germany had to give back Alsace-Lorraine to France.
The former Empire of Austria-Hungary was broken up
into several free and independent nations.
Eventually the final covenants were made known openly,
and there were no secret treaties.
Armaments were to be reduced, and economic barriers were removed
and were to be debated in a global assembly by many nations.
Never before had humanity created such a practical and universal
government that was meant to be permanent.
Lloyd George said to Wilson,
You have done more than any one man
to bring about further cordial and friendly relations
between England and the United States.
You have brought the two countries closer together
than any other individual in history.108
On June 28 Wilson joined this resolution:
The Wilsons returned to America on the S.S. WashingtonThat in some form international consultation
in economic matters should be continued
until the Council of the League of Nations has had
an opportunity of considering the present acute position
of the economic situation, and that the Supreme Economic
Council should be requested to suggest for the consideration
of the several Governments the methods of consultation
which would be most serviceable for these purposes.109
On July 10 President Wilson held his first White House
press conference in two and a half years.
That day he addressed the Senate with a very long speech.
Here is the last portion:
A league of free nations had become a practical necessity.
Examine the treaty of peace and you will find that
everywhere throughout its manifold provisions
its framers have felt obliged to turn to the League of Nations
as an indispensable instrumentality for the maintenance
of the new order it has been their purpose to set up
in the world,—the world of civilized men.
That there should be a league of nations to steady
the counsels and maintain the peaceful understandings
of the world, to make, not treaties alone,
the accepted principles of international law as well,
the actual rule of conduct among the governments
of the world, had been one of the agreements accepted
from the first as the basis of peace with the Central Powers.
The statesmen of all the belligerent countries were agreed
that such a league must be created to sustain
the settlements that were to be effected.
But at first I think there was a feeling among some of them
that, while it must be attempted, the formation of
such a league was perhaps a counsel of perfection which
practical men, long experienced in the world of affairs,
must agree to very cautiously and with many misgivings.
It was only as the difficult work of arranging
an all-but-universal adjustment of the world’s affairs
advanced from day to day from one stage of conference
to another that it became evident to them that
what they were seeking would be little more than something
written upon paper, to be interpreted and applied
by such methods as the chances of politics
might make available if they did not provide a means
of common counsel which all were obliged to accept,
a common authority whose decisions
would be recognized as decisions which all must respect.
And so the most practical, the most skeptical among them
turned more and more to the League as the authority
through which international action was to be secured,
the authority without which, as they had come to see it,
it would be difficult to give assured effect either
to this treaty or to any other international understanding
upon which they were to depend
for the maintenance of peace.
The fact that the Covenant of the League was
the first substantive part of the treaty to be worked out
and agreed upon, while all else was in solution,
helped to make the formulation of the rest easier.
The Conference was, after all, not to be ephemeral.
The concert of nations was to continue,
under a definite Covenant which had been agreed upon
and which all were convinced was workable.
They could go forward with confidence to make
arrangements intended to be permanent.
The most practical of the conferees were at last
the most ready to refer to the League of Nations
the superintendence of all interests which did not admit
of immediate determination, of all administrative problems
which were to require a continuing oversight.
What had seemed a counsel of perfection
had come to seem a plain counsel of necessity.
The League of Nations was the practical
statesman’s hope of success in many
of the most difficult things he was attempting.
And it had validated itself in the thought of every member
of the Conference as something much bigger,
much greater every way, than a mere instrument
for carrying out the provisions of a particular treaty.
It was universally recognized that all the peoples
of the world demanded of the Conference that it should
create such a continuing concert of free nations
as would make wars of aggression and spoliation
such as this that has just ended forever impossible.
A cry had gone out from every home in every stricken land
from which sons and brothers and fathers
had gone forth to the great sacrifice
that such a sacrifice should never again be exacted.
It was manifest why it had been exacted.
It had been exacted because one nation desired dominion
and other nations had known no means
of defense except armaments and alliances.
War had lain at the heart of every arrangement of Europe,—
of every arrangement of the world,—that preceded the war.
Restive peoples had been told that fleets and armies,
which they toiled to sustain, meant peace;
and they now knew that they had been lied to:
that fleets and armies had been maintained
to promote national ambitions and meant war.
They knew that no old policy meant
anything else but force, force,—always force.
And they knew that it was intolerable.
Every true heart in the world,
and every enlightened judgment demanded that,
at whatever cost of independent action,
every government that took thought for its people
or for justice or for ordered freedom should lend itself
to a new purpose and utterly destroy
the old order of international politics.
Statesmen might see difficulties,
but the people could see none and could brook no denial.
A war in which they had been bled white to beat the terror
that lay concealed in every Balance of Power
must not end in a mere victory of arms and a new balance.
The monster that had resorted to arms
must be put in chains that could not be broken.
The united power of free nations must put
a stop to aggression, and the world must be given peace.
If there was not the will or the intelligence
to accomplish that now, there must be another
and a final war and the world must be swept clean
of every power that could renew the terror.
The League of Nations was not merely an instrument to
adjust and remedy old wrongs under a new treaty of peace;
it was the only hope for mankind.
Again and again had the demon of war
been cast out of the house of the peoples
and the house swept clean by a treaty of peace;
only to prepare a time when he would enter
in again with spirits worse than himself.
The house must now be given a tenant
who could hold it against all such.
Convenient, indeed indispensable, as statesmen found
the newly planned League of Nations to be
for the execution of present plans of peace and reparation,
they saw it in a new aspect before their work was finished.
They saw it as the main object of the peace,
as the only thing that could complete it
or make it worthwhile.
They saw it as the hope of the world,
and that hope they did not dare to disappoint.
Shall we or any other free people
hesitate to accept this great duty?
Dare we reject it and break the heart of the world?
And so the result of the Conference of Peace,
so far as Germany is concerned, stands complete.
The difficulties encountered were very many.
Sometimes they seemed insuperable.
It was impossible to accommodate the interests
of so great a body of nations,—interests which directly
or indirectly affected almost every nation in the world,—
without many minor compromises the treaty, as a result,
is not exactly what we would have written.
It is probably not what any one
of the national delegations would have written.
But results were worked out which on the whole bear test.
I think that it will be found that the compromises
which were accepted as inevitable
nowhere cut to the heart of any principle.
The work of the Conference squares, as a whole,
with the principles agreed upon as the basis of the peace
as well as with the practical possibilities of the international
situations which had to be faced and dealt with as facts.
I shall presently have occasion to lay before you
a special treaty with France,
whose object is the temporary protection of France
from unprovoked aggression by the power with whom
this treaty of peace has been negotiated.
Its terms link it with this treaty.
I take the liberty, however, of reserving it
for special explication on another occasion.
The role which America was to play in the Conference
seemed determined, as I have said,
before my colleagues and I got to Paris,—
determined by the universal expectations of the nations
whose representatives, drawn from all quarters
of the globe, we were to deal with.
It was universally recognized that
America had entered the war to promote
no private or peculiar interest of her own
just only as the champion of rights
which she was glad to share with free men
and lovers of justice everywhere.
We had formulated the principles upon which the settlement
was to be made,—the principles upon which the armistice
had been agreed to and the parleys of peace undertaken,—
and no one doubted that our desire was to see
the treaty of peace formulated along the actual lines
of those principles,—and desired nothing else.
We were welcomed as disinterested friends.
We were resorted to as arbiters in many a difficult matter.
It was recognized that our material aid
would be indispensable in the days to come,
when industry and credit would have to be brought back
to their normal operation again and communities
beaten to the ground assisted to their feet once more,
and it was taken for granted, I am proud to say,
that we would play the helpful friend in these things
as in all others without prejudice or favor.
We were generously accepted
as the unaffected champions of what was right.
It was a very responsible role to play;
but I am happy to report that the fine group of Americans
who helped with their expert advice in each part
of the varied settlements sought in every transaction
to justify the high confidence reposed in them.
And that confidence, it seems to me, is the measure
of our opportunity and of our duty in the days to come,
in which the new hope of the peoples of the world
is to be fulfilled or disappointed.
The fact that America is the friend of the nations,
whether they be rivals or associates, is no new fact;
it is only the discovery of it
by the rest of the world that is new.
America may be said to have
just reached her majority as a world power.
It was almost exactly twenty-one years ago that
the results of the war with Spain put us unexpectedly
in possession of rich islands on the other side of the world
and brought us into association with other governments
in the control of the West Indies.
It was regarded as a sinister and ominous thing
by the statesmen of more than one European chancellory
that we should have extended our power
beyond the confines of our continental dominions.
They were accustomed to think of new neighbors
as a new menace, of rivals as watchful enemies.
There were persons amongst us at home
who looked with deep disapproval and avowed anxiety
on such extensions of our national authority
over distant islands and over peoples
whom they feared we might exploit, not serve and assist.
But we have not exploited them.
We have been their friends and have sought to serve them.
And our dominion has been a menace to no other nation.
We redeemed our honor to the utmost
in our dealings with Cuba.
She is weak but absolutely free;
and it is her trust in us that makes her free.
Weak peoples everywhere stand ready to give us
any authority among them that will assure them
a like friendly oversight and direction.
They know that there is no ground for fear
in receiving us as their mentors and guides.
Our isolation was ended twenty years ago;
and now fear of us is ended also,
our counsel and association sought after and desired.
There can be no question
of our ceasing to be a world power.
The only question is whether
we can refuse the moral leadership that is offered us,
whether we shall accept or reject
the confidence of the world.
The war and the Conference of Peace now sitting in Paris
seem to me to have answered that question.
Our participation in the war established
our position among the nations
and nothing but our own mistaken action can alter it.
It was not an accident or a matter of sudden choice
that we are no longer isolated and devoted to a policy which
has only our own interest and advantage for its object.
It was our duty to go in,
if we were indeed the champions of liberty and of right.
We answered to the call of duty in a way so spirited,
so utterly without thought of what we spent
of blood or treasure, so effective,
so worthy of the admiration of true men everywhere,
so wrought out of the stuff of all that was heroic,
that the whole world saw at last, in the flesh,
in noble action, a great ideal asserted and vindicated,
by a nation they had deemed material and now found
to be compact of the spiritual forces that must free men
of every nation from every unworthy bondage.
It is thus that a new role and a new responsibility
have come to this great nation that we honor
and which we would all wish
to lift to yet higher levels of service and achievement.
The stage is set, the destiny disclosed.
It has come about by no plan of our conceiving,
but by the hand of God who led us into 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.110
In the first speech in the United States Senate in the debate over
the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations the Democrat
Claude Swanson of Virginia supported President Wilson and criticized
claims that American sovereignty would be harmed by Article 10 of the League.
The debate would go on through the summer and into the fall.
On July 15 Wilson announced that he would meet
with Congressmen in the White House starting on the 17th.
Senator Gilbert M. Hitchcock of Nebraska led the Democratic minority,
and he enthusiastically supported the League of Nations.
The Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge was Majority Leader
since
August 1918 and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee since 4 March 1919.
Later Franklin D. Roosevelt would reveal that in late January 1919
when the Peace Conference was beginning, Republican leaders met secretly
in Washington to discuss how they could counter whatever Wilson did.
An unnamed source had told him,
Hays, Lodge and others made up their mind
before they knew anything about the Treaty
or the League of Nations that they were going to wreck it
whether their consciences demanded it or not.111
Lodge said that his committee did not have any right
to summon the President of the United States.
In July he took up two weeks reading aloud the entire 264 pages
of the Versailles Treaty in a Senate committee room, and often
and in the last portion Lodge was alone in that room.
The Senate committee was asking Wilson to submit the treaty for ratification,
and he was not in a hurry for a vote on that.
In response to an inquiry from the Senate on July 22 Wilson explained
that two companies of American railway troops who volunteered were near
Vladivostok temporarily to watch over the Trans-Siberian Railway.
Local people had supported the Allies in the war,
and Wilson felt a humanitarian obligation to them.
Two weeks after submitting the Versailles Treaty to the United States Senate
Wilson made a short speech as he presented a treaty with France on July 29.
Two days later Senator Lodge began holding hearings that would go on for six weeks.
Republicans denounced the Peace Treaty.
Yet a poll of 1,377 newspapers in the United States had found that
87% of the editors favored the League of Nations.
The cost of living and unemployment were rising.
In that summer in the United States there were 36 race riots.
In 1919 mobs hanged 59 black Americans and burned alive eleven.
Secretary of War Newton Baker consulted with Wilson and was allowed
to call out troops for civil peace, but they did not impose martial law.
Many people were moving from rural areas into cities.
Wilson gave a long speech offering various remedies at the Capital
on August 8 on how they intended to control prices and supplies.
War Secretary Newton Baker asked Wilson what name they should use
for the recent war that the Allies had been calling the “Great War for Civilization,”
and the US Navy referred to as the “War Against Teutonic Aggression.”
Britain was using “War of 1914-1918.”
Wilson told him to call it the “World War.”
On August 19 Wilson invited the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
to meet at the White House on the treaty.
He explained how Article 10 of the League of Nations will work
and that the vote by the United States in Council would be needed
for the United States to be a party to any policy or action.
He also explained,
The United States will, indeed, undertake under Article 10
to “respect and preserve as against external aggression
the territorial integrity and existing political independence
of all members of the League,” and that engagement
constitutes a very grave and solemn moral obligation.
But it is a moral, not a legal, obligation,
and leaves our Congress absolutely free to put
its own interpretation upon it in all cases that call for action.
It is binding in conscience only, not in law.
Article 10 seems to me to constitute
the very backbone of the whole Covenant.
Without it the League would be hardly more
than an influential debating society.
It has several times been suggested, in public debate
and in private conference, that interpretations of the sense
in which the United States accepts the engagements
of the covenant should be embodied
in the instrument of ratification.
There can be no reasonable objection to such interpretations
accompanying the act of ratification provided
they do not form a part of the formal ratification itself.
Most of the interpretations which have been suggested
to me embody what seems to me
the plain meaning of the instrument itself.
But if such interpretations should constitute
a part of the formal resolution of ratification,
long delays would be the inevitable consequence,
inasmuch as all the many governments concerned
would have to accept, in effect, the language of the Senate
as the language of the treaty
before ratification could be complete….
If the United States were to qualify the document
in any way, moreover, I am confident from what I know
of the many conferences and debates which accompanied
the formulation of the treaty that our example
would immediately be followed in many quarters,
in some instances with very serious reservations,
and that the meaning and operative force of the treaty
would presently be clouded
from one end of its clauses to the other….
Senator, I conceive one of the chief benefits
of the whole arrangement that centers
in the league of nations to be just what you have indicated—
that it brings to bear the opinion of the world
and the controlling action of the world on all relationships
of that hazardous sort, particularly those relationships
which involve the rights of the weaker nations.
After all, the wars that are likely to come are most likely
to come by aggression against the weaker nations.
Without the league of nations
they have no buttress or protection.
With it, they have the united protection of the world,
and inasmuch as it is the universal opinion that
the great tragedy through which we have just passed
never would have occurred if the Central Powers
had dreamed that a number of nations
would be combined against them,
so I have the utmost confidence that this notice beforehand
that the strong nations of the world will in every case
be united will make war extremely unlikely….
If it had been known that this war was coming on,
her moral judgment would have concurred with that
of the other Governments of the world,
with that of the other peoples of the world;
and if Germany had known that there was a possibility
of that sort of concurrence,
she never would have dared to do what she did.
Without such notice served on the powers
that may wish to repeat the folly that Germany commenced,
there is no assurance to the world that
there will be peace even for a generation,
whereas if they know beforehand
that there will be that concert of judgment,
there is the most tremendous guaranty.112
The Republican Senator Warren G. Harding asked some tough questions
about the difference between legal and moral obligations.
After three hours Senator Lodge said the meeting was over.
Wilson then provided a luncheon for those who cared to stay.
He asked the senators to leave their written questions with him,
and the next day he wrote responses to each of them.
On August 20 Senator Key Pittman of Nevada proposed four reservations
that were based on seven earlier reservations.
Many hostile witnesses appeared, and the
amendments senators voted for made Wilson angry.
An amendment to reverse the Shandong settlement was considered on August 25.
The next day the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved
about fifty amendments that would block Americans from membership
in most of the international committees that were to carry out the treaty.
Wilson decided that he wanted to take his message to the country,
and his telegrapher Edward Smithers planned a four-week western tour
that would travel 10,000 miles with stops in 29 cities in 21 states.
His advisor Tumulty asked Wilson about his health, and the President replied,
I know that I am at the end of my tether,
but my friends on the Hill say that the trip is necessary
to save the Treaty, and I am willing
to make whatever personal sacrifice is required,
for if the Treaty should be defeated, God only knows
what would happen to the world as a result of it.113
He realized that he may have to give up his life, and he told his wife Edith,
If the Treaty is not ratified by the Senate,
the War will have been fought in vain,
and the world will be thrown into chaos.
I promised our soldiers, when I asked them
to take up arms, that it was a war to end wars;
and if I do not all in my power to put the Treaty in effect,
I will be a slacker and never able
to look those boys in the eye.
I must go.114
Dr. Grayson made another appeal that he not risk his health
warning that it could be lethal.
Wilson responded,
I do not want to do anything foolhardy
but the League of Nations is now in its crisis,
and if it fails, I hate to think what will happen to the world.
You must remember that I, as Commander in Chief,
was responsible for sending our soldiers to Europe.
In the crucial test in the trenches they did not turn back—
and I cannot turn back now.
I cannot put my personal safety, my health,
in the balance against my duty—I must go.115
On August 31 Wilson met with Senate Minority Leader Gilbert Hitchcock
and showed him a preamble that included these words:
The Senate of the United States advises and consents
to ratification of said treaty with the following understanding
of the said treaty … and requests the President
of the United States to communicate these interpretations
to the several [European] States.116
Hitchcock was to keep this for future negotiations.
Secretary of State Lansing presented his ideas on September 5
in Boston at the annual meeting of the American Bar Association.
He suggested:
Justice applied through the agency of an impartial tribunal
clothed with an international jurisdiction eliminates
the diplomatic methods of compromise and concession
and recognizes that before the law all nations are equal
and equally entitled to the exercise of their rights
as sovereign and independent states.
In a word, international democracy exists
in the sphere of legal justice and, up to the present time,
in no other relation between nations.
Let us, then, with as little delay as possible
establish an international tribunal or tribunals of justice
with The Hague Court as a foundation;
let us provide an easier, a cheaper,
and better procedure than now exists;
and let us draft a simple and concise body of legal principles
to be applied to the questions to be adjudicated.
When that has been accomplished—and it ought not to be
a difficult task if the delegates of the Governments
charged with it are chosen for their experience and learning
in the field of jurisprudence—we shall, in my judgment,
have done more to prevent international wars
through removing their causes
than can be done by any other means
that has been devised or suggested.117
On 3 September 1919 President Wilson issued a call for
an industrial conference that Tumulty had proposed on June 4.
Wilson suggested that it be attended by 15 representatives of labor,
15 from management, and 15 for the public interest that would begin on October 6.
On the night of September 3 he left Union Station in Washington
on a presidential train with his wife Edith, Dr. Grayson, his advisor Tumulty,
four stenographers, two cooks, seven Secret Service agents, and many reporters.
They traveled between cities at night, and Wilson usually spoke twice each day.
At his first stop in Columbus, Ohio on September 4 a local trolley strike
and morning rain reduced the crowd until he spoke at Memorial Hall to 4,000
as 2,000 were turned away.
Here are some highlights from that speech:
When the Austrian delegates came before
the Peace Conference, they in so many words spoke of
the origination of the war as a crime and admitted in
our presence that it was a thing intolerable to contemplate.
They knew in their hearts that it had done them
the deepest wrong, that it had put their people and
the people of Germany at the judgment seat of mankind,
and throughout this treaty every term that was applied
to Germany was meant, not to humiliate Germany,
but to rectify the wrong that she had done….
As I said, this treaty was not intended
merely to end this war.
It was intended to prevent any similar war….
It was a Slavic people,
and I had to say to my Italian friends,
“Everywhere else in this treaty we have given territory
to the people who lived on it,
and I do not think it is for the advantage of Italy,
and I am sure it is not for the advantage of the world,
to give Italy territory where other people live.”
I felt the force of the argument for what they wanted,
and it was the old argument that had always prevailed,
namely, that they will need it from a military point of view,
and I have no doubt that if there is no league of nations,
they will need it from a military point of view;
but if there is a league of nations,
they will not need it from a military point of view….
We of all peoples in the world, my fellow citizens,
ought to be able to understand the questions
of this treaty without anybody explaining them to us,
for we are made up out of all the peoples of the world….
Do you realize, my fellow citizens,
that the whole world is waiting on America?
The only country in the world that is trusted at this moment
is the United States, and the peoples of the world
are waiting to see whether their trust is justified or not.118
On the same day Wilson gave a short talk from the back of the train
in Richmond, Indiana and about the Peace Treaty he said:
The chief thing to notice about it, my fellow citizens,
is that it is the first treaty ever made by great powers
that was not made in their favor.
It is made for the protection of the weak peoples
of the world and not for the aggrandizement of the strong.
That is a noble achievement, and it is largely due to the
influence of such great peoples as the people of America,
who hold at their heart this principle, that nobody
has the right to impose sovereignty upon anybody else;
that, in disposing of the affairs of a nation,
that nation or people must be its own master
and make its own choice.
The extraordinary achievement of this treaty is
that it gives a free choice to people
who never could have won it for themselves.
It is for the first time in the history
of international transactions an act of systematic justice
and not an act of grabbing and seizing.119
He gave a long speech at the Coliseum in Indianapolis to 20,000 people, saying:
You have heard a great deal about Article X
of the Covenant of the League of Nations.
