The Illusion of Victory (50 page)

The crowd tittered, and Creel, obviously considering the question absurd, replied,“Oh I have not been slumming for years.”

The words were on the front page of several newspapers the next morning. Members of Congress who consulted their dictionaries discovered they had been described as being “poor, dirty, degraded and often vicious.” Creel’s numerous enemies in Congress quickly persuaded their confreres to demand Creel’s banishment.“Uncle Joe” Cannon, former speaker of the House, said that the former muckraker “ought to be taken by the nape of the neck and the slack of the pants and thrown into space.”
¹⁴

Wilson enjoyed every minute of this contretemps. He telephoned Creel to tell him not to worry about the “antics of Congress.” Some historians think Wilson took Creel to Europe to rescue him from his congressional enemies, who would have tried to devour him without the protection of his friend the president. Even before he reached France, Wilson began to realize this generous gesture was a mistake. Creel had been a congenial and sometimes helpful adviser on domestic politics, as well as a dynamic leader of the Committee on Public Information. But his all-or-nothing style was not suited to the world of diplomacy.
¹⁵

Before he sailed, Wilson had seen a report of a speech David Lloyd George had given to a group of liberals in England. The prime minister had declared that “no settlement that contravenes the principles of eternal justice will be a permanent one. . . . We must not allow any spirit of greed, any grasping desire, to override the fundamental principles of righteousness.” He also called for a league of nations to preserve the peace. Wilson had cabled his “sincere admiration.” the president declared himself delighted to discover “such community of thought and counsel in approaching the high task now awaiting us.”
¹⁶

While the
George Washington
and its escorts plowed through the heavy seas of the wintry North Atlantic, Lloyd George was doing much the same thing in England, politically speaking. He had called an election to solidify
his grip on the House of Commons. The prime minister had begun his career as a liberal. He had not only opposed the Boer War, but also been a strong proponent of home rule for Ireland. But the war government he headed was mostly composed of conservatives. His repeated rejections of German peace proposals and calls for a knockout blow were Tory policies.

While the prime minister was hurling the noble apostrophes to peace and justice that had thrilled Wilson at some two hundred leading English liberals, elsewhere in London conservative leader Andrew Bonar Law was reading a letter from Lloyd George in which he pledged himself to a Tory program at home and abroad. Not by accident was the prime minister known as “the Welsh Wizard.” His political principles were extremely elastic; many said they were nonexistent.
¹⁷

Inevitably, rumors about this attempted double play got into the newspapers, and soon Lloyd George heard from Lord Northcliffe. The press baron had spent the war lashing his newspapers into ever wilder vituperation against “the Hun”—and there was no letup after the armistice was signed. Northcliffe wanted the kaiser and his circle tried as war criminals and Germany billed for every shilling England had spent on the war. “Make Germany Pay!”“Hang the Kaiser!” shrilled his headlines.

Northcliffe had revealed an interest in joining Lloyd George’s government but was rebuffed. The prime minister also ignored a suggestion to make him a delegate to the peace conference. But Lloyd George soon discovered he could not ignore the readers of the
Daily Mail
and the
Times
. They assailed him with hundreds of letters, demanding to know what he was going to do about the kaiser and Germany. At public meetings, when the prime minister orated about helping disabled veterans and building public housing, a cry invariably went up:“What about the Hun?”“Are you going to hang old Bloody Bill?”

Soon Lloyd George was giving speeches in which his liberal social program was barely mentioned. Instead he expostulated on the need for reparations from Germany. He pointed out that Berlin had demanded reparations from France after winning the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 and had thereby established “the principle.” Now it was Germany’s turn. As for the kaiser, was it fair to punish private soldiers for committing criminal acts and let the biggest criminal of them all live in luxury in Holland?

On December 5, while the
George Washington
pitched and rolled on the North Atlantic to the acute inner distress of most passengers (but not the
president), Lloyd George called for the kaiser’s prosecution because he had started the war and the war was “a crime.” The prime minister wanted reparations from Germany and promised to set up a commission to figure out exactly how much the Germans could pay.

