Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

It may some day be regarded as one of the chief merits of the Wilson Administration that it was not affected by this popular delusion. While a large part of the people seemed to expect a cheap and speedy victory by some sort of white magic, the Administration was getting ready to work for victory. And thanks largely to the unity which had been bought by the President's caution in the two previous years, Congress and the people assented to measures of exertion and self-denial such as no man could have expected America to undertake until compelled by bitter experience.

The first step was the dispatch of American naval forces to aid the Allies in the fight against the submarines, which for a few months were to come dangerously near justifying the confidence that had been placed in them. The process of naval reinforcement was slow, and not till 1918 did the American Navy become a really important factor in the anti-submarine campaign; but every destroyer added to the allied forces was of immediate value. The American Treasury was opened for vast credits to the Allies, who by their enormous purchases of war materials in the United States had created the abounding prosperity of 1916, and had pretty nearly exhausted their own finances in doing so. More than that, the Administration began at once to prepare for the organization of a vast army; and faced with this most important duty of the conduct of the war, the President took the advice of the men who knew. The army officers knew that if America were to take a serious part in the war the regular army and the National Guard would not be enough, nor even Garrison's Continental Army which had been rejected in 1916. A big army would be needed, and the right way to raise it was by conscription.

So the Selective Service act was introduced in Congress and passed in May, without very serious opposition. At the very start the American people had accepted a principle which had been adopted in the crisis of the Civil War only after two years of disaster and humiliation. It was the estimate of experts that this army would need a year of training before it would be fit for the front line, and a huge system of cantonments was hastily constructed to house the troops, while the nucleus of men trained in the Plattsburg camps was increased by the extension of the Plattsburg system all over the country.

For the leadership of this army General Pershing was selected, not without considerable criticism from those who thought General Wood deserved the position. The reasons which led to the selection of Pershing are not yet officially known to the public, but Pershing's record was to be a sufficient justification of the appointment.

But military and naval measures were only a part of the work needed to win this war. Allied shipping was being sunk by the submarines at an alarming rate, and new ships had to be provided. An enormous American program was laid out, and General Goethals, in whom there was universal confidence, was made head of the Emergency Fleet Corporation charged with its execution. But Goethals could not get along with William Denman, head of the Shipping Board, and changes of personnel were constant through the year until in 1918 Charles M. Schwab was finally put in chief control of the shipbuilding program.

For this and the development of the industrial program necessary for military efficiency the support of labor was essential. Mr. Wilson now reaped once more the benefit of a policy which had previously brought him much criticism. His retreat before the railroad brotherhoods in August of 1916, as well as the general policy of his Administration, had won him the invaluable support of the American Federation of Labor, and this good understanding, together with the unprecedented wage scales which came into operation in most industries with the war emergency, gave to the United States Government much more firm support from organized labor than most of the allied countries had been able to obtain.

But this war touched every department of human affairs. The Allies were short of food, and one of the first achievements of the American Government was the institution of a limited food control in the United States, under the directorship of Herbert Hoover. Saving of food by voluntary effort was popularized, and increased production and reduced consumption prevented the appearance of any serious food crisis in the allied countries. Later a fuel control was instituted under Dr. Harry A. Garfield, and the principle of voluntary self-denial established by the Food Administration was carried on into the field of news, where the newspapers submitted to voluntary restriction of the publication of news that might unfavorably affect military and naval movements. The Committee on Public Information, headed by George Creel, was in general supervision of this work, and, though it was, on the whole, unpopular and accomplished no very useful purpose at home, it developed during 1918 a service of European propaganda which was of immense value in heartening the Allies, informing the neutrals and discouraging the enemy.

For all this money was needed, and in May and June the first Liberty Loan of $2,000,000,000 was put before the public in an intensive campaign of publicity. Mr. McAdoo proved himself an extremely able advertiser of the public finances, and with the vigorous coöperation of banks and business men the loan was more than 50 per cent oversubscribed. There were other and larger loans later, but after the success of the first one there was no doubt that they would be taken; the first great accomplishment in national financing was almost as much of a surprise to the public as the ready acceptance of the draft.

Early in April the railroads were put in charge of a committee of five railroad Presidents, who were given great powers in the combination of facilities for better service. But the system did not work well, and on Dec. 26, 1917, the President announced the assumption by the Government of control of the railroads for the war emergency, with Mr. McAdoo as Director General.

Nineteen hundred and seventeen, then, saw the Wilson Administration undertaking far heavier burdens than any previous Administration had attempted, and meeting with a measure of success which was beyond all prediction. The most powerful nation in the world was getting ready for war on an enormous scale, getting ready slowly, to be sure, but with a surprising ease and a surprising harmony. The nation which had re-elected the President in November because he had kept it out of war was whole-heartedly behind him from April on as he led it into war.

