The President's Homecoming
I
FROM Charing Cross Station to Buckingham Palace it is a matter of fifteen minutes if one rides properly in a royal coach behind six cream-colored horses. Mr. Wilson made that journey on the morning of Boxing Day last year, through a crowd which overflowed from Trafalgar Square and the entire length of Pall Mall into the side streets; and at the end of the fifteen minutes the editorial writers of the London evening papers were writing, and the cable correspondents from home were cabling home, to the effect that the President had won the hearts of the British people.
More than once since that crisp and sunny — for London — morning, when I stood in Waterloo Place, just off Pall Mall, at the foot of the Crimean Monument, — stood quietly and scanned the crowd in conformity with my duties as a foreign observer; or craned up at the droning silver dragon-flies that were welcoming airplanes; or speculated in common with all my neighbors whether the two Tommies and the sailor who were scaling the Monument for a vantage-point would attain the shoulders of Victory or break their necks; or rose for one hectic moment on tiptoe to see a royal coach flit by with the now famous international smile inside, — more than once since last Christmastide I have wondered just how the editorial writers and the special correspondents knew at the end of fifteen minutes that, the President had won the hearts of the British multitude.
If one were required to describe that London crowd without the slightest preconception, without knowledge of the person or the occasion that had brought it into the streets, — in short, to give a simple statement of just what one saw or heard and not of what one read into the spectacle, — the record might be somewhat as follows. A big crowd; a comfortable, quietly dressed crowd; many military uniforms British; a good many uniforms American; for the rest, a mass of interested but by no means febrile civilians. There were children perching on parental shoulders — the child as a rule well-grown for its age, the father rather slight for the weight he had to carry, as in all festive crowds, but quite brave under his burden, as in all crowds. There was the pathetic little woman of five feet nothing, whose outlook on such occasions is entirely confined to the masculine shoulders in front of her, and whose attendance is all the more an act of faith, save when the advancing barrage of cheers announces the supreme moment and she allows herself to be lifted high by comparative strangers for one ecstatic glimpse of a royal coach which flashes and vanishes. The women in the crowd are more intent on the show of the day; the men, one would venture to say, on the drone and the shimmer of the biplanes, and certainly on the antics of the two Tommies and the sailor now nestling between the feet of Victory right over the bayonets of the Crimean grenadiers.
A rattle of cheers breaks out. Somebody from Flanders or the House of Commons has passed. A louder roll of cheers sweeps by and the women gasp and clap their hands wildly. The President has passed. The crowd floods out of Pall Mall, up and down Waterloo Place and its tributaries.
It is not my purpose here to set up the naturalistic, jog-trot, method of descriptive writing against the emotional-subjective literary style. Certainly it is not my intention to deny that when Mr. Wilson rode from Charing Cross to Buckingham Palace he carried with him the hearts of the English people. That may well have been the case. It is of importance, nevertheless, to insist on the fact that this London crowd of last December was not carried away by a tidal wave of feeling, such as would have justified the editorial writers and the special correspondents in describing a new conquest of Britain by Mr. Wilson in the course of a quarter of an hour. It is my own belief that to the very appreciable extent that the hearts of the English people were with the President that day, those hearts had been won before Mr. Wilson set foot in England, before Mr. Wilson set foot on board the George Washington in an Atlantic port. And this I believe to be true — by analogy — of the Paris crowds or the Italian crowds, which I did not see. It is a naïve, a melodramatic view, to think of Europe as won by the fleeting, physical presence of a man. It overlooks Europe’s emotions during the months and years before Mr. Wilson’s arrival.
One phenomenon I encountered in every European capital I visited. This was the readiness and certainty with which professional observers in one country were able to measure the pulse of the masses in the adjoining country. Elsewhere I have told how many of our American students of the soul of Europe, in their eager pursuit of the ’revolution’ that was just about to sweep over the Continent, were always being referred to the revolution as just around the corner, but across the frontier. Radical British statesmen told us that England could not show the way in the great social upheaval, but that things in France were very ominous. In Paris we learned from men at the head of the radical movement that the French, because of peculiar historical and social conditions, were not ripe for revolution, but that a crisis was approaching in the British trade-unions, and that in Italy affairs were on the razor’s edge. One might have expected a certain measure of caution from these men, seeing that their diagnoses of their own countrymen had turned out by no means infallible. British Radicals, for instance, spoke of the ’real’ sentiments of the French and Italian people at the very moment when their forecasts of the revolutionary sentiment of the British people had been knocked into a cocked hat by Mr. Lloyd George’s tremendous majorities.
