Mr. Wilson's War

Chapter 22 THE PRESIDENT’S PLEDGE

ON September 27, 1918, inaugurating the Fourth Liberty Loan drive at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, Woodrow Wilson made a speech which did as much to bring the war to a speedy close as the mutual butchery of the armies contending along the Meuse and in the Argonne Forest.

“… If it be in deed and in truth,” he said, “the common object of the Governments associated against Germany and 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 willing and ready to pay the price, the only price that will procure it … That price is impartial justice on 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 …”

Colonel House, who was in attendance, noted in his diary that the opera house was beautifully decorated and crowded with the most important people in New York.

“The President read his address. Most of it seemed somewhat over the heads of the audience, the parts of it which were unimportant bringing the most vigorous applause. We are all wondering how the press will receive it. After speaking the President asked me to ride with him to the Waldorf … He was flushed with excitement and altogether pleased with the day’s effort.”

The response to the President’s speech was more favorable in the English newspapers than at home. American editorial writers were still befuddled by the theory, piped out of Washington by Creel’s bureau, that the upheaval in Germany was a piece of sinister playacting staged by the High Command. London’s “cocoa press” commented favorably. Cables of congratulation arrived from Grey and Lord Robert Cecil.

From Germany, the immediate response to Wilson’s call for a peace of impartial justice was Prince Max of Baden’s note, transmitted through the Swiss, asking for an armistice on the basis of the Fourteen Points.

The German note, coming on the heels of similar proposals from the Austrians, threw Capitol Hill into an uproar. Prince Max’s suggestion of a mixed commission to arrange the details of the evacuation of occupied territory by the German armies was seen as a device to allow the Hun to regroup his forces for a defensive war on his own frontiers. “A trap”; clamored the newspapers. In the Senate Lodge marshalled the irreconcilables in a drive for unconditional surrender.

Meanwhile the President was consulting the members of his cabinet; and House, who was still in New York, over the longdistance telephone. House’s suggestion was that he gain time by announcing that he was taking up the German request with the Allied Powers. “I would advise that you ask the Allies to confer with me in Paris at the earliest opportunity.”

The confidential colonel hastened to Washington.

“I arrived at the White House as the clock was striking nine,” wrote House … “The President met me and we went into his study.” Lansing arrived. The President read the first draft of his reply to the two of them. Lansing sniffed and said the reply was an inquiry rather than an answer. House considered it too lenient. “He seemed much disturbed when I expressed decided disapproval of it. I did not believe the country would approve what he had written. He did not seem to realize … the nearly unanimous sentiment in this country against anything but unconditional surrender. He did not seem to realize how war-mad our people had become.”

After Lansing went home to bed Wilson and House sat up till one in the morning reworking the President’s reply to the German note. Their final version demanded, as preliminary to an armistice, the clearcut acceptance by the Germans of Wilson’s Fourteen Points; the immediate evacuation of invaded territory without any dillydallying over a mixed commission; assurances that the government in Berlin spoke for the German people and not for the military clique.

The President’s note of October 8 constituted the final wedge driven in between the Kaiser and his subjects. At the same time it was considered by neutrals and belligerents alike as a pledge by Woodrow Wilson that, if the Germans laid down their arms, they would be treated “with impartial justice” according to the principles of the Fourteen Points.

Comment in the American press was respectful but unenthusiastic.

On Columbus Day, renamed Liberty Day for the occasion, Woodrow Wilson marched at the head of a parade up Fifth Avenue and received, according to the New York Times, “an ovation such as no President has ever before encountered in this city … The Wilson smile was in evidence from start to finish, and his arm worked with the regularity of a piston doffing his tall hat to the cheering throngs.”

That evening, while President and Mrs. Wilson were dining at the Waldorf before attending a benefit for Italian soldiers blinded in the war, again at the Metropolitan Opera House, Tumulty brought the news that the German Government had accepted the President’s terms.

“There was an enormous crowd which cheered the President with much enthusiasm,” noted House. “I was so stirred by the news that had come from Berlin I could not listen to the programme.”

The President returned to Washington determined to lose no time. Every hour’s delay meant an unnecessary sacrifice of human lives. House went with him on the train.

“Yesterday,” noted House on October 15, “was one of the stirring days of my life. The President and I got together immediately after breakfast. I never saw him more disturbed … He wanted to make his reply final so that there would be no exchange of notes …”

Wilson’s first demand, before an armistice could be considered, was the cessation of such atrocities as the sinking of the Leinster …

“Neither the President nor I desired to make a vengeful peace. Neither did he desire to have the Allied armies ravage Germany as Germany has ravaged the countries she has invaded … He is very fine in this feeling and I am sorry he is hampered in any way by the Allies and the vociferous outcry in this country. It is difficult to do the right thing in the right way with people like Roosevelt, Lodge, Poindexter and others clamoring for the undesirable and the impossible.”

At this point it was essential that the President be personally represented on the Supreme War Council at Versailles, where the American representative, sturdy old General Bliss, had never been given any power to assume the initiative. Even before Wilson concluded his exchange of notes with Berlin, which cleared the way for an armistice, Colonel House was on the high seas headed for France.

Accompanied by Mrs. House, and by Miss Denton, who had furnished herself with a small pearlhandled pistol to protect the colonel’s life if need be; and by Miss Denton’s assistant, Miss Tomlinson; and by his soninlaw Gordon Auchincloss, on loan from the State Department, the confidential colonel boarded the U.S.S. North Pacific off Staten Island. On board he found Rear Admiral William S. Benson and his staff; Joseph C. Grew, onetime counsellor at the Berlin Embassy; a number of clerks and stenographers; and Frank Cobb of the New York World. That made up the party. They had a stormy crossing. They left in the fog and arrived in the fog. On October 26 the ship dropped anchor in the harbor at Brest.

In his pocket Colonel House carried a personal letter from the President which amounted to a power of attorney, and an impressively sealed document concocted at the State Department: “… Reposing special trust and confidence in the integrity and ability of William M. House of Texas, I do appoint him a special representative of the Government of the United States of America … and do authorize and empower him to execute and fulfill the duties of his mission with all the powers and privileges thereunto of right appertaining …”

To all concerned the moment seemed heavy with destiny. The President’s farewells, and indeed those of Mrs. Wilson, were unusually affectionate. “As I was leaving,” House noted in his diary, “he said ‘I have not given you any instructions because I feel you will know what to do’ … He knows that our minds are generally parallel and he also knows that where they diverge, I will follow his bent rather than my own.”

As the congressional-elections approached, in spite of the vigor of the wellfinanced campaign led by Will Hays, newly appointed chairman of the Republican National Committee, administration leaders remained confident. The morning of election day the New York Times predicted a Democratic victory. When the results were tallied, Woodrow Wilson was confronted, not with a Republican landslide to be sure, but with a clear indication that the Republican trend, which had come near defeating him in 1916, was continuing.

Both campaigns were hampered by the calling off of public meetings in many parts of the country on account of the influenza epidemic. The Republicans claimed that more of their rallies were cancelled than of their opponents’. In spite of this, and of a certain wariness that the fear of the Department of Justice’s interpretation of the Espionage Act instilled in antiadministration orators, the Republicans carried the House of Representatives by thirtythree seats and had a thin edge in the Senate. The cornbelt returned to the Republican fold.

In Illinois popular and pinkwhiskered J. Hamilton Lewis, who had tried to introduce a Senate resolution authorizing the President to conduct peace negotiations without senatorial consultation, lost to a Republican.

In Michigan, Lieutenant Commander Truman H. Newberry, industrialist and big navy enthusiast, had shown such zeal in his successful campaign against Henry Ford, who was induced to run for the Senate on a Wilson platform, that he had already become embroiled with a grand jury for the alleged misuse of campaign funds. If Newberry’s election could be made to stick, the Republican regulars would organize the Senate and Henry Cabot Lodge would have the chair of the committee, all-important at this juncture, on foreign affairs.

Political postmortems were almost unanimous in laying a large share of the blame for the administration’s defeat on the President’s appeal to the voters to show their support of his policies by electing a Democratic Congress.

“I have no thought of suggesting that any political party is paramount in matters of patriotism,” Wilson wrote in a statement issued a few days before election. “I mean only that the difficulties and delicacies of our present task are of a sort that makes it imperatively necessary that the nation should give its undivided support to the government under a unified leadership, and that a Republican Congress would divide the leadership … I am asking your support not for my own sake, or the sake of a political party, but for the sake of the Nation itself.”

In spite of its disarming phraseology, the President’s appeal was greeted by an outpouring of righteous indignation from Republican orators. “An insult,” shouted Will Hays, “to every loyal Republican in the land.” In vain George Creel and Tumulty pointed out that similar appeals had been issued at electiontime by George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and that McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt and Taft had been far more partisan in their election day pronouncements.

The Democratic defense was lukewarm. Such administration leaders as had been consulted had advised against this sort of statement. Washington newspapermen claimed that McAdoo was “mad as a hornet” because the President hadn’t asked his advice. Newton D. Baker was quoted as having pointed out wryly to a friend that of course it was wrong for a Democrat to ask people to vote for him; that was the prerogative of Republicans.

In the Senate lobby Henry Cabot Lodge, in behalf of his opposition group, handed the newspapermen an abusive rebuttal. “This is not the President’s personal war” was its burden. Theodore Roosevelt made Wilson’s appeal the theme of the final speech of his career.

Ever since Wilson made him give up his scheme to lead troops in the European war, T.R. had been beating himself to pieces against a wall of frustration. He was fighting illhealth. His explorations in the Amazon basin had left him with an intermittent fever. The bullet lodged next his lung caused chronic bronchitis. “When I went to South America I had one captain’s job left in me,” he confided to Owen Wister. “Now I’m good only for a major’s … It doesn’t matter what the rest is,” he added hastily, “I’ve had fun the whole time.”

He showed occasional bursts of the old energy; like a fighting bull bemused by the capes of the toreros, he was still good for an occasional deadly charge. He’d see red in a Wilsonian phrase and show his old fire and dash for a while, but he would soon tire and trot back weakly to his wife, Edith, and to Sagamore Hill for a rest.

He was subject to fits of rage, as in his runin with Samuel Gompers in the summer of 1917, when they appeared on the same platform in Carnegie Hall to greet the democratic revolution in Petrograd.

The newspapers had been filled for three days with accounts of a murderous race riot in East St. Louis. Mobs, instigated, it was claimed, by union leaders, had attacked Negro families who had moved up from the south in search of work. Houses were set afire, men and women slaughtered as they ran out from the burning buildings; children died in the burning houses. The toll was twentynine dead, about ninety people badly hurt; three hundred shacks and houses and a large part of the business district burned to the ground.

T.R. could not shake off the horror of this attack on helpless people. When he was introduced, amid a storm of cheers, by Mayor Mitchel, he departed from his prepared speech to express his shame and grief that such a thing could happen in America.

Gompers asked for the floor and tried to explain that those really to blame for the race riots were the manufacturers, greedy for war profits, who had lured cheap Negro labor up to St. Louis to break down union wage scales.

T.R.’s face flamed red. He shook his fist under Gompers’ nose. “Justice with me,” he shouted, “isn’t just a phrase or a form of words. How can we praise the people of Russia for doing justice to the men within their boundaries if we in any way apologize for a murder committed on the helpless?”

Gompers was ashy pale. He murmured something about an investigation being carried out by the A.F. of L.

“I’d put down the murders first and investigate afterwards,” roared T.R., flailing with his arms.

Boos, hoots and occasional cheers rose from the audience. It was with difficulty that order was restored in Carnegie Hall.

The following winter T.R. spent several weeks in hospital with an abscessed leg. When the weather turned warm he was out again charging about the country, assailing the Administration’s conduct of the war and lashing up patriotic fervor with his talks on Americanism. Wherever he went he shook men’s faith in the Wilsonian rhetoric. His plain speaking on Negro rights helped alienate Negro voters in the northern cities from the Democrats.

The Colonel couldn’t go to war himself but he gloried in being represented by his four sons. Archie and Theodore Jr. were officers in the A.E.F. Kermit had enlisted with the British and came down with malaria in the Mespot. Quentin, the youngest, was training for aviation. “I putter around with the other old frumps,” T.R. wrote Quentin after getting out of hospital in the spring, “trying to help with the liberty loan and the Red Cross and such like.”

As the summer of 1918 advanced, news from the fighting front warmed his heart. Theodore Jr. distinguished himself at Cantigny and was now a lieutenant colonel in his own right. Archie was badly smashed up by a burst of shrapnel. He came home on leave long enough to appear with his arm in a cast on the platform beside his father when T.R. addressed the erstwhile German-American Liederkranz Society in New York.

T.R. conducted two successful speaking tours through the middlewest. He staged a public reconciliation with Taft at a political dinner in Chicago. His re-entry into national politics seemed assured. Many elements in the Republican Party looked to his leadership to dislodge the Democrats from Washington in 1920. He was only sixtyone. If his health would mend he might be President once more.

Late in July news came that Quentin, the youngest, in some ways his father’s favorite, had been shot down fighting a formation of German planes. At first he was listed as missing. Then the Germans reported his death and burial with full honors behind their lines near Cambrai.

It hurt more than T.R. had expected. He threw all his energies into keeping his wife’s courage up. Unbowed he went to Saratoga, two days after the news came, to deliver the keynote address at the Republican state convention. All factions, even Boss Barnes whom he had lambasted in a libel suit, urged him to accept the Republican nomination for governor. Smiling he turned them down. He was out for bigger game.

On October 26, before a packed and cheering audience, he hauled the President over the coals for his call for a Democratic Congress. He denounced the arrogance of Wilson’s conduct of the war. With his customary combination of wild inflammatory statements and commonsense reasoning he tore the Fourteen Points to pieces, crying out that they were shams and would not bring the peace with justice the American people wanted.

(T.R. hadn’t been able to get Wilson’s war away from him: maybe he could carry off the peace.)

That night in Carnegie Hall, flashing his eyeglasses and clacking his great teeth and waving his arms with the legendary zest, T.R. seemed to his listeners his old riproaring self. He admitted to no one that he felt feverish and sick. The abscess in his leg was acting up. When he got home to Sagamore Hill he confessed to Edith that he was really not well. The day of the armistice they took him to Roosevelt Hospital in New York. He was weak and running a temperature and in great pain, suffering from what he described as sciatica.

Roosevelt’s old friend Henry White, a survivor from John Hay’s diplomatic corps, who had represented Roosevelt at the Algeciras Conference during the great days of his presidency, came, along with Elihu Root, to call on him at the hospital. White had just been appointed, as a sop to the Republicans, one of Wilson’s delegates to the Paris Peace Conference. White and Root wanted to consult T.R. on a program, but they found him too weak to talk.

He did pull himself together long enough to compose a few days later a careful denunciation of the President’s peace plans: “Our Allies and our enemies and Mr. Wilson himself should all understand that Mr. Wilson has no authority to speak for the American people at this time. His leadership has just been emphatically repudiated by them … Mr. Wilson and his Fourteen Points and his four supplementary points and his five complementary points and all his utterances every which way have ceased to have any shadow of right to be accepted as expressive of the will of the American people.”

By Christmas T.R. was thought sufficiently recovered to go home. Two weeks later he died, without a murmur, in his sleep in his own bed at Sagamore Hill.

Theodore Roosevelt intended his last blast as a warning to the world that Woodrow Wilson’s peace terms, even before they had been fully elaborated, were likely to be repudiated by the voters back home. Though blinded by personal bitterness the old campaigner had not lost his political intuition. Somehow, while so skillfully driving a wedge between the populations of the central empires and their governments, the President had allowed himself to become alienated from large and essential segments of the American people. The cleavage was not yet completely apparent.

In six years a change had come over the political landscape. The reform movements which had smoothed the way for Wilson’s leadership were losing their power or developing new aspects. During the years of the century’s youth the American people hungered and thirsted for righteousness. T.R. and Bryan and Woodrow Wilson built their political careers on popular faith in selfgoverning institutions, and on belief in the eventual triumph of Christian ethics. Now many of the reforms had come to pass. Senators were elected by popular vote. Woman’s suffrage was a fact. With many of the great aims attained the generous passion for civic virtue was degenerating into a series of smallminded manias.

Backed by an effective and bigoted organization prohibition was sweeping the country. Long before the war a good deal of reforming zeal had spent itself in efforts to suppress gambling and prostitution. Now the evils of drink became such an obsession that a man could hardly attain the office of notary public without being endorsed by the Anti-Saloon League.

In lashing the people up to a maximum war effort the Wilson administration unleashed blind hatreds and suspicions against foreigners and foreign ideas, and in fact against any ideas at all, that could hardly be controlled once their imagined usefulness, as a part of the psychology of total war, was at an end.

Such enthusiasts for political reform as remained were estranged by the prosecution of dissenting voices. As the suppressive measures weakened, movements like La Follette’s Progressive Party and the Nonpartisan League in Minnesota and the Dakotas, which were in many ways the heirs of Bull Moose, would come back into the open, but as agrarian or farmer-labor groupings. Somehow they had lost their national character.

When their leaders would speak of the war it would be no longer in terms of the Wilsonian slogans. They would not find the world made safe for democracy. The recollection would be too fresh in their minds that while Wilson’s Department of Justice conducted something like two thousand prosecutions of socialists, pacifists, syndicalists or alleged pro-Germans, hardly an effort was made to check the brutal profiteering that grew out of the cost-plus system. “Merchants of death” would be the reformers’ theme.

The young radicals who, at an earlier day, followed the progressives in their hue and cry against malefactors of great wealth, and in practical efforts to refurbish the selfgoverning process, were turning to the Russian Revolution for inspiration. John Reed, whose Ten Days that Shook the World made the October days real to thousands of Americans, became an archetype of the indignant youth of the time who failed to find any idealism in massacres at the fighting fronts or in repression of workingclass movements by the Department of Justice.

In Soviet Russia they were finding the righteous cause their fathers sought in following Wilson and Roosevelt and Bryan. To them the soviets were spontaneous selfgoverning assemblies like New England town meetings. The Soviet Government had repudiated secret diplomacy and was fostering selfdetermination of national minorities. Lenin had brought peace to the soldiers and land to the peasants. The repressions and massacres conducted in the name of the proletariat were shrugged off as temporary phenomena in the war against a host of enemies financed by capitalist governments, or as capitalist fabrications on the order of the Sisson documents.

Obstreperous and nonconformist youth, which a generation before might have listened to Woodrow Wilson with respect, was now attracted to the various socialist and syndicalist ideologies which were already beginning to harden into the Communist dogma.

The bellwether of those disillusioned with democratic methods would be Lincoln Steffens. Steffens, the most influential writer of the muckraking era, had been T.R.’s personal friend. He had glorified in print the labors of Bob La Follette in Wisconsin and of Newton Baker in Cleveland. Now Steffens, who had been the guide and philosopher of a whole generation of indigenous muckrakers and of the reform movement from coast to coast, was suddenly to make public his loss of faith in the tradition he had served for a lifetime. Stopping in after a trip to the Soviet Union, to call on his friend the sculptor Jo Davidson — whom he found fingering the clay for a bust of Bernard Baruch — Steffens was heard portentously announcing: “I have been into the future and by God it works.”