But great as was the President's moral authority at home, it was still greater abroad. The principles proclaimed in his address of April 2, and repeated and elaborated later in the year, became the creed of almost every political element in Europe except the German military party. The Russian revolution was still a liberalizing influence, in the early part of the year, and self-determination began to be proclaimed over all Europe as the central principle of any satisfactory peace settlement. In the allied countries, where Mr. Wilson's forbearance toward Germany had been heaped with ridicule for the last two years, he became over night the interpreter of the ideals for which the democratic peoples were fighting. Hereafter in any negotiations with Germany the President by general consent acted as the spokesman of all the allied Governments, and the peoples of the allied countries accepted his declarations as a sort of codification of the principles of the war. It must be left for the historian of the future to decide how much of this deference was due to appreciation of the President's service in clarifying the allied ideals, and how much to his position as head of the most powerful nation in the world, whose intervention was expected to bring victory to the Allies.

But in other countries as well, Wilson's ideals had become a dogma to which everybody professed allegiance no matter what his views. The President's principles, as publicly expressed in his speeches, had been in effect a declaration of worthy ends, such as all right thinking persons desired. He had been less concerned with the means to those ends, and consequently all who agreed with his principles were inclined to assert that the President's ideals were exemplified by their own practices. In 1917 the President enjoyed the unusual experience of seeing American liberals, British Laborites, three or four kinds of Russian Socialists, neutral Socialists, neutral clericals, neutral pacifists and even certain groups in the enemy countries all proclaiming their adherence to the ideals of President Wilson.

For a time, indeed, it seemed that the war might be decided by moral force. Beginning to take alarm at the activity of America, and not yet certain of the effect of the Russian revolution (which was having grave consequences in Austria-Hungary) the Germans inclined during the Summer of 1917 to a new peace offensive. Bethmann Hollweg was dropped on July 14, and five days later a majority of the Reichstag voted for a peace virtually on the basis of the status quo ante. In August the Vatican issued a peace proposal suggesting a settlement on that general principle, with territorial and racial disputes to be left for later adjustment; and the Socialists of Europe were preparing to meet at Stockholm for a peace conference of their own influenced by the same ideas.

But the President had changed his opinion that America had no concern with the causes and the objects of the war; he had had to search for and explore the obscure foundations from which the tremendous flood had burst forth. His Flag Day speech on June 14 showed that he was now thinking of the political and economic aspects of the German drive for world supremacy; and when the allied powers intrusted him with the task of answering the Pope's peace suggestion in the name of all of them, he declared that "we cannot take the word of the present rulers of Germany as a guarantee for anything that is to endure." The German Government could not be trusted with a peace without victory.

That peace offensive died out in early Fall. The Germans had lost interest, for they seemed likely to reach their objective in other ways. Things were going badly for the Allies. The offensives in the west had broken down and France's striking power seemed exhausted. Italy suffered a terrific defeat in October. America was preparing, but had not yet arrived, and the chief result of the Russian revolution had been the collapse of the eastern front. When in November the Bolsheviki overthrew Kerensky and prepared to make peace at any price, it was evident that the German armies in France would soon be enormously reinforced. So the Winter of 1917-18 saw a new peace offensive, but this time most of the work was done by the Allies, and the object was to detach Austria-Hungary from Germany.

The item of principal interest in the long-range bombardment of speeches on war aims by which the statesmen of the various powers conducted this exchange of views was the proclamation of the famous Fourteen Points, in which the President for the first time put his ideas as to the conditions of a just peace into somewhat specific form. The origin of this program, which was eventually to become the basis of the peace treaty, is still a matter of conjecture. Lloyd George on Jan. 5, 1918, had stated war aims in some respects identical with those which the President embodied in the Fourteen Points three days later. A good deal of the program had been included in the allied statement of Jan. 11, 1917, but the Fourteen Points were somewhat more moderate. They seemed to be, indeed, a rather hasty recension of old programs in the effort to modify allied aspirations so that Austria would accept them; for while the Fourteen Points professed to contain the scheme of a just peace, they were set forth as a step in the endeavor to persuade Austria to desert her ally. As it happened, Austria could not have deserted Germany even if she had desired; and, in any event, the effort to compromise was quite impracticable. The section referring to Austrian internal problems, for instance, proposed a solution which the Austrian Government had rejected only a few weeks before, and which the Austrian subject nationalities would no longer have been willing to accept

Whatever the origin of the Fourteen Points, their immediate effect was slight. The Austrians, and to a lesser extent the Germans, professed interest, but it was soon apparent that the Germans at least were not ready to approach the allied point of view. And the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, forced upon Russia on March 3, was in such stark contrast with the benevolent professions of German statesmen that the President realized that nothing could be gained by debate and compromise. On April 6, in a speech at Baltimore, he declared that only one argument was now of use against the Germans--"force to the utmost, force without stint or limit." The process of conversion from the viewpoint of January, 1917, was complete.