On this point I confess to speaking with a fair amount of irritation. I have thought it something more than absurd, I have thought it mischievous and confusing, at a time when the world needed the truth and lightso badly, that outsiders should be thumping the desk magisterially about the ‘masses’ of Europe; those silent masses whose hearts their own countrymen find it so difficult to plumb; those hearts which their very owners often fail to understand. American observers — more or less hasty observers — have spoken of British sentiment concerning Lloyd George with a confidence utterly unjustified by previous knowledge or by subsequent events.
But the great subject for ex-cathedra deliverances has been Clemenceau. How often have I read of this man’s vast unpopularity with the French masses; of the detestation in which he is held by the poilu, who is the real France; of the certainty that Clemenceau would be overwhelmingly beaten if he ventured to go before the French electorate. And how regularly Clemenceau, tiger that he is, has persisted in getting votes of confidence from his Chamber of Deputies and having his speeches placarded in the market-places of France.
II
It is a point that affects Mr. Wilson. The doubts I felt when fervid editorial writers and special correspondents assured the world that the President had won the heart of Europe in the course of a short drive from Charing Cross to Buckingham Palace, or from the Gare d’Orsay to the Hôtel Murat, these same doubts I experience now when a good many of these same editorial writers and special correspondents assure us that the President left Europe the other day having forfeited the hearts of the European masses, denied their hopes, darkened their faith. In neither case do I believe that the facts correspond to the vivid journalistic picture. I do not believe that the masses give their hearts or take them back with such melodramatic swiftness or completeness.
That Europe’s feelings for Mr. Wilson a few weeks ago were not what they were seven months ago is probably true. But this is only the inevitable let-down from aspiration to achievement. Whatever Mr. Wilson had accomplished at Paris in these seven months, the relapse in Europe’s emotions was bound to come. If the peoples of Europe expected all things from the President last December, then they are disappointed this August. But it is hardly for the contemporary historian to judge a statesman by everything everybody ever expected of him. Yet that is what a great many men are doing now. Of those who were quite sure seven months ago that Mr. Wilson, with a smile, had won the hearts of Europe, a great many are now convinced that he is the tragedy of the European peoples.
When Mr. Wilson walks down the gang-plank of the George Washington, in the course of the next two or three weeks (I am writing in the third week of June), there is, of course, just one question which Americans will ask. It is a question which Mr. Wilson will probably ask of himself many times between Brest and the home shores. Does the President come home a victor or otherwise? Have the Wilsonian principles been vindicated? Has the Wilson peace been made? Upon one’s general recollections — and prejudices — of the history of the Peace Conference, or upon a more thorough and conscientious study of the President’s seven months in Europe, the verdict will be based. In either case it will be judgment passed upon Mr. Wilson abroad, upon Mr. Wilson as against the statesmen of Europe. He will have scored over Lloyd George or been beaten by Lloyd George. He will have won the decision over Clemenceau or been outwitted by Clemenceau. He will have asserted himself against Orlando and Sonnino or have surrendered to the Italians. He will have imposed his will upon a reconstructed world, all the way through the chaotic alphabet, from Albania to Zara, or he will have been completely vanquished by the old Adam of European politics. At the moment of writing it requires no special vision to foresee the entire range of judgment from one edge of the partisan spectrum to the other, from Wilson the victor to Wilson the ghastly failure.
Yet it must be obvious that at the moment of Mr. Wilson’s landing in America we cannot say yes or no to the question whether he comes back in victory. And the reason is simply that Mr. Wilson’s fight is not over. He has brought his European campaign to an end. He faces a new campaign on the American front. And precisely as the four years’ war against Germany, raging all over the globe, found its decision in the last great battle between Arras and the Meuse, so the issue of victory or defeat for the President must be ultimately decided here at home, in the course of the next few weeks or months. If the Senate ratifies the treaty, including the League of Nations, then Mr. Wilson has won a victoire intégrate. If the Senate rejects the League, then Mr. Wilson’s battle has been a disaster. What happened to the President in Paris is of secondary consideration. His triumphs over Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and Orlando will be nullified by the collapse of the Covenant, just as all Germany’s victories in Russia and Serbia were swept away in the collapse of the German front between ChâteauThierry and Albert. If the Covenant is ratified, Clemenceau, Lloyd George, Orlando, and Makino may have won the battle of Paris, but they will have lost the peace of Versailles to the President.
