American Experiment (233 page)

At the core of the hostility, however, lay genuine differences of outlook and principle. For nearly three decades, Lodge had been a leading spokesman for an aggressive, unilateralist foreign policy backed by a stronger
military establishment. In the 1880s and 1890s, he had led Theodore Roosevelt and a few other young Republicans in calling for a naval buildup and the acquisition of colonies overseas. He had supported, as matters of paramount national interest, the war with Spain, the annexation of the Philippines, the building of the Panama Canal, and most of the interventions in Latin America carried out by Roosevelt and Taft. In 1919, Lodge hoped for a peace settlement that would strengthen America’s international influence vis-à-vis the European powers, and also in the Western Hemisphere. Wilson’s “idealistic” internationalism left Lodge cold, and he viewed the idea of collective security that was at the heart of Wilson’s League as a distinct threat to American freedom of action.

The President and the senator, therefore, were engaged in a battle over two conflicting foreign policy strategies. Wilson’s concept had its intellectual origins largely in his personal moral values; Lodge’s sprang mainly from traditional power considerations. The President placed his faith in the collegial good sense of an international parliament that he had taken great pains to craft; the senator proposed to rely on the nationalist economic and military policies that he had promoted for decades.

When the debate was cast in these terms, Lodge was able to rally some support in the Senate and in the country, yet seemingly not enough to block the treaty. In order to defeat Wilson, Lodge had to win and keep the backing of senators who opposed the treaty for a variety of other reasons, some of them not very admirable. Indeed, the struggle over the League of Nations aroused some of the basest prejudice and hate-mongering in American politics. James Reed of Missouri declared that “dark” peoples would outnumber whites three to one in the League assembly, while Senator Lawrence Sherman of Illinois alleged that the Catholic majority in the League would make it a tool of the Vatican. Other senators engaged in the traditional sport of twisting the lion’s tail, claiming that the British would use the League to send American boys to suppress freedom-fighters in Ireland.

With these and other legislators, Lodge acted as a traditional power broker, agreeing to tolerate or support their objections to the treaty in return for their supporting his. Slowly Lodge worked to knit the treaty opponents into a coherent group that would act together to amend or kill Wilson’s proposal. Hiram Johnson of California came over when Lodge agreed to support Johnson’s objection to Canada, Australia, and other British dominions having an independent vote in the League. At the same time, Lodge conducted delicate negotiations with Senator Porter McCumber, one of the mildest reservationists on the treaty, to find some common ground for an amendment to Article 10—Wilson’s Covenant.

The League’s opponents needed time to organize their coalition in the Senate and to convey their message to the general public. Lodge used parliamentary maneuvers to secure that time, first by tying up the Foreign Relations Committee with a two-week, word-for-word reading of the entire 268-page treaty, and then by inviting every conceivable opponent of the pact to testify at length against it. Lodge’s delaying tactics, however, did not redound exclusively to his side’s advantage. Wilson was also able to use the extra time to round up votes, for he too was pursuing a legislative strategy.

Soon after the President returned from Europe, several of his advisors suggested that he immediately tour the country to arouse further public support for the League. Other political insiders, however, most notably Herman Kohlsaat and Senator Gilbert Hitchcock, calculated that Wilson could do more good by staying in Washington to deal directly with the Senate. He heeded the advice of the latter; for six weeks he talked with senators individually and in small groups, wrote private letters to wavering Republicans, and submitted evidence—although not as much as Lodge requested—to the Foreign Relations Committee. One historian concludes that Wilson’s “approach to senators was flexible, not dogmatic and doctrinaire, not rigid and unbending.” The President answered questions and expounded on the League Covenant, but he also listened to the senators’ reservations and weighed their advice. Both Democrats and Republicans informed him that, despite the compromises that Wilson had made in Paris, the treaty would not gain the support of two-thirds of the Senate as it stood. Finding himself in a “perplexed and somewhat distressing situation,” the President nonetheless resolved to compromise once more in order to achieve his main goal of leading the United States into the League.