Article X speaks the conscience of the world.
Article X is the article which
goes to the heart of this whole bad business,
for that article says that the members of this League
(that is intended to be all the great nations of the world)
engage to respect and to preserve
against all external aggression the territorial integrity
and political independence of the nations concerned.
That promise is necessary in order to prevent
this sort of war from recurring,
and we are absolutely discredited if we fought this war
and neglect the essential safeguard against it….
What happened was that Germany was shut off
from the economic resources of the rest of the globe,
and she could not stand it.
A nation that is boycotted
is a nation that is in sight of surrender.
Apply this economic, peaceful, silent, deadly remedy,
and there will be no need for force….
This war had been fought in part because of the refusal
to observe the fidelity which is involved in a promise,
because of the failure to regard the sacredness of treaties,
and this Covenant of the League of Nations
provides that no secret treaty shall have any validity….
So, my fellow citizens, I look forward
with profound gratification to the time
which I believe will now not much longer be delayed,
when the American people can say
to their fellows in all parts of the world,
“We are the friends of liberty; we have joined with
the rest of mankind in securing the guarantees of liberty;
we stand here with you the eternal champions
of what is right, and may God keep us
in the Covenant that we have formed.”120
In St. Louis on September 5 at a luncheon in
the Hotel Statler he made a fairly long speech.
The war that has just been finished was no accident.
Any man who had followed the politics of the world
up to that critical break must have known that
that was the logical outcome of the processes
that had preceded it, must have known that
the nations of the world were preparing
for that very thing and were expecting it….
The reparation commission created by the treaty
is created for the purpose of seeing that
Germany pays the reparation, and it was admitted in all our
conferences that in order to do that steps must be taken
to enable Germany to pay the reparation,
which means here industrial and commercial rehabilitation….
We said that we were going to fight this war
for the purpose of seeing to it that the mothers and sisters
and fathers of this land, and the sweethearts and wives,
did not have to send their lads over
on the other side of the sea to fight any more,
and so we took part in an arrangement
by which justice was to be secured throughout the world.
The rest of the world, partly at our suggestion, said “Yes”
and said it gladly; said “Yes, we will go into the partnership
to see that justice is maintained;” and then I come home
and hear some gentlemen say, “But will we?”
Are we interested in justice?
The treaty of peace, as I have just said to you,
is based upon the protection of the weak against the strong,
and there is only one force that
can protect the weak against the strong,
and that is the universal concert of the strength of mankind.
That is the League of Nations….
We are partners with the rest of the world
in respecting the territorial integrity
and political independence of others….
You are betrayed.
You fought for something that you did not get.
And the glory of the Armies and Navies of the United States
is gone like a dream in the night, and there ensues upon it,
in the suitable darkness of the night, the nightmare dread
which lay upon the nations before this war came;
and there will come sometime,
in the vengeful Providence of God, another war,
in which not a few hundred thousand men
from America will have to die,
but as many millions as are necessary to accomplish
the final freedom of the peoples of the world.121
Wilson also spoke at Washington University and in the Coliseum in St. Louis.
He was hailed as “Woodrow Wilson, Father of World Democracy,”
and Republicans had a “truth squad” there.
He knew there were many German-Americans in the city, and he talked about
rebuilding Germany which they would need to do to pay reparations.
He said this was going to be the beginning of processes
that would make such a war impossible.
The real reason that the war that we have just finished
took place was that Germany was afraid
her commercial rivals were to going to get the better of her,
and the reason why some nations went into the war
against Germany was that they thought
Germany would get the commercial advantage of them.
The seed of the jealousy,
the seed of the deep-seated hatred
was hot, successful commercial and industrial rivalry….
This Nation went into this war to see it through to the end,
and the end has not come yet.
This is the beginning, not of the war but of the processes
which are going to render a war like this impossible.
There are no other processes
than those that are proposed in this great treaty.
It is a great treaty; it is a treaty of justice,
of rigorous and severe justice, but do not forget
that there are many other parties
to this treaty than Germany and her opponents.
There is rehabilitated Poland.
There is rescued Bohemia.
There is redeemed Jugo-Slavia.
There is rehabilitated Rumania.
All the nations that Germany meant to crush and reduce
to the status of tools in her own hands
have been redeemed by this war and given the guarantee
of the strongest nations of the world
that nobody shall invade their liberty again.
If you do not want to give them that guarantee,
then you make it certain that without your guarantee
the attempt will be made again,
and if another war starts like this one,
are you going to keep out of it?
If you keep out of this arrangement,
that sort of war will come soon.
If you go into it, it never will come.
We are in the presence, therefore, of the most solemn
choice that this people was ever called upon to make.
That choice is nothing less than this:
Shall America redeem her pledges to the world?
America is made up of the peoples of the world.
All the best bloods of the world flow in her veins,
all the old affections, all the old and sacred traditions
of peoples of every sort throughout the wide world circulate
in her veins, and she has said to mankind at her birth:
“We have come to redeem the world
by giving it liberty and justice.”
Now we are called upon before the tribunal of mankind
to redeem that immortal pledge.122On September 6 the crowd of 20,000 in Convention Hall
at Kansas City were also excited.
He said,Then, you will ask,
“Do we at once take up arms and fight them?”
No, we do something very much more terrible than that.
We absolutely boycott them….
It is the most complete boycott ever conceived
in a public document, and I want to say to you
with confident prediction that
there will be no more fighting after that….
We wanted disarmament,
and this document provides in the only possible way
for disarmament, by common agreement.
Observe, my fellow citizens, that, as I said just now,
every great fighting nation in the world is to be a member
of this partnership except Germany, and inasmuch as
Germany has accepted a limitation of her army
to 100,000 men, I do not think for the time being
she may be regarded as a great fighting nation.
Here in the center of Europe a great nation
of more than 60,000,000 that has agreed
not to maintain an army of more than 100,000 men,
and all around her the rest of the world
in concerted partnership to see that no other nation
attempts what she attempted,
and agreeing among themselves that they will not impose
this limitation of armament upon Germany merely,
but that they will impose it upon themselves….
If you do not want little groups of selfish men
to plot the future of Europe, we must not allow
little groups of selfish men to plot the future of America….
The only nations of any consequence outside
the League—unless we choose to stay out and go in later
with Germany—are Germany and Turkey….
I have come out to fight for a cause.
That cause is greater than the Senate.
It is greater than the government.
It is as great as the cause of mankind, and I intend,
in office or out, to fight that battle as long as I live.123
In Des Moines he stood up in his automobile smiling and waving.
He spoke there also on the 6th, and he rested on Sunday the 7th.
Most elected officials in Iowa were Republicans.
He claimed,
The isolation of the United States is at an end,
not because we chose to go into the politics of the world,
but because by the sheer genius of this people
and the growth of our power we have become
a determining factor in the history of mankind,
and after you have become a determining factor
you cannot remain isolated, whether you want to or not….
We had to collect the pieces of Poland….
The processes of frank discussion are the processes
of peace not only, but the processes of settlement,
and those are the processes which
are set up for all the powerful nations of the world.
I want to say that this is
an unparalleled achievement of thoughtful civilization.
To my dying day I shall esteem it the crowning privilege
of my life to have been permitted to put my name
to a document like that; and in my judgment,
my fellow citizens, when passion is cooled
and men take a sober, second thought, they are all
going to feel that the supreme thing that America did
was to help bring this about and then put her shoulder
to the great chariot of justice and of peace which was going
to lead men along in that slow and toilsome march,
toilsome and full of the kind of agony
that brings bloody sweat, but nevertheless
going up a slow incline to those distant heights upon which
will shine at the last the serene light of justice,
suffusing a whole world in blissful peace.124
Wilson as President had $25,000 for traveling expenses.
A survey in Missouri reported that Wilson’s visit had changed
the state from anti-League to being for the League.
A Republican Congressman from Missouri introduced a resolution to provide
$15,000 for travel expenses of any senators who wanted to oppose the Treaty.
The Washington Post reported that Wilson delighted the crowds,
and on September 8 the New York Times declared
that he was being “refreshed as he goes along.”
He rested at a hotel in Des Moines.
Wilson spoke in Omaha on September 8,
and he showed them a copy of the Peace Treaty and said,
You have heard of the council
that the newspaper men call the “big four.”
We had a very much bigger name for ourselves than that.
We called ourselves the “supreme council
of the principal allied and associated powers,”
but we had no official title,
and sometimes there were five of us instead of four.
Those five represented, with the exception of Germany,
of course, the great fighting nations of the world.
They could have done anything with this treaty
that they chose to do, because they had the power to do it,
and they chose to do what had never been chosen before,
to renounce every right of sovereignty in that settlement
to which the people concerned did not assent.
That is the great settlement
which is represented in this volume….
The Monroe Doctrine is expressly authenticated
in this document, for the first time in history,
by all the great Nations of the world,
and it was put there at our request….
If I felt that I personally in any way
stood in the way of this settlement,
I would be glad to die that it might be consummated,
because I have a vision, my fellow citizens,
that if this thing should by some mishap not be accomplished
there would rest forever upon the fair name of this people
a stain which could never be effaced,
which would be intolerable to every lover of America,
inconceivable to any man who knew the duty of America
and was ready with stout heart to do it.125
Also on the 8th Wilson spoke at the Coliseum in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
You have got to act by rule, and justice consists
in applying the same rule to everybody,
not one rule to the rich man and another to the poor;
not one rule to the employer and another to the employee,
but the same rule to the strong and to the weak.
That is exactly what is attempted in this treaty.
I cannot understand the psychology
of men who are resisting it.
I cannot understand what they are afraid of,
unless it is that they know physical force
and do not understand moral force.
Moral force is a great deal more powerful than physical.
Govern the sentiments of mankind and you govern mankind.
Govern their fears, govern their hopes,
determine their fortunes,
get them together in concerted masses,
and the whole thing sways like a team.
Once get them suspecting one another,
once get them antagonizing one another,
and society itself goes to pieces.
We are trying to make a society instead of a set of
barbarians out of the governments of the world….
America is necessary to the peace of the world.
And reverse the proposition:
The peace and good will of the world
are necessary to America.126
On September 9 Wilson spoke to the State Legislature in St. Paul, explaining,
The cost of living at present is a world condition.
It is due to the fact that the man power of the world
has been sacrificed in the agony of the battlefield
and that all the processes of industry
have been either slackened or diverted.127
Then in Minneapolis 15,000 people filled an auditorium, and Wilson said,
What are we debating in the United States?
Whether we will take part in guiding
and steadying the world or not….
No nation is admitted to the League of Nations
whose people do not control its Government.
That is the reason that we are making Germany wait.
She says that henceforth her people are going to
control her Government, but we have got to wait and see.
If they do control it, she is as welcome to the League
as anybody else, because we are not holding nations off.
