*****
At the end of 1918 the world was poised between the end of
the most destructive conflict in history and the beginning of a process
designed to bring the war to an official close and lay the foundation for an
enduring peace. As national leaders and
diplomats gathered in Paris,
soldiers returned home to a changed world.
January
After their triumphal visit to France
and Great Britain in
December, President and Mrs. Wilson visited Italy, where they were greeted by enthusiastic
crowds. The Peace Conference convened at the Quai d’Orsay in Paris. After President Poincare's welcoming speech,
the conferees chose Premier Clemenceau as permanent chairman. At a preliminary meeting the heads of
government of France, Great Britain, Italy
and the United States
designated a “Supreme Council” or "Council of Ten" (the heads of
government of those nations plus Japan and their foreign ministers)
as the Conference’s principal decision-making body. Among its first acts was to extend a formal
invitation to the warring factions in Russia
to attend a conference on the island
of Prinkipo in the Sea of Marmara in
an attempt to reach “some understanding and agreement by which Russia may work
out her own purposes, and happy, cooperative relations be established between
her people and the other peoples of the world . . . provided there is in the
meantime a truce . . .” In the United
States, former President Theodore Roosevelt died in his sleep at his home on
Long Island. The Eighteenth Amendment, forbidding
the importation, manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors, was
added to the Constitution, to become effective in a year.
February
Less than a month after the Peace Conference convened,
President and Mrs. Wilson left Paris and
returned to the United States
so the President could be in Washington
for the end of the 65th Congress. Before
his departure, in his capacity as chairman of the League of Nations Committee,
he submitted a preliminary draft of the League covenant. British Prime Minister Lloyd George and
Italian Premier Orlando took advantage of the recess to visit their own
capitals. Hoping to lay the groundwork
for ratification back home, Wilson
sent cablegrams to members of the Senate and House Foreign Relations Committees
inviting them to dinner at the White House and asking them to withhold comment
on the draft covenant until he had briefed them. He did not follow his own advice, however,
but immediately upon his arrival in Boston
gave a fiery speech attacking those who opposed the League as “narrow-minded
men that have no sweep beyond the day’s horizon.” The dinner at the White House took place, but
no minds were changed. In the Senate, Henry
Cabot Lodge, the incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, delivered
a speech in which he objected that the provisions of the proposed covenant
“seem to give a rich promise of being fertile in producing controversies and
misunderstandings” which would only delay achieving the immediate goal of
making peace with Germany. A proposed woman suffrage amendment to the
Constitution, already passed by the House of Representatives, came to a vote in
the Senate but fell one vote short of the necessary two-thirds. Supporters vowed to resubmit it in the next
Congress. In New
York, African-American troops returning from France paraded up Fifth Avenue from Madison Square to Harlem,
cheered by thousands of spectators. A
shipyard workers strike in Seattle
rapidly expanded into a general strike, which was called off after five
days. In Paris, an assassination attempt on Premier
Clemenceau failed but left him with a bullet he carried in his body for the
rest of his life. In Germany, the National Assembly in Weimar elected Friedrich
Ebert, leader of the Social Democratic Party, as the nation’s “Provisional
State President.” In the Russian civil
war the White forces, hopeful of victory over the Bolsheviks, rejected the Allies’
proposal for a conference at Prinkipo.