The key to Wilson’s strategy of conciliation lay with a small group of Republican senators, led by Kellogg, who had proposed a set of four moderate revisions to the treaty. If Wilson and Kellogg could rally a large enough coalition around those reservations, which were mainly interpretive in nature, they could beat Lodge at his own game. The contest settled into a battle of parliamentary tactics. Wilson persuaded Kellogg to submit his interpretive reservations as a separate resolution, requiring a two-thirds majority for passage, to be considered at the same time as the treaty itself. As Wilson explained the plan to his supporters, a coalition strong enough to pass Kellogg’s resolution would be strong enough to pass the treaty. By accepting Kellogg’s compromise, Wilson hoped to maneuver the Republican moderates into voting for the League.

Lodge recognized at once that Wilson’s tactics threatened his own efforts at coalition-building. The senator insisted that reservations to the treaty had to be submitted as amendments to the text itself, to be approved or rejected by a simple majority vote. Lodge could rally a potential majority behind his grab-bag of amendments, but not a two-thirds majority. The parliamentary arithmetic was plain: if Wilson won on the procedural question of what form reservations should take, the moderate Republicans would probably rally around Kellogg’s resolution as the best possible compromise and the treaty would pass substantially as Wilson wanted it.

The real climax of the legislative battle, therefore, came on August 20 when Democratic Senator Key Pittman moved that reservations to the treaty be passed in a contemporaneous resolution. Lodge met the challenge head-on, appealing to his fellow Republicans to stand together as a majority and thus retain control over consideration of the treaty. Faced with the prospect of dividing their party to the ultimate advantage of a Democratic President, most of the moderate Republicans sided with Lodge and the irreconcilables on the procedural question. Pittman was forced to delay his motion for a week while Wilson’s allies sought in vain to rally the mild reservationists back to their side. Finally, on August 27, the President conceded defeat in his tactical struggle with Lodge.

So Lodge had won—in the Senate. He had won because he had carried out one of the most brilliant feats of transactional leadership in the Senate’s history. He had controlled both his Senate majority and his committee with consummate skill. When a senator threatened to drift off the reservation, Lodge spared no pains to persuade the right man to get in touch with the right politicians who could bring the man back into the fold. Day after day he brokered and traded with both the reservationists and the anti-League extremists in his own party. He played the game like a chess master, arraying his men, calculating his tactics, exploiting time, coldly analyzing his foe’s moves, keeping his queen and his king—his committee chairmanship and his majority leadership—intact and in command.

Wilson too played a strong game in the Senate, mustering all his presidential and personal influence, using face-to-face persuasion, pulling back when need be, always holding his Senate Democrats in line. But the Senate was Lodge’s chessboard, not his. It was Lodge’s two-thirds rule for ratifying treaties, Lodge’s majority rule for amending treaties, not his.

Wilson’s strength lay in a much wider field, the national electorate. Lodge, to be sure, had not neglected this field: several hundred thousand copies of his key Senate speech were sent to his Senate friends for grassroots distribution; anti-League propaganda organs were busy; Lodge turned to Irish and other ethnic groups for support. But Wilson would
transcend all this. By appealing to the nation he could transform the very ground on which the battle was being fought—and transform global politics in the process.

On the same day that he conceded Senate defeat to Lodge, the President announced his intention of appealing to the country.

On the evening of September 3, the presidential special rolled out of Washington’s Union Station. The engine drew only seven cars: quarters for the servants, reporters, Secret Service men, and the train crew that accompanied Wilson; a dining car; and, last in line, the President’s blue-painted private coach, the
Mayflower.
As they sat together in the lounge of the final car, Wilson’s three chosen companions for the journey—his wife Edith, his devoted secretary Joseph Tumulty, and the uneasy doctor Cary Grayson—eyed the President anxiously.