We are holding selfish groups of men off….
Now, in the true Irish spirit, we are abolishing private fights,
and we are making it the law of mankind that
it is everybody’s business and everybody can get in.
The consequence is that
there will be no attempt at private fights.
It provides for disarmament
on the part of the great fighting nations of the world.
It provides in detail for
the rehabilitation of oppressed peoples,
and that will remove most of the causes of war.128
Again on the 9th in an auditorium in St. Paul he said,
Every man in America, if he behaves himself, knows that
he stands on the same footing as every other man
in America, and, thank goodness, we are in sight of the time
when every woman will know that
she stands upon the same footing.
We do not have to ask anybody’s leave what we shall think
or what we shall do or how we shall vote….
And there came a day at Paris when the representatives
of all the great governments of the world
accepted the American specifications upon which
the terms of the treaty of peace were drawn.129
When he was in St. Paul, Dr. Grayson noticed that Wilson was tired
and was suffering from headaches that continued
as he traveled to Bismarck, North Dakota.
There on September 10 he addressed Governor Frazier
and his fellow countrymen, saying among other things,
It is a noble project. It is a noble opportunity.
My pulses quicken at the thought of it.
I am glad to have lived in a day
when America can redeem her pledges to the world,
when America can prove that her leadership is
the leadership that leads out of these age-long troubles,
these age-long miseries into which the world
will not sink back, but which, without our assistance,
it may struggle out of only through
a long period of bloody revolution.130
At Billings, “in the great State of Montana” he said,
What I want to impress upon you to-day
is that it is this treaty or none.
It is this treaty because we can have no other.
Consider the circumstances.
For the first time in the world some twenty nations
sent their most thoughtful and responsible men
to consult together at the capital of France
to effect a settlement of the affairs of the world,
and I want to render my testimony
that these gentlemen entered upon
their deliberations with great openness of mind.
Their discussions were characterized by the utmost candor,
and they realize, my fellow citizens,
what as a student of history I venture to say
no similar body ever acknowledged before,
that they were nobody’s masters,
that they did not have the right
to follow the line of any advantage in determining
what the settlements of the peace should be,
but that they were the servants of their people
and the servants of the people of the world.
This settlement, my fellow citizens,
is the first international settlement
that was intended for the happiness
of the average men and women throughout the world.
This is indeed and in truth a people’s treaty,
and it is the first people’s treaty,
and I venture to express the opinion that
it is not wise for Parliaments
or Congresses to attempt to alter it….
This is the best treaty that can possibly be got,
and, in my judgment, it is a mighty good treaty,
for it has justice, the attempt at any rate,
at the heart of it.131
Wilson at Helena on September 11 in an Opera House addressed
Governor Sam V. Stewart and his fellow countrymen, saying,
I call you to mind that we did not go into this war willingly.
I was in a position to know; in the providence of God,
the leadership of this Nation was entrusted to me
during those early years of the war when we were not in it.
I was aware through many subtle channels
of the movements of opinion in this country,
and I know that the thing that this country chiefly desired,
the thing that you men out here in the West chiefly desired
and the thing that of course
every loving woman had at her heart,
was that we should keep out of the war,
and we tried to persuade ourselves
that the European business was not our business.
We tried to convince ourselves that
no matter what happened on the other side of the sea,
no obligation of duty rested upon us, and finally we found
the currents of humanity too strong for us.
We found that a great consciousness was welling up in us
that this was not a local cause, that this was not a struggle
which was to be confined to Europe, or confined to Asia,
to which it had spread, but that it was something
that involved the very fate of civilization;
and there was one great Nation in the world
that could not afford to stay out of it….
We fought Germany in order that
there should be a world fit to live in.
The world is not fit live in, my fellow citizens,
if any great government is in a position to do
what the German Government did—secretly plot a war
and begin it with the whole strength of its people,
without so much as consulting its own people….
Where did the idea first spread that
there should be a society of nations?
It was first suggested and it first spread in the United States,
and some gentlemen were the chief proponents of it
who are now objecting to the adoption
of the Covenant of the League of Nations….
And what does the treaty of peace do?
The treaty of peace sets all those nations
up in independence again;
gives Serbia back what had been torn away from her,
sets up the Jugo-Slavic States and the Bohemian States
under the name of Czechoslovakia;
and if you leave it at that, you leave those nations
just as weak as they were before….
Narrow selfishness will tie things up into ugly knots
that you cannot get open except with a sword.
All the human passions, if aroused on the wrong side,
will do the world an eternal disservice….
And, my fellow citizens, the underlying thought
of what I have tried to say to you to-night
is the organization of the world for order and peace.132
Wilson on September 12 at Coeur D’Alene, Idaho said,
It is a league to bring it about that there shall not be war,
but that there shall be substituted for it
arbitration and the calm settlement of discussion.
That is the heart of the League.133
At Spokane, Washington the same day Wilson said,
There, and at every other point in the Covenant
where it was necessary to do so,
I insisted upon language which
would leave the Congress of the United States free,
and yet these gentlemen say that
the Congress of the United States is deprived of its liberty.
I fought that battle and won it.
It is not necessary for them to fight it over again.134
The next stop was at the Armory in Tacoma, Washington,
and he said that the war costs, not counting loans to each other,
were for Britain $38 billion, France $26 billion, the United States $22 billion,
Russia $18 billion, Italy $13 billion, and including
Japan, Belgium, and other allies a total of $123 billion.
It cost the Central Powers a total of $186 billion including Germany $39 billion,
Austria-Hungary $21 billion, and Turkey and Bulgaria $3 billion.
The grand total of the war was $186 billion.
He also said,
The battle deaths—and this is the cost
that touches our hearts—were: Russia, 1,700,000;
Germany, 1,600,000; France, 1,380,000;
Great Britain, 900,000; Austria 800,000; Italy 364,000;
the United States, 50,300 dead.
A total for all belligerents of 7,450,200 men
dead on the field of battle! Seven and a half million!
The totals for the wounded are not obtainable at present,
but the number of torn and wounded
for the United States Army was 230,000,
excluding, of course, those who were killed.
The total of all battle deaths in all the wars of the world
from the year 1793 to 1914
was something under 6,000,000;
in all the wars of the world for more than 100 years
fewer men died than have been killed
upon the field of battle in the last five years.135
At least half of the deaths in 1793 to 1914 were
during the Napoleonic Wars that ended in 1815.
Also on September 13 Wilson arrived in Seattle, and many people
protested in the streets demanding that he “Release Political Prisoners!”
In the afternoon he met with labor delegates.
He appeared unsteady and said he would read their plea.
He spoke twice in Seattle.
America responds to nothing so quickly
or unanimously as a great moral challenge.
It is much more ready to carry through what now
lies before it than it was even to carry through
what was before it when we took up arms
in behalf of the freedom of the world….
In the first place, every nation that joins the League,
and that in prospect means every great fighting nation
in the world, agrees to submit all controversies
which are likely to lead to war either to arbitration
or to thorough discussion by an authoritative body,
the council of the League of Nations….
In the second place, all these great nations agree
to boycott any nation that does not submit a perilous
question either to arbitration or to discussion,
and to support each other in the boycott….
All the nations agree to join
in devising a plan for general disarmament….
All the nations agree to register every treaty,
and they agree that no treaty
that is not registered and published shall be valid….
They agree to join in the supervision
of the government of helpless and dependent people….
They agree also to accord and maintain fair and humane
conditions of labor for men, women, and children
born in their own countries and in all other countries
to which their commercial and industrial relations extend,
and for that purpose they agree to join in establishing
and maintaining the necessary international organization.136
On September 15 Wilson spoke at Hotel Portland and said,
For example, if the United States should conceivably—
I think it inconceivable—stay out of the League of Nations,
it would stay out at this cost:
We would have to see,
since we were not going to join our force with other nations,
that our force was formidable enough
to be respected by other nations.
We would have to maintain a great Army and a great Navy.
We would have to do something more than that:
We would have to concentrate authority sufficiently
to be able to use the physical force
of the Nation quickly upon occasion.
All of that is absolutely antidemocratic in its influence.137
On that day he also spoke to 7,000 at the Portland Auditorium and said,
“Nations must unite as men unite
in order to preserve peace and order.
The great nations must be so united as to be able to say
to any single country, ‘You must not go to war,’
and they can say that effectively when the country
desiring war knows that the force
which united nations place behind peace is irresistible.”…
That is a quotation from an address
said to have been delivered at Union College in June, 1915,
a year after the war began,
by Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge, of Massachusetts.
I entirely concur in Senator Lodge’s conclusion,
and I hope I shall have his cooperation
in bring about the desired result….
I tell you, my fellow citizens—I tell it with sorrow—
it was universally believed on the other side of the water
that we would not go into the war
because we were making money out of it,
and loved the money better than we loved justice.
They all believed that.
When we went over there they greeted us with amazement.
They said, “These men did not have to come.
Their territories are not invaded.
Their independence is not directly threatened.
Their interests were not immediately attacked,
only indirectly.138
While Wilson was in San Francisco on September 17,
he had a terrible headache.
That day the New York Times reported,
The opinion is generally held that
the President has steadily advanced his cause
since he started out on his nationwide tour….
It seems a safe assertion that the ten states through which
he has passed believe with him that the Treaty of Peace
should be ratified without delay and that they are willing
to bring the United States into a League of Nations.139
On the 17th in San Francisco’s Palace Hotel he said,
The moral compulsion upon us who at the critical stage
of the world saved the world and who threw in our fortunes
with all the forward-looking peoples of the world—
the moral compulsion upon us
to stand by and see it through is overwhelming.
We cannot now turn back.
We made the choice in April, 1917.
We cannot with honor reverse it now….
We cannot desert humanity.
We are the trustees of humanity, and we must see that
we redeem the pledges which are
always implicit in so great a trusteeship.140
On the same day in a San Francisco auditorium Wilson said,
I am a champion of that sort of peace, that sort of order,
that sort of calm counsel out of which,
and out of which alone, can come
the satisfactory solutions of the problems of society.
You cannot solve the problems of society
amidst chaos, disorder, and strife.
You can only solve them when men have agreed to be calm,
agreed to be just, agreed to be conciliatory, agreed that the
right of the weak is as majestic as the right of the strong;
and when we have come to that mind in the counsels
of nations we can then more readily come to that mind
in our domestic counsels, upon which the happiness
and prosperity of our own beloved people
so intimately and directly depend.141
The next day at a Palace Hotel luncheon he said,
The heart of this treaty, my fellow citizens, is that
it gives liberty and independence to people
who never could have got it for themselves,
because the men who constituted that conference realized
that the basis of war was the imposition
of the will of the strong nations
upon those who could not resist them….
My fellow citizens, I believe in Divine Providence.
If I did not, I would go crazy.