As a matter of fact, however, the application of force had already begun. On March 21 Ludendorff had opened his great offensive in France which was to bring the war to a German victory, and for the next few months Foch, and not Wilson, was the dominant personality among the Allies. And for a time it seemed that however much America had contributed to the moral struggle between the alliances, she would be able to furnish comparatively little force. The winter of 1917-18 had been full of humiliations. The railroad disorganization which had led to the proclamation of Government control at the end of December was being cleared up only slowly. The Fuel Administration was in an even worse tangle, and in January business and industry had to shut down for several days throughout the whole Eastern part of the country in order to find coal to move food trains to the ports. Great sums of money and enormous volumes of boasting had been expended on airplane construction without getting any airplanes. Hundreds of millions had been poured into shipyards and ships were only beginning to come from the ways. The richest nation in the world allowed hundreds of its soldiers to die in cantonment hospitals because of insufficient attention and inadequate supplies. Artillery regiments were being trained with wooden guns and only 150,000 Americans, many of them technical troops, were in France.

The Secretary of War, called before a Congressional committee to answer questions on these shortcomings, had created the impression that he either did not know that anything was wrong or did not care. On Jan. 19 Senator Chamberlain, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs, declared that "the military establishment of the United States has broken down; it has almost stopped functioning," and that there was "inefficiency in every bureau and department of the Government." The next day he introduced bills for a War Cabinet and a Director of Munitions, which would practically have taken the military and industrial conduct of the war out of the President's hands.

The President met the challenge boldly with the declaration that Senator Chamberlain's statement was "an astonishing and unjustifiable distortion of the truth," and must have been due to disloyalty to the Administration. Chamberlain's reply, while admitting that he might have overstated his case, was a proclamation of loyalty to his Commander-in-Chief and an appeal for getting down to the business of winning the war.

_The Fourteen Points_

_President Wilson's program for the world's peace was outlined in
the Fourteen Points, which constituted part of an address delivered
before Congress January 8, 1918, as follows:_

_No Private Understandings_

1 OPEN COVENANTS of peace, openly arrived at, after which there
shall be no private international understandings of any kind, but
diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.

_Freedom of the Seas_

2 ABSOLUTE FREEDOM of navigation upon the seas outside territorial
waters, alike in peace and in war, except as the seas may be closed
in whole or in part by international action for the enforcement of
international covenants.

_No Economic Barriers_

3 THE REMOVAL, so far as possible, of all economic barriers and the
establishment of an equality of trade conditions among all the
nations consenting to the peace and associating themselves for its
maintenance.

_Reduce National Armaments_

4 ADEQUATE GUARANTEES given and taken that national armaments will
be reduced to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety.

_Colonial Claims_

5 A FREE, open minded and absolutely impartial adjustment of all
colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle
that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests
of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the
equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined.

_Russian Territory_

6 THE EVACUATION of all Russian territory and such a settlement of
all questions affecting Russia as will secure the best and freest
cooperation of the other nations of the world in obtaining for her
an unhampered and unembarrassed opportunity for the independent
determination of her own political development and national policy
and assure her of a sincere welcome into the society of free
nations under institutions of her own choosing, and, more than a
welcome, assistance also of every kind that she may need and may
herself desire. The treatment accorded Russia by her sister nations
in the months to come will be the acid test of their good-will, of
their comprehension of her needs as distinguished from their own
interests and of their intelligent and unselfish sympathy.

_Restoration of Belgium_

7 BELGIUM, the whole world will agree, must be evacuated and
restored without any attempt to limit the sovereignty which she
enjoys in common with all other free nations. No other single act
will serve as this will serve to restore confidence among the
nations in the laws which they have themselves set and determined
for the government of their relations with one another. Without
this healing act the whole structure and validity of international
law is forever impaired.

_Alsace-Lorraine to France_

8 ALL FRENCH territory should be freed and the invaded portions
restored and the wrong done to France by Prussia in 1871 in the
matter of Alsace-Lorraine, which has unsettled the peace of the
world for nearly fifty years, should be righted in order that peace
may once more be made secure in the interest of all.

