From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (70 page)

Although painfully aware of the treaty's shortcomings, Wilson was pleased with his accomplishment. The League was a "living thing . . . ," he said, "a definite guarantee of peace . . . against the things which have just come near bringing the whole structure of civilization into ruin."
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The peace settlement evoked cries of protest from many quarters. Having never seen Allied armies or experienced occupation, most Germans deluded themselves that they had not been defeated. They viewed the treaty as vengeful and punitive and claimed to have been betrayed. Flags flew at half mast. Germans angrily protested a "shameful treaty," "the worst act of world piracy under the flag of hypocrisy."
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Liberals across the world expressed shock and bitterness at Wilson's seeming abandonment of the Fourteen Points. Disillusioned American progressives shared dismay at the terms of the treaty. Bolting the conference, Wilson's young, idealistic adviser William Bullitt told reporters he was going to the Riviera to lie on the beach and watch the world go to hell.
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Disappointment was especially keen among colonial peoples. The peacemakers in Paris focused mainly on European issues. Wilson gave little attention to the application of self-determination elsewhere. Recognizing the explosive potential of the issue, he refused to take it up with the Allies. Although sharply qualified, his rhetoric of self-determination, disseminated across the world by modern communications techniques, inspired among peoples under colonial rule hopes for freedom. Nationalists adopted his words to legitimize their cry for independence. The struggle for independence became internationalized and Wilson its unwitting champion. Oppressed people across the world looked to Paris for realization of their aspirations. Failure of the peacemakers even to acknowledge their demands naturally sparked widespread disillusion and anger. Mass protests erupted in India, Egypt, Korea, and China, among other places. "So much for national self-determination," a young library assistant, Mao Zedong, protested. "I think it is really shameless!" Across the world, an anti-colonial movement began to form that in time would achieve what Wilson had spoken of.
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Wilson recognized the limits of his handiwork, but he felt, probably correctly, that it was the best that he could accomplish given the formidable obstacles he faced and the limits of his power. He hoped that a League in operation could remedy the treaty's defects. He signed the document in
the ornate Hall of Mirrors of the palace at Versailles, the very symbol of the old order he sought to displace, on June 28, 1919, the anniversary of the assassination in Sarajevo that had sparked the conflagration. Exhausted from his labors, still not recovered from a debilitating illness, he hastened home to secure ratification of the treaty. Speaking before Congress on July 10, he issued a ringing challenge: "Dare we reject it and break the heart of the world?"
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For the next eight months, the nation engaged in yet another great debate over its role in the world. The carnage of the war gave a special urgency to the discussions. They took place in a politically supercharged environment, against the backdrop of strikes and labor violence, race riots, and the notorious Red Scare, with a presidential election just a year away.

The struggle contained many interlocking elements. Wilson had stretched executive powers before and during the war. At one level, it represented a clash between competing branches of government. It was also an intensely personal feud between two men who despised each other. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge had disliked Wilson from the start. By 1915, he called the president, except for James Buchanan, "the most dangerous man that ever sat in the White House" and confided in Roosevelt that he "never expected to hate anyone in politics with the hatred I feel towards Wilson."
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Lodge set out to defeat and humiliate his archenemy over the League issue. The president was determined not to let his foe thwart his great cause.

It was a fiercely partisan battle. There was no tradition in U.S. politics of bipartisanship on major foreign policy issues. On the contrary, since the Jay Treaty in 1794, parties had fought bitterly over such matters. Raised in the South during the Civil War and Reconstruction, Wilson was a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat. Republicans resented his success and were out to get him. They launched fierce partisan attacks on his internationalist proposals even before he went to Paris. The president's own actions helped to ensure greater opposition. He had done little during the war to build a bipartisan coalition behind his proposals. His appeal for the election of a Democratic Congress in 1918 gave them an opening they readily exploited. He had not taken a leading Republican with him to
Paris or consulted closely with the opposition in formulating his peace proposals.

The battle centered around what part the United States should play in the postwar world. It was not primarily a debate between isolationists and internationalists, as it has often been portrayed, although inflated rhetoric on both sides sometimes made it appear so. Rather, it focused on the extent and nature of the commitments the United States should assume. "Internationalism has come," Democratic Senate leader Gilbert Hitchcock observed, "and we must choose what form the internationalism is to take." The debate marked a "great historical moment," historian John Milton Cooper Jr. has concluded, and "elicited a breadth and depth of discussion" of fundamental foreign policy issues "that had not risen before and that remained unmatched since."
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By the time Wilson returned home, the lines had formed. Polls of newspaper editors and resolutions from state legislatures, the only measures of public opinion at the time, indicated strong support for the president's proposals, but opposition had developed. Progressive internationalists, Wilson's key allies in 1916, were profoundly disillusioned by his wartime acquiescence in the suppression of civil liberties. They were also angered by the "madness at Versailles," Wilson's seeming abandonment of the Fourteen Points and his support for a League that seemed better designed to uphold rather than reform the old order of world politics. Their ranks included some of the nation's leading intellectuals, who provided highly articulate arguments that other opponents used with devastating effect.
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Ethnic groups poured out resentment against the treatment of their homelands: German Americans castigated the punitive treaty and the "League of Damnations"; Italian Americans denounced Wilson's opposition to Italy's territorial claims; Irish Americans attacked him for failing even to consider freedom for their homeland and warned that Article X would be used to suppress legitimate nationalist movements and keep U.S. money from being sent to Ireland.
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Their passions still aflame from the fervor of the Great Crusade against autocratic Germany, nationalists warned in overblown rhetoric that Wilson's League would surrender U.S. sovereignty to a world body.