Organized labor was of two minds. Although Samuel Gompers kept the official leadership of the A.F. of L. in line behind the President, “a baneful seething,” stimulated by the Bolshevik-inspired revolutions that were sweeping Europe, continued under the surface. The foreignborn, stung by discrimination and harassment in America, dreamed of joining the triumphant uprising of the world proletariat. Repression bred resentments even among native Americans. It was hard for working men and women to forget that Debs was serving time in Atlanta.

Superficially, in spite of the deep popular misgivings of which the Republican victory at the polls was an inconvenient symptom, everything was as it had been. With the news of the armistice a sense of reprieve swept over the country. There was hardly a family that didn’t have men at the front or in training. Mothers, fathers, wives, sweethearts could take a deep breath and say to each other that their dear ones were safe. The elation of victory threw a certain halo about the figure of the President. His appeal to the crowd had never been greater. Yet mistrust was creeping in behind the cheers of the crowds.

The Administration was losing its favorable press. Though in private, newspapermen had long been outspoken against George Creel’s highhanded performances as presidential propagandist, the treatment of Woodrow Wilson himself, even by the opposition papers, remained respectful to the point of servility. He still had devoted adherents among the ablest journalists of the time. When the critical spirit began to express itself in the editorial columns, the tone was more of sorrow than of anger.

Three days after the armistice the President astonished the nation by using his wartime powers to seize the Atlantic cables. The move was ascribed to George Creel. Editorial writers explained sarcastically that Creel was planning to use his control of the cables to censor and distort the news of the Peace Conference as his “Committee of Public Misinformation” had censored and distorted the news from the fighting fronts. Hardly a voice was raised in the President’s defense.

The flurry over the nationalization of the cables had hardly subsided before the story broke that McAdoo was resigning as Secretary of the Treasury and as Director of Railroads. The President’s soninlaw was generally considered the strongest man in the Cabinet. Mac himself never did much to disguise the fact that he was of this opinion too; he snorted to House that the rest of the cabinet members were “nothing but clerks.” Although White House intimates knew that Mac had suffered a couple of spells of illness attributed to overwork and had been discussing with the President and his confidential colonel the reasons that would soon impel him to return to private life, the news of his abrupt resignation at such a critical juncture aroused a storm of gossip.

As an apostle of free enterprise Mac was resigning in protest against the President’s policy of nationalizing public utilities. He could no longer go along with Baker’s inefficiency in the War Department as revealed by the Hughes report on the shortcomings of the airplane production program. He had thrown up his job in a peeve because the President wouldn’t appoint him to serve at the Peace Conference.

McAdoo’s resignation was the signal for a stampede of “dollar a year” men out of Washington. Business executives and industrial leaders who had been working themselves sick for no pay on the control and procurement agencies of the Washington leviathan, while out of the corner of an eye they could see their less patriotic and often less able colleagues getting rich on war profits, returned to private life in droves. Even Bernard Baruch, the President’s dear Dr. Facts, announced he was leaving the Industrial War Board at the end of the year. The President wrote him immediately that he had further work in mind for him.

Though Wilson never had any idea of taking McAdoo to Europe, the resignation of his Secretary of the Treasury did force him to make a change in his list of delegates. With Mac gone, he would have to leave Secretary Baker, the only other cabinet member on whom he really relied, in Washington to keep the wheels of government moving during his absence. By mid November the story was in the headlines. The President was indeed planning to lead his delegation to the Peace Conference in person.

The news was received with dismay. At the State Department Lansing was quietly conducting his own canvass on the desirability of the President’s going to Europe. From Cardinal Gibbons in Baltimore to obscure Democratic precinct leaders in upper New York State the answer was negative. Old friends wrote begging Lansing to talk the President out of the notion. Many referred approvingly to the tradition that no President should leave the territory of the United States.

When Lansing respectfully presented his arguments the President intimated that he hadn’t yet quite made up his mind. Baruch was reported to be against the President’s going. Baker was against it. Secretary of Agriculture Houston, who was passionately loyal, suggested at a cabinet meeting, that though it might be fitting for the President to open the conference in person, he should then come home and leave the details to his delegates. As his way was, Wilson listened politely to all this advice and kept his own counsel; then one night he appeared without warning at Lansing’s house in the middle of a dinner party and brusquely announced to his Secretary of State that he’d made up his mind, he was going.

Echoes of these discussions and misgivings had been leaking into the nation’s press through the Washington newspapermen, who, now that the fighting had stopped, were short of sensations to report. Even the New York World, the President’s faithfulest supporter among bigcity newspapers, frowned on the idea. When the New York Times published a summary of editorials throughout the nation it was discovered that opinion was two to one against it.

From the moment House reached Paris on October 26 and set up his offices in a gray old mansion on the rue de l’Université on the Left Bank, the President and his confidential colonel exchanged incessant cables in their private code. Immediately House took his old chair on the Supreme War Council as the President’s personal representative.

Clemenceau greeted him like a longlost brother. “He received me with open arms. We passed all sorts of compliments. He seems genuinely fond of me,” noted House in his diary. “He thinks in the terms of the Second Empire,” he added a little later. “He doesn’t know what this new thought is about.” In spite of the illtempered old Tiger’s personal partiality, the colonel found the British more nearly in sympathy with the President’s plans. Lord Milner and Marshal Haig feared bolshevism more than they feared a German revival, and were in favor of moderate treatment of the defeated nations. Lloyd George talked first one way, then the other. He gave the impression of being more than usually flighty and irresponsible. His mind was on the coming general election back home.

While the Supreme War Council sat at Versailles, working out, amid the stiff formalities of military protocol, ever more Carthaginian armistice terms for the defeated nations, the Allied civilian leaders took refuge from the exigencies of their generals at the Quai d’Orsay. The handsome offices of Monsieur Stéphane Pichon, the French Minister for Foreign Affairs, were among the few state apartments in Paris where the chauffage centrale really worked. There the prime ministers, Clemenceau, Lloyd George and Orlando, with House sitting in for President Wilson, could lounge in front of a fireplace around a large carved flattopped desk and carry on their debates in a more unbuttoned atmosphere.

House was shocked by the first meeting he attended: “Lloyd George and Clemenceau wrangled for an entire afternoon as to whether the British or the French should receive the Turks’ surrender. They bandied words like fishwives, at least Lloyd George did … It would have been humorous if it hadn’t been a tragic waste of time.”

House’s first task was to get the Fourteen Points firmly imbedded in the agenda of the peace talks which would follow. “If this is done the basis for peace will already have been made. Germany began negotiation on the basis of these terms, and the Allies have already tentatively accepted them … but it is becoming daily more apparent,” he wrote, after he’d been two days in Paris, “that they desire to get from under the obligation these terms will impose upon them in the making of the peace. If we do not use care we shall place ourselves in some such dishonorable position as Germany did when she violated her treaty obligations as to Belgium.”

There were two great sticking points. Lloyd George was skittish about freedom of the seas, and Orlando insisted upon assurances that Italy’s Adriatic aspirations would be respected. After four days of argument House reached a compromise.

He promised that before the meaning of each debatable point was finally set down in definite and practical terms both the British and the Italians would be given the chance to argue out their exceptions in direct negotiations with the United States. Furthermore, with the President’s full knowledge and consent, the colonel furnished the Allied leaders with a private and confidential document, drawn up under House’s supervision, explaining away most of the features which the European statesmen found most objectionable in the Fourteen Points. The content was subject to negotiation, the ingratiating colonel assured them, if only they accepted the slogans in their outward form.

Just as House had reached this gratifying accord with the prime ministers, at a meeting this time in House’s large parlor on the rue de l’Université, news was brought them that Austria had accepted the armistice terms. “There was great excitement,” he noted, “and clasping of hands and embracing. I said to Orlando ‘Bravo Italy’ which brought him near to tears.”

“This has been a red letter day,” House cabled the President.

Sir William Wiseman was among the first to congratulate him. Wiseman, a slender active little man, hid a great deal of intrigue behind a frank and open countenance. Heading the British secret services in Washington during the better part of the war he had seen to it that he should become a familiar of the confidential colonel’s. His usefulness as bosom friend to the President’s chief adviser can hardly have been lost on his superiors at Whitehall. In Paris his function again was that of private British liaison man with Colonel House.

“Wiseman and my other friends,” noted House exuberantly under the date of November 4, “have been trying to make me believe that I have won one of the greatest diplomatic triumphs in history. That is as it may be. The facts are I came to Europe for the purpose of getting the Entente to subscribe to the President’s peace terms. I left a hostile and influential group in the United States frankly saying they did not approve the President’s terms … On this side I found the Entente governments as distinctly hostile to the Fourteen Points as the people at home. The plain people generally are with the President … it is not with the plain people we have to deal … I have had to persuade, I have had to threaten.” House’s threat was that Wilson would ask Congress to make a separate peace—“but the result is worth all my endeavors … I am glad the exceptions were made, for it emphasizes the acceptance of the Fourteen Points.”

House’s cables caused jubilation at the White House. “Proud of the way you are handling the situation,” cabled the President. Both the President and his confidential colonel felt they had taken the first step towards redeeming Woodrow Wilson’s pledge to the peoples of the world.

Leaving Foch to exercise his vindictiveness to the utmost, now that the rest of the central powers were hors de combat, in dictating an armistice to the Germans, the civilian leaders fell to discussing the location for the conference which was to impose a peace on Europe. Before House left for France he and the President had decided on Lausanne. They were taking it for granted that the conference must be held in a neutral country. Andrew Carnegie wrote Wilson suggesting The Hague, but when the Kaiser sought asylum in Holland that country was ruled out. Lloyd George started by suggesting the Spanish beachresort of San Sebastian. Orlando, the Italian prime minister, told House he would agree on any suitable city, preferably in Switzerland. House and Lloyd George settled on Geneva. All the while Clemenceau was quietly insisting on Versailles.

The day House cabled President Wilson for his approval of Geneva, the newspapers carried sensational news of a general strike in Switzerland. The Bolsheviks were repaying the hospitality of the Swiss during their years of exile by subsidizing revolutionary agitators there. Though the strike proved a flash in the pan Wilson took fright and cabled House that Switzerland was “saturated with every poisonous element.” Clemenceau described the advantages of Paris hotels and of the stately huge buildings at Versailles. Allied statesmen were worn out from years of strain and effort, they were already in Paris: why move? They settled on Paris from sheer lassitude. To House’s surprise Wilson readily agreed. Clemenceau had his way.

House confided his disappointment to his diary: “It will be difficult enough to make a just peace, and it will be almost impossible to do so while sitting in the atmosphere of a belligerent capital.”

That left the final question to be decided between House and the President. On what terms should Wilson attend? Wilson had all along insisted that he must preside over the opening sessions. House’s suggestion, like Houston’s, was that the President should attend the preliminaries and then turn the detail work over to plenipotentiaries. It had been decided that the four victorious powers, Italy, France, Great Britain and the United States, should each be represented by a commission of five. House jotted down in private that he would like to be chairman of the American commission himself, with McAdoo and Herbert Hoover as his chief assistants.

Clemenceau’s first thought when he heard that President Wilson was surely coming to Paris was that the arrival of another head of state would give Poincaré a chance to take the chair. That would never do; the Tiger intended to preside.

Lloyd George and Orlando were equally flustered. They feared Wilson would be hard to deal with. They dreaded the prospect of his appealing over their heads to their people back home. When they communicated their doubts to the colonel, House affably assured them that they would not find the President stiff and dictatorial in personal relations. Quite the contrary, House declared, he always found him amenable to advice.

The Americans whom House consulted in Paris were equally opposed to the President’s trip, but for different reasons. Frank Cobb got up an impassioned memorandum on the subject:

“The moment President Wilson sits at the council table with these Prime Ministers and Foreign Secretaries he has lost all the power that comes from distance and detachment … In Washington President Wilson has the ear of the whole world. It is a commanding position, the position of a court of the last resort of world democracy … He can go before Congress and appeal to the conscience and hope of mankind … This is a mighty weapon, but if the President were to participate personally in the proceedings, it would be a broken stick.”

Mindful of his determination “to follow his bent rather than my own” in representing Wilson in Paris, House, who knew how the President and Mrs. Wilson were looking forward to a state visit to Europe, felt he could not oppose the President’s coming. He employed all his diplomatic finesse in wording a cable to the White House: “If the Peace Congress assembles in France Clemenceau will be presiding officer. If a neutral country had been chosen, you would have been asked to preside. Americans whose opinions are of value are practically unanimous in the belief it would be unwise of you to sit in the Peace Conference. They fear that it would involve a loss of dignity and your commanding position. Clemenceau has just told me that he hopes you will not sit in the Congress because no head of a state should sit there. The same feeling prevails in England. Cobb cables that Reading and Wiseman voice the same view. Everyone wants you to come over and take part in the preliminary conference.”

When the President and Mrs. Wilson decoded House’s cable in the privacy of the inner study they were not at all pleased. “It upset every plan we had made,” Wilson cabled back waspishly. “I infer that the French and British leaders desire to exclude me from the conference for fear I might lead the weaker nations against them … I play the same part in my government that the prime ministers play in theirs. The fact that I am head of the state is of no practical consequence. No point of dignity must prevent our obtaining the results we have set our hearts upon and must have … I am thrown into complete confusion by the change of programme.”

House’s reply was soothing. “My judgment is that you should … determine upon your arrival what share it is wise for you to take in the proceedings.”

Wilson had already intimated he was willing to yield the chairmanship to Clemenceau.

November 19, the morning after the President broke in on Lansing’s dinner party to announce his final decision, he issued a formal announcement along the lines of House’s suggestion: “The President will sail for France immediately after the opening of the regular session of Congress … It is not likely that it will be possible for him to remain throughout the sessions of the formal Peace Conference, but his presence at the outset is necessary … He will of course be accompanied by delegates who will sit as representatives of the United States throughout the Conference.”

The announcement was sullenly received in Washington. In his recollections of those days Tumulty wrote that the President was profoundly distressed by the criticism “heaped upon him by his enemies on the Hill.” Tumulty had never seen him look more weary or careworn: “Well Tumulty,” he remembered Wilson’s saying, “this trip will either be the greatest success or the supremest tragedy in all history; but I believe in a Divine Providence … it is my faith that no body of men, however they concert their power or their influence, can defeat this great world enterprise.”

The choice of the commissioners was the subject of much correspondence. Lansing and Tumulty both backed up House in urging the President to appoint some leading Republicans such as Taft or Root or Senator Knox.

Wilson was very definite about not wanting Taft. Possibly he feared Taft might have his own ideas about how a League of Nations should be constituted. Root he wrote off as impossibly reactionary. For a while he toyed with the idea of taking Samuel W. McCall, the very Wilsonian Democratic governor of Massachusetts, or Justice Day of the Supreme Court. He was so firm in turning down Knox that none of his advisers dared suggest any other member of the Senate Committee for Foreign Affairs. Throughout the discussion Tumulty and the State Department were bombarded with names; everybody and his brother wanted to go to Paris. At last to quiet the rumormongering Tumulty gave out five names to the press.

Colonel House’s choice was expected. He was already in Paris. Nobody objected to Mr. Lansing. After all he was Secretary of State. The idea of picking Henry White to represent the Republicans was received with scornful laughter. During that estimable gentleman’s long diplomatic career, though nominally a Republican, he had hardly ever voted in an election. Nobody had anything against selfeffacing old General Bliss, but nobody had much to say in his favor either. The fifth name was Wilson’s own.

Congress was still somewhat stunned by the fact that the list included neither a Republican nor a Democratic senator, when the President appeared before the two houses to wish them farewell. Secretary Houston sorrowfully noted the lack of enthusiasm among the legislators. The President’s speech was received with unusual silence. He tried to explain that, although he was departing from precedent by sailing overseas, under modern conditions, through the use of the cables, he would be as near as if he had remained in Washington. “I shall be in close touch with you and you will know all that I do … I shall not be inaccessible.” It was his duty to attend the Peace Conference in person to complete the good work so many brave boys had given their lives for, and to redeem America’s pledge to mankind.

It was not one of Woodrow Wilson’s most successful addresses. Houston described the scene: “Many Republicans and some Democrats looked as sullen and stolid as wooden men.”

President and Mrs. Wilson sailed from New York on the old Hamburg-Amerika liner George Washington, long since converted into a troopship and operated by the navy. As the steamer warped out from the Hoboken dock into the turgid Hudson, full of tugs and launches packed to the gunwales with people come to see the President’s departure, the presidential pennant was broken out from the mainmast. Five destroyers churning in midstream, fired a twentyone gun salute. Every steamship in the harbor let loose with its siren. The din was terrific.

Two army airplanes and a dirigible circled overhead. From every dock and from the glittering windows of Manhattan skyscrapers flags rippled under the wintry sky. When the guns ceased booming, the President and Mrs. Wilson, who were enjoying the scene from the captain’s bridge, could hear faintly, fading into distance as the ship eased down the river, the cheers of an immense crowd, waving flags and handkerchiefs, that packed the Battery.

In the Narrows a gun on the old Monitor, of Civil War fame, anchored for her last sea duty at the opening of the submarine net, boomed a salute. A faint trilling could be heard, above the hiss of the wind through the rigging, of the voices of hundreds of schoolchildren singing “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” on the grassy slopes of Staten Island. The George Washington was joined by an escorting battleship in the Lower Bay and nosed out past Ambrose lightship into the heavy Atlantic swells in the center of a formation of destroyers.

Long before that the President and Edith Wilson had gone below to their quarters, where, amid what she described as “a wilderness of flowers,” they were served, in their private diningroom, in the company only of Cary Grayson and of Edith Wilson’s secretary, Miss Benham, a most delicious lunch. Edith noted that the luncheon was so surprisingly good because one of the best chefs from the Hotel Biltmore had been sent along to cater to the presidential party. When the President learned of it, detesting special privileges of this sort, he insisted that on his next trip he’d eat the same meals as the rest of the ship’s company. Immediately after lunch the President, worn out by long days at his desk in Washington preparing for the trip, and by a bad night on the train down, went to his stateroom and slept for three hours.

Later in the afternoon, refreshed by his nap, and marshalling the air of crisp smiling charm he could assume when he felt like it, the President accompanied by Mrs. Wilson walked about the promenade deck greeting the members of their party.

There was the Secretary of State and Mrs. Lansing. Mrs. Lansing was already feeling the first qualms of seasickness, and the Secretary was hiding a torment of doubt under his huffy but deferential air. At this point he was conscientiously keeping his doubts to himself or entering them bit by bit in his private diary. He had misgivings about the entire enterprise. He was not reconciled to the President’s attending the Peace Conference. His secret opinion of the Fourteen Points coincided with Theodore Roosevelt’s. Particularly he could see misery and bloodshed arising out of clashing interpretations of “self-determination of nations.”

There was the French Ambassador and Madame Jusserand. Monsieur Jusserand had just delivered to the President the Quai d’Orsay’s proposals for the organization of a preliminary interallied conference. Any expectations Jusserand may have had that the President would confer with him on the subject during the Atlantic crossing were destined to be disappointed.