Until the American people, through the Senate, has spoken, the outcome of the war and the peace is in abeyance. This is the belief of millions of men in this country and abroad, who can see in the treaty, without the League, a fair approximation to reason and justice. It is the belief of many men who see in the treaty only error and wickedness, but find recompense in the League. It is a belief eloquently voiced by a distinguished radical English publicist, who has been sufficiently drastic in his criticism of the procedure at Paris: —
‘Both the President and Premier Clemenceau have won and both have lost. The American peace is embodied in the League of Nations Covenant, and the French peace is embodied in the treaty. The Covenant lays down the scheme for a new world-order and the treaty reëstablishes the old world-order; the Covenant aims at the abolition of militarism, and the treaty reënacts militarism. But the two cannot coexist; they are mutually destructive. If the Covenant survives, the treaty must go; if the treaty survives, the Covenant is stillborn. It is my purpose here to appeal to American liberalism, in the name of English liberalism, not to desert the President. The struggle between the President and the Premier is not over; it has only begun.’
True criticism does not condemn the artist for failing to do what he never meant to do. We cannot speak of Mr. Wilson’s success or failure unless we keep in mind the aim he set for himself when he sailed for Brest. That great purpose, the President’s only purpose, was the League. It is fair enough to say that by his insistence on the League the President delayed the work of peace at Versailles; but it was because he thought of the League as the peace. Friends will call that his faith. Enemies will call it his obsession. The name hardly matters. Mr. Wilson’s success or failure will be measured by the degree to which his faith or his delusion is realized. It is impossible to have seen and heard the President at the Guildhall in London, or to remember him at the first business session of the plenary conference in Paris, without realizing how utterly the idea of the League had penetrated into Mr. Wilson’s being, as the essence and meaning, as the foundation and the crown of the Peace. In London and in Paris it was the note he sounded in the first words that fell from his lips, it was the beginning, the climax, and conclusion of his argument. The League was the one thing for which he had come to Europe.
Between Mr. Wilson and the radical school of critics the issue is clear. He has been accused of doing things in violation of the spirit of the League of Nations, which things he did because of his faith in the League of Nations. He has been accused of sacrificing this many or that many of his fourteen points; but the President, if it came to that pass, might almost assert that for the sake of a League of Nations he would sacrifice all his other thirteen points. He has tried to make the treaty, as apart from the League, square as far as might be with his ideals; but the League was his one ideal. For the sake of the League he compromised with the French maximum demands, rejecting the left bank of the Rhine, but conceding the Saar. For the sake of the League he compromised with France in the matter of the self-determination of Austria. For the sake of the League he confessedly compromised with Japan in the matter of Kiao-chau. His opponents have naturally asked how a man who believed in the reconciliation of the peoples — through the League — could sanction obstacles in the way of conciliation. His answer, just as naturally, has been that the League is the permanent and ultimate reconciler. With the League he expects to win back the price he paid for the League.
III
The President’s enemies abide in two camps. To one set of men, the practical, hard-headed kind, he is a trafficker in the phrases of a misty idealism. To another set of men, among them many of his former disciples, he has been vacillating, weak, cowardly, and so down the line to clear high treason against the ideals of liberalism. It is my own firm belief that this empty doctrinaire, as viewed from the extreme Right, and this waverer and compromiser, as visualized from the extreme Left, has seen reality with clearer eyes and held fast to an ideal with a firmer grip than the multitude of his critics.
Mr. Wilson has remembered. He has remembered the fifty-one and a half months from August 1, 1914, to November 11, 1918, which so many of his countrymen have forgotten or have chosen to forget. And this thing which so many of us have forgotten is the once familiar vow that this must be a war to end war. We have forgotten our outcries when the agony was upon us: that this thing must never happen again. To that end alone Germany must be beaten and the new world built. The one great result of the war, the one profit that might make its horrors almost worth while, must be guaranties against the repetition of the horror. It must not happen again.
It was an amazing and disconcerting thing, when I arrived in Paris in the early days of last January, to find how many Americans, more or less in close touch with our peace mission, had forgotten the fervid oath of only three months back, how reconciled they were, only two months after the armistice, to the thing happening again. I was prepared to some extent for the usual swift transitions from war-psychology to peace-psychology. That our soldiers, once Germany had been beaten, should be intensely eager to go home; that France, from a champion of civilization and a valiant comrade in the field, should quickly have become, in soldiers’ gossip, a nation of profiteers and unpleasing personal habits; that the nation which had fought the German invader to a standstill should by the very fact of her victory over Germany lose her clutch on our sympathies; that invaded and massacred France should become ‘imperialist’ France — all these things were natural enough.
