Master of the Senate (12 page)

What would have been the result had the Senate resisted TR’s expansion of executive authority in foreign affairs cannot be known—because the Senate did not resist. It refused to assert the powers in foreign affairs that the Framers had given it. Time after time, when a senator proposed an amendment limiting the new executive authority—denying appropriations for military forces sent to foreign countries without congressional consent, for example—the Senate’s GOP rulers saw to it that the amendment was voted down. “I say there is no law, and I do not believe there ever was a law to prevent the Commander-in-Chief of … the United States from … giving [American citizens] the protection required by self-respect,” Senator Elihu Root declared. A President’s authority as Commander-in-Chief therefore allowed him to send troops “unless it be for the purpose of making war, which of course he cannot do.” As the trend toward executive action continued during the Taft Administration, protests in the Senate grew louder. But, as Schlesinger summarizes, “whatever the nuances of arguments, limitations were evaporating. The executive was becoming habituated to the unconstrained deployment of American forces around the world, and Congress chose not to say him nay.” As Roosevelt himself was to say, “The biggest matters, such as the Portsmouth peace, the acquisition of Panama, and sending the fleet around the world, I managed without consultation with anyone….” To a considerable extent, TR was only telling the truth. Furthermore, precedents had now been established. Following bloodshed in Tampico in 1914, Woodrow Wilson asked congressional sanction to send troops to protect American citizens in Mexico. There was doubt among senators over whether the provocation justified Wilson’s reaction, but, trapped by what Hamilton had called the “antecedent state of things,” they approved the move. No President—and perhaps no outside force of any type—could have so drastically weakened the Senate’s power in foreign affairs. The Founding Fathers had given the Senate armor that should have prevented that. But the Senate could weaken itself—and it had done so, stripping away much of its own authority over foreign affairs.

B
UT NOT ALL OF IT
—as, in 1919, Woodrow Wilson discovered.

When the President sailed for Europe to personally represent the United States at the peace conference convening in Paris, warships in New York Harbor fired salutes, a huge throng filled Battery Park to cheer him off on his historic journey, and as his liner passed through the Narrows, his fellow passengers saw, all along the Brooklyn and Staten Island shorelines, children waving flags. When the ship pulled into Brest, posters on the walls of the old slate-roofed stone houses called on all Frenchmen to praise this world hero
who had come “to found a new order on the rights of peoples, and to stop forever the return of atrocious war.” The American President’s idealistic aims had captured the imagination of a war-weary world. In isolated villages in Italy, peasants burned candles before his portrait. All over Europe, crowds cheered him as he paraded through the streets, a reception which, as one historian puts it delicately, “tended to increase his sense of mission.” And not only was the peace treaty signed at Versailles in May, 1919, the remarkably moderate treaty that Wilson wanted, but incorporated within the body of the treaty was a Covenant, or Constitution, for a world organization for peace, a “League of Nations,” which he had determined to bring into being, so that the treaty would be “definitely a guarantee of peace.” And the American people were, by a substantial majority, in favor of the proposed League in principle, and newspapers supported it by a margin of four to one.

But it was not the people of the United States who would determine the fate of the League of Nations but the Senate of the United States—and the Majority Leader of the Senate, who commanded from Daniel Webster’s desk, was Henry Cabot Lodge.

Dr. Lodge (Ph.D., Harvard), historian and author, had been known as “the Scholar in Politics” before the advent on the political scene of Dr. Woodrow Wilson (Ph.D., Johns Hopkins), historian and author, who promptly was awarded that title as if Lodge had never held it. The Senator loathed the President. “I never expected to hate anyone in politics with the hatred I feel toward Wilson,” he had written a friend some years before; he told other friends that the President was “shifty,” “the most sinister figure that ever crossed the country’s path.” The feeling was reciprocated. The Republican senators, particularly Lodge, were “pygmy-minded—narrow … selfish … poor little minds that never get anywhere but run around in a circle and think they are going somewhere,” Wilson said. So strained were relations between the two men that at one ceremony Wilson refused to sit on the same platform with the Senator.

Piled atop the personal considerations were the political. In a wartime truce on politics, Republicans had in many instances supported Wilson’s war program more loyally than Democrats, but just before the 1918 congressional elections, Wilson had suddenly appealed to voters to return Democratic majorities to both houses. Furious Republicans considered the appeal a betrayal, and some of them—none more so than Lodge—saw it as confirmation of what they had long suspected was the President’s unbridled lust for power; Lodge believed that Wilson was planning to run for a third term, in 1920, and, that the President, anxious to be acclaimed as the peacemaker to boost his re-election prospects, was sacrificing the independence of the United States to the League. And when Wilson’s appeal backfired—the Republicans took control of both houses, although by a mere two-vote margin in the Senate—the President’s most bitter enemy was elevated not only to the Senate’s majority leadership but to the chairmanship of its Foreign Relations Committee.

For Lodge, moreover, the personal and political considerations were reinforced by the philosophical. His twenty-six years in the Senate had been twenty-six years of uncompromising advocacy of an assertive, unilateralist foreign policy backed by strong armed forces. He wanted a peace that would strengthen America’s position relative to the European powers. “The thing to do,” he had said during the war, “is to lick Germany and tell her what arrangements we are going to make.” Above all, he believed in the sovereignty and independence of the United States; the international cooperation that was the centerpiece of Wilson’s League he viewed as a menace to America’s need to preserve absolute freedom of action to pursue and protect its own interests.

And he believed in the sovereignty and independence of the Senate of the United States. He revered the Senate, with a reverence grounded in the same philosophy that had inspired the Founding Fathers to create it. As he was to write in 1921,

Never, he felt, had the threat to senatorial sovereignty been greater. A series of strong Presidents had chipped away at it, aiming “at weakening if not breaking down the government as nearly as possible to one which consists of the executive and the voters, the simplest and most rudimentary form of human government which history can show,” he said. And now Wilson was trying to destroy it entirely.