_New Frontiers for Italy_

9 A READJUSTMENT of the frontiers of Italy should be effected along
clearly recognizable lines of nationality.

_Autonomy in Austria-Hungary_

10 THE PEOPLES of Austria-Hungary, whose place among the nations we
wish to see safeguarded and assured, should be accorded the freest
opportunity of autonomous development.

_Rumania, Serbia and Montenegro_

11 RUMANIA, SERBIA and MONTENEGRO should be evacuated; occupied
territories restored; Serbia accorded free and secure access to the
sea, and the relations of the several Balkan States to one another
determined by friendly counsel along historically established lines
of allegiance and nationality; and international guarantees of the
political and economic independence and territorial integrity of
the several Balkan States should be entered into.

_Autonomy in Turkey_

12 THE TURKISH portions of the present Ottoman Empire should be
assured a secure sovereignty, but the other nationalities which are
now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of
life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous
development, and the Dardanelles should be permanently opened as a
free passage to the ships and commerce of all nations under
international guarantees.

_For an Independent Poland_

13 AN INDEPENDENT Polish State should be erected which should
include the territory inhabited by indisputably Polish populations,
which should be assured a free and secure access to the sea and
whose political and economic independence and territorial integrity
should be guaranteed by international covenant.

_League of Nation_

14 A GENERAL association of nations must be formed under specific
covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guaranties of
political independence and territorial integrity to great and small
States alike.

But the war did not go on into 1919. If America could contribute no aircraft and guns to the campaign of 1918, she could at least contribute men. The emergency of March and April brought forth a prodigious effort, and soldiers began to be shipped across the Atlantic by hundreds of thousands. By July 4 there were a million, before the end of the year over 2,000,000; and they could fight. At the end of the Summer the Germans realized that the war was lost; and realizing it, they turned back to President Wilson's mediation which they had rejected eighteen months before, and to the Fourteen Points which had been looked on so coldly in the previous Winter.

The first move was made by the Austrians, who on Sept. 15 proposed a conference for a "preliminary and non-binding" discussion of war aims. The President refused the next day, with the observation that America's war aims had been stated so often that there could be no doubt what they were. But it was evident that more peace proposals would follow, and on Sept. 27 the President delivered an address in the Metropolitan Opera House in New York in which his latest conception of the duties of the Peace Conference was set forth. He had realized that peace without victory was unsafe in view of the character of the German Government; it must be a peace with guarantees, for nobody would trust the Germans. But it must be a peace of impartial justice, "involving no discrimination between those to whom we wish to be just and those to whom we do not wish to be just," and the guarantee must be provided by a League of Nations which the Peace Conference itself--and not a subsequent general conference, as the President had held in the days of his neutrality--must organize. The development was logical; nearly all the American powers had entered the war, and neutrals were far less numerous than in 1916. And he argued that the League of Nations must be formed at the Peace Conference, to be "in a sense the most essential part" of its work, because it was not likely that it could be formed after the conference, and if formed during the war it would only be an alliance of the powers associated against Germany.

The Germans apparently thought these pronouncements offered some hope. Their Government was hastily being covered with a false front of democratic institutions to suit his insistence, and on Oct. 4 the new Chancellor, Prince Max of Baden, appealed to the President to call a peace conference at once, the basis of peace to be the Fourteen Points and conditions set forth in the President's later addresses, specifically that of Sept. 27. There ensued an interchange of notes lasting throughout an entire month, in which the President acted nominally as intermediary between the Germans and the Allies, though actually he was in constant touch with allied statesmen. What began as a duel of diplomatic dexterity presently developed into a German diplomatic rout as the German armies, retreating everywhere, drew nearer and nearer German soil. Positions which the German Government had hoped to defend were successively abandoned; the Germans agreed to accept without argument the Fourteen Points, with discussion at the conference limited only to details of their practical application, and to recognize the alterations which had been made in some of them by subsequent decisions of the American Government. They accepted the President's insistence that a peace conference must be conditional on an armistice which would imply complete evacuation of allied territory and the assurance of "the present supremacy" of the allied armies, and they strove desperately to convince him that the democratization of the German Government was real. Delegates went to Marshal Foch to discuss the armistice terms, and on Nov. 5 the Allies formally notified the President that they accepted the Fourteen Points, with the reservation of the freedom of the seas and subject to a definition of the restitution which the Germans must make for damage done.

On the same day sailors of the German High Sea Fleet, ordered out to die fighting in a last thrust at the British, mutinied and began a revolution that spread all over the empire. From the balcony of the Imperial Palace in Berlin Karl Liebknecht proclaimed the republic; the Kaiser fled across the Dutch border between two days; and on Nov. 11 the fighting ended and the Germans submitted to the terms imposed by Marshal Foch.