If I thought the direction of the disordered affairs
of this world depended upon our finite intelligence,
I should not know how to reason my way to sanity,
and I do not believe that there is any body of men,
however they concert their power or their influence,
that can defeat this great enterprise,
which is the enterprise of divine mercy
and peace and good will.142
Also on the 18th Wilson gave speeches to 10,000 people in Berkeley’s
Greek Theatre and to 12,000 in the Oakland Municipal Auditorium.
In Berkeley he said,
We cannot do any effective thinking for the world
until we know that there is a settled peace.
We cannot make any long plans for the betterment
of mankind until those initial plans are made,
and we know that there is going to be a field
and an opportunity to make the plans
that will last and that will become effective.143
In an Oakland auditorium he said,
This is a great treaty not merely for the peoples
who were represented at the peace table
but for the people who were the subjects
of the governments whose wrongs were forever ended
by the victory on the fields of France….
This treaty does not stop there.
It attempts to coordinate
all the great human endeavors of the world.
It tries to bring under international cooperation
every effort to check international crime.
I mean like that unspeakable traffic in women,
like that almost equally unspeakable traffic in children.
It undertakes to control
the dealing in deadly drugs like opium.
It organizes a new method of cooperation among
all the great Red Cross societies of the world….
The particular thing that this treaty provides
in the Covenant of the League of Nations is that every cause
shall be deliberately exposed to the judgment of mankind.
It substitutes what the whole world has long been for,
namely, arbitration and discussion for war.144
On September 19 Wilson spoke in a stadium at San Diego,
and electricity helped 30,000 people hear his 70-minute speech.
We went into this war not only to see that autocratic
power of that sort never threatened the world again,
but we went into it for even larger purposes than that.
Other autocratic powers may spring up,
but there is only one soil in which they can spring up,
and that is the wrongs done to free peoples of the world.
The heart and center of this treaty is that it sets at liberty
people all over Europe and in Asia
who had hitherto been enslaved by powers
which were not their rightful sovereigns and masters.145
That night Wilson attended a dinner with the Mayor of San Diego and said,
If there was any place in our discussions
where they wanted troops sent, they always begged that
American troops might be sent, because they said
none of the other associated powers would suspect them
of any ulterior designs, and that the people of the country
itself would know that they had not gone there
to keep anything that they took, that they had not gone
there to interfere with their internal affairs;
that they had gone not as exploiters but as friends.146
In Los Angeles about 200,000 came out on the streets,
and he spoke in the Hotel Alexandria saying
If you have a really humane purpose and
a real knowledge of the conditions of peace in the world,
you will have to say, “This is the settlement,
and we guarantee its continuance.”…
That is the purpose of the much-discussed Article X
in the Covenant of the League of Nations….
The whole freedom of the world not only,
but the whole peace of mind of the world,
depends upon the choice of America,
because without America in this arrangement
the world will not be reassured.
I can testify to that.147
That evening Wilson spoke at the Shriners Auditorium.
When we get to the borders of the United States,
we are neither Republicans nor Democrats.
It is our privilege to scrap inside the family
just as much as we please, but it is our duty as a Nation
in those great matters of international concern which
distinguish us to subordinate all such differences
and to be a united family and all speak with one voice
what we all know to be the high conceptions
of American manhood and womanhood.148
On September 22 Wilson spoke in Sacramento from
the rear platform of the train very briefly and said,
It is more than a guarantee of peace.
It is a guarantee of justice….
It is the first combination of the power of the world
to see that justice shall reign everywhere.149
On that day in Reno, Nevada, he addressed Governor Boyle
and his fellow countrymen saying,
It says in plain English that nothing in that Covenant
shall be interpreted as affecting
the validity of the Monroe Doctrine.
Could anything be plainer than that?
And when you add to that that the principle
of the Monroe Doctrine is applied to the whole world,
then surely I am at liberty to say that
the heart of the document is the Monroe Doctrine itself….
I conceive this to be the greatest charter—
nay, it is the first charter—ever adopted of human liberty.
It sets the world free everywhere from autocracy,
from imposed authority, from authority not chosen
and accepted by the people who obey it….
The only thing that can ever keep you in the League
is being ashamed to get out.
You can get out whenever you want to
after two years’ notice, and the only risk you run is having
the rest of the world think you ought not to have got out.150
The next day Wilson spoke from the rear of the train at Ogden, Utah saying,
I do not mean in any way to coerce the judgment
of public men, but to enlighten and assist that judgment,
for I am convinced, after crossing the continent, that there is
no sort of doubt that eighty per cent of the people
of the United States are for the League of Nations,
and that the chief opposition outside the legislative halls
comes from the disquieting element
that we had to deal with before and during the war.151
Then on September 23 Wilson spoke to 15,000 in the Tabernacle at Salt Lake City.
The language of the Covenant expressly excludes
the authorities of the League from taking any action
or expressing any judgment with regard to domestic policies
like immigration, like naturalization, like the tariff,
like all of those things which have lain at the center
so often of our political action and of our choice of policy….
The council of the League selects the powers
which are most ready, most available, most suitable,
and selects them only at their consent,
so that the United States would
in no such circumstances conceivably be drawn in
unless the flame spread to the world….
Every public man, every statesman, in the world knows,
and I say that advisedly, that in order that the United States
should go to war it is necessary for the Congress to act….
Every other great international arrangement
has been a division of spoils,
and this is an absolute renunciation of spoils,
even with regard to the helpless parts of the world,
even with regard to those poor benighted people in Africa,
over whom Germany had exercised a selfish authority
which exploited them and did not help them….
Armenia is one of the regions that
are to be under trust of the League of Nations.
Armenia is to be redeemed.
The Turk is to be forbidden to exercise his authority there,
and Christian people are not only to be allowed to aid
Armenia but they are to be allowed to protect Armenia….
We want to be friends of each other
as well as friends of mankind.
We want America to be united in spirit
as well as the world.152
On September 24 Wilson gave a very long speech at
Cheyenne, Wyoming saying among other things,
Every territory that had been under the dominion
of the Central Powers, unjustly and against its own consent,
is by that treaty and the treaties which accompany it
absolutely turned over in fee simple
to the people who live in it.
The principle is adopted without qualification upon which
America was founded, that all just government
proceeds from the consent of the governed.
No nation that could be reached by the conclusions
of the conference was obliged to accept the authority
of a government by which it did not wish to be controlled.
It is a peace of liberation….
Henceforth, for the first time, we shall have
the opportunity to play effective friends
to the great people of China, and I for one feel my pulse
quicken and my heart rejoice at such a prospect….
Without the Covenant of the League of Nations
that treaty cannot be executed.
Without the adherence of the United States
to that Covenant, the Covenant cannot be made effective….
I was present and can testify that when Article X
was debated the most significant words in it
were the words “against external aggression.”
We do not guarantee any government against anything that
may happen within its borders or within its own sovereignty.
We merely say that we will not impair its territorial integrity
or interfere with its political independence,
and we will not countenance other nations outside of it
making prey of it in the one way or the other….
The assembly is, so to say,
the court of the public opinion of the world.
It is where you can broach questions, but not decide them.
It is where you can debate anything
that affects the peace of the world,
but not determine upon a course of action
upon anything that affects the peace of the world.
The whole direction of the action of the League
is vested in another body known as the council,
and nothing in the form of an active measure,
no policy, no recommendation with regard to the action
of the governments composing the League can proceed
except upon a unanimous vote of the council.153
Dr. Grayson’s concern that Wilson was working too hard
increased in Cheyenne and in Denver.
In a Denver auditorium on September 25 he said,
In acquiescing in the Covenant of the League
we do adopt, and we should adopt,
certain fundamental moral principles of right and justice,
which I dare say, we do not need to promise to live up to,
but which we are certainly proud to promise to live up to….
There is nothing finer in the records of public action
than the united spirit of the American people
behind this great enterprise….
Ask any soldier if he wants to
go through a hell like that again.
The soldiers know what the next war would be.
They know what the inventions were that were just about
to be used for the absolute destruction of mankind.
I am for any kind of insurance
against a barbaric reversal of civilization….
Then, if we have this great treaty,
we have what the world never had before—
a court of public opinion of the world.
I do not think that you can exaggerate
the significance of that, my fellow countrymen….
The voice of the world is at last released.
The conscience of the world is at last given a forum,
and the rights of men not liberated under this treaty
are given a place where they can be heard.
If there are nations which wish to exercise the power
of self-determination but are not liberated by this treaty,
they can come into that great forum,
they can point out how their demands
affect the peace and quiet of the world,
they can point out how their demands
affect the good understanding between nations.
There is a forum here for the rights of mankind
which was never before dreamed of,
and in that forum any representative
has the right to speak his full mind.
If that is not a wholesome moral clearing house,
I wish somebody would suggest a better….
We are all democrats—
I will not insist upon the large “D”—we are all democrats
because we believe in a people’s government,
and what I am pleading for
is nothing less than a people’s peace.154
Also on September 25 the exhausted Wilson gave a long speech
at Pueblo, Colorado which quoted that Theodore Roosevelt said,
The one effective move for obtaining peace is
by an agreement among all the great powers in which
each should pledge itself not only to abide by the decisions
of a common tribunal but to back its decisions by force.
The great civilized nations should combine by solemn
agreement in a great world league for the peace
of righteousness; a court should be established.155
The following conclusion of Wilson’s speech that day would be
his last public utterance for several years.
The arrangements of justice
do not stand of themselves, my fellow citizens.
The arrangements of this treaty are just,
but they need the support of the combined power
of the great nations of the world.
And they will have that support.
Now that the mists of this great question
have cleared away, I believe that men will see the truth,
eye to eye and face to face.
There is one thing that the American people
always rise to and extend their hand to,
and that is the truth of justice and of liberty and of peace.
We have accepted that truth,
and we are going to be led by it, and it is going to lead us,
and, through us the world, out into pastures of quietness
and peace such as the world never dreamed of before.156
After the train left Pueblo, they stopped so that Wilson could take a walk,
and that night he told Edith that he was very sick and in much pain.
She sat by him until he fell asleep.
At their next stop at Wichita, Kansas he dressed for a speech.
Edith could see that he was very ill, and she persuaded him not to give a speech.
On the train Tumulty read a short statement to
the large crowd that was waiting at Wichita.
The presidential party decided to take the train straight back to Washington.
Woodrow Wilson had given his last public speech
except for a short talk on radio in November 1923.
Yet as President he continued to put out many written statements.
More than a thousand people cheered Wilson when he arrived
in the Washington train station on Sunday, September 28.
In the United States Senate on September 10 the Committee on Foreign Relations
had moved the Treaty into the full Senate with transcripts and Lodge’s 6-page report.
Lodge bragged that he would kill Article 10 and the Treaty.
The Democratic Leader Gilbert Hitchcock asked for quick ratification.
On September 12 the Foreign Relations Committee questioned
the treaty-critic William C. Bullitt, and he noted that
Secretary of State Lansing also opposed the League of Nations.