If the President gave this document any attention at all he thrust it aside without comment as another evidence of the reactionary tendencies he was going to have to combat. Neither Wilson nor his advisers seem to have given the French plan enough study to discover that it contained valuable suggestions as to procedure. Preliminary terms, including the federalization of the German empire, were to be imposed immediately. A general congress, modelled on the Congress of Vienna, where neutrals and enemy states would be represented, was to follow to take up the question of a League of Nations and the permanent pacification of the world. There was a sketch of a timetable according to which questions were to be brought up in order of their immediate importance; and, first of all — by a clause which, if it had been carried out, would have cleared up many difficulties — every secret treaty was to be cancelled.

Possibly it was some inkling of this memorandum, which threatened the Treaty of London so dear to the aspirations of Italia irredenta, that made the Italian ambassador decide all of a sudden that if Jusserand sailed on the George Washington, he had to go too. He threw a diplomatic tantrum in Frank Polk’s office at the State Department and suitable accommodations were found at the last moment for him and for his countess and their four children and attendant servants.

Another passenger was the affable Henry White, who carried in his briefcase suggestions by Elihu Root and Henry Cabot Lodge, which were to get no more attention than the French proposals. There was the irrepressible George Creel, who still hoped, in spite of almost hysterical opposition against him building up in Congress and on newspaper row, to go on transmitting to the world the Wilsonian slogans as they fell from his master’s lips. There was George W. Davis and his wife. The eminent New York lawyer was on his way to London to replace Walter Hines Page, who had come home to die in a New York hospital, as Ambassador to the Court of St. James.

Ray Stannard Baker was aboard, Wilson’s fervent acolyte who was to handle the press bureau for the American commissioners, and a few other newspapermen picked as rightthinking. (The great mass of the working press had to follow on the less comfortable Orizaba.) Then there were the members of Colonel House’s Inquiry, history professors, geographers, sociologists and experts in political economy, who were to furnish the President with the facts and figures he needed to back up his remaking of the map in accordance with principles of right and democratic justice. Along with three truckloads of printed matter the experts had been installed on the ship the night before she sailed.

In addition there was a group of highranking naval officers, two orchestras and a military band and operators and equipment for two motion picture theatres, and, below decks, a detachment of troops going as replacements to the A.E.F.

Although some of the secretservice men suffered from seasickness, the President and Edith Wilson found the trip delightful. Lifeboat drills and the threat of floating mines added a certain spice. The weather was mild. Sunny afternoons they played shuffleboard. The President took daily naps. Sunday he attended divine service with the troops and in the evening, after another service of hymnsinging and choruses of “Over There,” “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag” and “Keep the Home Fires Burning,” in which the President joined with his fine tenor voice, the doughboys were allowed to file by and to shake the President’s hand.

One day, when the George Washington was steaming past the green slopes and the misty violet cliffs of the Azores, the President called a meeting in his large parlor of the members of the Inquiry. They reported finding him relaxed, smiling, witty, and full of charm. According to Dr. Isaiah Bowman, who took notes, the President began by declaring that the Americans would be the only disinterested people at the Peace Conference.

“The men whom we were about to deal with did not represent their own people,” noted Dr. Bowman. This was the first conference, the President emphasized, “that depended on the opinion of mankind.” Unless the conference expressed the will of the people rather than of their leaders we would soon be involved in another breakup of the world … A League of Nations implied political independence and territorial integrity plus later alteration of terms and boundaries, if it could be shown that injustice had been done, or that conditions had changed. Matters could better be viewed in the light of justice when wartime passions had subsided … He didn’t see how elasticity and security could be obtained except under a League of Nations. He envisioned a governing council selected from “the best men who could be found” and sitting in some neutral city such as The Hague or Berne. Whenever trouble occurred it could be called to the attention of the council. Boycott of trade, postal and cable facilities would be an alternative to war against offending nations.

The people of the world wanted a new world order. If it didn’t work it must be made to work. The world readily accepted the poison of bolshevism because it was a protest against the way in which the world had worked. It was the business of the American delegation at the Peace Conference to fight for a new world order, “agreeably if we can, but disagreeably if necessary.”

A friendly personal note entered his voice. He hoped to see his experts frequently. His smile sought out every face. They would work through the commissioners to be sure, but in case of emergency he wanted them not to fail to bring any critical matter to his personal attention. He wound up with a phrase that went straight to the hearts of the members of the Inquiry: “Tell me what’s right and I’ll fight for it.”

Chapter 23 THE PEACE TABLE

IT wasn’t till December 13, amid the salutes of the French fleet and of six American battleships and of whole schools of destroyers, that the slow old George Washington steamed into the harbor of Brest. The date delighted the President. Thirteen was his lucky number. The rain held off. As they approached the shore the sky cleared and the sun shone through the smoke of the twentyone gun salutes. Mrs. Wilson found the day “radiant, just cold enough to be exhilarating.”

While the Wilsons were snatching an early luncheon the ship dropped anchor. Immediately their staterooms swarmed with officials. There was Monsieur Pichon and the Minister of Marine and a flock of French generals and General Pershing and General Bliss and Admiral Sims and Admiral Benson. “After much kissing of my hand by the foreigners and clicking of heels and presenting of bouquets and general good humor,” remembered Edith Wilson, “we left our good ship to go ashore in a tender called The Gun.”

They admired the gray stone harbor and the fishing boats with blue and tan sails hauled up on the rocks in the basin and the slatecolored town rising in terraces to the old castle of the dukes of Brittany. At the dock they found more officials, more gold braid, crack squads of French troops drawn up at attention, and the President’s daughter Margaret, who had been dutifully singing for the doughboys in Y.M.C.A. huts. “Poor child,” noted Edith Wilson, “the food or the climate had not agreed with her and she was really quite ill. We were glad to take her under our care.”

After a round of speechmaking the presidential party climbed into open touring cars and was driven through narrow dank streets lined with men and women in their best Breton costumes. The khaki of crowds of American soldiers stood out against the dark clothing of the French. They passed through triumphal arches. The walls were placarded with signs in red: LE PRESIDENT WILSON A BIEN MERITE DE L’HUMANITE.

This was no programmed demonstration. Women in black had tears in their eyes. Wounded war veterans applauded with their stumps if they had no hands. The throngs were shouting themselves hoarse: Vive Veelson.

At the railroad station a crimson carpet led them to a train de luxe with the monogram RF painted on every dark blue coach. The President and Mrs. Wilson were ensconced in President Poincaré’s own sleeping-car. Edith remarked that it was far from being modern or luxurious. The bunks were hard. “No part of the train was clean and the sheets felt damp as if just washed.”

There was a long wait and a number of mixups about baggage. It was dusk before the train pulled out. At dinner in the state diningcar, where Edith Wilson noted privately that the service was terrible, she amused herself during the wait between courses, collecting on her menu card the autographs of all the important personages assembled.

Again the sun was shining when they reached Paris in midmorning on December 14. The train drew up at a rural looking station. As the President and Mrs. Wilson stepped down from their sleeper they were greeted by the President of the Republic, the entire Cabinet and the staff of the American Embassy. After a round of speechmaking and a fanfare from the Garde Republicain President Wilson and President Poincaré settled themselves in an open victoria, while the ladies, Madame Poincaré, Madame Jusserand, Mrs. Wilson and daughter Margaret were accommodated in a landau.

The brass of their helmets glinting under the horsetails in the wintry sun, the Garde Republicain, on their fine clanking horses, led the parade to the Champs Elysées. The great chains under the Arc de Triomphe were pulled away for the first time, it was whispered to Mrs. Wilson, since 1871, and the two Presidents passed under the arch.

Along the curbs of the great avenue were ranks of captured German cannon. Over them fluttered the tricolor and Old Glory endlessly alternated. Facing the narrow strip of pavement they kept open for the carriages stood files of poilus in horizon blue. Everything: guns, roofs, balconies, was crowded with cheering shouting people. “Even the stately horsechestnut trees,” noticed Edith, “were peopled with men and boys perched like sparrows in their very tops … One grew giddy trying to greet the bursts of welcome that came like the surging of untamed waters. Flowers rained upon us until we were nearly buried.”

Occasionally above the packed heads they could read on a kiosk or on a piece of bare wall the placarded words: WILSON LE JUSTE.

They were driven through the Place de la Concorde, more crowded, they were told, than even on the day of the armistice; and past the Vendôme column and the templeform church of the Madeleine; then out another boulevard where all they could see was swarming faces and cheering mouths, to a street blocked off by soldiers, where stood the mansion assigned them for a domicile. Great wroughtiron gates set in a high stucco wall opened between blue and red sentryboxes for the carriages to enter and closed behind.

In My Memoir Edith went to some length to describe the magnificence of the Hôtel de Mûrat; the gleaming parquet, the tall mirrors, the flame-colored brocades, the broad sweeping stairway. “Enchanting suites” were reserved for the President and herself. The hangings were embroidered in fiery gold with the Napoleonic eagle. There was a gold toilet set with the Mûrat crest in her marble bathroom and tall crystal bottles of orange-flower water.

In the President’s bedroom the walls and draperies were of green damask studded with the gold bees of the Empire.

Edith Wilson hardly had time to glance into the cabinets full of objets d’art in her crimson and ivory parlor, before they had to change their clothes for the official luncheon at the Elysée Palace. The party was thrown into a dither by the announcement by a flustered young American liaison officer that everybody at the Elysée would be wearing a frock coat. These garments were already considered obsolete in America except by a few rural senators. The President was planning on striped pants and a cutaway. After a search through the trunks, Brooks, the President’s colored valet, triumphantly produced not only one but two frock coats. He’d guessed they might be needed, he said, grinning. “One never knows different customs in different countries.”

So much of the afternoon was taken up by the luncheon, and the breakneck exchange of official visits demanded by protocol between President and Madame Poincaré and President and Mrs. Wilson, to the accompaniment of the rolling of drums from the guard of honor, that it was late before Wilson could get in a private word with his confidential colonel.

House found the President in a disgruntled mood. He seemed to be suffering a reaction from the exultation of his welcome. House, who may have suspected Wilson was a little miffed because his alter ego had not come to Brest to meet him, hastily explained that he hadn’t yet recovered his strength after the bout of influenza that had kept him ten days in bed. Other members of American missions were dangerously ill. Willard Straight died of it. House’s doctor had forbidden him to make the trip. House turned to pleasanter matters. He congratulated the President on having induced the British and French to lift the censorship of American press cables.

Wilson was inquiring with some bitterness why the conference on peace terms couldn’t start immediately. He had planned on December 16. House pointed out that Lloyd George would not make a move until he knew the results of the general election in the United Kingdom. The French were quite content to wait while the Germans and Austrians starved a little more. All the Allies were sabotaging Herbert Hoover’s efforts to get food and supplies moving towards populations in desperate need.

Wilson had already taken a dislike to Poincaré. He suspected the sawedoff little Président de la République of being behind the French Government’s refusal to let workingclass delegations meet him at Brest. Permission was withdrawn at the last moment for the labor unions to lead a mammoth parade through Paris to greet the American President and to endorse the Fourteen Points. Wilson had planned to address them from the balcony of the Hôtel de Mûrat. The French Government was getting between him and the French people.

Then there was Lansing. The President complained that Lansing had tried to pack the George Washington with State Department people. “I found him in an ugly mood towards Lansing,” House noted in his diary. House took advantage of that mood to put in a plug for his own organization by telling the President how favorably impressed the specialists of the Inquiry were by his frank chat with them on the boat.

House admitted that Lansing was tactless. Still the President must remember that Lansing was playing a minor part and playing it without complaint. Jealousies between the State Department crowd and the Inquiry were inevitable. “I am sure Lansing does not mean to be brusque and impolite but he has an unfortunate manner.”

During the days that followed, President and Mrs. Wilson had every moment taken as they hurried from formal luncheons to formal dinners. They were always changing their clothes. They visited hospitals, they laid a wreath on Lafayette’s tomb, they listened to interminable speeches at the Hôtel de Ville, where the President was presented by the city authorities of Paris with a handsome gold pen to sign the treaty with, and Edith Wilson with “a beautiful Lalique box containing a most unusual pin composed of six doves of peace made of rose quartz.”

Whenever Wilson wasn’t delivering speeches or listening to speeches he was kept busy receiving callers: Clemenceau, Foch, Pershing, Venizelos with a pair of bodyguards in starched white kilts; military and civilian leaders from countries great and small. “Each day brought more interesting people,” Edith Wilson wrote, “and every hour was parcelled out.”

House meanwhile was trying to build a fire under the Allied statesmen. He got hold of Northcliffe, the selfrighteous lord of a large section of the British press, and tried to scare him with Herbert Hoover’s documented reports that the most fearful famine since the Thirty Years War impended in Europe. Famine threatened the defeated nations and the newborn republics with disintegration and chaos. The heirs of chaos would be the Communists.

House urged Northcliffe to use the power of his great press to bring some sense of urgency to the politicians.

“Northcliffe and I agreed that the President should visit England at once and receive the reception there which we knew awaited him.” According to House’s notes Northcliffe further agreed with him that Wilson’s reception by the Paris populace had already changed the attitude of the French politicians. “We believe that if he goes to England and gets such an endorsement from the English people, Lloyd George and his colleagues will not dare oppose his policies at the Peace Conference.”

It was clear by this time that it would be the middle of January before the interallied conference, still thought of as preliminary to the real Peace Conference, could get started. In the interval House advised the President to make state visits to England and to Italy.

The colonel, who had moved his organization to the Crillon when that handsome old hostelry became the headquarters of the American commissioners, chaperoned some preliminary meetings between the President and Clemenceau. House considered the first meeting a success. “Neither said anything that was particularly misleading. They simply did not touch upon topics which would breed discussion.”

A few days later, when Clemenceau called on the President for a second time at the Hôtel de Mûrat, House noted that in the hour and a half they were together the President did nearly all the talking. “Clemenceau expressed himself in a mild way in agreement … He thought a League of Nations should be attempted, but he was not confident of success either of forming it or of its being workable after it was formed.”

A meeting, carefully stagemanaged by House, between the President and bland Premier Orlando and avid hawkfaced Sonnino, the redheaded Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs, was similarly ineffectual. “The President talked well but he did not convince the Italians that they should lessen their hold on the Pact of London.”

The French presidential train was brought out once more to take the Wilsons to Chaumont to spend Christmas with the A.E.F. Edith Wilson found it more uncomfortable than ever. The heat didn’t work. “The sheets in the icy beds felt damp and dangerous.” She wondered how they lived through the miserable night without catching pneumonia. They reached Pershing’s general headquarters in a snowstorm and toured the barns and farmyards where the doughboys were billeted. Edith Wilson found touching their efforts at Christmas decorations with green sprays and bits of red paper. Both she and her husband were impressed by the discomforts the doughboys were undergoing through the French winter.

Deep mud and driving sleet took some of the sparkle out of the military show put on for them by the 77th Division. Even mules bogged in the mire. They ate Christmas dinner in a cantonment with the soldiers. The only warm place they found in Lorraine was General Pershing’s chateau where a welcoming fire roared in the hearth and hot tea was ready for them. There was a dreary train ride back to Paris and next day they started for England.

Colonel House failed to accompany the President. He was husbanding his health, and he felt he was more useful in Paris trying to talk Clemenceau around to the Fourteen Points than appearing in short pants at the Court of St. James. In his place he sent his soninlaw Gordon Auchincloss. Auchincloss, an uppety young man to begin with, was becoming a little too conscious of the importance of his position. The President’s secretaries blamed him for not getting them invited to the state banquets. He officiously made daily reports to House over the longdistance telephone and managed to give Mrs. Wilson and Cary Grayson the impression that the colonel had sent him along to spy on their doings. They promptly infected the President with their suspicions.

From Auchincloss’s phone calls House heard the details of the British election. It was the first election since woman’s suffrage, and there was a large soldier vote. Lloyd George ran scared. Though he began his campaign with a number of speeches advocating a peace of justice and a League of Nations in Wilsonian style, the wily Welshman soon found that the three topics that appealed to his listeners were immediate demobilization of conscripted men, making the Germans pay the whole cost of the war and trying the German leaders as warcriminals. “Make the ’uns pay to the last farthing” and “ ’ang the Kaiser” became the slogans of his campaign. The result was a landslide victory for Lloyd George and for his coalition government. The khaki election, it came to be called.

House had hardly digested the results of the khaki election when he learned of the overwhelming four to one vote of confidence Clemenceau won in the Chamber of Deputies the night of December 29. The Tiger spoke sarcastically of Woodrow Wilson’s plans. He described what he called “la noble candeur” of the American President. All Paris fell to discussing the exact shade of meaning in the French phrase. “Candeur” could be translated as candor but it could also be translated as the simplicity of the village idiot. When Clemenceau told the chamber that he preferred firm treaties and alliances to preserve the balance of power to some chancy League of Nations the deputies rose in a stormy ovation.

House noted that this was about as poor an augury as could be for the success of progressive principles. The facts were exactly the opposite of Wilson’s highflown declaration to the specialists on the George Washington: “The men whom we are about to deal with do not represent their own people.” Of the four national leaders on whom the main decisions would rest at the Peace Conference, Woodrow Wilson was the only one who had been repudiated at the polls.

“Coming on the heels of the English elections,” noted House dismally in his diary on the last day of the old year, “and taking into consideration the result of recent elections in the United States, the situation strategically could not be worse.”

The royal train that picked up President and Mrs. Wilson at Calais was “luxuriously comfortable.” King George and Queen Mary met them at Charing Cross Station at the end of a red carpet lined with potted palms. They were driven to Buckingham Palace in the cumbersome old royal coaches by coachmen in periwigs. Footmen in crimson liveries perched behind. The day turned out sunny. In spite of Boxing Day being a bank holiday, the streets of downtown London were packed with people shouting “We want Wilson.” When they passed Marlborough House the dowager Queen Alexandra was seen leaning out of a window, kissing her hand and waving a small American flag. In every open space troops were drawn up at attention and brass bands played.

The courtyard of the palace was massed with American doughboys, with hospital cases, on crutches or in wheelchairs, in the front rank. A great shout went up as, with his silk hat in his hand, Woodrow Wilson stepped from the coach to greet them.

The President and Mrs. Wilson had hardly settled in their state apartments, which they found stacked with baskets of roses from members of the Cabinet and thoroughly chilly from the lack of steam heat, when the President was asked to address the crowd from the balcony. His speech aroused prolonged cheering and the waving of English and American flags.

The King and Queen could not have been more considerate. Through the days that followed the Wilson party moved in the complicated evolutions of court etiquette. Edith performed the ceremonial acts with rapture. The President caused some sartorial confusion by appearing in plain evening clothes, which meant that all the gentlemen-in-waiting had to do likewise. Cary Grayson preened himself in a fulldress admiral’s uniform.

In the houses of the politicians conversation was freer than at the state banquets, where they ate under the stern gaze of beefeaters with halberds. While the President was meeting the past, present and future prime ministers at a luncheon tendered him by Lloyd George at 10 Downing Street, Mrs. Wilson was entertained by Lady Reading. Next her at table sat Margot Asquith, whom Edith described as smoking incessantly and scratching her matches, as some men did on their pants, on the seat of her tailored dress. She announced she was dying to meet the President because she had never yet met an American with brains.