This was not good enough for Lord Northcliffe. A telegram demanded that the prime minister set an exact figure. Two days later, in another speech, Lloyd George said Germany could and should pay 24 billion pounds—$120 billion ($1,428 billion in twenty-first-century dollars). He vowed he would make the Huns cough up this incredible sum “to the last penny.” If need be, he would “search their pockets” for the final farthing.
¹⁸

With Northcliffe satisfied, Lloyd George now executed the secret bargain he had struck with Bonar Law and the Tories. Bonar Law and company would tolerate no more than 150 liberals in Parliament. To eliminate 260 others, the prime minister announced he would not endorse anyone who had voted against him in a tempest stirred by an army officer’s accusation of government misconduct nine months before. The supposed grudge was sheer pretext—the numbers did not even add up. But soon there were 159 liberals, 364 conservatives and 18 independents with “the coupon,” as the newspapers called Lloyd George’s endorsement. It was one of the dirtiest deals ever seen in English politics, but it worked magically from Lloyd George’s point of view. Demonstrating the potency of the German hatred that Northcliffe, Lord Bryce and Wellington House had sown in the souls of British voters, the prime minister’s coalition emerged from the election with the largest majority in the history of the House of Commons—525 of 707 seats. The liberals had been reduced to an infinitesimal band of some 30 hapless survivors. If Lloyd George was right, and the war was “a crime,” they had been cruelly punished for their share in starting it.
¹⁹

For a while, the significance of the British elections was shoved aside by the sheer dimension of the president’s welcome in Europe. He and Mrs. Wilson arrived in Brest on Friday, December 13, a date that made the superstitious sailors aboard the
George Washington
wince. But Wilson was exultant. He claimed thirteen was his lucky number. He had thirteen letters in his name. In fact, he had urged the captain to cut the ship’s speed so they would arrive on the supposedly unlucky day.

On the president’s last night at sea, nine American battleships and twenty destroyers from the European squadron joined Wilson’s flotilla. France sent almost as many warships; a veritable armada escorted the president into Brest, where generals and admirals and government officials by the dozen welcomed him. Soon he was aboard a train to Paris, where reporters glimpsed the first indications that Wilson had already achieved semidivine status. In many villages, people knelt beside the track in the dark, their hands clasped in worship, as the train thundered past.
²⁰

Wilson’s reception in the French capital was one of the most spectacular events of the twentieth century. Two million Parisians jammed the streets, screaming,
“Vive Wilson!”“Vive l’Amérique!”
A huge banner saluted
“Wilson le Juste.”
Preceded by an honor guard of cavalry, Wilson rode beside President Raymond Poincaré, acknowledging the delirious cheers with sweeping waves of his high silk hat. Henry White, whose memories of such celebrations went back to Napoleon III, said he had never seen anything like it.

The Wilsons and their party took up residence in the palace of Prince Joachim Napoleon Murat, a descendant of Napoleon’s sister. The magnificent mansion was the size of the White House, surrounded by ten-foot walls to keep the masses at bay. Beautiful drawing rooms displayed Napoleon’s portrait everywhere, an ironic reminder that the Germans were not exactly the inventors of militarism. It was a setting worthy of an emperor. Coupled with his reception by the people of Paris, it is easy to imagine Wilson developing delusions of Philip Druish political grandeur. He was already convinced that he, rather than the politicians of Europe, was in closer touch with the wishes and hopes of their people. Didn’t the hysterical adoration of those screaming Parisians prove it?

If the peace conference had begun, Wilson might have made political capital from the aura of that frenzied reception. Instead, the president discovered to his dismay that domestic politics was keeping Lloyd George and Clemenceau busy. He and Edith spent the next few days going from ceremony to ceremony—an honorary degree at the Sorbonne, a reception at the Hôtel de Ville—with no opportunity for him to do more than spout glittering generalities.