By the end of September more than 300,000 steelworkers were on strike,
and the main target was the US Steel Corporation.
On 1 October 1919 President Wilson’s condition seemed to be improving with rest.
The next morning his left hand went limp.
They sent for Dr. Grayson, and he said the President was paralyzed.
They consulted several doctors who came to the White House.
The left side of his body had lost feeling.
Yet his mind was okay despite the thrombosis, a clot in a brain artery.
He could still think and speak.
Secretary of State Lansing let Secretary Joseph Tumulty and Dr. Grayson decide
if Wilson should be replaced by Vice President Thomas R. Marshall
because of disability, and neither one would do that.
Marshall was serving as president of the Senate.
When he came to the White House, Edith told him
that she would inform Wilson that he came.
Wilson never contacted Marshall after that.
Yet Marshall continued to support the President’s policies.
On October 4 Mrs. Edith Wilson insisted that a full report
of Wilson’s condition should be deferred.
One week later Senator George H. Moses of New Hampshire sent a letter
to constituents that evidence indicated a cerebral hemorrhage and that
Wilson would no long be “a material force or factor in anything.”157
Edith Wilson took over his presidential duties as best she could.
She was intelligent but had only two years of schooling.
Dr. Dercum was a nerve specialist in Philadelphia, and he told Edith that
Louis Pasteur had a similar case and recovered to do great intellectual work
afterward, and he sent her the book The Life of Pasteur.
He advised her,
Madam, it is a grave situation, but I think you can solve it.
Have everything come to you;
weigh the importance of each matter,
and see if it is possible by consultations
with the respective heads of the Departments
to solve them without the guidance of your husband.
In this way you can save him a great deal.
But always keep in mind that every time you take him
a new anxiety or problem to excite him,
you are turning a knife in an open wound.
His nerves are crying out for rest,
and any excitement is torture to him.158
She asked if it would be better for him to resign and let Marshall be President
so that he could rest to save his life.
Dr. Dercum responded,
No, not if you feel equal to what I suggested.
For Mr. Wilson to resign would have a bad effect
on the country, and a serious effect on our patient.
He has staked his life and made his promise to the world
to do all in his power to get the Treaty ratified
and make the League of Nations complete.
If he resigns, the greatest incentive to recovery is gone;
and as his mind is clear as crystal he can still do more
with even a maimed body than anyone else.
He has the utmost confidence in you.
Dr. Grayson tells me he has always
discussed public affairs with you;
so you will not come to them uninformed.159
On 18 December 1917 the United States Congress had passed
the 18th Amendment to the Constitution prohibiting the “manufacture,
sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors,”
and it was ratified by the states on 16 January 1919.
Rep. Andrew Volstead of Minnesota introduced the
National Prohibition Act on June 27, and the House of Representatives
passed it on July 22 followed by the Senate on September 5.
The joint conference committee agreed to it by October 10.
Secretary Tumulty on October 27 wrote the message vetoing the Volstead Act,
which would have provided enforcement for the Prohibition of alcohol,
and Wilson signed that.
The House overrode the veto that day, and the Senate did so the next day.
Most of the Prohibition Act went into effect on that day,
and the rest did on 17 January 1920.
Edith at one point suggested that President Wilson resign, but he refused.
After that she stopped any attempt to get him to resign.
Tumulty helped provide the annual message with help
from the Cabinet members in December,
and he used Wilson’s western speeches for material.
Mrs. Wilson often explained that the President
was not strong enough for various tasks.
She insisted that he opposed accepting ratification
of the Treaty with the Lodge reservations.
Senator Hitchcock wrote a letter that Wilson
considered those nullification of the Treaty.
On November 17 Hitchcock came to see Wilson.
His son-in-law William McAdoo urged the President
to make concessions on the Peace Treaty, and Wilson said
he would not compromise on the “Ten Commandments.”
When Edith suggested that he “accept these reservations
and get this awful thing settled,” he replied,
Little girl, don’t desert me, that I cannot stand.
Can’t you see that I have no moral right
to accept any change in a paper I have signed
without giving to every other signatory,
even the Germans, the right to do the same thing?
It is not I that will not accept;
it is the nation’s honor that is at stake.
Better a thousand times to go down fighting
than to dip your colors to dishonorable compromise.160
On November 19 the Senate voted on the Peace Treaty
with the Lodge reservations with 39 for and 55 against.
Then they voted as Wilson wanted without any amendments,
and that also failed 38 to 53.
Because 90% of American Communists and anarchists
were born in foreign countries, calls were made to deport aliens.
US Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer had ordered Russian-born workers
in 12 American cities arrested on November 6,
the second anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.
On December 21 the transport Buford was used to deport 149 anarchists to Russia.
In early January another series of “Palmer raids” were carried out.
On December 5 the Republican Senator Albert Fall of New Mexico
and the Democrat Hitchcock were allowed to see Wilson
about the American citizen Jenkins being held in Mexico.
Edith took notes while Wilson spoke with difficulty and made a joke
when Fall said they were praying for him, asking “Which way?”
Edith Wilson handled her role in the government this way:
I studied every paper, sent from the different Secretaries
or Senators, and tried to digest and present in tabloid form
the things that, despite my vigilance,
had to go to the President.
I, myself, never made a single decision
regarding the disposition of public affairs.
The only decision that was mine was
what was important and what was not,
and the very important decision
of when to present matters to my husband.161
On 5 January 1920 Senator Gilbert Hitchcock returned to Wilson
four interpretive reservations that he had approved in August with another.
One of them reserved the rights of Congress on Article 10
without denying the obligation of the United States to use its conscience
and judgment on any appeal from the League’s Council.
A message from President Wilson was sent to the Democrats
at the Jackson Day celebration on 8 January 1920 advising,
Without the Covenant of the League of Nations
there may be as many secret treaties as ever,
to destroy the confidence of Governments in each other,
and their validity cannot be questioned….
The maintenance of the peace of the world
and the effective execution of the treaty depend upon
the whole-hearted participation of the United States….
I have endeavored to make it plain that
if the Senate wishes to say what the undoubted meaning
of the League is I shall have no objection….
We cannot rewrite this treaty.
We must take it without changes which alter its meaning,
or leave it, and then, after the rest of the world
has signed it, we must face the unthinkable task
of making another and separate treaty with Germany.167
On January 13 Wilson sent a cablegram to the governments
of Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Brazil, and Belgium calling for the first meeting
of the League of Nations at the Foreign Affairs Ministry in Paris on January 16.
He also sent a welcoming message to the Pan-American
Financial Conference in Washington on January 19.
On January 26 Mrs. Wilson in a letter she forwarded to Hitchcock
said that he could make the new interpretation public.
He did that on February 9 as the Senate was considering the Treaty;
but the bipartisan conference of the Congress had already agreed on compromises
on January 23, and they ended their meetings at the end of the month.
Also on February 9 Secretary of State Lansing sent a letter on behalf
of President Wilson to the American Ambassador at Paris advising him
to reject the British and French proposal on the Adriatic issue.
Lansing resigned four days later and was replaced by
Frank L. Polk who sent a similar message on the 24th.
By February 1920 Wilson was giving dictation
to Swem with some unfortunate and embarrassing results.
Tumulty asked Wilson if the railroads should be returned to private owners,
should they recognize the government of Costa Rica,
who was to be on the commission to settle the miners’ strike,
and many appointments needed to be made.
Wilson would have liked to run for a third term, but that was not to be.
Tumulty hoped to get a referendum on the League, and that
was changed to relying on the next election as a referendum.
Wilson petulantly refused to go along with Britain and France.
His capabilities were declining.
He gave instructions such as withdrawing from the treaty with Germany
and the promise to help defend France which
would have erased what he had done before.
Wilson alienated his friend, the British ambassador Edward Grey
and so many that he asked Tumulty if he had any friends left.
On March 8 Wilson wrote an important and rather long letter
to Senator Hitchcock that the New York Times published on March 9.
I am sorry to say that the reservations that have come
under my notice are almost without exception,
not interpretations of the Articles to which
it is proposed to attach them
but in effect virtual nullifications of those Articles.
Any reservation which seeks to deprive
the League of Nations of the force of Article X
cuts at the very heart and life of the Covenant itself.
Any League of Nations which does not guarantee
as a matter of incontestable right the political independence
and integrity of each of its members might be
hardly a futile scrap of paper, as ineffective in operation
as the agreement between Belgium and Germany
which the Germans violated in 1914.
Article X as written into the Treaty of Versailles
represents the renunciation by Great Britain and Japan,
which before the war had begun to find so many interests
in common in the Pacific; by France; by Italy—
by all the great fighting powers of the world
of the old pretensions of political conquest
and territorial aggrandizement.
It is a new doctrine in the world’s affairs
and must be recognized or there is no secure basis
for the peace which the whole world
so longingly desires and so desperately needs.
If Article X is not adopted and acted upon,
the governments which reject it will, I think, be guilty
of bad faith to their people whom they induced
to make the infinite sacrifices of the war by the pledge
that they would be fighting to redeem the world
from the old order of force and aggression.
They will be acting also in bad faith to the opinion
of the world at large to which they appealed for support
in a concerted stand against the aggressions
and pretensions of Germany.
If we were to reject Article X or so to weaken it
as to take its full force out of it, it would mark us
as desiring to return to the old world of jealous rivalry
and misunderstandings from which
our gallant soldiers have rescued us, and would leave us
without any vision or new conception of justice and peace.
We would have learned no lesson from the war
but gained only the regret that
it had involved us in its maelstrom of suffering.
If America has awakened, as the rest of the world has,
to the vision of a new day in which the mistakes of the past
are to be corrected, it will welcome the opportunity
to share the responsibilities of Article X.
It must not be forgotten, Senator, that this Article
constitutes a renunciation of wrong ambition
on the part of powerful nations
with whom we were associated in the war.
It is by no means certain that without this Article
any such renunciation will take place.
Militaristic ambitions and imperialistic policies are
by no means dead even in the counsels of the nations
whom we most trust and with whom
we most desire to be associated in the tasks of peace.
Throughout the sessions of the conference in Paris
it was evident that a militaristic party,
under the most influential leadership,
was seeking to gain ascendency in the counsels of France.
They were defeated then, but are in control now.
The chief arguments advanced in Paris
in support of the Italian claims on the Adriatic
were strategic arguments, that is to say, military arguments,
which had at their back the thought
of naval supremacy in that sea.
For my own part, I am as intolerant of imperialistic designs
on the part of other nations
as I was of such designs on the part of Germany.
The choice is between two ideals: on the one hand,
the ideal of democracy, which represents the rights
of free peoples everywhere to govern themselves,
and on the other hand, the ideal of imperialism
which seeks to dominate by force and unjust power,
an ideal which is by no means dead
and which is earnestly held in many quarters still.
Every imperialistic influence in Europe was hostile
to the embodiment of Article X
in the Covenant of the League of Nations,
and its defeat now would mark the complete
consummation of their efforts to nullify the treaty.