After the traditional receptions at Guild Hall by the Lord Mayor of London, and turtle soup at the Mansion House, the royal train with the royal sleepingcar attached carried the presidential party up into the North to Carlisle. According to House’s diary, he and Northcliffe cooked up this visit of the President to his mother’s English birthplace as sure to appeal to English middleclass sentiments.

On a rainy Sunday morning the Wilsons attended the service in his grandfather Woodrow’s church and in the afternoon their train took them to Manchester, the capital of the nineteenthcentury liberalism Woodrow Wilson was brought up in. There after accepting the freedom of the city at a municipal banquet, he delivered in Free Trade Hall a speech which he and House had prayerfully concocted in Paris a few days before.

He touched on the immense complexity of the problems, petitions, demands irreconcilable each with the other, that had poured in on him since he had landed in Europe. “I am not hopeful,” he admitted, “that the terms of the settlement will be altogether satisfactory … Interest does not bind men together, interest separates men,” he exclaimed. “There is only one thing that can bind people together, and that is a common devotion to right … We are not obeying the mandate of party or politics, we are obeying the mandate of humanity.”

Only a League of Nations would “provide the machinery of readjustment” to right whatever wrongs might be perpetuated in the tugging and hauling he was anticipating at the Peace Conference. His frankness was wellreceived. His idealistic phrases stirred the Midlands crowd. He came away feeling that in Manchester he had met one of his most understanding audiences.

Returning to the Continent on New Year’s Day of 1919 the Wilsons spent only a few hours in Paris. The President found time for a long talk with House. They discussed the economic commission on which Baruch and Vance McCormick, who were sailing from New York that day, would serve with Herbert Hoover to try to formulate an American policy towards the Allied demands on Germany for reparations, which were getting more exorbitant every day. House was to be chairman.

The President gave House a lively account of the British political figures he had hobnobbed with in London. Wilson did not feel at home in the fashionable club atmosphere of British politics. House remarked maliciously that Wilson’s trip had robbed the British statesmen of their Christmas vacations on the Riviera. They had all stayed home to welcome him. House pronounced himself delighted with the popular response to the President’s visit to England.

House then brought up the ticklish question of getting cooperation out of the Republican Congress. He wanted the President to tell the Republicans that legislation was now their affair. His advice was to follow the policy of give and take. House could note the familiar stiffening of the President’s jaw at that suggestion.

“He had grown so accustomed to almost dictatorial powers,” House confided in his diary, “it will go hard to give them up.”

After accomplishing a series of official chores the President drove with Mrs. Wilson in the evening to the Gare de Lyon, where the Italian royal train awaited them. “To my surprise,” wrote Edith, “the Italian train was the most magnificent of all. I had never seen anything like it: servants in livery of royal scarlet; plate, china and glassware bearing the Italian arms; table linen and bed linen beautifully embroidered.”

The Italian ambassador to Washington and a “tall lugubrious-looking individual wearing a longtailed frock coat and looking like the undertaker at an important funeral” who represented the King of Italy were hosts on the train. Margaret Wilson and Miss Benham were of the party and, of course, the indispensable Dr. Grayson who cared for two of the ladies who were taken with travellers’ ills on the journey.

Next morning the American ambassador to Rome met them at the frontier. They stopped in Genoa long enough for the President to visit the house Columbus was reputed to have been born in. The journey south was lovely. “Our arrival in Rome,” wrote Edith Wilson, “will always be the most brilliant canvas in all the rich pictures in my memory.” No more rain. The sky was sapphire blue. Golden sand had been spread on the streets traversed by the state cortège. Brocades and velvets embroidered with coats of arms in tarnished gold hung from the balconies.

The Quirinal Palace, where they were lodged, was still used as a military hospital, but one wing had been furnished with tapestries and rugs and museum pieces of statuary and of Renaissance furniture. The pictures were a collector’s dream. Every window of their suite of rooms looked out on a garden full of flowers. Edith Wilson was told that a hundred thousand people packed the streets and squares around the palace waiting for her husband to show himself on the balcony.

During all the state dinners and the mummery and the toasts of his visit to Rome, Woodrow Wilson was tortured by the prospect of having to call on the Pope. Various State Department advisers and members of the diplomatic corps had been insisting that such a visit was essential. Protestant missionaries were bitterly protesting. All the President’s Presbyterian hackles rose at the thought. He had consented to go to the Vatican with the proviso that he should spend the same amount of time calling on his friend the Reverend Mr. Lowry, the rector of the American Episcopal Church.

The President’s ride across Rome to the Vatican, standing up in an open touring car, developed into a triumphal procession. The crowd was so great His Holiness was kept waiting fortyfive minutes.

The President had let it be known that on his return from the Vatican he would address, from the window of the Quirinal, the enormous crowd that had gathered in the square outside. He was intending to undercut Orlando and Sonnino through a direct appeal to the Italian people to back the Fourteen Points. When he returned from his papal audience he found that squads of police had dispersed the crowd.

This discourtesy threw the President into a cold rage. He let loose to the newspapermen gathered about him in no uncertain terms. The incident threw a chill over the rest of the Italian trip, although the enthusiasm of the crowds in Milan surpassed that of the crowds in Rome.

In Milan the President’s presence had been advertised for a gala performance of Aïda at La Scala. It was a Sunday. The President declared he never went to the theatre on Sunday. The Italian chief of protocol smoothly explained that this was a “sacred concert,” and the President allowed himself to be placed in a box where he listened solemnly while choruses sang the national anthems and soloists caroled out some arias from church music. Right after, the curtain rose and Aïda was performed in its entirety.

In Turin the President harangued a thousand mayors from the cities and towns of the Piedmont region who had gathered to greet him. They represented men of every walk of life, bankers, merchants, farmers, storekeepers, blacksmiths. When he shook hands with them all after his address a few of the more rustic mayors bent over and kissed his hand. The President was deeply touched.

At the university an honorary degree was bestowed on him. Edith felt her husband was at his best in the simple friendly speech of appreciation he addressed to the students. He brought down the house by putting on a blue student cap. “How young and virile he looked as he stood there,” she exclaimed.

These stately progresses seemed to Edith Wilson the consummation of her girlhood dreams. “Fate having chosen me,” she wrote in My Memoir, “for such a Cinderella role, I have tried to picture it for others, in an endeavor to make a return for this great privilege which was mine.”

When the Wilsons arrived back in Paris on January 7, fagged by many functions and long trainrides, the President was determined that ceremonial engagements should no longer be allowed to interfere with the work of peacemaking. He instructed his secretary to accept no more invitations.

As soon as he was settled at the Hôtel de Mûrat, he called his confidential colonel on the private telephone line he’d had installed between his study and House’s room at the Crillon, to be brought up to date on the news. The formal opening of the Peace Conference was set for January 18.

The American commissioners were meeting that afternoon at House’s rooms at the Crillon. Much to Lansing’s chagrin, House — who with innocent vanity noted in his diary that he had more rooms than all the other commissioners put together — usually managed to have them meet in his suite. The President, whose familiars were already dropping hints that the confidential colonel was taking too much the center of the stage during his absences, sent word that he would be there at five to preside over this meeting in person. Almost at the same moment a message arrived from Clemenceau that he too was calling on House at five P.M. for a private talk.

The colonel faced a dilemma. Even his worldfamous tact was strained to meet this test.

“The President came first,” House noted. “I brought him to my reception room and had the other commissioners meet him.” The President of the United States had just started a lively discussion with Lansing and Bliss and White on the difficulties they were facing, when Monsieur le Président du Conseil de Ministres was announced. “I asked President Wilson to excuse me and took Clemenceau into another room, where we had one of our heart to heart talks.”

Clemenceau, one of the most malicious of men, who liked House, but was already complaining that Wilson thought he was Jesus Christ, undoubtedly appreciated the possibilities for mischief. Keeping the President of the United States waiting in the anteroom was as much fun as putting something over on Poincaré. He dawdled over his conversation with House.

House was preoccupied with his task: “I convinced him,” House dictated to the faithful Miss Denton when she typed out his diary, “I think, for the first time that a League of Nations was for the best interests of France … I called his attention to the fact that today there was only one great military power on the Continent of Europe and that was France … There was no balance of power so far as the Continent was concerned, because Russia had disappeared and both Germany and Austria had gone under … I asked whether or not in the circumstances France would not feel safer if England and America were in a position where they would be compelled to come to the aid of France in the event another nation like Germany should try to crush her … If she lost this chance which the United States offered through the League of Nations it would never come again … Wilson could force it through because, with all the brag and bluster of the Senate, they would not dare defeat a treaty made in agreement with the Allies, and thereby continue alone the war with Germany or make a separate peace.”

Clemenceau in his Splendeur et Misère de la Victoire described House with approval as “a supercivilized person escaped from the wilds of Texas, who sees everything, understands everything, and while never doing anything but what he thinks fit, knew how to gain the ear and the respect of everybody.” Certainly he wanted House to think well of him.

Maybe he really was convinced, for the moment. “The old man seemed to see it all,” noted House, “and became enthusiastic. He placed both hands on my shoulders and said, ‘You are right. I am for the League of Nations as you have it in mind and you may count upon me to work with you.’ ”

House took advantage of the Tiger’s enthusiasm to bring up the troublesome matter of reparations. Certain sections of the French press, known to be “inspired” by the government, were beginning to call for the cancellation of American war debts, at the same time demanding incredible billions in reparations from Germany. The Germans must not only be made to pay the whole cost of the war and repair all the damage the war had done, but they must furnish pensions for Allied veterans. “I urged him to use his influence to discourage such schemes. They were doing harm to France and would eventually prejudice the Americans against her.”

When House finally ushered Clemenceau into the meeting of the commissioners, it was obvious that the colonel’s absence had lasted too long. The President had been left to mark time with what he’d come to consider a group of dunderheads. Observers noted the chill in Wilson’s manner. Some dated from that moment the President’s alienation from his confidential colonel.

During the first days of January all Paris tingled with expectation. The city had never been more crowded. The population awaited the opening of the Peace Conference as they would await the opening of the season of horseracing or a world’s fair. People resorted to every conceivable intrigue to obtain admission to the opening session set for the Salon de l’Orloge at the Quai d’Orsay.

Every great hostelry flaunted the flag of some foreign potentate. The less expensive hôtels meublés were packed with humbler representatives of every nation, tribe, enclave, minority on the Eurasian continent. In uniform and out of uniform Greeks, Macedonians, Serbs, Montenegrins, Croats, Slovenes, Czechs and Slovaks, Transylvanians, Ukrainians, Galicians, Poles, Lithuanians, Esthonians, Latvians milled in the lobbies. There were robed Arabs of the Hedjaz chaperoned by legendary young Colonel Lawrence.

There were Palestine Arabs and Arabs of the Mespot, Persians, Kurds, Syrians, Christian Lebanese and Moslem Lebanese; representatives of Armenia and Azerbaidjan and Caucasian Georgia. There were Jewish Zionists, and contesting factions of Poles and Silesians and an envoy from the Duchy of Teschen.

Luxemburg had its mission, and Lichtenstein. A Swedish committee had come to ask for the Aaland Islands. Danish diplomats arrived to demand Schleswig-Holstein. Each group wanted something at the expense of its neighbors.

The American Commissioners Plenipotentiary had their offices at 4 Place de la Concorde in a rambling suite which included the old cabinets particuliers upstairs from Maxims, with their memories of the grand dukes and the superannuated whoopee of the Second Empire. Navy yeomen were in charge: Harold Nicolson remarked that the place smelled like a battleship. There security was rigorous. Marines scrutinized passes so sharply that many an important personage was left kicking his heels in the guardroom while clerks scuttled about looking for his identification. At the entrance swarthy delegations stormed around the tall immovable sentries begging for appointments with “Monsieur le Président Veelson.”

Disappointed there they would troop up the Champs Elysées to the Hotel Astoria near the Arc de Triomphe, where the British delegations had their offices. Every province of the empire on which the sun never set had its representative, with attendant bevies of experts and specialists. The entrance was barred to foreign inroads by a cordon of Tommies resplendent with brasspolish and pipeclay.

Around the edges of the recognized delegations hovered all sorts of adventurers peddling oil concessions or manganese mines, pretenders to dukedoms and thrones, cranks with shortcuts to Utopia in their briefcases, secret agents, art dealers, rug salesmen, procurers and pimps. Petites femmes solicited strangers on the boulevards with scraps of all the languages of Europe. Restaurants and nightclubs were packed to the last table. Taxis were at a premium. Business boomed at the Maison des Nations.

Even the Seine was in flood. The autumn rains had turned to intermittent slushy snow. The quais and lowlying streets were awash and the brown water swirled as high as the carved keystones of the bridges.

Excited by the carnival atmosphere, thrilled by the hope of humane and rational solutions, the younger men among the British and American delegations got along famously. They swapped back copies of The Nation and The New Republic for The Spectator or The Round Table. They exchanged luncheons at the Crillon for luncheons at the Hotel Majestic, where the British had imported an entire London staff, from headwaiter to dishwasher, so that their tabletalk should not be reported to foreign ears.

At the Crillon the eager young men might be rewarded with a glimpse of Colonel House’s receding chin as he slipped with silent tread down a corridor, but the important personages among the Americans kept out of sight.

At the Majestic the British leaders ate in full view. While you talked of the League the tall figure of its fosterfather, Lord Robert Cecil of the bulging forehead and bushy hair, might be seen unfolding like a jackknife from behind a table.

For any world problem you could find an expert with the facts at his fingertips. A great number of dedicated and wellintentioned and well-prepared people were putting all they had into solving the world’s ills. The American specialists were encouraged to find such likemindedness among the British. Such of them as could get through the language barrier found occasional young Frenchmen unexpectedly in accord. Full of hope they compared their plans to fashion a just peace and a League of Nations that would work.

Left in a certain isolation by the fact that the livelier spirits tended to foregather in Colonel House’s anterooms, the Secretary of State kept his nose to the grindstone. Lansing was a conscientious man. He liked precision. He was convinced that careful agenda must be prepared for the coming meetings. Over the Christmas period he suffered agonies from an ulcerated tooth. Mrs. Lansing was not a bit well. Illness in the family did not keep him from carefully elaborating a skeleton plan for a treaty for the President’s use, or from cooperating with House’s specialists in drawing up a tentative formula for a League of Nations. When he tried to explain his schemes to the President, he discovered, to his mortification, that the President was not in the least interested.

Wilson had his own ideas. According to House, he was still trying to fit his own sketch of a covenant for a League of Nations into thirteen headings. His constitution for the league was based on the draft House had presented the summer before. House’s assistants were sitting up nights harmonizing this document with Cecil’s reworking of the British Phillimore Committee’s plan, which had just been flown over from London, after some final touches by the energetic hand of the South African representative, Jan Christiaan Smuts. The President let Lansing know in no uncertain terms that he didn’t want him to meddle in the business. He didn’t want any lawyers, he told him in the tone he knew how to make so disagreeable. Problems of procedure did not interest him.

Lansing like House was a careful diarist. He made his entries in a small precise hand. On January 10 he recalled the hour’s conference with the President and the commissioners in General Bliss’s room, at which he presented his memorandum. “A very unsatisfactory session,” wrote Lansing. “Pres’t apparently resents anybody offering suggestions or doing anything in the way of drafting a treaty for a league of nations except himself … He said he did not want lawyers to engage in that.”

Lansing was proud of his knowledge of international law. It was his whole career. This remark of the President’s cut him to the quick. Years later, when he published his apologia for his part in the drama he wrote a whole chapter about it. From that moment he made no further suggestions about the covenant or the league.

He unburdened himself to his diary. “Auchincloss has shown me the President’s draft. It is most inartistically drawn and I believe will be riddled in its present form.”

Secretary Lansing had disagreed with the President once too often. From now on he was held at arm’s length. “Lansing is a man one cannot grow enthusiastic over,” House noted, “but I do think the President should treat him with more consideration.”

Two days later House was taken ill with a kidney ailment. He had a high fever and was in great pain. He had two nurses in attendance. The story got about that he was dying. Obituaries were actually published in the American press.

With Lansing mortally offended and his confidential colonel incapacitated, Wilson, who paid scant attention to the prolixities of General Bliss or to Henry White’s diplomatic anecdotes, and who didn’t even have a competent secretary, was left to struggle singlehanded in his initial bout with a group of the most astute political operators in Europe and Asia.

The leaders of the British delegation arrived in Paris on January 11. Lloyd George, fresh from his smashing victory at the polls, came surrounded by some of the ablest men in the United Kingdom. All political factions were represented except for Asquith’s Liberals. Arthur Balfour embodied the philosophy of the Conservative gentry in its most rarified form. Bonar Law could speak for the financial and manufacturing and mercantile interests, George Barnes for the trade unions. Cecil and Smuts, who were to be the godfathers of the British Commonwealth of Nations, stood for an international idealism as radical as Woodrow Wilson’s.

As a second string, Lloyd George, who was as skilled, as Wilson was deficient, in the art of using other men for his own purposes, had the premiers of the selfgoverning dominions: Hughes from Australia, Massey from New Zealand, Sir Robert Borden from Canada. Each of them represented the majority parties of their respective electorates. Smuts and Botha, at that moment, had all factions in South Africa behind them. In the background was a bevy of emirs and maharajahs, each animated by a knowledgeable Foreign Office adviser, from India and the Oriental protectorates. To organize and synchronize the work of the delegations came the accomplished Sir Maurice Hankey, fresh from a similar job for the Imperial War Cabinet. Largely because the Americans could not present anyone equally competent, Hankey became confidential secretary of the inner circle of the Peace Conference, and the only reporter of the most secret meetings of the Allied leaders.

The British prime minister arrived in Paris at the head of one of the most formidable groups of negotiators ever assembled. “On the other hand,” as Winston Churchill, who was then serving as Secretary of State for War put it, “he reached the Conference somewhat dishevelled by the vulgarities and blatancies of the recent general election. Pinned to his coat tails were the posters ‘Hang the Kaiser,’ ‘Search their pockets,’ ‘Make them pay’; and this sensibly detracted from the dignity of his entrance on the scene.”

The French, as hosts of the British and American delegations, had the advantage of being on their home ground. The Quai d’Orsay was almost as wellfurnished with brains as the Foreign Office. Clemenceau had the Chamber of Deputies under his thumb. Through Mandel’s alternating censorship and subsidy, he could play like an organist on all the varied political pipes, right, left and center, of the French press.

Though the Tiger found Foch and his generals even more troublesome in victory than they had been in defeat, he could give them their heads from time to time when he needed a fait accompli.

British observers noticed how much slower the Americans were than the Europeans in the give and take of repartee in committee work.

Although the prime ministers had been meeting right along in the guise of the Supreme War Council or at less formal interallied conferences, and had already established a set of rules by which they hoped to keep control of proceedings, the British and French looked forward with misgivings to the first plenary meetings of the representatives of all the Allied and Associated Powers. They knew that Lansing’s project was for the United States to marshal the smaller nations against what the Americans considered the evil designs of the Europeans, and they feared that, in the absence of the understanding Colonel House, he might carry President Wilson along with him.