During the next week, House arranged for Wilson to meet Clemenceau twice. The first time was mere friendly chitchat, which House found encouraging. The second time, Wilson broached the idea that had become the centerpiece of his peace program, a league of nations. The French premier was polite but extremely skeptical. He doubted whether a league could be formed or whether it would be workable. A meeting with the Italian premier, Vittorio Orlando, proved equally frustrating. He declined to relinquish an iota of the territory Italy had wangled in the secret 1915 Treaty of London, no matter what the Fourteen Points said about self-determination.
²¹

The French tried to fill Wilson’s days with visits to battlefields. They wanted him to see firsthand the damage the Germans had done to France and Belgium. He resisted the idea, claiming that he did not need to view the havoc to become convinced that the peace treaty should provide “just punishments” for the enemy’s depredations. He became more than a little angry when the French declined to be satisfied with these assurances. Paris newspapers began asking why Wilson refused these invitations. The president finally yielded and made a hurried trip to Rheims, where he committed an unforgivable (to the French) faux pas. He remarked that the famous cathedral was not as badly damaged as he had been led to believe.

On Joe Tumulty’s advice, the president and his wife saw another side of the war firsthand. They visited French and American hospitals in Paris. Wilson was visibly shaken by some of the wounded men he saw there—many were blinded, more than a few were amputees. He had sent these young men to the Western Front to give him a seat at the peace table. The president absolutely refused to have his picture taken with them. There was a limit to how much political capital his conscience permitted him to make of their fate.

To his mounting frustration, Wilson next learned that the peace conference had been postponed until January 18, 1919. At the Murat Palace, most of his days were devoted to receiving delegations from distant parts of Europe, all seeking his help to win the right of self-determination in the new world order he had promised. Aboard the
George Washington,
Secretary of State Lansing had confided to his diary the growing conviction that this idea was the worst of Wilson’s Fourteen Points: “The phrase is simply loaded with dynamite!”

In Paris, the same realization began to dawn on Wilson. The idea had opened a political Pandora’s box that would be difficult if not impossible to close. Albanian warlords, tribal chieftains from obscure valleys in the Caucasus and Carpathian mountains, would-be politicians from Armenia, the Ukraine and Bessarabia appeared at the gates of the Murat Palace seeking redress and recognition. Among the more exotic was a delegation from
the mountains of northern Austria. They spoke Polish and did not want to be part of the new nation of Czechoslovakia. Would the great “Voodrow Veelson” please solve their problem?
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Partly to escape this ordeal, Wilson decided to make ceremonial visits to Great Britain and Italy. He had planned to visit both countries at some point in his European sojourn. Why not now, when a warm reception would, he hoped, enhance his political potency at the peace conference?

Wilson’s welcome in London was not as emotional as Paris. But it was hardly tepid.“Two Million Londoners Give Wilson the Reception of His Life,” boomed Northcliffe’s
Daily Mail
. The president’s talks with Lloyd George and other British leaders were not nearly as warm. The fevered enthusiasm of the masses did not change the statesmen’s minds about Wilson. Mourning almost a million dead men, the British leaders remembered the president saying he was “too proud to fight” after the sinking of the
Lusitania
and calling for peace without victory—an idea the election results in both England and the United States had just repudiated.

Wilson’s remarks in his several speeches reflected this underlying tension. “I have conversed with the soldiers,” he said in one speech.“They fought to do away with an older order and to establish a new one.” He was neglecting “imperative tasks” at home to lend his support to the creation of this new order, which was the “great, may I not say, final task of humanity.”
²³

Wilson was telling the British that American intervention had won the war and he was now in charge of reordering the world. Very few prominent Britons were prepared to swallow this claim without gulping hard. They compared Pershing’s floundering in the Argonne to the rapid advances Haig’s soldiers had made in the closing weeks of the war. Already taking shape was the fixed opinion that the British, not the Americans, had won the war.