March
On the last day of the 65th Congress, Senator Henry Cabot
Lodge introduced a “round robin” signed by thirty-seven senators, more than
enough to defeat ratification, opposing the existing draft of the League of Nations covenant. President Wilson left Washington
after Congress adjourned, stopping in New York
on his way back to Paris to deliver another
speech denouncing senators who criticized the League of
Nations. Although Congress
had adjourned with unfinished business pending, Wilson refused to call a special session that
would have allowed debate on the treaty to continue in the now-Republican
Senate. For the first time in its
history the Supreme Court addressed the question of First Amendment protections
for political speech, affirming the convictions of Charles Schenck, general
secretary of the Socialist Party, and Eugene V. Debs, the party’s former
presidential candidate, for violating the Espionage Act by printing leaflets
and making speeches urging resistance to the draft. Writing for a unanimous Court, Justice Oliver
Wendell Holmes held that words can be prosecuted when they create a “clear and
present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress
has a right to prevent.” In Paris the Peace Conference
resumed, with the original “Big Four” (Clemenceau, Lloyd George, Wilson and
Orlando) now acting as the central decision-making body. At the top of its agenda was the peace treaty
with Germany,
the principal issues of which were disarmament, territorial adjustments, and
reparations. In a further attempt to
reach an accommodation regarding Russia’s
participation, an American delegation led by William C. Bullitt traveled to Moscow, met with Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders, and
returned to Paris
with a proposal for a truce between the warring factions. The Supreme Council delegated a commission to
draw the border between Hungary
and Rumania. When the commission awarded part of the
disputed territory to Rumania
and designated most of the remainder as a neutral zone, Hungarian Prime
Minister Michael Karolyi’s government fell and Béla Kun, the leader of the
Hungarian Bolsheviks, emerged from prison to take power. Italy,
claiming the right to Turkish territory under the terms of its wartime
agreements with the Allies, landed troops on the Mediterranean coast of Anatolia.
April
Because the United States
was not a party to the 1915 Treaty of London, which promised Italy much of the Dalmatian coast in return for
joining the war on the side of the Allies, President Wilson was able to take a
firm stand against Italy’s
claims on the ground that they violated the principle of
self-determination. He also rejected,
along with other members of the Supreme Council, Italy’s
claim to the port city of Fiume,
which was not covered by the Treaty of London, as a spoil of war. When Wilson
released a statement rejecting Italy’s
claims, Prime Minister Orlando and Foreign Minister Sonnino, under intense
domestic political pressure, walked out of the Conference and returned to Italy. The question of Russia’s
participation in the conference was effectively resolved when the Allies ignored
the Bolshevik proposal Bullitt had brought back from Moscow and allowed the deadline for a
response to expire. Fighting broke out
between Rumania and Hungary as a
peacemaking mission by South African Foreign Minister Jan Smuts failed and the
Rumanian Army occupied the area awarded to it by the Supreme Council and
invaded the neutral zone as well. The
Allies reached substantial agreement among themselves on the terms of the
treaty to be presented to Germany. Germany’s armed forces were to be
significantly reduced in size and their future expansion severely limited. Germany
was to lose all of its colonies, which would be governed as mandates under the League of Nations.
The provinces of Alsace and Lorraine were to be returned to France and a small area adjacent to the
Rhineland ceded to Belgium. The Rhineland
itself was to be demilitarized. The fate
of Schleswig-Holstein, annexed by Bismarck
in 1867, would be determined by plebiscite.
The Kiel Canal, built by the Kaiser in 1895, would remain in Germany, with a
provision guaranteeing free passage for other nations. The island of Heligoland,
site of the main base of the German High Seas Fleet during the war, was to remain
German but its fortifications and harbors were to be destroyed. On Germany’s
eastern border, the provinces of West Prussia,
Posen and Upper Silesia were to be severed from Germany
and added to the new nation of Poland. Danzig would become a free city to be
governed by the League of Nations, and a “corridor” along the Vistula River
was to be given to Poland
to provide access to the Baltic. The
fate of southern portions of East
Prussia would be submitted to a plebiscite. The
issue of reparations would be submitted to a commission for determination.
