It's December 1918 and the Great War has come to an end. As the United States Congress convenes in its “lame duck” session after the mid-term elections, President Wilson delivers his annual State of
the Union address. Explaining his decision to attend the peace conference in person, he receives a noticeably less friendly reception than in previous appearances before Congress. The next day he departs for France, where his welcome is far more enthusiastic. After spending Christmas with American troops he travels to England, where he and Mrs. Wilson are guests of the King and Queen. While he is there, the results of the British Parliamentary elections are announced. The expanded British electorate, which includes women for the first time, returns Lloyd George's coalition government to power while inflicting decisive defeats on the parties that controlled Parliament when the war began. The European Allies meet in London in an effort to arrive at a common approach to issues certain to arise at the peace conference, but fail to reach agreement on many issues. Russia, nominally a victor in the war, has not been heard from. A new nation of South Slavs is proclaimed in Belgrade; combining nations on both sides of the war practicing different religions and speaking different languages, it faces an uncertain future.
*****
President Wilson Delivering His State of the Union Address
As required by Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution, Congress convened on December 2, the first Monday in December. The Constitution also requires that the President "from time to time give to the Congress information on the State of the Union," and President Wilson has chosen throughout his presidency to do so in person. After both houses passed resolutions approving the convening of a joint session, the Senators walked through the Capitol building to the House chamber, where at 1:00 p.m. a committee of Senators escorted the President to the podium. The Congress he addressed, of course, is the outgoing one. The Congress elected in November will not take office until March, and will not convene in its regular session until December of next year.
The dominant subject of the President's message was the recent end of the fighting in Europe. Near the end of his speech he announced his plan to attend the peace conference in person. He said he regarded it as his duty to attend because, both sides having accepted his Fourteen Points as the basis for peace, he should be available to give his “personal counsel in their interpretation and application.” He asked for Congress's support: "May I not hope, gentlemen of the Congress, that in the delicate tasks I shall have to perform on the other side of the seas in my efforts truly and faithfully to interpret the principles and purposes of the country we love, I may have the encouragement and the added strength of your united support?" Unlike the friendly reception President Wilson had received every other time he had addressed Congress, especially last year when he asked for a declaration of war against Germany and again last month when he announced the terms of the armistice, the applause that greeted this announcement was hesitant and almost entirely limited to Democratic members of the House of Representatives. The Justices of the Supreme Court, seated in the well in front of the first row of Senators, seemed uncertain what to do, finally standing as a show of respect but not applauding. Chief Justice White, who had led the applause on previous occasions, was absent. Most Senators kept their seats.
President Wilson's trip to Europe is the first by any President while in office, and except for President Roosevelt's brief trip to the Panama Canal Zone in 1906 it is the first time any sitting president has left the country. Before the joint session convened, resolutions were introduced in both houses of Congress declaring the office of President vacant during the President's absence, and Senator Albert B. Cummins (Rep., Iowa) introduced a resolution providing for the appointment of a committee of eight Senators to attend the peace conference. Congress remains under Democratic Party control until March, however, so none of the resolutions was brought to a vote.
Roosevelt in Washington, D.C. Earlier This Year
Former President Roosevelt has been hospitalized since the armistice at Roosevelt Hospital in New York with a severe case of rheumatism. When President Wilson announced that he would lead the peace commission to Paris, Roosevelt immediately objected that in view of the recent Congressional election Wilson has "no authority whatever to speak for the American people." On December 3, the day after the President's address to Congress, Roosevelt issued a statement from his hospital bed that "President Wilson has not given the slightest explanation of what his views are or why he is going abroad. He pleads for unity, but he is himself responsible for any division among the American people." "As for the fourteen points," he said, "so far as the American people have expressed any opinion upon them, it was on November 5, when they rejected them." He insisted that America must look after its own interests, maintaining its economic independence, preserving the Monroe Doctrine and control over the Panama Canal, and otherwise avoiding interference in foreign affairs. At the Peace Conference, he said, "it is [the President's] business to stand by France, England, and our other allies and to present with them a solid front to Germany." On Christmas Day, Roosevelt left the hospital and returned to his home at Oyster Bay.