Since Lansing’s crowd from the State Department commandeered all the tickets available for Americans, the members of House’s Inquiry, temporarily bereft of their guardian, had to content themselves on January 18 with watching the arrival of the dignitaries from the courtyard of the Foreign Office. Each arrival was greeted by a fanfare and a roll of drums as the plenipotentiary descended from his automobile or carriage. President Wilson removed his silk hat and bared his horseteeth in a good long smile for the benefit of the motionpicture cameras.

The arrival of the plenipotentiaries was a lengthy parade. The United States, Great Britain and France each had five delegates and, to the surprise of the bystanders, so had Japan. The Japanese diplomats had taken advantage of the Americans neglecting to attend a somewhat surreptitious meeting of the interallied council held in London before Christmas, while House was laid up with the flu, to insist that the British stand by their alliance. At a period in the war when Japanese torpedoboats were desperately needed for convoy service in the Mediterranean, the British had made further promises. So now five Japanese delegates, smiling and bowing and hissing through their teeth, filed in towards the seats allotted to the great powers. Without anybody’s knowing exactly how it happened the Big Four had become the Big Five.

Next in importance came Belgium, and Brazil, which had also furnished a few torpedoboats; and the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, with three delegates each. Then came China, Greece, the Hedjaz, Poland, Portugal, Rumania, Siam and the brandnew Czechoslovak Republic, with two. A crowd of nations that had been merely “technical belligerents” followed: Cuba, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Liberia, Nicaragua, Panama, Bolivia, Uruguay, Ecuador and Peru had one delegate apiece.

The confirmation of Japan’s admission to the inner circle, during the confused skirmishing of the final week before the Peace Conference opened, was a defeat for Woodrow Wilson. Another was the admission of five British dominions, which were also represented on the British Empire delegation, to the sessions in their own right. That afternoon at the Quai d’Orsay, two delegates were seated for Canada, Australia, South Africa and India, and one for New Zealand. As balm for President Wilson’s hurt feelings, he was allowed to remove Costa Rica, ruled by a dictator of whom he disapproved, from the list of technical belligerents.

When all the delegates were seated in the splendor of diplomatic uniforms or the gravity of frock coats amid the scarlet damask and the ormoulu, under the glittering chandeliers reflected in the long mirrors, amid the smell of furniture polish and musty hangings and pomade and cologne, President Poincaré arrived with a welcoming speech. Amid the applause that followed he waddled from delegate to delegate until he had shaken every hand. Some of the British amused themselves by noting that Mr. Wilson wore oldfashioned highbuttoned shoes.

Monsieur Clemenceau, in black skull cap and lisle gloves, hastened to assume the chair, provisionally it was announced. President Wilson gracefully proposed him for permanent chairman and he was duly elected. He proceeded expeditiously to conduct the election of vice presidents, a secretary, commissions to deal with this and that.

The first two items of the agenda were no surprise to anybody. (1) Responsibility of the authors of the war, (2) Responsibility for the crimes committed in the war. The third created quite a hubbub: legislation with regard to international labor. This was a tribute to the Communist threat.

Clemenceau allowed nobody to catch his breath. He raced through the items. The powers were requested to submit memoranda on these questions. In compliment to Mr. Wilson it was announced that at the next plenary meeting a society of nations would come first in the order of the day. Before anybody had put in a word the Tiger declared the meeting adjourned.

Harold Nicolson who attended as a young Foreign Office brain described Clemenceau as “highhanded with the smaller powers … ‘Y-a-t-il d’objections …? Non … adopté’ … like a machine gun.”

As they were getting their coats in the lobby, a friend of Nicolson’s found himself next to the veteran French diplomat Jules Cambon. “Mon cher,” he said, “savez-vous ce qui va resulter de cette conference?” He dragged out his vowels for emphasis: “Une impro-vis-a-tion.”

“Cynic” young Nicolson called him in his diary.

It was obvious to all concerned that the plenary conference was too unwieldy a body to accomplish anything. Even before it was organized two delegates from each of the five powers had been meeting regularly in Monsieur Pichon’s room. Now formally named, the Council of Ten proceeded to take up, in somewhat helterskelter fashion, all the questions which had been neglected since the signing of the armistice.

During the two months that had gone by since fighting ceased on the western front, none of the problems the plenipotentiaries had to deal with had stood still. The situations described on neat white papers in the briefcases of the specialists changed continually, and always for the worse.

The class war was overflowing the boundaries of Europe. In spite of column after column in the Allied press to the contrary, Lenin was stabilizing the merciless Communist regime. British detachments were seizing the oilwells throughout the Middle East and clear up to Baku, but they controlled very little beyond the range of their sentries’ rifles. In spite of all the French generals could do to stir up reaction and nationalism around the fringes of Bolshevism, Trotsky’s Red Army was regaining lost ground. The people starved, the people died, but the soviet organization remained.

In the borderlands of Europe and the Near East national selfdetermination was becoming a scourge. Amid famine, cholera and typhus newly hatched republics showed their mettle by attacking their weaker neighbors. In Paris the representatives of all these ethnic groups were tireless in their demands. Outlets to the sea; strategic frontiers, racial frontiers, linguistic frontiers; none of them coincided. Greedy hands were tearing the map of Europe to pieces.

As Tasker Bliss put it in a letter to his wife: “The submerged nations are coming to the surface and as soon as they appear they fly at somebody’s throat. They are like mosquitos, vicious from the moment of birth.”

No one man could keep the details in his head.

The three worst problems that continuously buzzed about President Wilson’s ears were: first the Japanese contention that the concessions which the Germans had wrung from China in the Shantung area be turned over to them instead of being given back to China; second the Italian demands (somewhat encouraged by House, who in return for Italian backing of the League, had promised Orlando that he would make the President see reason on strategic frontiers for Italy); and third, the disposition of the German colonies.

Harold Nicolson in his Peacemaking told of being called all of a sudden as an expert on Italian boundaries to attend Arthur Balfour at a conference at the Hôtel de Mûrat. He quoted from his diary:

“On arrival pickets of police, troops, much saluting. Wilson is much guarded. We are taken up to an upper gallery which contains a glass roof and a statue of Napoleon in Egypt … Balfour is ushered into a room on the right. We others wait outside for two and a half hours, while the drone of voices comes from the next room. Mrs. Wilson passes, her high heels tocking on the parquet, a mass of mimosa in her arms. The old butler enters and puts on the lights one by one. I read The Irish Times.”

Suddenly the door opened and out came Lloyd George, followed by Bonar Law, Balfour and President Wilson.

Balfour introduced Nicolson as a young friend who knew all about Italian boundaries. “Now let me see what was it we wanted? Ah yes, Fiume.”

“No not Fiume, we had all that,” said Wilson. Nicolson noticed his southern drawl.

President Wilson wanted to know the exact number of Germans who would be annexed to Italy if the frontier were set at the Brenner Pass. Nicolson estimated the number at two hundred and forty or maybe two hundred and fortyfive thousand.

“Well a matter of thousands anyway,” said the President airily.

“Yes and anti-Italian thousands,” spoke up Nicolson, who at that moment was an enthusiast for selfdetermination and for every one of the Fourteen Points.

“You mean they are pro-German?”

Nicolson contended that they were pro-Tyrol.

The President then asked for statistics on Fiume. What was the dividing line between Fiume and Susak? Ashak, corrected Nicolson tactfully; that was the Yugoslav suburb. A mere rivulet divided them.

The President said the Italians had told him that if you tried to pass from Fiume to Ashak you were certain to be murdered. Nicolson demurred.

“I guessed he was talking through his hat,” said the President cheerfully. “Well good night to you gentlemen. Good night Mr. Balfour.”

“We withdrew,” noted Nicolson. “This is called giving expert advice.”

Nicolson found the President younger than his photographs. “One does not see the teeth except when he smiles which is an awful gesture.” He described the President’s shoulders as broad and his waist narrow, the face very large in proportion to his height. His clothes “those of a tailor’s block, very neat and black and tidy; striped trousers; high collar; pink pin.”

As they walked downstairs Balfour, who was a courteous man, apologized for having kept Nicolson waiting so long. “To tell the truth the last half hour we have only been discussing whether Napoleon or Frederick the Great could be called disinterested patriots.” Nicolson asked what conclusion they reached. Balfour could not remember.

It was a relief to Wilson to turn from the illtempered wrangling over geographical and ethnological details that went on in the Council of Ten to the academic calm of the commission, which he was appointed to head at the second plenary meeting of the Peace Conference on January 25, to draw up the constitution for a League of Nations. Drawing up constitutions had been his hobby since he was a college student. This was the sort of thing he had been looking forward to, so House put it, “as an intellectual treat.”

The meetings took place around a large oval table in Colonel House’s comfortable salon at the Crillon. House stagemanaged the proceedings with his usual selfeffacing hospitality. Wilson and House represented the United States. Cecil and rugged General Smuts — who spoke from experience, nourished not only from books, but from the rude personal vicissitudes of a life studded with victories and defeats in war and in politics — represented the British Empire. Longwinded Léon Bourgeois and a fellow international lawyer represented France, Orlando and a colleague from the Italian Senate, Italy. The Japanese had two and the Belgians, Czechoslovaks, Chinese, Portuguese, Serbians and Brazilians one member each.

The committeemen were interested and cooperative. The work, based on a draft drawn up by British and American experts who had tried to cull the best out of Smuts’ and Cecil’s and Wilson’s plans, proceeded so smoothly that at the end of ten meetings the document was ready to be presented to the plenary assembly.

The American secretaries and attendant specialists noted with pleasure the skill and tact with which their President dealt with thorny problems and with some of the thorny characters at the committee table. On February 7 House noted, after a particularly successful session: “Many important articles adopted. Practically everything originates from our end of the table, that is with Lord Rob’t Cecil and the Pres, and I acting as adviser. The P. excels in such work. He seems to like it and his short talks in explanation of his views are admirable. I have never known anyone to do such work so well.”

As the drafting progressed the idea of the covenant more and more assumed a mystical significance to Woodrow Wilson: through all the deep tunnels of his memory the word resounded. It carried him back to the religious dedication of his boyhood, through his father’s sacred stories of the Scots Covenanters who were their forebears, to the Old Testament pact between Almighty God and His chosen people. It irked him that there were people in the world who did not appreciate the divine appointment of his dedication to the great task.

The French press, which most of the Americans scorned as flippant and venal, was shifting from the reverential treatment accorded “Meester Veelson” during his first days in Paris. Squibs and cartoons were appearing. Wilson’s patience broke down completely when a leading article that he considered scurrilous appeared in the respectable Figaro.

“President Wilson,” the article read, “has lightly assumed a responsibility such as few men have ever borne. Success in his idealistic efforts will undoubtedly place him among the greatest characters of history. But let us admit frankly that if he should fail, he would plunge the world into a chaos of which Russian Bolshevism is but the feeble image; and his responsibility before the conscience of the world would be heavier than any simple mortal could support.”

In theory Wilson was all for freedom of the press but this was going too far. Although the signature was “Capus,” he suspected that the voice was the voice of Clemenceau. Edith Wilson led the outraged chorus in the little family party at the Hôtel de Mûrat. The President sent Grayson running to Ray Baker to instruct him to release a story that if the propaganda against the assembled governments were not curbed immediately President Wilson would propose moving the conference to a neutral city. On his way Grayson confided in House.

House expostulated. “To my mind it was a stupid blunder,” the colonel noted angrily in his diary. Although Mandel refused to allow his newspapers to print any report of President Wilson’s threat, he did tone down, for a while, the gibes of the Paris press.

On the surface everything was splendor and serenity at the plenary session of the Peace Conference which took place on Valentine’s Day in the Salon de l’Orloge. The fact that the President was leaving that night for Brest in order to reach Washington in time for the closing of the Sixty-fifth Congress added to the air of drama. Monsieur Clemenceau opened the meeting and immediately gave President Wilson the floor. Wilson seemed to his friends to be in unusually fine form when he reported, his fine voice thrilling with pride, the unanimous agreement of the committee representing fourteen nations on the text he was about to read.

With careful enunciation he read the preamble:

“In order to secure international peace and security by the acceptance of obligations not to resort to the use of armed force, 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, and in order to promote international cooperation, the Powers signatory to this Covenant adopt this constitution of the League of Nations.”

He went on to read the twentytwo articles, establishing an executive council in which the United States, Great Britain, France, Italy and Japan should have the leadership, a body of delegates of the lesser states, a secretariat, the machinery for consultation and arbitration … The High Contracting Parties agreed “to respect and preserve … the territorial integrity and existing political independence” of all member states … An international court of justice, reduction of armaments. Sanctions against transgressors, the abrogation of all treaties inconsistent with the covenant …

The words “High Contracting Parties” resounded like a refrain from article to article. To many of the men listening in the airless hall it seemed the consummation of twentyfive years of effort to secure a world polity. The President’s speech was received with profound emotion. Tears were streaming down House’s face when he shook the President’s hand in the ovation that followed.

Although delegates’ wives were categorically excluded, Edith Wilson had induced Clemenceau to get her and Cary Grayson smuggled in. They sat on stiff chairs in a tiny alcove behind a red brocaded curtain.

“It was a great moment in history and as he stood there — slender, calm and powerful in his argument — I seemed to see the people of all depressed countries — men and women and little children crowding round and waiting upon his words.”

The covenant was unanimously accepted and Edith Wilson had the pleasure, peering through a crack in the curtains, of seeing the delegates crowding around to press her husband’s hand. The Tiger had been insistent that she should not let herself be seen or else “he’d have all the other wives on his neck.” The hall cleared fast. When the last coattail had disappeared out of the door Edith Wilson and Cary Grayson tiptoed out of their hiding place. The presidential limousine was waiting for them in the courtyard below. Woodrow Wilson took off his silk hat and leaned back against the cushions. She asked him if he were tired. “Yes I suppose I am, but how little one man means when such vital things are at stake.”

The President had a last conference with House before setting off for the train. “I outlined my plan of procedure during his absence,” noted the colonel. “I told him I thought we could button up everything during the next four weeks. He seemed startled and even alarmed by the statement. I therefore explained that my plan was not to actually bring these matters to a final conclusion but to have them ready for him to do so when he returned. This pleased him.” House drove with the Wilsons to the station.

There were the usual palms and flags and red carpets, President and Madame Poincaré, Clemenceau patient behind his mustaches, the Cabinet in frock coats, ambassadors, attachés. Just before the President stepped on the train he sought out his confidential colonel, who as usual was allowing himself to melt into the background. He was seen to place his hand on House’s shoulders and whisper, “Heavy work before you, House.” “He looked happy,” wrote House, “as well indeed he should.”

President Wilson’s trip home was an indifferent success. Landing in Boston he was greeted amiably by a sourfaced little man named Calvin Coolidge, who was the new Republican governor of Massachusetts, and by a crowd that packed Mechanics’ Hall and spread out along Huntington Avenue. They cheered him till the rafters rang. Henry Cabot Lodge, who was already excoriating the League on the Senate floor, took fresh umbrage at the President’s having addressed a Boston crowd. Wilson was trying to undercut him in his own bailiwick.

The President arrived in Washington in time to preside at a White House dinner of thirtysix covers for the members of the Senate and House committees on foreign affairs. He told stories and answered questions with his most disarming smile.

“I never saw Mr. Wilson appear so human or so attractive as that night,” Congressman J. J. Rogers wrote Henry White, who was keeping up a busy correspondence from Paris with his Republican friends in an effort to cozen them into going along with the League idea.

Lodge himself admitted that the dinner had been pleasant, that the President “was civil and showed no temper,” but claimed that he seemed illinformed about the constitution of the League of Nations, particularly on the subject of mandates. “We went away as wise as we came.”

The President’s few days in Washington were largely spent signing his name. However, he found time to review, amid exuberant crowds, a parade of returned soldiers. Newton Baker’s War Department was bringing the doughboys home almost as fast as it got them transported overseas. Every move towards demobilization received universal acclaim. It was remarked that the American public thought war was like baseball. “We won; let’s go home.”

The immediate results of the President’s dinnerparty were unfortunate. Senator Frank Brandegee of Connecticut and Senator Lodge and a group of kindred spirits, alarmed at the influence they feared the President’s declarations might have with the public, immediately introduced a resolution to the effect that the Senate opposed the League of Nations, as at present constituted, and demanded the immediate negotiation of peace with Germany on terms favorable to the United States.

The Wilson Democrats managed to block their resolution. Brandagee and Lodge gave the document to the press in the form of a “round robin.” They secured the signatures of thirtynine senators, enough to prevent ratification of any treaty under the twothirds rule.

When Wilson appeared at the President’s room in the Senate wing to sign the last bills, he found the Sixtyfifth Congress expiring in turmoil and confusion. A Republican filibuster, largely animated by that willful man, La Follette, prevented the passage of essential appropriation bills. The President would be forced almost immediately to call a special session of the new Sixtysixth Congress which was safely in Republican hands.

It was in a defiant mood that the President arrived in New York to go aboard the George Washington. He met some encouragement there. When he went through the streets, protected, so the newspapers said, by the largest contingent of police ever seen in the city, he was greeted by cheering crowds estimated as nearly as large as the crowds on Armistice Day. Al Smith presided over a monster audience gathered in the Metropolitan Opera House to hear the President. Caruso sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Ex-President Taft, who had been wearing out his health on a speaking tour in behalf of the League of Nations, made the introductory address. The two men appeared on the stage arm in arm as the band played “Over There” and the platform committee tried to whoop up an ovation.

“The first thing I am going to tell the people on the other side of the water,” declared Woodrow Wilson, “is that an overwhelming majority of the American people is in favor of the League of Nations.”

The New York Times reporter discerned no overwhelming applause. Certain expressions aroused “short nervous moments of clapping.” He described the audience as intent, attentive to every word.

A large part of the speech was an attack on the President’s critics. “The men who utter the criticisms have never felt the great pulse of the heart of the world.”

Wilson announced for the hundredth time his dedication to the cause the soldiers had given their lives for. He was determined there would be no peace without the covenant: “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.”

Freed, for a while, from the sermonizings of the American president, the negotiators in Paris turned eagerly to House. Lip service had been paid to the “noble candeur” of Wilson’s aspirations for a league to abolish war. The time had come to get down to practical business. The colonel expressed understanding of everybody’s problems. Orlando called him “my dear friend.” He was Clemenceau’s chum.

When Lloyd George, facing an uprising in Parliament and suffering daily tonguelashings from the Northcliffe press, went home to trim his fences, he left the absentminded and philosophic Balfour in command. Though skeptical of the perfectability of human affairs, Balfour was a thoroughly humane man. House and Balfour became thick as thieves.

They agreed that before bolshevism made any further inroads the German peace terms must be settled. A bad peace today might be better than a good peace three months later. The League of Nations must temporarily be shelved in favor of a preliminary treaty.

The American and British plenipotentiaries had an appointment for a meeting with Clemenceau on this very topic at House’s office at the Crillon at ten the morning of February 19. The Tiger, so House explained, with perhaps a touch of fatuity, in his diary, “had come around to my way of thinking that it was best to make a quick and early peace with Germany.”