The very symbol and heart of that sovereignty was, to Lodge, the Senate’s power over treaties. “War can be declared without the assent of the Executive, and peace can be made without the assent of the House,” he had once pointed out. “But neither war nor peace can be made without the assent of the Senate.” A treaty, he emphasized, is not a treaty just because a President has entered into it. A treaty is “still inchoate, a mere project for a treaty, until the consent of the Senate has been given to it.” Therefore, he said, “The responsibility of a Senator in dealing with any question of peace is as great in his sphere as that of the President in his.” Personal malice toward Wilson, political scheming—these were elements in Lodge’s motivation. But, as James MacGregor Burns has written, “at the core of the hostility … lay genuine differences of outlook and principle.”

Woodrow Wilson’s “faith in representative democracy, in majority rule, in the ultimate wisdom of the people, went,” as Burns put it, “to the very core of
his being”—as did his belief in the superiority of his mental processes to those of “pygmy-minded” senators. This feeling was evident in the makeup of the five-member delegation he selected to accompany him to Paris. While President McKinley had included three senators on the five-member delegation negotiating the treaty ending the Spanish-American War, Wilson took no senators with him; he apparently was resolved to have no opposition in his delegation. His announcement that his chief adviser would be his little-known personal confidant, Colonel Edward M. House, caused distress even on the Democratic side of the Senate. “Who is this Colonel House?” Arizona’s Henry Ashurst demanded. “Whence did he come, what has he accomplished, and where is he headed?” Wilson was unmoved. Returning to the United States for necessary bill-signing work in March, he reported that the treaty and the Covenant were linked—and then sailed again for France. When Lodge fired a warning shot across his bow—rising at his desk to read to the Senate just before it adjourned at midnight, March 3, 1919, a “Round Robin” declaring that the League “in the form now proposed” was unacceptable to the United States, a Round Robin bearing the signatures of thirty-seven Republican senators and senators-elect—Wilson reacted with contempt. “Anyone who opposes me … I’ll crush!” he told the French ambassador. “I shall consent to nothing.
The Senate must take its medicine.”
He had outsmarted the Senate, he felt. He boasted to the world that when the treaty was brought back, “the gentlemen on this side will find the Covenant not only tied into it, but so many threads on the treaty tied to the Covenant that you cannot dissect the Covenant from the treaty without destroying the whole vital structure.” He assumed, in the words of one historian, that “The Senate would not dare to kill the peace treaty outright.” It would have no choice but to consent.

Which showed that the onetime constitutional scholar had forgotten some of his lessons. Thirty-seven Republicans, more than the thirty-one necessary to block a treaty, had already declared this treaty unacceptable. Even if every Democrat voted to ratify it (and several Democrats had their own reservations about it), it would not be ratified so long as the Republicans remained united.

And the leader of the Republicans knew how to keep them united; Lodge had, after all, served his apprenticeship under Aldrich and Allison. Now, in 1919, “No one knew better than he the various devices and methods by which a treaty could be killed, nor had anyone more practice in the use of them,” commented the historian W. Stull Holt. More than a dozen Republicans, led by the rigid isolationists Robert La Follette, William E. Borah, and Hiram Johnson, felt even more strongly about the treaty than did Lodge, so strongly that they were dubbed the “irreconcilables.” About a dozen “mild reservationists” approved the League in principle but wanted minor alterations. And a middle bloc of Republicans—“strong reservationists”—were willing to go along with the League only if American sovereignty was guaranteed. In a series of compromises, Lodge bound the three groups together in a solid front behind a series of fourteen reservations (fourteen to match Wilson’s Fourteen Points;
newspapermen would dub them the “Lodge Reservations”) so that the Treaty of Versailles could be ratified only if these reservations—which would protect America’s sovereignty and freedom of action (but which would also have made the League a substantially weaker organization than the one Wilson had envisioned)—were added to the treaty. At the height of public enthusiasm for the treaty, Lodge had calmly reassured an ally, “The only people who have votes on the treaty are here in the Senate.” And he, not the President, had the votes.

Moreover, he had the Senate’s inviolable rules under which a proposed treaty had to be considered by the Foreign Relations Committee before it could be considered by the Senate as a whole—and on the committee, he had a solid majority, for its Republican members were either “irreconcilables” or less ideological skeptics like Warren G. Harding of Ohio. By the time the President of the United States returned from Versailles in his glory, the Senate of the United States was arrayed against him in its might. On July 10, 1919, the day following his return, Woodrow Wilson entered the Senate Chamber with a bulky copy of the treaty under his arm and presented it to the Senate in a speech that enunciated the noble ideals behind it—“Dare we reject it and break the heart of the world? … We cannot turn back. We can only go forward, with lifted eyes and freshened spirit, to follow the vision…. America shall in truth show the way….” But hardly had the President finished and left the Chamber when Senator Lodge rose at his desk to utter a single quiet sentence that had as much significance as all Wilson’s eloquence. He wished to move, the Senator said, to refer the treaty to the Foreign Relations Committee.

Woodrow Wilson was now to be reminded of the power of the Senate. The President’s eloquence, as Burns puts it, “reverberated through press and public,” a press and public favorable to the idea of a League of Nations. But Lodge and other opponents of the League believed that if the public was educated to the possible sacrifices of American sovereignty to an international body, public opinion would change. Ample funding from Republican bankers was available to finance this education—a massive public relations campaign—but time was needed for the campaign to accomplish its purpose. And the Founding Fathers had created the Senate to provide such time, to be the “cooler” for public opinion, to “refine and enlarge the public views” and produce “the cool and deliberated sense of the community.”