The Illusion of Victory (54 page)

On the same day that the Dáil declared Ireland independent, masked men murdered two members of the Royal Irish Constabulary in County Tipperary. The British reacted with the same ineptitude that had characterized their relations with Ireland for the past four hundred years. They rushed in troops and set up what amounted to military governments in every Irish city. They forbade anyone to leave home after 7 P.M. without a permit. Mail was censored, and a virtual state of siege became the order of the day—and night. This rumbling Celtic volcano added up to future trouble for Woodrow Wilson.

Isolated in the Murat Palace with his adoring wife and his worshipful physician, Admiral Cary Grayson, Wilson was able to convince himself all over again that the League of Nations would right his collapse on the mandates and all other wrongs on the horizon of the peace conference. Ignoring the growing doubts of Secretary of State Lansing, who was never a league enthusiast, Wilson flung himself into a day-and-night effort to draft the covenant.

It was an exhausting business. The league commission’s nineteen delegates met in Colonel House’s suite at the Hôtel Crillon after Wilson’s daylong sessions with the Council of Ten, and often worked until after midnight. They were toiling under the double pressure of the desire of the rest of the peace conference to get to the business of the treaty and a deadline Wilson had imposed—a February 14 departure for a visit to the United States to sign essential appropriation bills and address Congress before it adjourned.

The League of Nations Commission met only ten times in fourteen days, working at night, to write a constitution for the world. One historian has compared this limited time and effort with the twelve intense weeks the delegates of 1787 spent creating the Constitution of the United States.
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However, Wilson and his group had the advantage of previous drafts of the covenant by House, the president and the British. In fact, Wilson had spent a large part of his time since he arrived in Europe thinking and talking about the league.

Thanks to this head start, the president was able to take charge of the meetings and get his way on many things. He discarded the British idea of creating an executive council of the great powers and insisted on adding some smaller nations to this part of the league’s structure (although the major powers remained permanent members of the council). He was able to insist on an article guaranteeing the territorial integrity of all the league’s members. Next came a severe struggle with the French, who wanted the league to have an international army to enforce its decisions. Wilson called this proposal “international militarism” and instead relied on the league’s provisions for arbitration of disputes and the use of sanctions against offending states. Military action by a concert of the member states’ armed forces would be considered only as a last resort.

The French finally accepted this decision with repeated grumbles. A Clemenceau attempt to make the preamble of the covenant an indictment of Germany’s conduct in the Great War was voted down. The infuriated French were on the brink of walking out on the commission and sabotaging the league. They were intimidated into a last-minute submission by a blunt British threat to side with the United States and leave them “without an ally in the world.”
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Finally came a proposal by Japan, whose delegation sat mute most of the time, letting the Westerners do the talking. The Japanese spokesman pointed out that there had been much debate about the equality of nations in the league, whether they were large or small. He hoped the league would add an amendment declaring the equality of all the planet’s races. Wilson and House, in preliminary discussions, had approved the idea. But here the British abruptly deserted the Anglo-American alliance. They were not about to tell the tens of millions of Indians, Africans, Burmese, Egyptians, Malayans and other nonwhites in their global empire that they were equal to Englishmen. Foreign Secretary Balfour dismissed the proposition as an eighteenth-century idea. Premier Billy Hughes bellowed he would get the first ship back to Australia if this notion passed.

Wilson let them get away with it. When the Japanese delegate tried to bolster Tokyo’s argument by pointing to a Wilson article affirming religious equality, the president sat mute while the British said both racial equality and religious equality should be discarded. Rarely did the gulf between the heirs of the revolutionaries of 1776 and the imperialist descendants of George III yawn so starkly. But Wilson, in his eagerness to get the form of the league adopted, allowed the contradiction to go unchallenged.
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These compromises were all done in a frantic rush because Wilson was scheduled to depart for the United States the following day. Also, Wilson had grown disenchanted with the Japanese for their behavior in Siberia and their eagerness to snap up parts of China and numerous Pacific islands. Racial prejudice undoubtedly played a role here. The president who had increased segregation in the federal government was quick to find reasons for disliking people of different skin color. Even though the Japanese were only imitating the white imperialists.

Many Wilson biographers and several historians call the next day, February 14, the high point of Wilson’s life. He presented the completed covenant to the plenary council of the peace conference and asked the delegates to adopt it as an integral part of the forthcoming treaty. He saw himself leading the entire world to a new spiritual level, a global incarnation of American idealism. But he was a very tired man. His words did not come close to matching his vision, nor did the text of the league, which had not a single soaring phrase to remind listeners of the Declaration of Independence or the Gettysburg Address. It had been written in haste and showed it.

While rain poured from a gray sky, Wilson read the document word for word to the assembled delegates and followed it with a brief speech, in which he called the league “not a straitjacket but a vehicle of life.” He praised some of the features he professed to like best, such as the mandate system, ignoring his recent surrender, which would soon strip the idea of moral meaning. After telling the Japanese that their plea for racial equality was unwelcome, Wilson proclaimed the birth of a single human family: “We are all brothers and have a common human purpose.” the ambivalence underlying these words may have had something to do with William Allen White’s appraisal of Wilson’s performance. The Kansan thought his “spoken words were as grey and drab and soggy as his reading.”
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During these last frantic days before he returned to the United States, Wilson played a major role in another attempt to resolve the Russian problem. In late January, the president issued a statement urging the Bolsheviks and their White Russian enemies to confer with representatives of the peace conference about an end to their civil war. As a meeting place, the president proposed the island of Prinkipo in the Sea of Marmara. The offer made front-page headlines in the United States.“Allies Adopt Wilson Plan to Aid Russians; Recognize Revolution,” shouted the
Washington Post
. The paper reported that General Pershing was likely to be the American representative at the conference.
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As usual, the newspapers got only half the story. The idea originated with Lloyd George, whose conservative parliamentary supporters were having nightmares about the Bolsheviks taking over Russia. Wilson volunteered to issue a statement that would, they hoped, at least halt the civil war and perhaps lay the groundwork for an agreement that would divide Russia into White and Red spheres.