May
The final draft of the treaty, negotiated among the Allies
without input from Germany,
was presented to the Germans on May 7, “Lusitania Day.” Premier Clemenceau, presenting the treaty, made
it clear that it was non-negotiable. He told
the German representatives “It is neither the time nor the place for
superfluous words. . . . You have asked
for peace. We are ready to give you
peace. We shall present to you now a
book which contains our conditions. . . . You will find us ready to give you
any explanation you want, but we must say at the same time that this second
Treaty of Versailles has cost us too much not to take on our side all the
necessary precautions and guarantees that the peace shall be a lasting
one.” He told the Germans “no oral
discussion is to take place,” and gave them fifteen days to present a written
response. When the head of the German
delegation, Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, was given the floor, he
acknowledged Germany’s
defeat and responsibility to make reparations, but rejected the assertion that Germany and its
people were the only ones responsible for the war. “Such a confession in my mouth,” he said,
“would be a lie.” In its written response,
Germany objected to the
proposed treaty on the grounds, among others, that it was contrary to President
Wilson’s Fourteen Points and that the reparations being discussed were far more
than Germany
would be able to pay. Italian Premier
Orlando and Foreign Minister Sonnino, not wishing decisions to be reached
without their participation, returned to the Peace Conference. Shortly afterward, Italian troops were put
ashore at Smyrna, on the Aegean coast of Turkey. With the encouragement of the other members
of the Supreme Council, Greece
landed troops to contest the Italian claims.
The Curtiss NC-4, a flying boat with a crew of five under the command of
Lieutenant Commander Albert Read, completed the world’s first transatlantic
flight, flying from New York to England in
twenty-three days.
June
After two weeks of uncertainty and debate among the Allies
about how to reply to the Germans’ lengthy objections to the draft Treaty, they
chose to leave the Treaty substantially unchanged and gave the Germans a
deadline to accept or reject it.
Brockdorff-Rantzau urged his government not to sign, but the German
National Assembly in Weimar
declined to follow his advice and passed a resolution agreeing to the Treaty as
written. While the Treaty was under
consideration in Weimar, most of the ships of
the German High Seas Fleet interned at Scapa Flow
were scuttled by their crews. The Treaty
ending the war with Germany
was signed in the Hall of Mirrors of the Palace
of Versailles on June 28, the fifth
anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Germany was represented by its new
Foreign Minister Hermann Mueller. After
the signing, President Wilson left Paris. In Brest he boarded
the U.S.S. George Washington for his return voyage to the United States,
where he faced a hostile Congress.
British pilot John Alcock and his navigator Arthur Brown made the first
non-stop transatlantic flight, flying a Vickers Vimy bomber from St. John’s, Newfoundland
to County Galway, Ireland, in about sixteen hours. Bombs planted by anarchists exploded in cities
across the United States, including
one at the Washington, D.C. home of Attorney General A. Mitchell
Palmer.
July
For the first time in history, an American president
appeared in person before the Senate to present a treaty for ratification. President Wilson told the Senators that the
League of Nations was the “only hope for mankind,” and that if the United States rejected
the Treaty of Versailles it would “break the heart of the world.” Former President William Howard Taft, a
supporter of the League of Nations and the founder
and president of the pro-ratification League to Enforce Peace (LEP), proposed some
reservations, as did other prominent Republicans including 1916 presidential
nominee Charles Evans Hughes, former Secretary of State Elihu Root and Republican
National Committee Chairman Will Hays. A
few days later, facing criticism from League supporters, Taft supported an LEP resolution
in support of unconditional ratification, but a mixed message had been sent. In the Senate, debate on the treaty began
with a speech by Senator Claude Swanson (Dem., Va.) in support of ratification, and
President Wilson began holding meetings with Republican senators in an effort
to persuade them to support the treaty. On
the last day of the month, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee began public
hearings. Race riots broke out in
Chicago and Washington, D.C., and a rapid increase in the cost of
living led to labor unrest. In Toledo, Ohio,
Jess Willard, the “great white hope” who had defeated Jack Johnson to win the
heavyweight boxing championship in 1915, lost his title to challenger Jack
Dempsey when he failed to answer the bell for the fourth round.
August
In a speech on the Senate floor, Senator Lodge outlined five
reservations he considered essential to ratification of the Treaty. Shortly afterward, at Lodge’s request,
President Wilson agreed to meet with the Foreign Relations Committee. The meeting took place at the White House,
but no progress was made toward agreement.