_Peace Conference and Treaty, 1919_

So the war had been ended by the military defeat of the Germans. In arranging the preliminaries of peace Mr. Wilson's influence had been dominant. But the personal aspect of his triumph was far more imposing in 1918 than it could possibly have been in 1916. Had his mediation ended the war before America entered it would have been bitterly resented in the allied countries and by American sympathizers of the Allies. But in the interval the President had appeared as the leader of the nation which furnished the decisive addition to allied strength that brought the final victory; he had at last condemned in strong terms the German Government, toward which he had to maintain a neutral attitude earlier in the war, and he had had the satisfaction of seeing that Government overthrown at last when the German people realized that it had cost them more than it was worth. So now the war was ended in victory, but still ended by Wilson's mediation, and moreover on terms which he himself had laid down--another triumph that would have been unthinkable two years earlier. In November, 1918, Woodrow Wilson was exalted in the estimation of the world more highly than any other human being for a century past, and far more highly than any other American had ever been raised in the opinion of the peoples of Europe.

But he had just suffered a surprising defeat at home. It became evident to Democratic leaders in the early Fall of 1918 that they were likely to lose the Congressional elections. Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives had been so notoriously incompetent that most of the war measures had had to be carried through under the leadership of Republicans, and there was grave dissatisfaction with some of the members of the Cabinet. The appeals of Democrats in danger were heard sympathetically at the White House, and on Oct. 25 the President had issued a statement asking the people to vote for Democratic Congressional candidates "if you have approved of my leadership and wish me to continue to be your unembarrassed spokesman in affairs at home and abroad." He admitted that the Republicans in Congress had supported the war, but declared that they had been against the Administration and that the time was too critical for divided leadership. It was the sort of appeal that any European Premier might have made upon "going to the country," and the President ended with the statement that "I am your servant and will accept your judgment without cavil."

If this statement had never been issued, the results of the ensuing election might not have been accepted as a repudiation of the President. But he had made it a "question of confidence," to borrow a term from European politics, and the result was disastrous. The elections gave the Republicans a majority of thirty-nine in the lower house and a majority of two in the Senate, which by a two-thirds vote would have to ratify the peace treaty which the Executive would negotiate. In such a situation a European Premier would, of course, have had to resign, but the President of the United States could hardly resign just as the war was coming to an end. The attempt to fit the parliamentary system into the framework of the American Constitution had failed. The President made no comment on the outcome of the election, but he continued to be the unembarrassed spokesman of America in affairs at home and particularly abroad. It soon became known that he intended to go to the Peace Conference in person--at the request, it was intimated, of Clemenceau and Lloyd George. The criticism of this plan was by no means confined to Republicans, but the President persisted in it. There was a widespread demand for a non-partisan Peace Commission, but the apparent concession which the President finally made to this sentiment--the appointment of Henry White, long out of the diplomatic service and never very active in politics, as the sole Representative on a commission of five--satisfied the bulk of Republican sentiment not at all. It should be observed however, that behind the five official delegates there was a host of experts--military, economic, legal and ethnological--some of whom did very important service at the conference; and in the selection of this body no party lines had been drawn.

On December 4 the President sailed from New York on an army transport, accompanied by Mrs. Wilson and by a whole caravan of savants loaded down with statistics and documents. He left a nation whose sentiment was divided between sharp resentment and a rather apprehensive hope for the best, but he landed on a continent which was prepared to offer to Woodrow Wilson a triumphal reception such as European history had never known. The six weeks between his landing at Brest and the opening of the Peace Conference were devoted to a series of processions through England, France and Italy, in which the Governments and the people strove to outdo each other in expressing their enthusiasm for the leader of the great and victorious crusade for justice and democracy. Sovereigns spiritual and temporal and the heads of Governments heaped him with all the honors in their power, and crowds of workingmen stood for hours in the rain that they might see him for a moment at a railroad station. Even from neutral Holland, divided Ireland and hostile Germany came invitations to the President, and he would probably have been received by those peoples as enthusiastically as by British, French and Italians.

For the war had been ended on the basis of the ideals of President Wilson. Those ideals had been expressed in vague and general terms, and every Government thought that its own war aims coincided with them. Every people, suddenly released from the long and terrible strain of the war, thought that all its troubles were suddenly to be ended by the principles of President Wilson. Jugo-Slavs and Italians claimed Istria and Fiume, and each felt itself supported by the principles of President Wilson. To Frenchmen those principles meant that Germany must pay for the war forced on France, and to Germans they meant that a ruined France and an uninvaded Germany could start again on the same footing.