The issue would be decided in the Senate, where a particularly complex array of forces was at work. The Republicans had a majority of only two. While most of them accepted involvement in some form of international organization—indeed, their party had pioneered such efforts—they were not disposed to accept Wilson's proposals uncritically or hand him a major victory on the eve of a presidential election. Many Republicans resented Wilson's aloofness and arrogance and distrusted what progressive senator George Norris branded his "anxiety for power."
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Most important, Republicans differed with the president on key substantive questions. Fourteen Republican senators, the so-called Irreconcilables, opposed entry into the League in any form. They represented different geographical regions and political philosophies and opposed Wilson for various reasons. Some, like Norris, felt the United States should use its influence to promote disarmament and help oppressed peoples. The Nebraskan had originally supported Wilson's peace efforts, but he became disillusioned by the terms of the treaty, particularly Shandong, which he condemned as the "disgraceful rape of an innocent people."
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He feared the league would perpetuate the status quo and bind the United States to the reactionary great powers. Conservative nationalists like former secretary of state Philander Knox viewed the League as hopelessly utopian and argued that U.S. interests could best be protected by using military power in cooperation with friendly states. Staunch unilateralists like senators Hiram Johnson of California and William Borah of Idaho expressed horror at the thought of surrendering U.S. freedom of action to a world organization. "What we want," Borah asserted, "is . . . a free, untrammeled Nation, imbued again with the national spirit; not isolation but freedom to do as our own people think wise and just."
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Most Republicans accepted a League in some form. A group of mild reservationists, mostly from the Middle West and moderate in view and demeanor, sought only minor changes that would protect U.S. sovereignty and clarify and limit obligations under Article X. These Republicans provided the basis for a compromise, but they could not go too far for fear of undercutting their party's interests. A larger group of strong reservationists headed by Lodge raised searching questions about the League. Some doubted it would work: Nation-states could not be expected to transfer
sovereignty to an untested international organization and would not send troops to implement Article X unless their vital interests were threatened. Others warned that the League would involve the United States in disputes that were not its concern, undermine its preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, threaten control of domestic issues such as immigration and tariff policy, and take from Congress the power to declare war. While willing to endorse U.S. participation in a League, they wanted stronger reservations to protect its sovereignty and weaken obligations under Article X, which they viewed as an unacceptable departure from U.S. tradition.
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The opposition seized the initiative before Wilson returned from Paris. Amply financed by millionaire industrialists Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Mellon, the Irreconcilables launched a nationwide campaign, sending out thousands of pamphlets denouncing the "Evil Thing with a Holy Name" and making hundreds of speeches, many of them appealing to the racial and nationalist prejudices of Americans. Senator Joseph Medill McCormick of Illinois warned that Wilson's superstate would lead to "efficient and economical Japanese operating our street railways . . . Hindoo janitors in our offices and apartments . . . Chinese craftsmen driving rivets, joining timbers, laying bricks in the construction of our buildings." Borah claimed that through the League the United States would "give back to George V what it took away from George III."
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In the meantime, Foreign Relations Committee chairman Lodge stacked his committee with anti-League Republicans, including six Irreconcilables. His strategy was to stall, allowing opposition to build, and then secure defeat of the treaty or its approval with major reservations. Lodge consumed six weeks reading the massive document aloud to his committee. He invited large numbers of witnesses to testify, most of them hostile, including Lansing, who had broken with Wilson in Paris, and representatives of disgruntled ethnic groups.

Wilson was not uncompromising at the start of the fight. During his trip back from Europe in February, he had met with members of the foreign affairs committees of both houses of Congress, explained his proposals for a League of Nations, and attempted to address objections. While responding firmly to hard-core foes like Lodge, he sought to palliate moderates like Taft. Indeed, he had taken back to Paris for discussion with his counterparts proposals set forth by the former president. But there were limits beyond which he would not go, most notably the obligations under
Article X. And at times he breathed defiance to his critics. In a dramatic meeting on August 19, the only time a congressional committee has ever subjected a president to direct questioning, the Foreign Relations Committee met with Wilson at the White House for three hours. The tone was civil, although some senators sought to extract from the president information that could be used against him. But the meeting changed no minds and produced no movement toward compromise.
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Facing possible defeat and persuaded—mistakenly—that an outpouring of popular support might move the recalcitrant senators, an already feeble Wilson, against the advice of his wife, Edith (whom he had married in 1915), and his personal physician, decided to take the fight to the nation. McKinley had done the same thing in 1898 to gain backing for the Treaty of Paris. In 1916, Wilson had used a similar trip to secure preparedness legislation. In September, at Columbus, Ohio, he launched a ten-thousand-mile swing through the West. He delivered forty-two speeches in twenty-one days, all without benefit of microphone, and made numerous other public appearances. Speaking to large and generally enthusiastic crowds, he passionately defended the League of Nations—"the only possible guarantee against war," he called it. The alternative, he warned, would be more foreign wars and a national security state that might threaten American democracy. He sought to ease fears about Article X, noting on one occasion that U.S. troops would not be sent to the Balkans or Central Europe—"If you want to put out a fire in Utah, you don't send to Oklahoma for the fire engine." Often, he touched the emotions of his listeners, singling out in the audience mothers of young men killed in battle. He appealed to Americans to accept the responsibilities of world leadership.
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By the time the president reached Pueblo, Colorado, on September 25, he was exhausted and suffering from severe headaches. After what turned out to be the last speech of the tour, he collapsed. Reluctantly admitting that he could not go on—"I just feel as if I am going to pieces"—he looked out the window of his train and began to weep. A week later, back in Washington, he suffered a massive stroke that left him partially blind and paralyzed on the left side.
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