The battle lines were inadvertently hardened the next day when
resolutions introduced by Senator Key Pittman (Dem., Nev.) in an attempt to outline
mutual understandings that had been reached regarding the “construction and
interpretation” of the Treaty were disavowed by the “mild reservationists” who
had attended the meeting. The failure to
arrive at a satisfactory compromise emboldened the “irreconcilables” opposed to
League membership, and a few days later the Foreign Relations Committee voted in
favor of an amendment to the Treaty that would return Shantung to China. The Committee approved three more amendments,
including one to equalize the votes of the United
States and the British Empire
in the General Assembly. In response, the
White House announced that the President would embark on a “swing around the
circle,” a cross-country speaking tour to the west coast and back, with
speeches planned in fifty cities in thirty days in support of the Treaty. Senator Philander Knox of Pennsylvania,
an influential Republican who had served as Secretary of State under President
Taft, joined the ranks of the “irreconcilables” opposing American membership in
the League of Nations. An actors strike closed plays on
Broadway. The territorial conflict between
Hungary and Rumania ended in a Rumanian victory when the Rumanian
Army occupied Budapest and Béla Kun fled to the Soviet Union.
September
President Wilson departed on his cross-country speaking tour. His first stop was a luncheon address in Columbus, Ohio,
the home of Republican Senator Warren G. Harding, a member of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee and a treaty opponent. That evening the President spoke in Indianapolis, Indiana,
a state represented by two other Republican senators. His next stops were in St.
Louis and Kansas City, reflecting
the fact that one of Missouri’s
senators, James A. Reed, was the most outspoken Democratic opponent of the Treaty. Speeches, sometimes two a day, followed at Des Moines, Omaha, Sioux Falls, Minneapolis
and St. Paul. As his train crossed Montana,
Wilson learned
of William Bullitt’s testimony before the Foreign Relations Committee in which
he revealed that Secretary of State Lansing had shared many of his own concerns
about the Treaty and the League in a private conversation. Among other things, Lansing
had called the League “entirely useless” and designed to serve the interests of
England and France. In response to press inquiries, Lansing declined comment, sending a telegram to Wilson that reached him several days later in Los Angeles. He called Bullitt’s conduct “despicable and
outrageous” but stopped short of an outright denial. Returning from the west coast, President
Wilson issued a statement challenging the Senate to hold an up or down vote on
the treaty without amendments or reservations.
After struggling through a speech in Pueblo, Colorado,
he collapsed from what was described by his physician Admiral Grayson as
“nervous exhaustion.” The remainder of
his speaking tour was cancelled, and he returned directly to Washington. During his absence, the Foreign Relations
Committee forwarded the Treaty of Versailles to the Senate with thirty-eight
amendments and four reservations, along with hearing transcripts and a report signed
by Senator Lodge on behalf of the Republican majority, which stated that “the
committee believes that the League as it stands will breed wars instead of
securing peace.” In New York, General Pershing led the First
Division in a victory parade on Fifth
Avenue. In Boston, police officers
went on strike. The mayor fired the
police commissioner, but Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge reinstated him
and mobilized the State Guard to police the city. A Steelworkers strike shut down steel mills
throughout the country.