What was not so simple was to find men of affairs in close contact with our peace delegates madly anxious to close the chapter of the four-years war and get home. To get the army home toot sweet; to sign a treaty toot sweet; to cut loose from the European mess which we never could understand; to go back where we were before the sixth of April, 1917 — that was our sole duty. But what of twenty years from now, and another war in Europe? We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, I was told. This little old world could not be made over in a day. The point now was to get back home to business. We had forgotten, toot sweet.
Other Americans in Paris had likewise forgotten. After all, you would expect to find the hard-headed business man among the first to shed the war emotion. If he absorbed the lessons of the war, it would be through their continuing impact on his normal life. The problems of the new world must be translated into terms of his daily problems. He had neither the leisure nor the aptitude nor the desire for consciously cherishing a ‘vision.’ But there were in Paris and about the Hotel Crillon a large and active group of men whose professional concern — I use professional in no invidious sense — was precisely with the vision of a world after the war. They were newspapermen, publicists, social workers, officials connected with the peace mission, of a radical cast of mind. To-day among the severest critics of Mr. Wilson, they were only six months ago his ardent disciples, with a greater faith in the President than Mr. Wilson possibly had in himself; for they, at least, seemed to have no doubt that it was in the President’s power to impose his will on the rest of the Conference and shape the treaty quite as he saw fit.
Only that the things which they now saw were not what the President saw. They, too, had forgotten the one great longing which had been born out of the war — the longing for a guaranty against war. Theirs was the opposite impulse to that of the hard-headed business man. They did not say that the world, after all, was bound to be the same little old world that had emerged from other wars. On the contrary, they were so carried away by the possibilities of a totally new world that they forgot their original interest in a peaceful world. They forgot the League in their interest in Reconstruction. And Reconstruction during those months was such an ever-new thing in Europe, so full of dramatic changes and promises, so rich in ever-opening vistas, that the idea of a league rapidly became for them oldfashioned, inadequate, or even hostile to their new affections. Two thirds of Europe was seething with revolution. New nationalities, new classes, new alignments presented themselves. What was going on in Russia, in Hungary, in Germany became of infinitely more consequence than what might happen to the League.
It is true that a more or less perfunctory tribute was paid to internationalism, of which the League might be supposed a part. But their great concern was with Revolution, with Labor, with Mass Effort. And war and peace? Yes, war was still an evil. Yes, war was a device of the governments and the ‘ interests ’ to bedevil the peoples. And yet, this question of war — well, frankly, it depends, don’t you know? It might be a capitalistic war, or it might be a people’s war. It might be a war for enslavement, or it might be a war for freedom. In other words, Liberals have begun to talk quite like their imperialist opponents. The Liberal, too, has discovered that there are righteous wars and the other kind. The only difference is that the imperialist discusses righteousness in terms of nations and the new Liberal talks of war in terms of class. A Clemenceau war against the German people would be an unholy war. An invasion of Poland or Hungary by the Soviet armies bearing aid to fellow Socialists in Poland or Hungary would be a righteous war. And thus liberalism has opened the gates to the ancient enemy.
It is the President’s outstanding service and his title to fundamental consistency that he has not forgotten. The memory of men’s arms upflung in an agon^' of appeal against a return of the great horror has remained vivid to him, and he has written the vision into the Covenant. Between the men who six months ago cried out against war and now have their business to attend to and those others who cried out against, war and have now found out that there are Revolutions and Reconstructions which they would much rather have than peace, the President stands forth as the man who has not forgotten. And with him, I take it, there are many millions of plain people who have not forgotten. How many millions, Mr. Wilson is now trying to find out.
IV
If the analysis I have attempted of Mr. Wilson’s impelling motive is anywhere near the truth, there emerges the question, should Mr. Wilson have gone to Europe? It is not altogether an academic question. Until the President’s work is completed, until the treaty has been ratified in the Senate, the victory is not won. And therefore it is still of practical importance to review the campaign from the beginning, to ascertain what errors of tactics or strategy Mr. Wilson may have committed, and to see whether the mistakes might be rectified in the interest of ultimate victory, precisely as the Allies in the war drew profit from the mistakes of the first three years of conflict.
