against the declaration of war. Most of them were from the Middle West, where pro-Ally feeling was less pronounced than it was in the East and the South. By becoming involved in a European war, a fateful departure was made in American policy. Giving up our historic limited goal of protecting this hemisphere against foreign aggression, we were committing ourselves to an ambitious crusade with such alluring but vague objectives as “making the world safe for democracy” and “making the world itself at last free.”
One reason for growing skepticism about the success of this crusade was Wilson’s inability to inspire the majority of his countrymen with enthusiasm for, or even understanding of, his great design for future world peace. One wonders how many Americans carefully studied the Fourteen Points, laid down by the President as America’s peace aims, or the supplementary statements of principle which amplified these points.3
The main principles of Wilsonism were government by consent of the governed, national self-determination, an end of secret treaties, a nonvindictive peace, and an association of nations strong enough to check aggression and keep the peace in the future. The mood that developed in wartime America did not make for intelligent popular support of Wilson’s aims. The nation had not been involved in a major foreign war within the memory of a living man. It went on a prodigious emotional debauch.
American soil had not been invaded and the immediate cause of the conflict, the right to carry on one-sided trade with one set of belligerents, was not an ideal trumpet call for martial action. As Wilson’s ideals, to the average man, were too abstract and rarefied to serve as fighting slogans, the builders of national morale concentrated on building up belief in the supreme wickedness of the “Hun,” for whom “unspeakable” was one of the mildest adjectives in general use.
“Four-minute men” rushed about the land, selling war bonds and hate with equal vigor. Their favorite peroration was: “I’d compare those Huns with snakes, only that would be insulting the snakes.” Some pastors found relief from previously repressed lives by shouting dramatically: “I say God damn the Kaiser—and I’m not swearing, either.”
Pittsburgh “banned” Beethoven, to the greater glory of democracy. Sauerkraut became “liberty cabbage.” Producers of films and stories with stock Teutonic villains reaped a rich harvest. Some professors went just as war mad and said just as foolish things as the extreme German nationalists whose chauvinistic boastings were held up to deserved ridicule.
All this did not create a hopeful background for a just and reasonable peace. It was significant that when the President, toward the end of the war, made one of his more serious and statesmanlike addresses, the audience perversely applauded all the more trivial clichés and remained indifferent to his more original and fruitful ideas.
By the autumn of 1918 the breaking point in the world struggle had come. America had proved more than an adequate substitute for Russia. The number of American troops on the western front increased from three hundred thousand in March 1918 to two million in November. Half-starved and exhausted by the blockade, repulsed in the last desperate attempts to break through on the western front in France, Germany faced the prospect of ever increasing American reinforcements and of continually increasing American supplies.
Ludendorff, who shared with Hindenburg the command of the German armies, urged the civilian government to appeal for an armistice on October 1. The German Chancellor, Prince Max of Baden, in agreement with the Austrian Government, appealed to Wilson on October 5 for an armistice on the basis of the Fourteen Points.
There was a widespread clamor in America for unconditional surrender. But Wilson kept the negotiations in progress. When the armistice was finally signed, it was on the basis of the Fourteen Points and subsequent public declarations of Wilson, with one reservation and one elucidation. Lloyd George reserved for future discussion Point 2, providing for freedom of the seas. And it was agreed between Colonel House, Wilson’s representative in Paris, and the Allied leaders that “restoration” of invaded territory should mean that “compensation will be made by Germany for all damage done to the civilian population of the Allies and their property by the forces of Germany by land, by sea and from the air.”
That there was a recognized obligation on the part of the Allies to make the peace treaty conform to the Fourteen Points and to Wilson’s other statements is evident from the wording of a reply to a German protest against the peace terms in May 1919:
“The Allied and Associated Powers are in complete accord with the German delegation in their insistence that the basis for the negotiation of the treaty of peace is to be found in the correspondence which immediately preceded the signing of the armistice on November 11, 1918.”
Wilson did not obtain Allied endorsement of his peace conditions without a severe diplomatic struggle behind the scenes. Colonel House went so far as to intimate that if the Fourteen Points were not accepted the negotiations with Germany would be wiped off the slate and America might then conclude a separate peace with Germany and Austria.4 This firm tone led to satisfactory results in this instance, but it was seldom employed when the practical details of the settlement were being worked out.
The hope of far-sighted liberals in America and in Europe that Wilson’s principles would be the foundation of a just and lasting peace could never have been achieved for several reasons.
Wilson’s prestige was weakened first of all when he issued an ill-advised appeal for the return of a Democratic Congress in 1918. The Republicans were successful in the election, and Wilson’s influence was lessened in the eyes of European statesmen accustomed to the system of government by a cabinet responsible to parliament. Another tactical error was Wilson’s failure to appoint a single active representative Republican as a member of the commission to negotiate the peace. (The five members were Wilson, House, Secretary of State Robert Lansing, General Tasker Bliss, and Henry White, a Republican who had lived much of his life abroad and carried no special weight in the councils of his party.)
It was probably a mistake on Wilson’s part to have attended the conference personally. He would have wielded greater power and influence from Washington. And Paris was an unfortunate choice for the seat of the conference if reconciliation rather than vengeance was to be the keynote of the peace. France had suffered much in the war, and in the Paris atmosphere everyone was afraid of being reproached with pro-Germanism. As Harold Nicolson, a young British diplomat who viewed the proceedings with a keen and critical eye, remarked:
“Given the atmosphere of the time, given the passions aroused in all democracies by the four years of war, it would have been impossible even for supermen to devise a peace of moderation and righteousness.”5
Old-fashioned secret diplomacy is open to criticism. But one reason why the Congress of Vienna, meeting after the convulsions of the Napoleonic Wars, succeeded far better than the conference of Versailles was the freedom of the statesmen there from the influence of popular passion. The chief representatives of the European Allies, Lloyd George, Clemenceau, Orlando, knew they faced the danger of being swept away by a storm of popular reproach if they did not hold out for the maximum in territory and indemnities.
So the cards were heavily stacked against a peace treaty that would reflect the Fourteen Points and Wilson’s other principles. If the President, amid the terrific strain of Paris, had time to take a cool historical view of what was going on, he must have felt the rightness of his earlier preference for a peace without victory. It is to his moral credit that he sometimes fought hard for his principles.
But Wilson’s support of his ideals was erratic, inconsistent, and, on balance, ineffective. The President was uncompromising in rejecting Italian claims for Fiume and Dalmatia. But he acquiesced without a struggle in a still more flagrant violation of the right of self-determination: the assignment