Wilson had never seemed to recover fully from his bout of influenza in Paris. For weeks he had suffered daily from mind-numbing headaches. The strain of his constant negotiations with the Senate showed in every line on his face, every irritable word and clipped gesture. Grayson, familiar with Wilson’s history of periodic physical breakdowns under stress, was vehemently opposed to the trip. But the President was determined to make his appeal to the country, to circumvent by force of eloquence and will the constitutional impasse that threatened to nullify his diplomatic craftsmanship. He believed that American leaders, like British parliamentarians, should “take their case to the people.”

When the train arrived next morning in Columbus, Ohio, the President seemed to brighten somewhat. The cheering crowds, though not as large or as reverential as those in Europe, were plainly a tonic to him. He opened his first speech of the tour with words of relief: “I have long chafed at confinement in Washington and I have wanted to report to you and other citizens of the United States.”

Public speaking as the enunciation of moral principles in clear ringing terms was Wilson’s first love, his greatest political asset. As the audiences responded to his verbal magic, some of Wilson’s frustration at the near-checkmate in the Senate began to ease away. He reached out to touch the issue closest to the hearts of his listeners. If the treaty could be passed, he declared with a beat of his hands, then “men in khaki will not have to cross the seas again!” He also reached upward, to the high ideals that were the staple of his political philosophy. “America was not founded to make money,” he told businessmen in St. Louis, “it was founded to lead the world on the way to liberty.”

The swing around the country was not destined to be a triumphant march of idealism, however. The President’s visits triggered opposition as well as applause. In Missouri, a minister countered Wilson by denouncing the League as a Wall Street plot. A Milwaukee socialist labeled the President’s plan a “capitalist scheme” to bring “more wars and more armaments.”

Lodge, meanwhile, was not idle. Although he remained firmly committed to his legislative strategy, he did dispatch several of his allies from among the irreconcilables to counter Wilson in the battle for public opinion. Hiram Johnson arrived in the Midwest shortly after Wilson left and brought an anti-League rally to its feet with charges that England hoped to use the international pact to send a hundred thousand American soldiers to fight in Constantinople. James Reed stumped New England, where doubts about the League and suspicions of Britain were most concentrated. Reed played to the hilt his assigned role of twisting the lion’s tail; “the bloody footprints of John Bull,” he exclaimed in speech after speech on the treaty, were “all over the dastardly document.” But it was back in Washington that Lodge landed the most telling blow, against both the League and against Wilson personally. The senator summoned William Bullitt, still smarting over what he regarded as Wilson’s betrayal of the peace mission to Russia, to testify about Secretary of State Lansing’s true attitude toward the treaty. Bullitt told the Foreign Relations Committee that Lansing had been less than candid in publicly stating his support for the treaty, that privately the Secretary believed the League was “entirely useless” and should “unquestionably be defeated.” When quizzed by the press, Lansing refused to deny that he had made such remarks to Bullitt.

The rising echoes of opposition that pursued Wilson denied him the release he had sought in the speaking tour. As the special moved westward, the President telescoped his schedule of speeches, canceled the days that had been set aside for rest, harangued crowds at every whistle-stop from the rear platform of his train. His headaches and nausea grew worse. Grayson feared that Wilson was trying to kill himself.

As the strain mounted, Wilson strove to answer the attacks on the treaty point by point. The people were being “deliberately misled,” he charged in Oakland, especially about the plan for collective security. In Reno and elsewhere, he laid out the rationale behind Article 10, the League Covenant that he himself had composed.

“Article 10 is the heart of the enterprise. Article 10 is the test of the honor and courage and endurance of the world. Article 10 says that every member of the League, and that means every fighting power in the world … solemnly engages to respect and preserve as against external
aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of the other members of the League. If you do that, you have absolutely stopped ambitious and aggressive war….”

The pressure on Wilson drove him again and again to an emotional prophecy: “I have it in my heart that if we do not do this great thing now, every woman ought to weep because of the child in her arms. If she has a boy at her breast, she may be sure that when he comes to manhood this terrible task will have to be done once more. Everywhere we go, the train, when it stops, is surrounded with little children, and I look at them almost with tears in my eyes, because I feel my mission is to save them. These glad youngsters with flags in their hands—I pray God that they may never have to carry that flag upon the battlefield.”