Objections to the President’s trip, when his plans for the voyage were formulated last year, were largely based on propriety. There was the precedent against the Chief Executive leaving the country during his term of office. The issue was debated from both sides in the spirit of a rather trivial legalism. On the one hand, a precedent was being violated. On the other hand, a precedent was not being violated. Mr. Taft had driven or walked half-way across the international bridge between El Paso and Juarez, to shake hands with a Mexican President. Mr. Roosevelt had gone on a battleship to the Canal Zone. Mr. Wilson would travel on an American battleship, make his home in the American Embassy, and so constructively retain residence on American soil. The debate was suddenly closed by a common recognition of the simple fact that, in an unprecedented situation, old precedents die and new precedents are born.
But if the war and Mr. Wilson’s earlier actions, as some of his critics pointed out, had rendered obsolete the argument from precedent, it was still Mr. Wilson’s duty to have considered whether the great purpose he had in mind would be best subserved by sticking to precedent or by violating it. What was the strategy, rather than the narrow propriety, of the situation? Here I cannot help feeling that Mr. Wilson’s position was like that of the High Command in a great battle. G.H.Q. is always found well behind the battle line, and general officers do not lead the assault. There are exceptions, to be sure. Napoleon occasionally seizes the flag of a wavering regiment and presses on to victory. But it is only when disaster threatens that the risk is justified.
If America’s interests at the Conference had been represented by men of Mr. Wilson’s choice, acting under guidance from Washington, and those interests had been at any time imperiled, we can well imagine the President taking ship for Brest. And we can imagine the tremendous effect which such a move would have produced on the situation in Paris. It would have been what the rush of American troops across the seas was last summer. It would have been the oncoming of the reserves.
As things have turned out, it is possible to maintain that Mr. Wilson threw his reserves into the fight at the outset. We know that his prestige in Europe waned in the course of seven months. His second arrival at Brest naturally failed to evoke the tremendous repercussions of the first. We may well ask what would have been the effect if, in the last days of April, Mr. Wilson, instead of summoning the George Washington to Brest for the second time, had summoned her to New York City for his first trip abroad.
But the parallel between Mr. Wilson at Washington and Joffre or Foch one hundred miles behind the lines at G.H.Q. is not a perfect one. The Wilson battle-line lay only partly in Europe. One wing of the front, and for him the most vital sector, lay here in America. This problem would not have existed for the President if we had no constitutional provision requiring the ratification of a treaty by a two-thirds majority in the Senate, or if the President were absolutely assured of the necessary vote in the Senate. The facts were, of course, quite the other way. In the November elections the President had lost both Houses of Congress; and he had himself made the issue for the elections one of indorsement of his policies. It was difficult to explain away the outcome of the elections as due to matters quite foreign to war and peace. At least, the necessity confronted Mr. Wilson to demonstrate that, while a majority of the American people might be against Mr. Burleson, or against Mr. Creel, or against the Democratic Party on questions of domestic polity, a majority of the American people was still for a Wilson peace. But the President was not there.
The war against Germany was won, not primarily by leadership, but by national unity within every belligerent country and by national organization for war within each country. Let it be recalled that not all Foch’s or Haig’s cares were concerned with the situation in the field. Many an anxious eye they cast back to the home front. When Mr. Wilson sailed for Brest to wage battle for a just peace, he left behind him neither a united country nor the organization for reestablishing unity. To that task he might well have stayed at home and devoted himself. Through the press and the forum he should have advised — and consulted— the country and Congress on the aims and the methods of our peace representatives in Paris. I say advise and consult because it is obvious that much of the opposition which has arisen in Congress is not due to partisanship but to exasperation, natural to a great degree, with Mr. Wilson’s reticence, with his self-sufficiency at a time when no statesman was big enough to dispense with the counsel of his countrymen. To explain where explanation was necessary, to placate where the strategy of the situation dictated conciliation, to attack where the challenge was clear — for all such purposes the President would have been at his strongest here at home. And his strength at home would infallibly have been reflected in the Conference, and victory in Paris would have been definite. It would have been the victoire intégrate, and in that case there would have been no supplementary battles to fight in the Senate after the Germans had signed.
This assumes that Mr. Wilson’s delegates in Europe could have fought his battles as well as he has done. It is my belief that they could have done so. Mr. Wilson’s presence in Europe was not absolutely necessary to rally liberal opinion in the Allied countries against their own governments in favor of a Wilsonian peace. It is naïve to think that Mr. Wilson won the hearts of the French people in the course of a short drive along the Champs Elysées, that he won the Italian people by a single public appearance at Rome, that he won the hearts of the British people between Charing Cross and Buckingham Palace. He had their hearts before he set sail for Brest. He might have remained in the White House, and still be Wilson and America to the Italian peasants who are reported to have burned candles before his picture, and to the Poles and Czechs who erected statues to the great liberator across the seas.