I hold the doctrine of Article X
to be the essence of Americanism.
We cannot repudiate it or weaken it
without at the same time repudiating our own principles.
The imperialist wants no League of Nations but if,
in response to the universal cry of the masses everywhere,
there is to be one, he is interested to secure one
suited to his own purposes, one that will permit him
to continue the historic game of pawns and peoples,—
the juggling of provinces, the old balances of power,
and the inevitable wars attendant upon these things.
The reservation proposed would perpetuate the old order.
Does anyone really want to see the old game played again?
Can anyone really venture
to take part in reviving the old order?
The enemies of the League of Nations have
by every true instinct centered their efforts against Article X,
for it is undoubtedly the foundation of the whole structure.
It is the bulwark, and the only bulwark,
of the rising democracy of the world
against the forces of imperialism and reaction.
Either we should enter the League fearlessly,
accepting the responsibility and not fearing the role
of leadership which we now enjoy, contributing our efforts
towards establishing a just and permanent peace,
or we should retire as gracefully as possible
from the great concert of powers
by which the world was saved.
For my own part, I am not willing to trust to the counsel
of diplomats the working out of any salvation of the world
from the things which it has suffered.
I believe that when the full significance
of this great question has been generally apprehended,
obstacles will seem insignificant before the opportunity,
a great and glorious opportunity, to contribute
our overwhelming moral and material force
to the establishment of an international regime in which
our own ideals of justice and right may be made to prevail
and the nations of the world be allowed
a peaceful development under conditions
of order and safety hitherto impossible.
I need not say, Senator, that I have given a great deal
of thought to the whole matter of reservations
proposed in connection with the ratification of the treaty,
and particularly that portion of the treaty which contains
the Covenant of the League of Nations,
and I have been struck by the fact that
practically every so-called reservation was in effect a rather
sweeping nullification of the terms of the treaty itself.
I hear of reservationists and mild reservationists,
but I cannot understand the difference
between a nullifier and a mild nullifier.
Our responsibility as a nation in this turning point of history
is an overwhelming one, and if I had the opportunity
I would beg everyone concerned to consider the matter
in the light of what it is possible to accomplish for humanity
rather than in the light of special national interests.162
Wilson began watching movies, and he especially liked
those sent by the Signal Corps of his tours in Europe.
He refused to compromise with the Senate.
He suspected that Clemenceau and Marshal Foch were involved in militaristic intrigues.
On 19 March 1920 again the US Senate voted 49 to 35 to ratify the Peace Treaty,
and that was short of the two-thirds needed for a treaty.
On March 29 Wilson sent a message to the US House of Representatives
affirming the police work of American troops led by General Allen in German territory.
Wilson went to his first cabinet meeting since the stroke on April 14.
He tried to remove several members and make new appointments.
When Mrs. Wilson and Grayson came in,
she explained that that was just an experiment.
At that meeting Palmer blamed Bolsheviks and “alien anarchists”
for the current anthracite coal strike.
Wilson in April told Dr. Grayson that he was considering resigning
because of ill effects from his sickness, but he knew that Edith would object.
On June 12 he refused to see Senator Carter Glass
because he was getting a massage.
Glass had moved from being Treasury Secretary to Senator on February 2,
and as chairman of the platform committee
he was making sure that Wilson’s policies were there.
McAdoo withdrew from the presidential race because
he thought that his father-in-law Wilson was a candidate.
Palmer also wanted to be president.
On May 24 Wilson supported the position of the Congress
to relieve the misery in Armenia.
On June 13 Dr. Grayson told Robert Woolley, who was going to attend
the Democratic Convention, that Wilson must not be nominated explaining,
He still believes that it is possible to persuade the country
to join the League without the Lodge reservations,
and he says that he would gladly resign
when that has been accomplished.
He couldn’t survive the campaign.
He is permanently incapacitated
and gradually weakening mentally.
At times by sheer grit he pulls himself together,
keeps himself in good spirits for a week or ten days,
transacts business through Tumulty,
and even seems to improve.
Then he slumps and turns so morose
that it distresses me to be near him.
We must take no chances in San Francisco.163
Grayson and Woolley agreed that they could trust
Senator Carter Glass of Virginia to stop any effort to nominate Wilson again.
On June 23 Wilson sent a telegram to Tennessee’s Governor Roberts
supporting the legislature calling a special session
to consider the amendment for woman suffrage.
The Democrats’ convention began in San Francisco on June 28.
After 16 ballots they nominated James M. Cox of Ohio on July 3
with Franklin D. Roosevelt as his running mate.
On July 1 the Democrats’ National Chairman Homer Cummings
had assured Wilson that the League plank had his views,
and Wilson responded that they should not concede anything.
On July 18 Cox and Roosevelt visited Wilson,
and Cox said, “Mr. President, we are going to be a million percent with you
and your Administration, and that means the League of Nations.”164
Wilson responded that he was very grateful.
Cummings visited him on July 26, and Wilson said, “You know,
I would rather be hated than be the object of derision.”165
On July 30 Wilson urged the United Mine Workers of America
to go back to work in Illinois, and on August 30
he urged them to accept the wage commission award.
On September 16 some terrorists exploded a bomb on Wall Street
that killed 38 people and wounded about 400.
Wilson was worried that if the Republicans won,
there would be “the most terrible industrial situation.”
Wilson’s appeal on October 3 for Americans to support the League of Nations
in the coming election was published in the New York Times the next day.
The Times also printed his address to the pro-League
Republicans at the White House on October 27.
After Cox with only 34% of the votes lost the election on November 2,
Wilson sent him a kind letter.
He wrote to the victorious Warren Harding that
he could get him a warship so that he could visit Panama.
Wilson had refused to pardon the socialist Eugene Debs
because he had opposed the war.
Debs as a candidate for President while in prison received 914,191 votes
as the Republican Harding received 60% of the votes.
Wilson was informed that he won the Nobel Peace Prize for 1919.
They gave the Peace Prize for 1920 to Léon Bourgeois
for representing France on the League of Nations Commission.
Wilson felt outrage because he felt that Bourgeois had tried
to turn the League into a military alliance against Germany.
The League of Nations had their first meeting in Geneva on November 15.
On December 2 a written annual message was sent
to both houses of Congress that began and ended this way:
I sincerely regret that I cannot be present
at the opening of this session of the Congress.
I am thus prevented from presenting in as direct a way
as I could wish the many questions
that are pressing for solution at this time.
Happily, I have had the advantage of the advice of heads
of the several executive departments who have kept
in close touch with affairs in their detail and whose
thoughtful recommendations I earnestly second….
The instrument of all reform in America is the ballot.
The road to economic and social reform in America is the
straight road of justice to all classes and conditions of men.
Men have but to follow this road
to realize the full fruition of their objects and purposes.
Let those beware who would take
the shorter road of disorder and revolution.
This right road is the road of justice and orderly process.166
On December 24 the United States Government proclaimed that it was
relinquishing the federal control of the railroads to become effective
on 1 March 1921 for all railroads and systems of transportation.
In his annual message to Congress on December 7 Wilson noted that
Abraham Lincoln said, “Let us have faith that right makes might,
and in that faith let us dare to do our duty as we understand it.”168
The message goes on to discuss democracy, the nation’s finances, and agriculture.
He also called on the Congress to grant independence to the Philippine Islands.
On 3 March 1921 Wilson sent to the House of Representatives a veto message
on their emergency tariff bill because he believed it was against equal justice for all.
Friends helped the Wilsons buy a fine house in Washington,
and they moved there on 4 March 1921.
Wilson agreed to give Ray Stannard Baker his papers and documents
so that he could write about the Paris Peace Conference, and that helped
make his Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement a rather accurate account.
In August 1923 Wilson published the essay “The Road Away from Revolution”
in the Atlantic Monthly suggesting “Our civilization cannot survive materially
unless it be redeemed spiritually.”169
On 11 November 1923 Wilson gave his last public speech on radio
for Armistice Day that the New York Times printed.
Wilson ended it saying,
I am not one of those who have the least anxiety
about the triumph of the principles I have stood for.
I have seen fools resist Providence before,
and I have seen their destruction,
as will come upon these again,
utter destruction and contempt.
That we shall prevail is as sure as that God reigns.
Thank you.170
Ray Stannard Baker wrote several volumes on the life of Woodrow Wilson,
and he concluded Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement with this paragraph:
What President Wilson brought to Paris,
and what he fought for with utter sincerity of purpose,
was a new attitude of the nations,
a new spirit toward international affairs.
He had an imperishable vision of
“a great wind of moral force moving through the world,”
of “just men everywhere coming together
for a common object,” of great nations seeking
to serve the world rather than asking to be served by it,
of good-will as the true foundation of civilized society.
These ideas are fundamental; they are as true to-day as
when Wilson voiced them in the last great days of the war,
and later at Paris.
There can be no peace, no justice in the world
without an attempt to apply them.
These things have been said,
the great word has been spoken,
and more and more as time passes
the world will be compelled to return
to the principles set forth by Woodrow Wilson.171
On 11 November 1922 the annual Armistice Day pilgrimage
brought 5,000 admirers to the Wilsons’ home.
On December 27 the partially paralyzed Franklin Roosevelt told Wilson that
organizers of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation had raised $1 million
in about one year and that it would be used to
promote public welfare, democracy, and peace with justice.
On Wilson’s birthday the next day four board members visited Wilson
and said that Henry Ford had donated $10,000 while most of their funding
came from thousands of citizens who gave one dollar
which meant much more to Wilson.
He planned to write a book entitled The Destiny of the Republic,
but Wilson only managed to write this beginning:
Woodrow Wilson died on 3 February 1924.Unlike the government of every other great state,
ancient or modern, the government of the United States
was set up for the benefit of mankind
as well as for the benefit of its own people,—
a most ambitious enterprise, no doubt, but undertaken
with high purpose, with clear vision,
and without thoughtful and deliberate unselfishness,
and undertaken by men who were no amateurs
but acquainted with the world they lived in,
practiced in the conduct of affairs,
who set the government up with an orderliness
and self-possession which marked them as men
who were proud to serve liberty with the dignity
and restraint of true devotees of a great ideal.172
1. War and Peace: Presidential Messages, Addresses, and Public Papers (1917-1924),
Volume 1 by Woodrow Wilson, p. 1-5.
2. Woodrow Wilson: The Man, His Times and His Task by William Allen White,
p. 347-348.
3. Woodrow Wilson by August Heckschher, p. 450.
4. Woodrow Wilson: Revolution, War, and Peace, p. 76.
5. Wilson: Campaigns for Progressivism and Peace 1916-1917 by Arthur Link, p. 408.
6. Ibid., p. 421-422.
7. War and Peace: Presidential Messages, Addresses, and Public Papers (1917-1924),
Volume 1, p. 6-16.