House and Balfour were waiting for him when news came that the French Premier had been assassinated as he left his house on his way to the meeting.

Stephen Bonsal, House’s interpreter in French, reported that Balfour exclaimed “Dear, dear” in his dreamy way, as if someone had spilled a cup of tea; “I wonder what that portends.”

They were soon reassured. Clemenceau was seriously wounded but he was far from dead. A demented young man named Cottin, shouting that he was a Frenchman and an anarchist, had jumped on the runningboard of Clemenceau’s car and shot seven bullets at him with a revolver. Only one took effect but it lodged much too near the lung for safety. The Tiger remained unruffled. He insisted that the madman’s sentence should not be too severe and kept making jokes about how it disgusted him to find that, after four years of war, any Frenchman could be such a bad shot.

The doctors ordered quiet. Clemenceau laughed at the doctors. He was a doctor himself. Three days after the attempt on his life, he was sending Mandel to ask House to call on him. House found him in his apartment, out near Passy, sitting up in an armchair, wrapped in an old army blanket with a soiled silk muffler around his neck. A Sister of Mercy in a big butterfly cap, whom Clemenceau kept teasing unmercifully, hovered over him for a nurse.

“The poor old fellow,” wrote House, “has not been able to leave his chair since he was shot”—when he tried to lie down he started to choke. “He speaks of it as ‘the accident.’ He should not be permitted to see visitors but I suppose he is so insistent that they think it is best to humor him. I was surprised to see the very humble apartment where he lives.”

Bonsal, who went along, found the Tiger “gay as a cricket”; he quoted him as telling House in his quaint fluent English, “As I cannot lie down since that madman shot me I naturally will not let anyone else lie down. I shall insist on a little speed being turned on. I am confident that if we Americans”—he grinned through his mustache. It amused him to think of himself as an American—“and the British and French could only get together we could push through the peace treaty with Germany in a very few days and then we would be at liberty to take up arrangements with Austria, Turkey, and the Bulgars — and those fellows should not detain us for long.”

Speed was essential. Behind the blockade Germany was starving. The Spartacist revolt seemed on the verge of success. Although Joffe and his propagandists had been forcibly expelled from the Russian Embassy in Berlin by the Social Democratic Government, Communist rubles and Communist agitators remained behind. Although the Social Democrats were firmly backed by the rank and file of returning soldiers, they were desperately put to it to preserve order. Only in January a Spartacist revolt had been suppressed with great loss of life. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the most eloquent of the revolutionists, were killed at that time. News came daily of further uprisings. Kurt Eisner, on whom all German moderates depended, was assassinated in Munich. A Communist coup threatened in Bavaria.

In Russia Trotsky was using the winter breathingspace to improve the organization and rifle power of his Red Army. At the same time on the anti-Bolshevik frontier the Czechs were fighting the Poles for Vilna. Other Polish contingents were trying to take Lemburg from the Ukrainians. Where they weren’t fighting their neighbors the liberated Poles fought among themselves. As fast as the Supreme War Council furnished them arms they turned them on each other.

The French military were busy everywhere. Foch had the bit in his teeth. His agents were stimulating a movement for an independent Rhine-land. His plans were Napoleonic. He was airily telling the Supreme War Council that if they would give him a hundred thousand Americans he’d solve the bolshevik problem once and for all. He’d raise an army of Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians and Balts and, with the Americans as a solid core, he would mop up the Reds to the Urals.

Bliss, representing the United States, sat stoneyfaced. He called it a program for a new Thirty Years War. He exploded in a private letter to Mrs. Bliss: “We ought to get out of Europe, horse, foot and dragoons.”

Lloyd George came back to Paris full of new zest for reparations. He had to bring home something tangible for his electorate. The British experts had settled on a sum amounting to a hundred and forty billion dollars. The French went them one better by demanding two hundred billion. Most of the Americans agreed with Baruch that it didn’t make sense to even talk of anything more than twenty billions. Both Lloyd George and Clemenceau admitted to House in private that the Germans would not be able to pay these astronomic sums, but talk of big sums was what the people wanted. “I was amused and struck,” House noted, “by the cynical way they discussed their people.”

In order to hurry a preliminary treaty through, House was making concessions right and left. He was getting concessions in return. “It is now evident,” he wrote, “that the peace will not be such a peace as I had hoped.”

On the first day of March, Clemenceau was back in his chair presiding over the meetings in Monsieur Pichon’s parlor. At his best he was lively as ever, but people noted that he tended to drowse off during discussions. Often he was in pain. The old ivory of his eyelids would drop over his strangely animal-like eyes, and he’d sleep gently as a baby; except when something came up pertaining to French demands. Then he would be awake in a moment.

March 2, House noted in his diary, was Texan independence day. “I wish I was home to celebrate it.”

Though stimulated by the free hand the President’s absence gave him to model history as he’d dreamed of doing, House was far from encouraged by the prospect ahead. “There is scarcely a man here in authority, outside of the President, who has a full and detached understanding of the situation … The President himself lacks a certain executive quality which in some measure unfits him for the supreme task … If the President should exert his influence among the liberals and laboring classes, he might possibly overthrow the governments of Great Britain, France and Italy, but if he did he might bring the whole world into chaos …”

House felt the weight of the world on his shoulders. “It is Archangel and Murmansk at one moment, the left bank of the Rhine the next, next Asia Minor, the African Colonies, the Chinese-Japanese difference, the economic situation as to raw materials, the food situation … No one can ever know how hardpressed I have been during the past month.”

March 6 he had a cosy lunch along with Lloyd George at the prime minister’s apartment off from the Place des États-Unis. The Welshman made a clean breast of it to the confidential colonel. He had to bring home the bacon. The British electorate dreamed of reparations to cut down their taxes, to pay war pensions, to float new industries. The colonials wanted repayment for their sacrifices out of the German colonies.

“It always amused me to have George say in his naïve way that he has done this or that or the other for political effect but that he really knew better,” noted House musingly. “He doesn’t seem to have any ingrown sense of right and wrong, but only looks at things from the standpoint of expediency … with all his faults,” the colonel concluded, “he is by birth, instinct and upbringing a liberal.”

Decisions had to be made. Problems had been postponed too long to be settled properly. Lloyd George was beginning to promise Clemenceau a separate treaty guaranteeing France from attack in return for French complaisance to British demands. He would even build a tunnel under the Channel to bring British troops over faster.

“When the President was away,” wrote House of these informal meetings, “I never hesitated to act and take as much responsibility as either of the others.”

By the time Wilson arrived back in Paris the three Europeans, plus House, had managed to freeze out the Japanese delegation. The reiterated request of the little yellow brethren that racial equality be written into the covenant was as embarrassing to the British colonials as it was to President Wilson. In the strictest secrecy, at meetings which, as soon as Wilson arrived were to be given official status as the Council of Four, they were at work on a preliminary treaty with Germany.

The President arrived at Brest on March 13 too late to leave for Paris the same night. He had insisted on the George Washington making port on his lucky thirteenth. He was recovering his equanimity after the disappointments of his trip back to America. The sea voyage did him a world of good. Edith and Dr. Grayson thought him in fine fettle.

He arrived in an ugly mood towards House. The confidential colonel’s plan for a preliminary treaty conflicted with his decision not to sign any treaty that didn’t have the covenant imbedded in it. He was worried, and with reason, for fear Lodge’s round robin would serve as an excuse to shelve the whole plan for a League of Nations. Reports from the British and American newspapers gave him reason to believe a rumor was being circulated that the League was dead.

Edith Wilson never had liked House any better than she liked McAdoo. Now she saw a chance to get rid of him. “A regular jellyfish,” she called him. She kept telling her husband that House was weakkneed; and, besides, he got too much publicity. He was no longer the anonymous adviser. Last spring the President had had to write personally to Doubleday Page, the publishers, suggesting that they quietly drop Arthur Howden Smith’s book called The Real Colonel House. Now House was being written up in the British and American press as the brains of the Peace Conference. His photographs were everywhere. Wickham Stead, one of the foremost British advocates of a League of Nations, was giving House all the credit.

Grayson agreed with Mrs. Wilson. A “yes man,” he called the confidential colonel. The whole presidential party was up in arms against Colonel House. Even the secretservice men were indignant about how he had sold out the President.

House rode down to Brest on Poincaré’s train to meet his affectionate friend. Although House states in his journal for March 14: “I did not go out to the George Washington to meet President and Mrs. Wilson, but met them at the landing stage,” both Mrs. Wilson and E. W. Starling, one of the secretservice men, describe in their recollections a scene in the President’s stateroom aboard the ship.

Starling described, to the journalist who wrote up his story, the President and Colonel House being closeted that night in the President’s cabin.

“… After what seemed like a long time Colonel House emerged from the suite, looking disturbed and walking rapidly. As I stepped inside to close the door I saw the President standing, his eyes fixed on me but showing no recognition … His face was pale and seemed drawn and tired. The whole figure expressed dejection. I closed the door, mentally cursing Colonel House.”

Edith Wilson remembered the scene even more dramatically. “I look back at that moment,” she wrote in My Memoir, “as a crisis in his life, and feel that from it dated the long years of illness, due to overwork, and that with the wreckage of his plans and his life have come these tragic years that have demoralized the world.”

Her account of the scene was vivid: “It was after midnight and very still aboard, when I heard my husband’s door open and the Colonel take his leave … Woodrow was standing. The change in his appearance shocked me. He seemed to have aged ten years, and his jaw was set in that way it had when he was making a superhuman effort to control himself. Silently he held out his hand, which I grasped, crying ‘What is the matter? What has happened?’

“He smiled bitterly. ‘House has given away everything I had won before I left Paris. He has compromised on every side, and so I have to start all over again, and this time it will be harder.’ ”

Wherever the interview took place — Ray Baker writes of it as taking place on the train — it was tense. The President blamed House for having induced him to set the senators up to that dinner; “Your dinner … was a failure as far as getting together was concerned,” House remembered his saying. The senators had been intransigent. The President would have no part of a preliminary peace with Germany. If they forced him he’d insist on a preliminary peace with every one of the belligerents.

House summed up the conversation: “The President comes back very militant and determined to put League of Nations into treaty.”

This time the President and his party put up in the newer quarter of Paris, near the apartment house where Lloyd George and Balfour were lodged. The President didn’t want to be beholden to the French for his residence; the Hôtel de Mûrat was too napoleonic to be comfortable and, besides, he was convinced the French flunkies there were all spies. Eleven Place des Etats-Unis was an art nouveau mansion belonging to a banker named Bischoffsheim. It contained a fine collection of paintings. Edith Wilson’s bathroom was ornamented with enamelled appleblossoms. The lighting fixture was a tangle of birds and butterflies. There were gold faucets at the washstand. On the square outside rose Bartholdi’s sculptured group of Lafayette being received by George Washington.

The President immediately ordered the cluttered parlors cleared for office space. His first act was to have Ray Baker issue a statement to the press:

“The President said today that the decision made at the Peace Conference at its plenary session, January 25, 1919, to the effect that the establishment of a League of Nations should be made an integral part of the Treaty of Peace, is of final force and that there is no basis whatever for the reports that a change in this decision was contemplated.”

The work of the Council of Four became an unremitting grind. Wilson’s insistence on scrapping plans for a preliminary peace meant that many things had to be taken up all over again. It wasn’t long before Clemenceau and Lloyd George and Orlando, each in his particular way, discovered how to handle President Wilson. If they threatened the League of Nations he would make concessions. He would give up anything for the covenant.

The detail work was punishing to everyone concerned. The Council of Four did not suffer from a lack of information. It suffered from the excess of it.

Hordes of specialists, and good ones, were ready to produce statistics on every conceivable subject. Their difficulty was in finding out what use the Big Four were making of their reports. The proceedings, except when some one of the olympians leaked a story to the press for some particular purpose, were shrouded in the blackest secrecy.

The British delegations had the advantage of a discreet summary of developments distributed daily by Sir Maurice Hankey. Wilson never saw fit to inform his various teams of what was going on. Lansing’s men didn’t know what House’s men were up to. Neither group had any consistent contact with Baruch’s commission.

Herbert Hoover, schooled in the troubled waters of international intrigue by his experience in Belgium, went doggedly ahead with Quaker tenacity organizing his relief work where it was most needed; but, although he knew more than anybody about what actually went on among the populations whose fate was being so arbitrarily decided, he was hardly consulted; and his only information about what was being decided upstairs came from occasional chats with Colonel House.

The Secretary of State was reduced to sitting in glum idleness in sessions of the various councils, which went on revolving as a series of fifth wheels after the Big Four had gone into their inner sanctum. Lansing amused himself making sketches of the delegates on his pad. As for Henry White and Tasker Bliss their opinions were never asked. They were reduced to tagging after House’s soninlaw, Auchincloss, for any little hints of news he would vouchsafe them. House was still consulted, but Edith Wilson and Grayson were busy behind the scenes whittling away what little influence he had left.

The President had rolled up his sleeves. There was no one he could trust. He would have to take the whole business on singlehanded. At first he put up a stubborn battle to reduce French demands for the left bank of the Rhine, for a Rhenish republic and for the coalfields of the Saar. None of this could be made to jibe with the pledge of selfdetermination in the Fourteen Points. By the end of March the discussion culminated in a personal row with Clemenceau. Unless France had the Saar, growled the Tiger, he would not sign the peace treaty. “In that event do you want me to return home?” asked the President in the tone he could make like a whip. Clemenceau lost his temper. “I do not wish you to go home, but I intend to do so myself.” He stamped out of the room.

The peacemaking was at a deadlock. Lloyd George confided in House that he was impressed by the President’s show of spirit. House tried to rub it in about how terrible the President was in his rages.

On April 3 Mrs. Wilson telephoned House that the President was sick with a cold and that he was requesting that House take his place at the Council of Four. The President was in bed with what Dr. Grayson described as influenza. He had a high fever and a cough that kept him from sleeping.

It is probable that along with the grippe Wilson suffered a minor cerebral hemorrhage. When he got to his feet Ray Baker noticed a taut look on one side of his face. The eye twitched constantly.

Ike Hoover, the White House usher, who now officiated in striped pants and a cutaway in the waiting room to the President’s suite, dated a drastic change in the President’s personality from this bout of illness.

From his sickbed Wilson made good his threat to Clemenceau by letting Ray Baker leak to the press the fact that he’d cabled the skipper of the George Washington to get the ship ready to bring him home.

When the President returns to the council meetings he finds everybody more conciliatory. His colleagues are in a flurry to get the business over with. A gruff reminder that there is reason for haste comes to the Big Four when the liberal Count Karolyi, failing of support by the western powers, gives up in despair his effort to reorganize Hungary and is replaced in Budapest by the Communist Bela Kun.

Concessions become the order of the day. President Wilson himself makes the sort of concessions he blamed House for even suggesting. He concedes the Saar and the left bank of the Rhine to France, but for fifteen years only. The Tiger agrees to the time limit. The President makes Clemenceau even happier by joining with Lloyd George in the promise of a separate treaty guaranteeing France from attack. He accepts the exaction of unlimited reparations from Germany.

Through Smuts’ influence mandates under the League are substituted for outright possession of the German colonies. The Poles are given the chance of a plebiscite in Silesia. The Japanese are assured that if they drop their untimely insistence on racial equality, justification will be found for their exploitation of the Shantung peninsula. Everybody is happy except the Italians.

On April 13 the Four decide they are ready to invite the German representatives to Versailles to hear their fate. The Austrians will come to St. Germain a little later. The Turks and Bulgars can wait. All idea of a Congress of Versailles where victor and vanquished would meet with the neutral states to establish the reign of justice and commonsense has long since been abandoned.

The Italians are raising a storm about Fiume. The subtle Venizelos is getting concessions for the Greeks that conflict with Italian plans in the Aegean. Wilson has given the Italians sovereignty over the German-speaking Tyrol so that they may have their strategic frontier. He feels that should satisfy them. Clemenceau and Lloyd George back him up.

On April 22, amid distressed entries about Italian intrigue, House notes in his diary that it is San Jacinto day. Again he wishes he were home in Texas.

Next day Orlando announces that without Fiume, Italy will never sign the peace treaty. The Council of Four is deadlocked again.

The President is on his high horse. He types out a statement on his own typewriter appealing to the Italian people, pointing out that they have been given the Brenner Pass. They have Trieste. Adjacent Fiume must be a free port serving the new nations of the Balkans and the Danube Valley. He begs the Italians “to exhibit to the newly liberated peoples across the Adriatic that noblest quality of greatness, magnanimity, friendly generosity, the preference of justice over interests.”

Grayson hurries the statement to Ray Baker who broadcasts it to the press.

The result is that crowds march about Rome crying “Abasso Veelson.” Humble Italians who had pasted up the President’s photograph on their walls beside the effigies of la santissima tear them down. The streets of Fiume are decorated with posters showing President Wilson in a German helmet. Orlando and Sonnino depart for Rome in a huff.

Lloyd George, though he doesn’t want the Italians to have Fiume, keeps on suggesting soothing compensations in the carving up of the Turkish dominions. Not many days elapse before Sonnino and Orlando are back in Paris as if nothing has happened.

What is now the Council of Three is cosier without Orlando. Compensation for everybody is the watchword now. They meet at Lloyd George’s flat or in President Wilson’s study on the Place des Etats-Unis. They pore over maps. They trace out railroads, rivervalleys, ethnographic boundaries, spot coalmines. Details, details. Complication on complication. They keep forgetting the strange names, the location of tunnels, the ports. They are tired. The facts slip through their fingers, details blur. Both Clemenceau and Wilson are severely shaken in health. Lloyd George, though a well man, is easily distracted as a sparrow.

Harold Nicolson, who as a Foreign Office specialist has been detailed to the olympians, jots down glimpses of them at work. First, one May morning at Lloyd George’s flat: “We are still discussing when the flabby Orlando and the sturdy Sonnino are shown into the dining-room. They all sit around the map. The appearance of a pie about to be distributed is thus enhanced. Ll.G. shows them what he suggests. They ask for Scala Nova as well. ‘Oh no,’ says Ll.G., ‘you can’t have that. It’s full of Greeks.’ He goes on to point out that there are further Greeks at Marki, and a whole wedge of them along the coast towards Alexandretta. ‘Oh no,’ I whisper to him, ‘there are not many Greeks there.’ ‘But yes,’ he answers, ‘don’t you see it’s colored green?’ I then realize that he mistakes my map for an ethnological map, and thinks the green means Greeks instead of valleys, and the brown means Turks instead of mountains. Ll.G. takes this correction with great good humor. He is quick as a kingfisher.”

That afternoon Nicolson is called into a meeting of the Three to President Wilson’s study. He thinks of them as the witches in Macbeth.

“The door opens and Hankey tells me to come in. A heavily furnished study with my huge map on the carpet. Bending over it (bubble, bubble, toil and trouble) are Clemenceau, Ll.G. and P.W. They have pulled up armchairs and crouch low over the map … I was there about a half an hour talking and objecting. The President was extremely nice and so was Ll.G. Clemenceau was cantankerous … ‘Mais voyez vous, jeune homme, que voulez-vous qu’on fosse? Il faut aboutir.’