The Peace conference that began on January 18 was bound to disillusion a great many people, including President Wilson himself. Principles had to be translated into practice, and every effort to do so left one party to the dispute, if not both, convinced that the principles had been betrayed. The treaty which was eventually produced led American liberals to complain that the President had surrendered to European imperialism, and brought from such Republicans as still admired the Allies the complaint that he had betrayed allied interests at the promptings of pacifism. Equally diverse opinions might have been obtained from all types of extremists in Europe. The Fourteen Points were susceptible of varying interpretations, according to individual interests; and at the very outset the American delegates found some of the allied leaders contending that they need not be considered, since the Germans had surrendered, not because they regarded the principles of President Wilson as just, but because they had been beaten. There was undoubtedly a great deal of truth in this contention, but the American delegates succeeded in holding the conference to the position that having accepted the German surrender on certain terms it would have to abide by those terms. The terms had to be interpreted, however, and every agreement on the details led to a protest from somebody that the President had abandoned the Fourteen Points.

All this, together with the growing Republican opposition at home which was making itself heard in Europe, led to a rapid decline in the President's prestige. So long as it was a question of generalities he was the moral leader of the peoples of the world, but after a few weeks of getting down to particulars he was only the head of the peace delegation of a single State--and a State in which there was already serious opposition to his policy. This altered standing was made evident toward the end of April, when a protracted disagreement with the Italian delegation over the Adriatic question led the President to issue a declaration of his position which was virtually an appeal to the Italian people over the heads of their own representatives. Nowhere had the President been received with more enthusiasm than in his trip through Italy four months before; but now Dr. Orlando, the Italian Premier, went home and promptly got a virtually unanimous vote of confidence from his Parliament, which was supported by the overwhelming majority of the people.

The treaty was finally signed on June 28, and the President left at once for home to take up the fight to get it through the Senate--a fight which, it was already apparent, would be about as hard as the struggle to get any treaty evolved at all out of the conflicting national interests in Paris. There was a demonstration for him at Brest as he left French soil, but nothing like the enthusiasm that had greeted his arrival. This was perhaps the measure of his inevitable decline in the estimation of Europe; it remained to be seen how he stood at home. As early as January 1, before the Peace Conference met, Senator Lodge, Republican leader in the Senate, had declared that the conference ought to confine itself to the Peace Treaty and leave the League of Nations for later discussion.

On February 14, after the first reading of the League covenant, the President had made a hurried trip home to talk it over with the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations--a committee that had been loaded up with enemies of the League of Nations. The members of the committee dined with him at the White House on February 26, and the covenant was discussed for several hours. But the President could not convert the doubters; on March 3 Senator Lodge announced that thirty-seven Republican Senators were opposed to the League in its present form, and that they regarded a demand for its alteration as the exercise of the Senate's constitutional right of advice on treaties. The President took up the challenge, and on the following day, just before sailing back to Paris, he declared in a public address that the League and treaty were inextricably interwoven; that he did not intend to bring back "the corpse of a treaty," and that those who opposed the League must be deaf to the demands of common men the world over.

The fight was now begun. Some modifications were made in the covenant in the direction of meeting criticisms by Elihu Root, but it was adopted. On July 10 the treaty was laid before the Senate and referred to the Committee on Foreign Relations, which at once began to hear opinions on it. The President himself appeared before the committee on August 19. Outside the Senate party lines were breaking up; the Irish and German elements who had come into line during the war, but had felt that their interpretation of President Wilson's ideals had been violated by the treaty, were aligned in support of the Republican opposition; and a certain element of the Democratic Party which inclined to admire the theory of traditional isolation found itself in harmony with the Republicans. On the other hand, many moderate Republicans supported the President, chief among them Mr. Taft; and in the churches and colleges support of the League commanded an overwhelming majority.

Convinced that the people were behind him against the Senate, or would be behind him if they understood the issue, the President left Washington on September 3 for another appeal to the country. Declaring that if America rejected the League it would "break the great heart of the world," he went to the Pacific Coast on a long and arduous speaking tour, another request, in effect, for a vote of confidence for his work as Premier. The effort was too much; he broke down at Wichita, Kan., on September 26, and was hurried back to the White House, where for weeks he lay disabled by an illness whose nature and seriousness were carefully concealed at the time, and even yet but imperfectly understood. Meanwhile the treaty had been reported out of committee, and the offering of a multitude of amendments, all of which were defeated, led eventually to the drawing up of the "Lodge reservations," finally adopted on November 16.

Nobody knew how sick the President was, but Senator Hitchcock, who had led the fight for the treaty in the Senate, saw him on November 18 and was told that in the President's opinion the Lodge reservations amounted to nullification of the treaty. So the Democrats voted against the treaty. Lodge's refusal to accept Wilson's treaty was as unshakable as Wilson's refusal to accept Lodge's treaty. When the special session ended and the regular session began the President eventually yielded a little and consented to interpretative reservations proposed by Senator Hitchcock. But this would not satisfy the Republicans; and on March 20 the rejected treaty was finally sent back to the White House.