October
Shortly after returning to the White House, President Wilson
suffered a debilitating stroke that forced the cancellation of a reception for
the visiting King and Queen of Belgium. Admiral Grayson continued to refuse to
provide information about the President’s condition beyond the initial
announcement that he was suffering from “nervous exhaustion.” Senator George Moses (Rep., N.H.) wrote in a
letter to a constituent that the President was “a very sick man” who is “unable
to undergo any experience which requires concentration of mind.” When Moses’ letter was leaked to the press, Grayson
questioned the Senator’s medical qualifications and said he “must have
information that I do not possess.” In
the Senate several amendments to the Treaty were defeated, including amendments
to limit voting by the British Empire and to delete the provision allowing
Japanese occupation of Shantung. French President Poincare issued a
declaration stating that, because Great Britain,
Italy and France had ratified the Treaty of Versailles, France’s
state of war with Germany
was at an end. Labor unrest spread
across multiple industries in the United States. A strike of east coast longshoremen paralyzed
transatlantic and coastwise shipping for a week before it was called off following
an ultimatum from the War Department. The
steel industry strike that began in September led to violent confrontations
between striking steelworkers, police and strikebreakers. Martial law was declared in Gary, Indiana
and surrounding steel cities, and Army units under the command of General
Leonard Wood were sent into the city to maintain order. Following cabinet meetings presided over by
Treasury Secretary Carter Glass, a statement issued in the President’s name
denounced a threatened coal strike as “calculated to create a disastrous fuel
famine.” Attorney General Palmer went to
court and obtained an injunction forbidding the United Mine Workers from going
ahead with the strike, but when the strike deadline arrived at month’s end the
miners walked off the job without further direction from the union’s national officers. The Volstead Act, enforcing nationwide
prohibition pursuant to the newly adopted Eighteenth Amendment, was returned to
Congress with a veto message objecting that the legislation included provisions,
no longer appropriate, to continue enforcement of wartime prohibition. Congress overrode the veto the next day. In another First Amendment challenge to the
Espionage and Sedition Acts, the Supreme Court in a 7-2 ruling affirmed the
conviction of Russian immigrant and anarchist Jacob Abrams and several of his
comrades for distributing leaflets condemning President Wilson for sending
troops to Russia
to fight the Bolsheviks. The lasting
impact of the decision, however, was not in the majority ruling but in the
dissenting opinion of Justice Holmes, joined by Justice Louis Brandeis, in
which he included a ringing affirmation of the bedrock principle of free speech,
writing that the First Amendment is based on belief in the “free trade in ideas
– that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself
accepted in the competition of the market,” and insisting that “we should be
eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we
loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten
immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an
immediate check is required to save the country.” The Belgian King and Queen, before leaving
the United States
at the end of the month, visited the President in his bedroom at the White
House. In baseball, the Cincinnati Redlegs
defeated the heavily favored Chicago White Sox to win the best-of-nine World
Series five games to three. Not long
afterward the “Black Sox” scandal surfaced when a grand jury charged that some
of the Chicago
players had conspired with a gambling syndicate to lose the series
intentionally.
November
For much of November the Senate was occupied debating and
voting on a series of proposed amendments and reservations to the proposed
Treaty of Versailles. A cloture rule, adopted
after the Armed Ships Bill filibuster in 1917 but applied now for the first
time, limited each senator’s time to speak, but there was no limit to the
number of senators who could have their say.
All the proposed amendments were defeated, as were most of the
reservations other than fourteen proposed by the Foreign Relations Committee,
referred to as the “Lodge reservations.”
The LEP continued to send a mixed message, generally supporting the Treaty
but voting down a resolution to oppose the Lodge Reservations. In doing so it followed the lead of two of
its most prominent members, former President Taft and Harvard President
Lawrence Lowell, who argued that some reservations might be necessary to get
the Treaty ratified. After two meetings
with the President, Senator Gilbert Hitchcock, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign
Relations Committee, summarized the President’s views in a draft letter, which he
gave to Mrs. Wilson. She read it to the
President, revised it as he directed, and returned it to Senator Hitchcock, who
shared it with his fellow Democrats. Promptly
leaked to the press, it said that in the President’s opinion “the resolution [for
ratification with the Lodge reservations] does not provide for ratification,
but rather for nullification of the treaty,” and that he “hope[s] the friends
and supporters of the treaty will vote against the Lodge resolution of
ratification.” The President’s firm
rejection led to the Treaty’s defeat. Three
final votes on consent to the Treaty were taken, two with the “Lodge reservations”
attached and one with no reservations. All three failed to pass, and the Senate
adjourned. President Wilson declined to
make any statement in response to the Senate’s action, and refused even to see Senator
Hitchcock when he called at the White House.