8. Ibid., p. 22-24, 26-27.
9. The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Volume 42 April 7—June 23, 1917 ed. Arthur Link,
p. 304.
10. Wilson by Scott Berg, p. 450.
11. War and Peace: Presidential Messages, Addresses, and Public Papers (1917-1924),
Volume 1, p. 38.
12. Ibid., p. 53.
13. American Midnight: The Great War, A Violent Peace,
and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis by Adam Hochschild, p. 105.
14. The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Volume 43 June 25-August 20, 1917, p. 151.
15. War and Peace: Presidential Messages, Addresses, and Public Papers (1917-1924),
Volume 1, p. 80-81.
16. Woodrow Wilson Life and Letters: War Leader 1917-1918 by Ray Stannard Baker,
p. 208.
17. Ibid., p. 209.
18. The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Volume 43 June 25-August 20, 1917,
p
. 427-428, 430-431.
19. The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Volume 44 August 21-November 10, 1917, p. 59.
20. Woodrow Wilson Life and Letters: War Leader 1917-1918 by Ray Stannard Baker,
p. 294.
21. War and Peace: Presidential Messages, Addresses, and Public Papers (1917-1924),
Volume 1, p. 108-109.
22. Ibid., p. 111-112.
23. The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Volume 44 August 21-November 10, 1917, p. 555.
24. Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Volume 45 November 12, 1917-January 15, 1918,
p. 12, 15.
25. Ibid., p. 39.
26. Ibid., p. 215.
27. Woodrow Wilson Life and Letters: War Leader 1917-1918 by Ray Stannard Baker,
p. 436.
28. The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Volume 45 November 12, 1917-January 15, 1918,
p. 194-202.
29. Ibid., p. 534-539.
30. Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Volume 45 November 12, 1917-January 15, 1918,
p. 448-451.
31. Woodrow Wilson Life and Letters: War Leader 1917-1918 by Ray Stannard Baker,
p. 169-171, 173.
32. Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Volume 46 January 16-March 12, 1918, p. 320-323.
33. Ibid., p. 598.
34. Armistice March 1-November 11, 1918 by Ray Stannard Baker, p. 37.
35. War and Peace: Presidential Messages, Addresses, and Public Papers (1917-1924),
Volume 1, p. 194-195.
36. Woodrow Wilson Life and Letters: Armistice March 1-November 11, 1918
by Ray Stannard Baker, p. 57.
37. Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Volume 47 March 13-May 12, 1918, p. 283.
38. Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Volume 48 May 13-July 17, 1918, p. 55-56.
39. War and Peace: Presidential Messages, Addresses, and Public Papers (1917-1924),
Volume 1, p. 211.
40. Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Volume 48 May 13-July 17, 1918, p. 163-164.
41. Ibid., p. 223, 226-227.
42. Ibid., p. 229-230.
43. Armistice March 1-November 11, 1918 by Ray Stannard Baker, p. 241-242.
44. Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Volume 48 May 13-July 17, 1918, p. 514, 516-517.
45. War and Peace: Presidential Messages, Addresses, and Public Papers (1917-1924),
Volume 1, p. 236-237.
46. Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Volume 48 May 13-July 17, 1918, p. 540-541.
47. Armistice March 1-November 11, 1918 by Ray Stannard Baker, p. 259.
48. Ibid., p. 271-272.
49. Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Volume 48 May 13-July 17, 1918, p. 640-643.
50. Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Volume 49 July 18-September 13, 1918, p. 97-98.
51. Ibid., p. 374.
52. Ibid., p. 403.
53. Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Volume 51 September 14-November 8, 1918,
p. 128-131.
54. Ibid., p. 158-161.
55. Armistice March 1-November 11, 1918 by Ray Stannard Baker, p. 454.
56. Ibid., p. 463.
57. Ibid., p. 476.
58. Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Volume 51 September 14-November 8, 1918,
p. 333-334.
59. Ibid., p. 603-604.
60. Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Volume 53 November 9, 1918-January 11, 1919,
p. 36-41.
61. Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Volume 51 September 14-November 8, 1918,
p. 299-302.
62. Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Volume 53 November 9, 1918-January 11, 1919,
p. 284-286.
63. Ibid., p. 461-463.
64. The Peace Negotiations: A Personal Narrative by Robert Lansing, p. 48-49.
65. Ibid., p. 50-51.
66. Ibid., p. 55.
67. Ibid., p. 83.
68. Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at
Versailles, 1918-1919 by Arno J. Mayer, p. 270.
69. The Peace Negotiations: A Personal Narrative by Robert Lansing, p. 71-73.
70. The End of Order: Versailles 1919 by Charles L. Mee Jr., p. 48.
71. The Peace Negotiations: A Personal Narrative by Robert Lansing, p. 116-117.
72. Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement by Ray Stannard Beker, Volume 1, p. 352.
73. Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Volume 54 January 11-February 7, 1919, p. 265-268.
74. Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World by Margaret MacMillan,
p. 317-318.
75. War and Peace: Presidential Messages, Addresses, and Public Papers (1917-1924),
Volume 1, p. 413-423, 426.
76. Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Volume 55 February 8-March 16, 1919,
p. 239, 241-242, 244-245.
77. Woodrow Wilson by August Heckschher, p. 569.
78. Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Volume 55 February 8-March 16, 1919, p. 389-391.
79. Ibid., p. 417-419, 421.
80. Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement by Ray Stannard Baker, Volume 2, p. 310.
81. Ibid., p. 323.
82. Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement by Ray Stannard Beker, Volume 1, p. 311.
83. Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement by Ray Stannard Beker, Volume 2, 348.
84. Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement by Ray Stannard Beker, Volume 1, p. 329.
85. Ibid. , p. 348-349.
86. Woodrow Wilson: Book Two: World Prophet by Arthur Walworth, p. 292.
87. Wilson by Scott Berg, p. 566.
88. Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at
Versailles, 1918-1919 by Arno J. Mayer, p. 474-476.
89. Wilson by Scott Berg, p. 564.
90. Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World by Margaret MacMillan, p. 189.
91. American Midnight: The Great War, A Violent Peace,
and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis by Adam Hochschild, p. 217.
92 Woodrow Wilson: Book Two: World Prophet by Arthur Walworth, p. 302.
93. Woodrow Wilson: A Life for World Peace by Jan Willem Schulte Nordholt, p. 330.
94. Ibid. p. 298.
95. War and Peace: Presidential Messages, Addresses, and Public Papers (1917-1924),
Volume 1, p. 461-463.
96. Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Volume April 23-May 9, 1919, p. 272-273.
97. Woodrow Wilson and World Politics by N. Gordon Levin Jr., p. 147.
98. Ibid., p. 145-146.
99. Wilson by Scott Berg, p. 583.
100. War and Peace: Presidential Messages, Addresses, and Public Papers (1917-1924),
Volume 1, p. 478-481.
101. Wilson by Scott Berg, p. 587.
102. Woodrow Wilson and World Politics by N. Gordon Levin Jr., p. 159-160.
103. Wilson by Scott Berg, p. 592.
104. Woodrow Wilson and the Paris Peace Conference ed. N. Gordon Levin Jr., p. 61-62.
105. Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Volume 59 May 10-31, 1919, p. 608-609.
106. Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Volume 60 June 1-17, 1919, p. 68-69.
107. Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement by Ray Stannard Baker, Volume 2,
p. 331-332.
108. Wilson by Scott Berg, p. 601.
109. Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement by Ray Stannard Baker, Volume 2, p. 367.
110. Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Volume 61 June 18-July 25, p. 432-436.
111. Wilson by Scott Berg, p. 609.
112. Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Volume 62 July 26-September 3, 1919,
p
. 343-344, 372, 389.
113. Wilson by Scott Berg, p. 619.
114. Ibid.
115. Ibid., p. 620.
116. Woodrow Wilson by August Heckschher, p. 594.
117. The Peace Negotiations: A Personal Narrative by Robert Lansing, p. 72-73.
118. War and Peace: Presidential Messages, Addresses, and Public Papers (1917-1924),
Volume 1, p. 591-593, 596, 600, 604-605.
119. Ibid., p. 605-606.
120. Ibid., p. 610, 612, 620.
121. Ibid., p. 622, 625-626, 631, 633.
122. Ibid., p. 637, 644-645.
123. War and Peace: Presidential Messages, Addresses, and Public Papers (1917-1924),
Volume 2, p. 3-4, 7, 11, 13.
124. Ibid., p. 18, 22, 29-30.
125. Ibid., p. 32-33, 38, 43
126. Ibid., p. 54-55.
127. Ibid., p. 158.
128. Ibid., p. 70-71, 73.
129. Ibid., p. 78.
130. Ibid., p. 100.
131. Ibid., p. 103, 109.
132. Ibid., p. 117-118, 121, 125, 127, 137.
133. Ibid., p. 146.
134. Ibid., p. 156.
135. The Messages and Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Volume 2 ed. Albert Shaw,
p. 937-938..
136. War and Peace: Presidential Messages, Addresses, and Public Papers (1917-1924),
Volume 2, p. 937-938, 940, 944-946
137. Ibid., p. 196.
138. Ibid., p. 203-204, 215.
139. Woodrow Wilson by August Heckschher, p. 603-604.
140. War and Peace: Presidential Messages, Addresses, and Public Papers (1917-1924),
Volume 2, p. 219-220.
141. Ibid., p. 249.
142. Ibid., p. 250, 262.
143. Ibid., p. 264.
144. Ibid., p. 268, 271-272, 275.
145. Ibid., p. 278.
146. Ibid., p. 296.
147. Ibid., p. 304, 306.
148. Ibid., p. 324.
149. Ibid., p. 326.
150. Ibid., p. 331-332,
151. Ibid., p. 345.
152. Ibid., p. 348, 351-352, 358-359, 365.
153. Ibid., p. 369, 373-377
154. Ibid., p. 387-388, 392-394, 398.
155. Ibid., p. 410-411.
156. Ibid., p. 415-416.
157. Woodrow Wilson by August Heckschher, p. 614.
158. My Memoir by Edith Bolling Wilson, p.289.
159. Ibid.
160. Woodrow Wilson: Book Two: World Prophet by Arthur Walworth, p. 386.
161. My Memoir by Edith Bolling Wilson, p.289.
162. The Papers of Woodrow Wilson Volume 64 November 6, 1919-February 27, 1920,
p. 68-71.
163. Woodrow Wilson: Book Two: World Prophet by Arthur Walworth, p. 400.
164. Ibid., p. 403.
165. Woodrow Wilson by August Heckschher, p. 636.
166. War and Peace: Presidential Messages, Addresses, and Public Papers (1917-1924),
Volume 2, p. 428, 442.
167. Ibid., p. 454-455.
168. Ibid., p. 513.
169. Ibid., p. 538.
170. Woodrow Wilson: A Life for World Peace by Jan Willem Schulte Nordholt, p. 415.
171. Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement by Ray Stannard Baker, Volume 2, p. 522.
172. Wilson by Scott Berg, p. 725-726.
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