_The Closing Year, 1920-1921_

The President's recovery was slow, and the first incidents of his return to the management of public affairs were rather startling, in view of the abrupt manner with which he resumed the direction of executive policy. During his illness the Cabinet had met from time to time and in a fashion had carried on the routine work of the executive department. Had it not done so, had the gravity of the President's illness been generally known, the demand which was heard for an explanation of the constitutional reference to the "disability of the President" and an understanding of the circumstances under which the Vice-President might assume the office would have been much stronger. There was a good deal of apprehension, therefore, when Secretary of State Lansing resigned, and the published correspondence showed that the President had regarded his action in calling Cabinet meetings as a usurpation of Presidential authority. It was evident from the correspondence that another and perhaps stronger reason for the President's disapproval had been the action of the Secretary in conducting a Mexican Policy on his own initiative, during the President's illness, which showed considerable divergence from the President's own. Nevertheless, the manner of the action caused some uneasiness and there was much surprise when Mr. Lansing was replaced by Bainbridge Colby, a comparatively recent proselyte from the Progressive Party.

There was still further uncertainty as to the condition of the President when he re-entered with a series of rather sharp notes into the Adriatic controversy, which England, France and Italy had been trying to settle, without consulting the Jugoslavs, during his illness; and a letter to Senator Hitchcock on March 8, asserting that the militarist party was at that time in control of France, aroused grave misgivings on both sides of the Atlantic. These, however, were unjustified; the President's improvement, though gradual, continued. But the work of the Executive during 1920 was far less important than in previous years, for the interest of the country was concentrated on the Presidential election.

On January 8 a letter from the President had been read at the Jackson Day dinner in Washington, in which he refused to accept the Senate's decision on the treaty as the decision of the nation. "If there is any doubt as to what the people of the country think about the matter," he added, "the clear and single way out is ... to give the next election the form of a great and solemn referendum." Once more, as in 1918, the President had asked for a verdict on his leadership. There was some perturbation among the Democratic leaders, for into a Presidential election so many issues enter that it would be difficult to regard it as a referendum on any particular issue. It might have been so accepted if the President himself had come forward as a candidate for a third term, but there was no sign from the White House as to his attitude on this issue, and there was no spontaneous demand for him outside. The leading candidate during the pre-convention campaign was William G. McAdoo, the President's son-in-law, who had resigned as Secretary of the Treasury and Director General of Railroads after making a successful record during the war, and before the criticism of the Wilson Administration as a whole had become acute. McAdoo had the powerful support of organized labor and most of the Federal office-holders, but whether or not he had the support of the White House no man knew. The Republicans assumed it for their own purposes, and Senator Lodge's keynote speech at the Chicago Convention was full of denunciations of the "Wilson dynasty"; but if McAdoo were Wilson's candidate the President showed no sign of knowing it.

That McAdoo was not nominated, however, can be ascribed very largely to his relationship to the President and the suspicion that he was the President's candidate. The Democratic Convention at San Francisco adopted a platform praising and indorsing the President's record in all details. The convention had to do that; the President's record was the party's record. Homer Cummings as Temporary Chairman kept the convention cheered up by a keynote speech of eulogy of that record, which moved the assembled Democrats to such enthusiasm that Secretary of State Colby, who had not been a Democrat long enough to know much about the behavior of the species, declared that at any movement that day the rules could have been suspended and the President renominated by acclamation. But when the convention came down to the work of nomination the President was not considered, and the delegates devoted themselves to finding the most available man who had not had any connection with the Administration. James M. Cox was finally nominated on Woodrow Wilson's record and sent out to the great and solemn referendum.

Aside from a formal proclamation of unity of ideals and intentions with the candidate, the White House took practically no part in the campaign. Not until October, when a delegation of pro-League Republicans called at the White House, was it known that the President's health had temporarily taken a turn for the worse and that active participation would have been impossible. It could hardly have affected the result very much in either direction.

Whether or not the President had intended to turn over the Government to Hughes in November, 1916, he did nothing so unkind to Harding in November, 1920. The President-elect was allowed plenty of time to try to choose his Cabinet and his policies, but the Administration had gradually withdrawn from all connection with European affairs, and it was made known soon after Congress met in December that nothing would be done which might embarrass the new Administration in its handling of foreign relations and interrelated problems.