The President Departs for Europe
During the voyage to Europe President Wilson and his wife kept largely to themselves. Although Secretary Lansing had written a memorandum to the President shortly after the armistice laying out a number of questions likely to arise at the peace conference, the President had not replied. At the suggestion of Inquiry member William C. Bullitt, the President held one meeting en route to France with selected members of the group in which he outlined in general terms his objectives for the conference. He emphasized that he would rely heavily on their advice, saying "Tell me what's right and I'll fight for it."
The President Arrives in France
The U.S.S. George Washington dropped anchor in the Brest roadstead on Friday, December 13, a date many superstitious people might consider unlucky. President Wilson, however, considers thirteen his lucky number. His name has thirteen letters, he became Princeton's thirteenth president in his thirteenth year there, and his inauguration as President of the United States took place in 1913. Add the fact that thirteen is the number of stripes on the American flag, representing the thirteen original states, and his choice of the thirteenth as the date for his arrival seems inevitable. In Brest, he made brief remarks in a crowded reception room at the pier, where Ambassador Jusserand led the applause waving his hat above his head. Automobiles then carried the President's party to the railroad station along a fifteen-minute route lined by thousands of cheering spectators, including soldiers and sailors in uniform and children dressed in Breton costumes.
Paris Welcomes President Wilson
At ten o'clock the next morning the presidential train pulled slowly into the Bois de Boulogne Station in Paris with an American flag draped across the front of the locomotive. As President Wilson stepped down from the first car, he was greeted by a young woman in the peasant costume of Alsace. After brief informal greetings on the platform, Presidents Wilson and Poincare entered a carriage drawn by two horses and followed by a dozen other carriages carrying the presidents' wives, Prime Minister Clemenceau, Ambassadors Sharp and Jusserand, and other dignitaries. The procession, greeted for miles by enthusiastic crowds waving American flags, moved from the Bois de Boulogne to the Champs Elysses, across the Alexander III Bridge, then back across the river through the Place de la Concorde to the palace of Prince Murat, where President Wilson will reside during his stay in Paris. He spent two hours with Colonel House that afternoon, and met with Premier Clemenceau twice in the following days.
President and Mrs. Wilson with the King and Queen and Princess Mary
President Wilson spent Christmas Day at American Army headquarters in Chaumont, where he reviewed the troops. The President and Mrs. Wilson shared Christmas dinner with General Pershing and departed that evening for London. The next day they were greeted by the King and Queen at Charing Cross Station and taken through streets lined with cheering crowds to Buckingham Palace, where they stayed as guests until their return to France on the last day of the year.
Eamon de Valera
Parliamentary elections were held in Great Britain on December 14. Because it took some time to receive and tabulate the soldier vote, the results were not announced until December 28, during the President's stay in London. The newly enacted Representation of the People Act expanded the franchise significantly, giving the vote to all men over age 21 and men in military and naval service over age 19. It also included the first grant of woman suffrage, allowing women to vote who were over age 30 and met certain property qualifications. Prime Minister Lloyd George's coalition government was returned to power by a large majority. The election was a major defeat for the two parties that together had controlled the government at the beginning of the war. Herbert Asquith's Liberals saw their representation in Parliament reduced from 272 to 36, and John Dillon's Parliamentary Irish Party lost all but six of its seats to Eamon de Valera's Sinn Fein. Sinn Fein calls for Irish independence from Great Britain, and has announced that it will meet separately in Dublin and refuse to join the British Parliament in Westminster. Asquith and Dillon lost their own seats in Parliament.
European Allies Confer in London (Front row left to right: Orlando,
Bonar Law, Clemenceau, Curzon, Lloyd George, Sonnino)
When the month began, Premier Clemenceau was in London meeting with Prime Minister Lloyd George and representatives of the other European Allies. To allay any concern that the United States was being excluded, Clemenceau met with Colonel House before leaving France and advised him of the meeting, assuring him that no important decisions would be made without the United States. In fact, the European Allies tried but were unable to reach agreement on common positions on several issues, including disposition of the lands of the Ottoman Empire and Italian claims to lands in the Adriatic.
Another question on which there is no consensus is what role, if any, Russia will have in the Peace Conference. The nation that first went to war against Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1914 is not represented in Paris. Although it was the largest of Germany's enemies, and probably saved France from defeat in the early months of the war, its withdrawal from the war at the beginning of this year with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk came close to bringing about the Allies' defeat, and is regarded by them as a betrayal. Germany was obliged by the armistice, however, to renounce Brest-Litovsk, so Russia is still technically one of the nations at war with Germany. On a practical level, moreover, it is virtually impossible for the Paris conferees to discuss a peace settlement without considering Russia. The role of Russia in the forthcoming conference is further complicated by the fact that its control over its territory is contested by White revolutionaries, by the fact that Allied troops occupy Vladivostok and parts of the Russian Arctic, by the Bolsheviks' repudiation of Russia's debt to the Allies, by their publication of the Allies' secret agreements, and perhaps most fundamentally by uncertainty about whether the Bolshevik government even cares to participate in the conference.