“It is appalling,” Nicolson adds, “that these ignorant and irresponsible men should be cutting Asia Minor to bits as if they were dividing a cake … The happiness of millions being decided that way … Their decisions are immoral and impracticable … But I obey my orders.” Il faut aboutir.

April 29 the German plenipotentiaries arrive at Versailles. The French shut them up in a small house inside a barbed wire enclosure as if they were prisoners.

May 7, which the Allied newspapers make much of as the anniversary of the sinking of the Lusitania, the Germans are summoned to the Trianon at Versailles. It is a fine spring day. The sunlight pours in through the tall windows as the German plenipotentiaries walk in to meet the victorious powers. Clemenceau presides. Count Brockdorff-Rantzau, a skinny man in black who with tremulous steps has led in the German envoys, doesn’t glance at the document. Without rising — his friends claim he is so nervous he can’t trust his legs to support him — he launches into a speech defending the German people from full responsibility for the war. He accuses the Allies bitterly of having caused the death of thousands of noncombatants by continuing the blockade after the armistice. He declares the principles of President Wilson to be binding on victor and vanquished. He announces that the German people are ready to cooperate wholeheartedly in putting into effect the principles enunciated in the Fourteen Points.

His speech, translated sentence by sentence, is received with cold hostility, aggravated by the seeming discourtesy of the man’s not rising to his feet. “Any more observations?” growls Clemenceau. “If not the meeting is closed.”

The German Government promptly complies with the Fourteen Points by making public the terms of the treaty. Many of the American delegates in Paris first read it when a clandestine translation is hawked about the streets. At home in the States the members of the Senate and House committees for foreign affairs are thrown into a fury because nobody has thought to furnish them with an official text. They have to read the details in the newspapers.

The more farseeing Americans in Paris receive the treaty with almost as much dismay as the Germans. Herbert Hoover writes in his memoirs of being waked up at four in the morning of May 7 by a messenger bringing him the text. In this Hoover is one of the favored few. He sits up in bed and reads it through. “I was greatly disturbed … It seemed to me the economic consequences alone would pull down all Europe and thus injure the United States.”

Hoover is so disturbed he has to get up. He dresses and goes out on the street to try to walk off his agitation. The sun is rising. The streets are deserted. “In a few blocks I met General Smuts and John Maynard Keynes … It flashed in all our minds why the others were walking about at that time of day … We agreed that it was terrible, and we would do what we could … to make the dangers clear.”

At the eleventh hour Lloyd George has an attack of conscience. He tries to get Wilson, Clemenceau and Orlando to agree to modifications and adjustments suggested by the saner men in all the delegations. Nicolson describes him as fighting “like a little Welsh terrier” in the Council of Four to set a limit to reparations, to revise the eastern frontiers, and to assure Germany of admission into the League. To the surprise of the specialists it is Wilson this time who refuses to budge. Litera scripta manet.

The day the new batch of German envoys arrives at Versailles with instructions from the Weimar Government to sign the treaty at any cost, the news comes out that the crews have scuttled the entire German fleet, interned, according to the armistice terms, under the eyes of the British, at Scapa Flow.

The French have spared no effort to make the signing of the peace treaty a mighty show. Above the heads of the crowd at Versailles the blue and white pennants on the lances of the cavalrymen lining the long avenue flutter in the sun of a fine summer’s day. The tallest of the Garde Republicain stand like statues in their horsehair helmets on either side of Louis XIV’s grand stairway as the plenipotentiaries and their delegations and their wives and families climb the steps to the Hall of Mirrors. Their sabers are at the salute.

At one end of the enormous gaudy hall the world press is packed in a motley throng. At the other the plenipotentiaries sit at a horseshoe table. Around them are all the uniforms of the Allied armies, embossed with every conceivable decoration. Between the tall mirrors and the tall windows shine the gilded curlycues and the encrusted capitals of the grand siècle. Overhead stretch painted ceilings in a whirligig of colors and shapes.

At the center of the table sit Wilson and Lloyd George, almost lost, in all the splendor, in their somber frock coats. Squat Clemenceau is hunched between them. Harold Nicolson, who likes to describe Clemenceau as looking like a gorilla carved out of ivory, notices that over the Tiger’s head on the flamboyant ceiling is a scroll which reads: LE ROI GOUVERNE PAR LUIMÊME.

When Clemenceau gestures for silence a sharp clank resounds through the thronged hall as the guards thrust their sabers back into their scabbards.

In the silence that follows Clemenceau’s voice croaks harshly: “Faites entrer les Allemands.”

Two ushers hung with silver chains enter from a door at the end of the hall. They are followed by four officers, one American, one English, one French, one Italian. After them totter two small civilians in glasses. Their feet plunk miserably on the strip of parquet between the carpets, as, in the heavy silence, under the stare of two thousand eyes, they walk the length of the hall to the little table where the texts of the treaty have been laid out for signature.

They sign. At that moment the guns start to roar outside. The crowds cheer. The sky is aflutter with frightened pigeons. Amid the ancient trees along the green prospects of the park spurt the legendary fountains.

In the hall the tension has snapped. People move about and crane their necks to see. The plenipotentiaries form a queue to sign like men buying tickets at a railroad station. President Wilson leads the Americans, next comes Colonel House.

From her seat Edith Wilson, who is wearing a gray picture hat, a gray gown and orchids, and carrying a gray and blue beaded bag her husband has just presented her to match her dress, can hear the whir of the motionpicture cameras that press about the plenipotentiaries.

From behind her she catches the apologetic Texas drawl of Loulie House who has jumped to her feet. “Please let me stand long enough to see my lamb sign.”

That night President and Mrs. Wilson undergo the final longdrawn ceremonies of a dinner at the Elysée Palace.

(When the invitation came from Poincaré Wilson flew off the handle. He vowed he would not sit down at table with the swine. It was as if all his resentment of the frustrations suffered in Paris were focussed into hatred of the stubby little President of the French Republic. It was all House and Henry White could do to convince him that not to accept the invitation would cause an international incident. Perhaps Mrs. Wilson had already clinched the matter by getting a special dress for the occasion designed for her by Worth.)

She describes it, with feeling, in My Memoir as a closefitting black charmeuse gown with a fishtail train, encrusted from the knees up with sequins shading in color from black through tints of gray “to glittering white at the bust and shoulders.” She carries a large ostrichfeather fan and, having been impressed by the diamond tiaras the court ladies wore in England, wears a special tiaralike headdress made up by Worth out of sequins and rhinestones.

From the banquet they hurry to the station.

“Everyone was in a holiday mood and happy, though a note of sadness too was felt … For one last time we found the red carpet stretched, the lines of soldiers to be inspected, the palms waving, and the French officers lined up to bid us bon voyage.”

Next day they are aboard the George Washington bound for home.

Chapter 24 THE SUPREMEST TRAGEDY

ON July 10, in the noonday glare of the Washington summer heat, Woodrow Wilson appeared in solemn mood before the Senate and saw the great bound volume of the Treaty of Versailles placed upon the clerk’s desk. Grayson, who was watching him carefully, found his step elastic, his eyes bright, his color good. His attitude was challenging:

“The united power of free nations must put a stop to aggression and the world must be given peace … Shall we or any other free people hesitate to accept this great duty? Dare we reject it and break the heart of the world?… 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.”

He urged immediate ratification.

The document was rushed to the printers. That night copies were distributed throughout the Senate office building so that at last the senators could read the actual text of the commitments which the President had made in the name of the United States.

By the end of the month Henry Cabot Lodge was ready, as chairman of the Committee for Foreign Affairs, to inaugurate public hearings on the question of ratification. The Republicans, perhaps in somewhat mischievous deference to the President’s call for open covenants, openly arrived at, insisted on these hearings being open to the reporters and to the public. Sensationally reported in the press, the hearings brought dismay to the White House.

August 19 the President invited the entire Senate committee to a private conference in the East Room. He greeted the senators amiably. He had taken the liberty, he said, of writing out a little statement on the points of controversy which had so far come up. This he proceeded to read.

He repeated his arguments for ratification of the treaty at the earliest practicable moment. At home and abroad the revival of trade and commerce and industry, and reconstruction, and every sort of plan for the orderly life of the world, waited on the peace. He reminded the senators that he had already introduced revisions on points which some of them had brought up.

He spoke vigorously in defense of Article X, “the heart of the covenant,” by which the United States joined the Allied powers in undertaking to “preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence” of all members of the League; but he pointed out, in a disarming tone, that this obligation was moral, rather than legal.

The senators presented their questions. They asked about the disposition of the Pacific Islands under the mandate system. How would that affect American control of the Pacific cables? The President’s answers did not satisfy them.

The chief stumbling block was Article X. The conference became involved in a tangled argument on the difference between a moral and a legal obligation. The argument became heated.

The Democratic senators had little to say.

The President seemed reluctant to reveal how decisions had been reached at the Peace Conference. He was particularly evasive on the subject of Shantung. Had the Japanese been offered Shantung in return for their signature?

Senator Hiram Johnson of California read the minutes of his examination of Secretary Lansing a few days before. After some squirming, the Secretary of State had admitted that in his opinion the Japanese would have signed even without Shantung.

Johnson read out his question: “So that the result of the Shantung decision was simply to lose China’s signature, rather than to gain Japan’s?

“Secretary Lansing: ‘That is my personal view, but I may be wrong about it.’ ”

The President exclaimed testily that his conclusion was different from Mr. Lansing’s.

The discussion continued until one of the Democrats suggested that maybe they’d better recess. The President graciously invited the senators to lunch with him. While waiting for the lunch hour Senator Brandegee in acid tones summarized the points at issue.

Senator Johnson asked to be informed on the practical details. Would American troops be expected to help the French garrison on the Rhine? Would they be expected to enforce every provision of the treaty in Europe, Asia and Africa? The President admitted American troops might have to be stationed for the next fifteen years on the Rhine.

The senator brought up the paragraph on ratification.

President Wilson seemed a little vague as to how many signatures, besides Germany’s, it would take to put the treaty in force. Senator Hitchcock came to the President’s rescue by reading a paragraph to the effect that the treaty would be binding on a nation only from the date of that nation’s signature.

Senator Moses of New Hampshire came back to the mandates: “Mr. President, under the terms of the treaty, Germany cedes to the principal allied and associated powers all her overseas possessions?

“The President: Yes.

“Senator Moses: We hereby, as I view it, become possessed in fee of an undivided fifth part of those possessions.

“The President: Only as one of five trustees, Senator. There is no thought in any mind of sovereignty.

“Senator Moses: Such possessions as we acquire by means of that cession would have to be disposed of by congressional action.

“The President: I have not thought about that at all.

“Senator Moses: You have no plan to suggest or recommendation to make to Congress?

“The President: Not yet, sir, I am waiting until the treaty is disposed of.”

At that point Senator Lodge remarked that it was thirtyfive minutes past one. They had been talking for three hours and a half. The conference adjourned and the senators followed the President into the dining-room.

Though he managed to keep his temper the conference left Wilson in angry turmoil. It was now clear that without modifications the Senate would never ratify the treaty. He was determined to appeal to the people. The voice of the people would cry down these crabbed criticisms. Already he was planning with Tumulty a swing around the country that would bring his great League plan home to the people. The Republicans in the Senate would never dare face a popular uprising.

Tumulty was all for it. As a practical politician the President’s secretary was appalled by the disrepair into which the Democratic Party had fallen during the President’s absence abroad. In bringing the League home to the people, the President, in whose gifts as a campaign orator Tumulty had childlike faith, would revive the party machinery at the grassroots. Enthusiastically he went to work to plan a speaking tour through the middlewest and down the Pacific coast. The President would meet the erstwhile Progressives like Johnson and Borah, who were the most fervent opponents of the treaty, on their home ground.

Although Wilson intended to urge the people to insist on ratification of every word of the treaty as he had laid it before the Senate, without dotting an i or crossing a t, at that moment he was admitting to himself that he might have to consent to some modifications. Late in August he drew up a document on his own typewriter for the information of Senator Hitchcock.

Gilbert M. Hitchcock was a wellmeaning smalltown publisher from Nebraska who, with little parliamentary experience, found himself, through the illness of the aged minority leader, Senator Martin of Virginia, in the position of minority leader pro tem in the Senate. Consequently it was upon Hitchcock that devolved the task of sponsoring the Versailles treaty. What he lacked in knowhow he made up in loyalty to the President as head of the Democratic Party.

Wilson noted, for Hitchcock’s private information, that he was willing, if absolutely necessary, to agree to four reservations. More emphasis could be placed on the provision that any state could withdraw from the League at any time. States could use their own judgement as to whether they would use armed force to carry out the League’s decisions. It should be specified that the League might not meddle in questions of immigration, naturalization or tariffs; and he was willing to restate in stronger terms his original reservation as to the Monroe Doctrine.

Hitchcock told the President he was convinced that these concessions would go far towards meeting the views of all but the most irreconcilable of the Republicans. In his opinion a twothirds majority would not be too hard to obtain.

Wilson hated the senators and all they stood for. He would arouse the people. He hoped to lash public opinion to such a pitch of enthusiasm for the League that the senators would not dare oppose him. Even so, at that moment, he was willing to go along with those Republican and Democratic senators who were in favor of moderate reservations.

As the day for the President’s departure approached, Grayson and Edith Wilson grew more and more uneasy about the possible effect on his health of such a gruelling trip. He had not really recovered from his illness in Paris in April. The summer heat had been unusually hard on him. Although he took long periods of rest each day he did not seem able to throw off fatigue as he used to. Edith Wilson urged Grayson to assert himself as the President’s personal physician. They both begged him to call the trip off.

The President’s answer — as Edith quoted it — was, that as Commander in Chief he had been responsible for sending American soldiers into battle. “If I don’t do all in my power to put that treaty into effect, I will be a slacker and never able to look those boys in the eye. I must go.”

Tumulty added his plea. He had been argued around to the conclusion that the President’s health was even more important than the Democratic Party. “I know that I’m at the end of my tether,” Tumulty remembered Wilson’s telling him. “… Even though, in my condition it might mean giving up my life, I will gladly make the sacrifice to save the treaty.”

The Washington streets were hot and muggy and airless on the evening of September 3 when the President and Mrs. Wilson drove to Union Station. The President arrived jaunty in a straw hat.

Tumulty had thrown everything he had into the preparations for the trip. A private clubcar named Mayflower was specially arranged for the presidential party. There were staterooms for the President and Mrs. Wilson and for Dr. Grayson and for Mrs. Wilson’s Swedish maid. Brooks the valet was to sleep on the couch in the drawingroom. An office had been installed. On the foldup table was one of the President’s favorite Hammond portable typewriters.

Tumulty and the White House staff and the secretservice men rode in pullmans ahead. There were accommodations for more than a hundred newspapermen and reporters.

The first stop was Columbus. The meeting there was thinly attended. After the President had finished speaking a Chinese student called out from the gallery, “What about Shantung, Mr. President?”

At Indianapolis there was a parade to the state fair. Dust and heat and yelling crowds. An enormous turnout; but when the President spoke people seemed more interested in the fat cattle and the exhibits of prize-winning pickles than in the League of Nations.

At St. Louis, the bailiwick of knownothing Senator Reed, who was raging up and down the country denouncing the treaty, the crowds were unexpectedly cordial. Wilson was introduced as “The Father of World Democracy.” Shouts of approval and storms of handclapping capped every sentence.

Kansas City was even better.

The presidential train avoided Chicago where anglophobe “Big Bill” Thompson was mayor and where Senator Medill McCormick’s excoriation of the treaty had been frantically applauded and Wilson’s name booed, amid shouts of “Impeach him, impeach him.”

Wherever Wilson talked people seemed to leave the halls convinced. He threatened them with doom. “I can predict with absolute certainty,” he said in Omaha, “that within another generation there will be another world war if the nations of the world do not concert the method by which to prevent it.” He was thrilled by the response he got. “I am catching the imagination of the people,” he told his wife. “I don’t care if I die the minute after the League is ratified.”

At Mandan he spoke from the rear platform to a throng collected in the station. Billings and Helena turned out excited crowds. He met with an ovation at Coeur d’Alene in Senator Borah’s home state. Spokane, the hated Poindexter’s home town, seemed to have gone mad for Wilson.

Tumulty was in his element. He had democratic committees aboard the train at every stop to wring the President’s hand. The President smiled and smiled. Good humor reigned in the presidential party. Grayson and Tumulty carried on a sort of minstrel show that kept everybody in stitches. Edith Wilson put up a brave front though she knew that her husband was suffering blinding headaches, that he hardly ate or slept.

Wilson was agreeable to everybody. He told stories and shook hands and tirelessly stood up in open touring cars, waving at the crowds through the dusty broiling western towns. At night he’d ask the newspapermen in for sandwiches. He’d never been more affable. When people suggested that he was pushing himself too hard he had a wisecrack for them. “My constitution may be exhausted, but I still have my bylaws.”

The reception in Seattle was overwhelming. The President made three speeches in a day and reviewed the Pacific fleet in Puget Sound from the deck of the famous old Oregon, back from overawing the Russians off Vladivostok. On the way to the armory singing schoolchildren waved red white and blue flags. When he appeared on the platform he was greeted like a presidential candidate with confetti and balloons and a prolonged demonstration.

The only sour note was the young Wobblies standing with folded arms along the curb on the downtown streets with PARDON DEBS on their hatbands and banners reading RELEASE THE POLITICAL PRISONERS. Wilson had repeatedly refused even to consider a pardon for any of them.

The baneful seething that had worried Wilson in past years was rising hourly to the surface in the news that came to the presidential train. The President wracked his brains for solutions. While one secretary was kept busy typing out fresh speeches another had to pound away on the day to day work of the presidency.

From coast to coast came complaints about wartime profiteering and the high cost of living. War industries were shutting down. There was unemployment everywhere. Wages were cut. There were bloody race riots where Negro laborers had moved north. Steelworkers were on strike. Coal miners were walking out. Employers were fighting strikes with injunctions and hired gunmen. The New York theatres closed because the actors refused to perform until they got fair contracts. In Boston a strike of the police force turned the streets over to hoodlums and thugs.

To quiet the unrest of labor the President was calling an industrial conference to meet in Washington.

Overseas hotspots kept exploding on the map like popcorn in a skillet. French and British plans to establish some respectable capitalist regime in Russia went continually awry. The leaders they backed, though they massacred the Reds that fell into their hands as tirelessly as the Reds massacred the Whites, seemed to face invariable defeat. In China echoes of the Fourteen Points had set the young students’ ears to tingling. The blind revolt against foreign exploitation of Boxer days was taking new forms. Students were learning the language of European politics from Wilson and Lenin and from the democratic idealism of American missionaries. Voices calling for Chinese selfdetermination and Chinese selfgovernment were reaching the American press. On the Adriatic a baldheaded poet named Gabriele d’Annunzio was defying the dictates of Versailles by lashing up an Italian mob to seize Fiume. The President could hardly control his indignation.