The history of Woodrow Wilson's Administration virtually ends with the rejection of the treaty; but the business of government had to be carried on through the final year. During 1920 old issues that had long been hidden behind the war clouds came out into the open again. Obregon overthrew Carranza and entered into power in Mexico, but the Wilson Administration maintained neutrality during the brief struggle. Ambassador Fletcher had resigned, but Henry Morgenthau, appointed to succeed him, did not obtain the confirmation of the Senate, and the new Administration had not been formally recognized at the end of President Wilson's term. A controversy over the status of American oil rights was one of the chief impediments to recognition, though Obregon's general attitude was far more friendly to America than that of Carranza.

The President in November announced the boundaries of Armenia, which he had drawn at the request of the European Allies. But these boundaries were of no particular interest by that time, since the Turks and the Bolsheviki were already partitioning Armenia; and the mediation between the Turks and Armenians which the Allies requested the President to undertake was forestalled by the Bolshevist conquest of the remnant of the country. The Adriatic dispute, in which the President had taken such a prominent part in 1919, was finally settled without him by direct negotiation between Italy and Jugoslavia. In one other international problem, however, that of Russia, the United States Government still exerted some influence. The President during 1918 had showed more willingness to believe in the possibility of some good coming out of Bolshevist Russia than most of the European Governments, and the American Expeditionary Forces in Siberia took no active part in the fighting there. At the Peace Conference the President had been willing to call the various Russian parties to the Prinkipo conference, but nothing came of this; and America eventually took up a middle ground toward Russia. While the British seemed ready to make friends with the Bolsheviki and the French remained irreconcilably hostile, the American Government--whose policy was fully set forth in a note of August 10, 1920--refused to attack them, but also to have any dealings with them. This policy was much criticised as being purely negative, but toward the end of Mr. Wilson's Administration both England and France were tending to follow it through the force of circumstances, England's effort to find a basis of trade relations with Bolshevist Russian being as futile as France's support of anti-Bolshevist revolutionary movements.

The Republicans and their Irish supporters in the 1920 campaign revived the old demand for the exemption of American shipping from the Panama Canal tolls, but this and various other differences with England which arose toward the end of Mr. Wilson's Administration were left over for settlement by the new President. More urgent, however, was another ancient issue now revived--the California land question. In 1917, when America was just entering the war and could not afford any dangerous entanglements on the Pacific, the Lansing-Ishii agreement was negotiated with Japan. By this the United States recognized Japan's "special interests" in China, particularly in "the parts to which her territory is contiguous," while both powers professed agreement on the principles of Chinese independence and territorial integrity, and the open door. However necessary this concession in order to protect an exposed flank in time of war, it was regarded with much alarm by friends of China, whose wrath was later aroused by the action of the President at the Peace Conference in agreeing to the cession of Shantung to Japan. There was a renewed antagonism between American and Japanese interests in certain quarters, and the American Army in Siberia, if it did nothing else, at least kept the Japanese from seizing Vladivostok until the Americans had left.

With this background, the situation created by the revival of anti-Japanese agitation in California seemed more or less disquieting, but when a more stringent land law was enacted by the Californians in November negotiations between the two Governments began at once and are still going on at the close of the Administration with good prospect of agreement.

The President's unpopularity had been so violently expressed by the election of November 2 that it was bound to be mitigated soon after, and this natural reaction was aided by the failure of the Republican Congress to accomplish anything in the short session and by President-elect Harding's slowness in deciding among candidates offered for the Cabinet and policies put forward for his attention. As President Wilson prepared to turn over the executive duties to his successor there was already evidence that the American public was returning to a greater appreciation of his services. As a token of the estimation in which he was still held by the more intelligent circles abroad, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to him in December, 1920; and European statesmen who had opposed him at the Peace Conference were already expressing surprise at learning that Mr. Harding believed that the League of Nations was dead.

_Copyright_ New York _Times_.

_Published through the courtesy of the New York Times._

In Flanders Fields

By Lieut. Col. John McCrea

In Flanders fields the poppies grow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place, and in the sky
The larks still bravely singing, fly,
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe!
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch. Be yours to lift it high!
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, tho poppies blow
In Flanders fields.

America's Answer

By R. W. Lillard

Rest ye in peace, ye Flanders dead!
The fight that ye so bravely led
We've taken up! And we will keep
True faith with you who lie asleep,
With each a cross to mark his bed,
And poppies blowing overhead
Where once his own life blood ran red!
So let your rest be sweet and deep
In Flanders fields!

Fear not that ye have died for naught,
The torch ye threw to us we caught!
Ten million hands will hold it high,
And Freedom's light shall never die!
We've learned the lesson that ye taught
In Flanders fields!

Recessional

By Richard Linthicum