The Russian Revolution stirred strong emotions in Wilson’s soul. It reminded him of the dolorous failure of his attempt to control the Mexican Revolution. He took a similar approach in his pronunciamento to the Bolsheviks.

His statement breathed disinterested idealism. It called for a cease-fire, the removal of internal economic barriers, a general election and some “adequate” arrangement for the repayment of Russia’s large debts to France and England.

Wilson was ignoring the vicious names the Bolsheviks had called him. He was playing one of his favorite games: defender of the poor against the forces of “privilege.” He was hoping the Bolsheviks would join the Americans in this noble crusade and align themselves with him at the peace conference. It was a hope that only proved the president’s ignorance of the Bolshevik mind.

Behind Wilson’s back, Secretary of State Lansing cabled the State Department that nothing was likely to come of Wilson’s invitation. It had been issued only because Allied military intervention in Russia was failing. Also behind Wilson’s back, the French encouraged the White Russians, whom they were supporting with guns and money, to spurn the proposal. The Bolsheviks flung some new insults and declined to agree on a truce. It soon became clear that this dove of peace was dead on arrival. No further appeals for peace in Russia were forthcoming from Woodrow Wilson.

At seven o’clock on Wilson’s last day in Paris, Winston Churchill, now minister of war in Lloyd George’s cabinet, made a dramatic appearance at the Council of Ten. In his most pungent style, Churchill said the Bolsheviks were winning the civil war. He portrayed Lenin and his followers as an enormous menace to the future peace and stability of Europe and the world. Now or never was the time to stamp out this political disease. Churchill called for an Allied army to invade Russia without delay, crush the Bolsheviks and restore Russia to the comity of nations.

Lloyd George was adroitly absent on supposed political business in London. Although he had opposed Churchill’s proposal in the British cabinet, in one of his classic flip-flops the prime minister sent him to Paris in the hope that he might galvanize Wilson into some sort of solution to the Russian nightmare. Clemenceau, who had no liberal illusions about the Bolsheviks, wholeheartedly backed Churchill’s plea.

Wilson flatly opposed a military solution. He favored the swift withdrawal of the Allied troops from northern Russia and Siberia. He talked about the need for more information, which was, from his point of view, the main purpose of the Prinkipo proposal. Beside him, Secretary of State Lansing seethed over the thought of even talking to the murderers of Czar Nicholas and his family. Churchill bluntly asked if Wilson was at least willing to spend serious money to arm the White Russians. The president halfheartedly said he might go along if the rest of the council voted in favor of the idea. Whereupon he headed for the
George Washington,
leaving Colonel House in charge of further negotiations.

Talks between Colonel House and anti-interventionists in the British delegation soon torpedoed Churchill’s call for action, leaving Clemenceau isolated. From midocean, Wilson approved by wire:“It would be fatal to be led further into the present chaos.” without U.S. support, the bankrupt British and French could do little but fritter around the edges of the Russian upheaval.
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On February 23, 1919, the
George Washington,
bearing President Wilson and his party, and several thousand returning doughboys, approached the New England coast. It had been a turbulent voyage. Heavy seas had forced the naval escort to abandon the big liner. Now the ship was groping toward Boston in a heavy fog. Wilson was landing in the capital of New England at Joe Tumulty’s suggestion. It was a gesture of defiance to Henry Cabot Lodge. Tumulty had been buoyed by the positive editorial reaction to the draft covenant of the League of Nations, which had been published in American newspapers on February 15, the day after Wilson presented it in Paris.
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Wilson was not completely convinced that this foray to Boston was a good move. In Paris, he had received some very different advice from Colonel House. His alter ego had persuaded him to send a telegram to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee, asking them not to comment on the league until he had a chance to discuss it with them. The president had invited them all to dinner at the White House on February 26. House had convinced Wilson that this intimate conclave was preferable to introducing the covenant in a speech to both houses of Congress. The colonel felt that the legislators had grown weary of Wilson’s lecturing them.

In an exchange of cables with Tumulty while Wilson was at sea, the president had wondered if it would be better to land in Boston and go directly to the train station, where he would make only a few friendly remarks. But Tumulty, his Irish up, had plunged ahead and planned a huge reception. He had invited the governors of all the New England states and persuaded the Democratic mayor of Boston to close the schools for the day. Many businesses followed suit with a day off for their employees.

Congress’s reaction to the news that Wilson was planning to make a speech in Boston before meeting with them was ferociously negative. Republican Senators Borah of Idaho and Poindexter of Washington and Democrat James Reed of Missouri unleashed devastating attacks on the League of Nations, calling it a capitulation to British imperialism. They claimed the article on territorial integrity guaranteed the current British empire until the end of time. They excoriated the provision that allotted each of Britain’s five dominions a vote in the league’s assembly, giving London six votes to Washington’s one. Reed’s attack brought the Senate and the galleries to their feet in a wild ovation.
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In midocean, the president had received a cable informing him that Premier Clemenceau had been shot by a French anarchist, who had resolved to kill any man who was likely to start another war. The grand old man was recovering from a wound that left a bullet near his lung. A few days later, similar violence erupted in Munich. The German Socialist leader Kurt Eisner had been killed instantly by a right-wing assassin. The deed had plunged the city into a wave of counter-assassinations by left-wing zealots.