As a final aggravation wires from Washington detailed the testimony of a rich and earnest young man named William C. Bullitt before the Senate Committee for Foreign Affairs. Bullitt had resigned from a Peace Conference job in protest against the treaty and against the Allied policy of backing every outbreak in Russia of partisans of the old regime against the soviet power. Now he revealed some private conversations with Secretary Lansing. Lansing not only disapproved of the Shantung agreement, but of the covenant. The Secretary of State had said the American people would unquestionably defeat the treaty if they ever understood what it let them in for.

“My God,” Wilson cried out to Tumulty, “I did not think it was possible for Lansing to act in this way.”

The train was rushing on to the next speaking engagement. There was no time to deal with Lansing now. Lansing would get what was coming to him later.

Back in Paris the story tickled Clemenceau. His bon mot was going the rounds. “I got my bullet during the conference; Lansing got his after.”

In Portland the crowds were sedate, but three times as many people stood outside the armory as could get in to hear the President. When the presidential cortege took a fast tour of the scenic drives up the Columbia River, one of the most popular of the newscorrespondents was killed in a car crash. The President and Edith Wilson were immensely saddened. People noticed that the President couldn’t seem to throw off the sense of shock. “It made us jittery,” said one of the secretservice men. “From then on nothing seemed to go right.”

San Francisco was a success in spite of efforts of the Irish societies to cause trouble. Berkeley and the bay towns were delirious. A special stop was made in Sacramento to boost the League in Hiram Johnson’s back yard.

The newspapermen declared that San Diego was the high point of the trip. Through a recently installed loudspeaker system the President addressed fifty thousand wildly enthusiastic people. “The war we have just been through,” he told them, “though it was shot through with terror, is not to be compared with the war we would have to face next time.” They shouted approval of the League. Los Angeles tried to go San Diego one better.

Wilson and Tumulty were so elated they talked of carrying the campaign into Massachusetts and lighting a fire under Senator Lodge back where his voters lived.

In Salt Lake City the Mormon Tabernacle was packed to suffocation. The heat was insufferable. Edith said she felt sick and blind from the lack of air and would have fainted if her maid hadn’t handed her a bottle of lavender smelling salts. She sent a handkerchief drenched with the salts by a secretservice man up to her husband. After his speech the President came back dripping with sweat. He changed his clothes, but Edith noticed he couldn’t seem to stop sweating.

At Cheyenne and Denver there were more parades, more delegations, more hands to shake. Wilson’s headache was continuous now, blinding. He suffered nerve pains in his arms.

In Pueblo he suddenly announced that he wouldn’t go to greet fifty thousand people waiting at the fairgrounds. He’d never said he would. When Tumulty showed him the itinerary with his okeh on it he lost his temper. Entering the new city auditorium Starling, the secretservice man who was right behind him, noticed that he couldn’t seem to see where he was going. The President stumbled on a step. Starling almost had to lift him up the steps to the platform.

Many of the reporters spoke of it as the best speech of the whole tour, but Starling, who stood right behind him to catch him if he fell, thought he seemed to lose the thread, to repeat himself. His enunciation was thick. At one point he broke down and cried.

“What of our pledges,” he cried, “to the men that lie dead in France … There seems to me to stand between us and the rejection or qualification of this treaty the serried ranks of those boys in khaki, not only those boys who came home, but those dear ghosts that still deploy upon the fields of France.”

With tears streaming down his face he told of Decoration Day at a cemetery for the war dead … French women putting flowers on the graves … “There was a little group of French women who had adopted these graves, had made themselves mothers of these dear ghosts by putting flowers every day on these dear graves” … He wished the men in public life who opposed the covenant could visit such a spot. “I wish that the thought that comes out of those graves could penetrate their consciousness … the moral obligation … to see … the thing through … and make good their redemption of the world.”

His peroration was in the old style: “Now that the mists of this great question have cleared away … we have accepted the truth 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.”

Tumulty was deeply moved. He saw tears in every eye. Edith Wilson was crying. The hardboiled newspapermen sniffled. “Down in the amphitheatre I saw men sneak their handkerchiefs out of their pockets … The President,” Tumulty wrote, “was like a great organist playing upon the heart emotions of the thousands of people who were held spellbound by what he said.”

Woodrow Wilson had covered something like eight thousand miles in less than a month. He had delivered thirtysix set speeches and all sorts of short addresses from the rear platform of his train. He had sat in on countless political meetings and exerted himself to the utmost in a dozen parades.

The night after the Pueblo speech, while his train was speeding towards Wichita, President Wilson, shortly after he had turned in, was stricken with unbearable pain. Grayson could do nothing to alleviate it. The President couldn’t lie down. He couldn’t stay still. He dressed himself and tried sitting up. There seemed no way of making him comfortable.

“It’s a stroke,” Brooks told Starling. “It’s all over now.”

“The Doctor and I,” Edith wrote, “kept the vigil while the train dashed on and on through the darkness … About five in the morning a blessed release came and sitting upright on the stiff seat my husband fell asleep … The dear face opposite me was worn and lined; and as I sat there watching the dawn break slowly I felt that life would never be the same … and from that hour on I would have to wear a mask, not only to the public but to the one I loved best in the world: for he must never know how ill he was and I must carry on.”

In the morning Wilson protested that he must continue his tour but Edith Wilson and Grayson and Tumulty took things into their own hands and ordered the train to head straight back to Washington. The special train sped across the countryside with blinds drawn as if there were a dead man aboard. When the train arrived in Washington the President had recovered sufficiently to be able to walk from the train to the car.

Three days later President Wilson was stricken down by cerebral thrombosis.

The first the White House staff knew was when early one morning Ike Hoover got a sudden call from Mrs. Wilson to send for Dr. Grayson. “The President is very sick.” The chief usher sent a car for Grayson to his house. When they went up to the President’s suite Hoover found every door locked. The door was opened just enough to let the doctor in and closed in Hoover’s face. When Grayson came back he was terribly shaken. “My God,” he told Hoover, “the President is paralyzed.”

For weeks Wilson lies desperately ill. His left side is paralyzed. His speech is affected. His condition is complicated by acute inflammation of the prostate gland. Edith is convinced an operation is too risky. A stricture almost causes his death. Showing the extraordinary powers of recuperation he has shown in similar but less drastic attacks, gradually he begins to recover.

Edith Wilson is determined that “he must never know how ill he was … I must carry on.”

Without hesitation she takes upon herself complete charge of the sickroom and of such duties of the presidency as cannot be postponed. Ever since their marriage she has been giving him advice, and arranging his papers for him, and helping decipher messages in the private code he had with Colonel House.

Now Edith Wilson becomes de facto the President. Grayson collaborates humbly. He brings in trained nurses, consulting physicians. He rigs up the presidential suite as a small hospital They both take extraordinary precautions that no word of the President’s real condition shall reach the world outside. A nervous breakdown, Tumulty is told to report to the press. With rest and seclusion the President is recovering.

A few days after the President’s stroke, Lansing, profoundly disturbed, seeks out Tumulty in the cabinet room. In default of any real information the wildest rumors are current in Washington. The President is dead. He has lost his mind and is confined in a straitjacket.

Something must be done to cope with the situation. Lansing has a copy of Jefferson’s Manual in his hand. If the President really is incapacitated, he tells Tumulty, his powers and duties should devolve on Vice President Marshall. He points out the pertinent paragraph in the Constitution.

Tumulty flies up in his face. “Mr. Lansing,” he quotes himself as declaiming, “the Constitution is not a dead letter in the White House.” He needs no tutoring from Lansing about the Constitution. Whose business will it be to certify to the disability of the President, he asks hotly.

Lansing says it would be up to him and Dr. Grayson.

“You may rest assured,” shouts Tumulty, dropping into brogue in his excitement, “that while Woodrow Wilson is lying in the White House on the broad of his back I’ll not be a party to ousting him.”

He adds, almost in tears, “The President has been too kind, too loyal, too wonderful to me to receive such treatment at my hands.”

At that moment Dr. Grayson appears.

Tumulty turns to him. “And I am sure Dr. Grayson will never testify as to his disability. Will you, Grayson?”

Grayson will do no such thing.

“I then notified Mr. Lansing that if anyone outside of the White House circle attempted to certify to the President’s disability, that Grayson and I would stand together and repudiate it.”

Lansing retires crestfallen to the Department of State.

With Edith Wilson in command from behind the locked doors, such White House business as is essential is carried on. Through Grayson, Tumulty informs her of the problems of each day. She decides which items won’t worry the President too much and makes a show of consulting him and sends back a scribbled note for Tumulty to act on. When the time comes for a Thanksgiving proclamation, Swem, the private secretary to whom the Wilsonian style has become second nature, drafts it. This time Mrs. Wilson manages to get the President to sign his name. The document comes back with the signature barely decipherable, at the top instead of the bottom of the sheet.

The news that the treaty may fail in the Senate has been received with consternation in England. When, in the cool light of afterthought, the British statesmen read over the Treaty of Versailles they find themselves in agreement with President Wilson that only a series of rational readjustments under a league of nations can save Europe from disaster. Smuts, who signed under protest, is aghast at the document he put his name to. John Maynard Keynes has resigned his job with the British treasury and is preparing his famous blast against the treaty’s iniquities.

House, in London, on his way home from fulfilling the pleasant task of helping pick Geneva for the League’s capital, has been busy stirring up the English. He wants them to let the American Senate know that the British Government will accept almost any reservations the senators feel necessary.

Sir Edward Grey, now Viscount Grey of Falloden, though ill and discouraged and nearly blind, is prevailed upon to accept a special embassy to Washington to make such agreements as are urgently needed to avoid a naval armament race and to get ratification for the League of Nations. The British Cabinet thinks of him as an eminent liberal almost certain to be congenial to President Wilson. He arrives in Washington the day Wilson is stricken on the train to Wichita.

A few days later House reaches New York from England so weak from an attack of gallstones he has to be carried off the boat on a stretcher. Hopelessly incapacitated himself, he sends his friend and erstwhile interpreter Stephen Bonsal to Washington. He knows that Bonsal, a schoolmate of the senator’s soninlaw, is on good terms with Lodge. They have in common a passion for the writings of George Borrow. If any man can talk the senator around it is Bonsal. At a couple of friendly interviews Bonsal fills the senator in on the gossip of the Peace Conference. He wheedles him into admitting that his reservations might be modified. Lodge pencils some suggestions, particularly certain changes in wording that might make him accept Article X, on a printed copy of the covenant which Bonsal just happens to have in his pocket Bonsal rushes this copy to the post office and mails it to House in New York. House promptly dispatches it to President Wilson at the White House.

No reply. Edith Wilson has ceased to deliver House’s letters to the President. She hates House and undoubtedly she feels that anything connected with the hated Lodge may upset her husband and bring about a relapse. Nothing is ever heard of Lodge’s modification of his reservations.

Senator Lodge, who knows of Bonsal’s intimacy with House, and who still considers the confidential colonel the quickest channel to the President’s ear, being touchy as a bear, is insulted by what he considers a direct rebuff from the White House. A few days later he reintroduces his reservations, in their original form, on the Senate floor.

Edith Wilson has cut all channels of communication with the President. When Sir William Wiseman, whom the Foreign Office sent ahead of the new ambassador, trusting in his intimacy with the confidential colonel to smooth the way, calls at the White House, Mrs. Wilson tells him the President is too ill to see him. “I had never liked this plausible little man.” Besides she knows he’s a crony of House’s. The eminent Viscount Grey suffers the same fate as Wiseman. Not even Tumulty has the courtesy to give him an interview. Without being received by the President he can’t function as an ambassador. After cooling his heels dismally for three months at the British Embassy he goes home in despair.

Edith Wilson, however, does consider the President well enough during this period to receive a visit from the King and Queen of Belgium. Like many another Virginian, Mrs. Wilson has a soft spot for royalty. She lets them in to see her husband in his bed and allows them to show him a beautiful set of china they have brought the Wilsons for a present. When the young Prince of Wales arrives in Washingon he is dutifully taken up to the sick man’s bedside.

Meanwhile the fulldress debate on the peace treaty resounds through the Senate chamber. Twice during November Edith Wilson allows Senator Hitchcock to see the President. He finds a tremulous whitebearded old man propped up with pillows. The paralyzed arm is hidden under the covers. Hitchcock still believes moderate reservations may win. When Hitchcock brings up Wilson’s own suggestions as a basis for compromise Wilson tells him, “Let Lodge compromise.”

As the day of the Senate vote draws near, the pressure for a compromise builds up in Washington. Herbert Hoover is using all the influence he has with the members of Wilson’s cabinet. Baruch, whom Edith likes, and who is a cordial friend of Grayson’s, urges them both to try to convince the President that enough senators are ready to vote for the treaty with moderate reservations if he will only give his consent. Half a loaf is better than no bread.

“For my sake,” says Edith, “won’t you accept these reservations and get this awful thing settled.”

He pats her hand. “Little girl don’t you desert me. That I cannot stand.”

Grayson puts in his two cents’ worth.

Wilson shakes his head. “Better a thousand times to go down fighting,” Edith quotes him as saying.

The day before the vote he dictates a letter to Hitchcock: “I sincerely hope that the friends and supporters of the treaty will vote against the Lodge resolution of ratification.”

Lodge uses all his parliamentary skill to set a trap for the Democrats. He arranges for the treaty to be brought to a vote first with his own reservations attached. Following the President’s instructions the southern Democrats join the diehard Republicans to vote it down. Then Hitchcock moves that the treaty be reconsidered with his moderate reservations attached. He is voted down by the Republicans voting solid. Lodge, to prove to the world that the Democrats are defeating their own treaty, now allows a new resolution to consider the treaty with his own reservations to be presented. In a rollcall vote, it is defeated by fortyone ayes to fiftyone nays, with the President’s Democrats voting against.

Senator Swanson of Virginia rushes across the aisle to Senator Lodge’s desk. “For God’s sake, can’t something be done to save the treaty?”

“Senator, the door is closed,” replies Lodge. “You have done it yourselves.”

By the end of December the President is well enough to dress himself and to hobble about a little with a cane. “He had changed from a giant to a pygmy in every wise,” wrote the White House usher. “It was so sad that those of us about him, who almost without exception admired him, would turn our heads away when he came along, or when we went near him.”

For another fourteen months Woodrow Wilson lives on at the White House, immured in a sickroom. Every message, every newspaper passes through Edith Wilson’s hands.

“He must never know how ill he was; and I must carry on.”

When he is well enough to go out for drives in the White House motor car he sits covered by a cape in front with the driver, because it’s too painful for him to try to sit up in the back seat. He takes pathetic pleasure in the motion pictures that are shown him almost every afternoon, propped in his wheel chair in one of the large upstairs rooms.

By early February Wilson is well enough to settle with Lansing. Secretary Lansing has been calling informal meetings of the members of the Cabinet to keep the government rolling during the President’s illness. This is the last straw. He dictates a stiff letter asking for the Secretary’s immediate resignation.

Bainbridge Colby, erstwhile Progressive who became a devoted Wilsonian, and who has the reputation of writing a very good speech, is appointed in Lansing’s stead.

Illusions flourish in the sickroom world.

Wilson is convinced that the American people, the people who cheered him in Omaha and Seattle and Coeur d’Alene and Pueblo, Colorado, are for him and for his covenant almost to a man. Only the reactionary senators stand in their way.

He propounds a strange scheme: he will challenge the senators who are against the treaty to resign and seek re-election. He will promise that if they are re-elected he will induce the Vice President to resign and, after appointing a Republican Secretary of State he will resign himself; the Secretary of State will thus become President. Hasn’t he always believed in party government in the English style?

When the Senate reconsiders the Versailles Treaty, and the possibility arises that ratification may still be secured, with reservations tempered by compromise, Wilson again insists that Hitchcock’s obedient Democrats cast their votes against any treaty with reservations of any kind. So strong is the clamor for compromise that, even so, the treaty almost passes with the necessary twothirds vote. Only strict orders from the White House keep the Democrats in line for rejection. “We can always depend on Mr. Wilson,” says Brandegee to Lodge.

The theory is abroad that Wilson has insisted on rejection of the amended treaty because he wants a campaign issue for 1920. Can it be that he dreams of a third term?

When the Democrats convene in San Francisco in June the candidates are William Gibbs McAdoo and A. Mitchell Palmer. Wilson won’t let Tumulty give his endorsement either to his soninlaw or to his Attorney General. Newspaper articles are inspired about the President’s very good health. Photographs are broadcast taken from his good side. Colby is dispatched to San Francisco as bearer of a message from the White House: in case of a deadlock; why not Wilson?

The scheme goes awry. On the fortyfourth ballot a harmless Ohio politician named James M. Cox receives the nomination. His runningmate is the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Cox is to run against another Ohio politician, considered equally harmless, Warren Gamaliel Harding, whose candidacy is the product of a similar deadlock in the Republican convention. Senator Harding’s qualifications are that he’s a strong reservationist on the treaty and that he comes from Canton which was William McKinley’s home town. Perhaps there is something that reminds people of McKinley about the way Harding wears his frock coat.

Wilson calls the Democratic candidates to the White House for his blessing. From his wheel chair he receives their assurance that they will treat the campaign as a solemn referendum on the Covenant of the League of Nations.

When the American people go to the polls in November to decide this solemn referendum Harding wins by seven million votes.

On Inauguration Day Woodrow Wilson drives to the Capitol from the White House with President-elect Harding. While Harding walks with swinging stride up the broad steps of the Capitol, Wilson is smuggled in a wheel chair through a side door and up by a private elevator to the President’s room in the Senate wing. There the traditional congressional committee waits upon the retiring President to ask if he has any further communications to make to the retiring Congress. The man whose duty it is to ask that question as committee chairman is Henry Cabot Lodge.

“I have no communication to make,” says ex-President Wilson; “I appreciate your courtesy, good morning, sir.”

No crowds packed the empty sidewalks of the avenues when Woodrow Wilson was driven from the Capitol to the house on S Street which Edith Wilson had readied to receive him. The sickroom life went on. A querulous invalid, sometimes he surprised his family by a burst of high spirits. He liked to spring a limerick on them. For a while his health seemed to improve. He would speak of his plan to write a book on the philosophy of government, but he got no further than a dedication to his wife.

When he sat up he liked to wear an old gray sweater he had worn as a young professor. When occasionally an old friend, or a delegation, was admitted to see him, they found him seated by the fire in his library, always in the same worn brown leather armchair that had come with him from Princeton. Visitors deferred to him as titular head of the Democratic Party.

Each Armistice Day a small nostalgic crowd would gather on the quiet street and a few extra policemen would be assigned to the beat and Edith Wilson would arrange for him to say a few words urging all good men to come to the aid of the League, and the lost peace. He enjoyed the afternoon rides in their motor car. Though the day was excessively hot, he was well enough, when President Harding, whose administration was beset with storms and scandals, died of poisoning attributed to an Alaskan crab, to attend the funeral.

There was no real recovery. In the fall of 1923 the sight began to fail in Wilson’s good eye. Glasses brought no relief. His digestion failed. Dr. Grayson remembered him whispering, “The machinery is worn out … I am ready.”

He died on February 3, 1924, about churchtime on a Sunday morning. When he was interred in the crypt of the unfinished Episcopal cathedral up on St. Alban’s Hill, President and Mrs. Calvin Coolidge were present at the ceremony.