Nikola Pasic
A new Balkan state declared its existence in Belgrade on December 1. Combining the pre-war nation of Serbia (now including Montenegro) and southern parts of the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire, Prince Alexander of Serbia, acting as Regent for his father the King, proclaimed the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Non-Serbs prefer to call the new nation Yugoslavia. Its name, however, is the least of the factors presenting a challenge for the long-term cohesion and viability of the new state. Others include the fact that Croats and Slovenes were on opposite sides of the recently concluded war; their different religious, linguistic and cultural identities; and their conflicting territorial ambitions. Alexander has appointed Nikola Pasic, Serbia's pre-war prime minister, to represent the new nation in Paris. He will be accompanied by Ante Trumbic, a Croatian who has been named foreign minister.
Senator Lodge
On December 21, while President Wilson was enjoying the adulation of Parisians, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (Rep., Mass.), who will be Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee in the new Congress, gave a speech on the Senate floor in which he warned against trying to base a peace treaty on the Fourteen Points. He said it would be "a grave mistake on the part of the President to
ignore the Senate, because our ultimate responsibility in making the
peace is quite equal to his own." While he had "no fault to find with [the President] not
appointing Senators as delegates to the conference," he expressed the opinion that at least five of the Fourteen Points should be put aside until agreement is reached on the terms of the peace with Germany. He said the Points regarding secret diplomacy, freedom of the seas, economic barriers, reduction of armaments, and establishment of a League of Nations presented issues which, if interjected into the conference, would likely cause delay and "lead to division among the nations which have conquered Germany."
*****
December 1918 – Selected Sources and Recommended Reading
Contemporary Periodicals:
Contemporary Periodicals:
American Review of Reviews, December 1918 and January 1919
New York
Times, December 1918
Books and Articles:
A. Scott Berg, Wilson
Britain at War Magazine, The Fifth Year of the Great War: 1918
Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis 1911-1918
John Milton Cooper, Jr., Woodrow Wilson: A Biography
John Milton Cooper, Jr., The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt
Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis 1911-1918
John Milton Cooper, Jr., Woodrow Wilson: A Biography
John Milton Cooper, Jr., The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt
John Dos Passos, Mr. Wilson's War
Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny
David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East, 1914-1922
Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life
Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History
Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History
Martin Gilbert, A History of the Twentieth Century, Volume One: 1900-1933
Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill Volume IV: The Stricken World 1916-1922
Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill Volume IV: The Stricken World 1916-1922
Ann Hagedorn, Savage Peace, Hope and Fear in America, 1919
Godfrey Hodgson, Woodrow Wilson's Right Hand: The Life of Colonel Edward M. House
Roy Jenkins, Churchill: A Biography
John Keegan, The First World War
David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society
Ian Kershaw, To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949
John Keegan, The First World War
David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society
Ian Kershaw, To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949
Anthony Lewis, Make No Law, The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment
W. Bruce Lincoln, Passage Through Armageddon: The Russians In War and Revolution 1914-1918
Giles MacDonogh, The Last Kaiser: The Life of Wilhelm II
Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World
Robert K. Massie, Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea
Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World
Robert K. Massie, Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea
G.J. Meyer, A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918
G.J. Meyer, The World Remade: America in World War I
Ted Morgan, FDR: A Biography
William Mulligan, The Great War for Peace
William Mulligan, The Great War for Peace
Michael S. Neiberg, The Path to War: How the First World War Created Modern America
Patricia O'Toole, The Moralist: Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made
Edward J. Renehan, The Lion's Pride: Theodore Roosevelt and His Family in Peace and War
Jonathan Schneer, The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict
David Stevenson, Cataclysm: The First World War As Political Tragedy
David Stevenson, With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918
J. Lee Thompson, Never Call Retreat: Theodore Roosevelt and the Great War
Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931
Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931
Geoffrey C. Ward, A First Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt
The West Point Atlas of War: World War I