Hitchcock and other treaty supporters resolved to bring the treaty
before the Senate again in the next session of Congress which (as the
Constitution provided prior to the adoption of the Twentieth Amendment in 1933)
would begin the first Monday in December.
The war on radicals continued as Attorney General Palmer, using
authority given by the Espionage Act, ordered raids on the headquarters of the
Industrial Workers of the World and the Seattle Union Record, organized labor’s
newspaper voice in the Pacific Northwest. In Great Britain, Lady Astor became
the first woman elected to the House of Commons. Born Nancy Langhorne in Virginia,
she was the wife of William Waldorf Astor, a wealthy American who had moved to England where
he became a British subject and member of the House of Lords. The Prince of Wales visited the United States and Canada,
calling on President Wilson in the White House and touring New
York City and the Military
Academy at West
Point, where he was greeted by the new superintendent, Brigadier
General Douglas MacArthur. The next week
at the Polo Grounds, the Army-Navy football rivalry resumed after a two-year
hiatus due to the war. Navy won 6-0.
December
As was the custom, President Wilson delivered the annual
State of the Union message on the first day of the new session of Congress. For the first time in his presidency, he
delivered the address in writing, his physical condition making it impossible
for him to appear in person. Despite its
importance, the message did not mention the Treaty of Versailles or the
controversy over its ratification. This,
in addition to the President’s refusal to see Senator Hitchcock a week earlier,
increased concern in Congress about his ability to perform the duties of his
office. When an American citizen was
seized in Mexico,
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee appointed a subcommittee of two (Senator
Hitchcock and Republican Senator Albert Fall) to visit the White House and
discuss the matter with the President in person. After the meeting both senators judged him “perfectly
capable of handling the situation,” a conclusion perhaps aided by the dim light
in the President’s bedroom, by the artful arrangement of the bedclothes, and most
importantly by the announcement during the meeting that the American citizen
had been released. In the Senate, efforts
to reach an accommodation regarding acceptable reservations continued until mid-December,
when the White House issued a statement that seemed to foreclose any hope that
the President might be willing to compromise.
It said “the hope of the Republican leaders of the Senate that the
President would presently make some move which will relieve the situation with
regard to the treaty is entirely without foundation,” and insisted that the
President has “no compromise or concession of any kind in mind,” but intends
“that the Republican leaders of the Senate shall continue to bear the undivided
responsibility for the fate of the treaty and the present condition of the world
in consequence of that fate.” Still
hoping to find an acceptable formula, Senator Hitchcock said he agreed with the
President that concession or compromise is for the Senate, not the President,
and that Senate supporters of the Treaty “will continue to seek a compromise
between the Lodge reservations and those I offered last November.” Senator Lodge, the Republican leader, blocked
a proposal by Senator Oscar Underwood (Dem., Ala.) to establish a conciliation committee
of ten senators to reach a compromise. On
the day before Christmas the White House announced that the nation’s railroads
would be returned to private ownership on March 1. A Christmas Day parade on Fifth Avenue in support of amnesty for
political prisoners was broken up by police.
At the end of the month the President’s secretary Joseph Tumulty met
separately with the President and Senator Hitchcock, leading to speculation
that the new year might see the President become more involved in the
ratification debate. General Leonard
Wood gave permission for his name to be entered in the South Dakota Republican
Presidential Primary. Viscount French,
the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland
and former commander of the British Expeditionary Force in France, escaped an assassination attempt by members
of the Irish Republican Army as he was being driven through Phoenix Park
in Dublin on
his way to the Viceregal Lodge. One of
the attackers was shot dead and two policemen were injured. In Paris,
Premier Clemenceau won a strong vote of confidence after a speech outlining France’s
foreign policy. He expressed his
satisfaction with the military guarantees from Great
Britain and the United
States, predicted a solution to the disagreement with Italy about Fiume, and declared France’s firm opposition to the Soviet
government in Russia,
promising that “we will be the allies of all peoples attacked by Bolshevism.”
