Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him Part 36

As Senator Brandegee and others contended that the Covenant of the League of Nations was a "muddy, murky, and muddled doc.u.ment," so Mr. Williams of New York, in 1788, charged "ambiguity" against the proposed Const.i.tution, saying that it was "absolutely impossible to know what we give up and what we retain."

Mandates and similar bogies had their counterpart in Was.h.i.+ngton's day.

George Mason, fearful like Senator Sherman of Illinois in a later day, "apprehended the possibility of Congress calling in the militia of Georgia to quell disturbances in New Hamps.h.i.+re."

The att.i.tude of George Was.h.i.+ngton in his day was very similar to that of Woodrow Wilson. Writing to Knox, on August 19, 1797, he said: "I am fully persuaded it [meaning the Federal Const.i.tution] is the best that can be obtained at this time. And, as a const.i.tutional door is open for amendment hereafter, our adoption of it, under the present circ.u.mstances of the union, is in my opinion desirable." And of the opponents of the proposed Const.i.tution he said, "The major part of them will, it is to be feared, be governed by sinister and self-important motives."

The storm centre of the whole fight against the League was the opposition personally conducted by Senator Lodge and others of the Republican party against the now famous Article X. The basis of the whole Republican opposition was their fear that America would have to bear some responsibility in the affairs of the world, while the strength of Woodrow Wilson's position was his faith that out of the war, with all its blood and tears, would come this great consummation.

It was the President's idea that we should go into the League and bear our responsibilities; that we should enter it as gentlemen, scorning privilege. He did not wish us to sneak in and enjoy its advantages and s.h.i.+rk its responsibilities, but he wanted America to enter boldly and not as a hypocrite.

With reference to the argument made by Senator Lodge against our going into the League, saying that it would be a surrender of American sovereignty and a loss of her freedom, the President often asked the question on his Western trip: How can a nation preserve its freedom except through concerted action? We surrender part of our freedom in order to save the rest of it. Discussing this matter one day, he said: "One cannot have an omelet without breaking eggs. By joining the League of Nations, a nation loses, not its individual freedom, but its selfish isolation. The only freedom it loses is the freedom to do wrong. Robinson Crusoe was free to shoot in any direction on his island until Friday came. Then there was one direction in which he could not shoot. His freedom ended where Friday's rights began."

There would have been no Federal Union to-day if the individual states that went to make up the Federal Union were not willing to surrender the powers they exercised, to surrender their freedom as it were.

Opponents of the League tried to convey the impression that under Article X we should be obliged to send our boys across the sea and that in that event America's voice would not be the determining voice.

Lloyd George answered this argument in a crus.h.i.+ng way, when he said:

We cannot, unless we abandon the whole basis of the League of Nations, disinterest ourselves in an attack upon the existence of a nation which is a member of that league and whose life is in jeopardy. That covenant, as I understand it, does not contemplate, necessarily, military action in support of the imperilled nation. It contemplates economic pressure; it contemplates support for the struggling people; and when it is said that if you give any support at all to Poland it involves a great war, with conscription and with all the mechanism of war with which we have been so familiar in the last few years, that is inconsistent with the whole theory of the covenant into which we have entered. We contemplated other methods of bringing pressure to bear upon the recalcitrant nation that is guilty of acts of aggression against other nations and endangering their independence.

The Republicans who attacked the President on Article X had evidently forgotten what Theodore Roosevelt said about the one effective move for obtaining peace, when he urged: "The nations should agree on certain rights that should not be questioned, such as territorial integrity, their rights to deal with their domestic affairs, and with such matters as whom they should admit to citizens.h.i.+p." They had, also, evidently forgotten that Mr. Taft said: "The arguments against Article X which have been most pressed are those directed to showing that under its obligations the United States can be forced into many wars and to burdensome expeditionary forces to protect countries in which it has no legitimate interest. This objection will not bear examination."

Mr. Taft answered the question of one of the Republican critics if Article X would not involve us in war, in the following statement:

How much will it involve us in war? Little, if any. In the first place, the universal boycott, first to be applied, will impose upon most nations such a withering isolation and starvation that in most cases it will be effective. In the second place, we'll not be drawn into any war in which it will not be reasonable and convenient for us to render efficient aid, because the plan of the Council must be approved by our representatives, as already explained. In the third place, the threat of the universal boycott and the union of overwhelming forces of the members of the League, if need be, will hold every nation from violating Article X, and Articles XII, XIII, and XV, unless there is a world conspiracy, as in this war, in which case the earliest we get into the war, the better.

Evidently Mr. Taft did not look upon Article X as the bugaboo that Mr.

Lodge pretended it was, for he said:

Article X covers the Monroe Doctrine _and extends it to the world_. The League is not a super-sovereign, but a partners.h.i.+p intended to secure to us and all nations only the sovereignty we can properly have, i.e., sovereignty regulated by the international law and morality consistent with the same sovereignty of other nations. The United States is not under this const.i.tution to be forced into actual war against its will. This League is to be regarded in conflict with the advice of Was.h.i.+ngton only from a narrow and reactionary viewpoint.

Mr. Herbert Hoover, now a member of Mr. Harding's Cabinet, in a speech delivered on October 3, 1919, answering the argument that America would be compelled to send her boys to the other side, said:

We hear the cry that the League obligates that our sons be sent to fight in foreign lands. Yet the very intent and structure of the League is to prevent wars. There is no obligation for the United States to engage in military operations or to allow any interference with our internal affairs without the full consent of our representatives in the League.

And further discussing the revision of the Treaty, Mr. Hoover said:

I am confident that if we attempt now to revise the Treaty we shall tread on a road through European chaos. Even if we managed to keep our soldiers out of it we will not escape fearful economic losses. If the League is to break down we must at once prepare to fight. Few people seem to realize the desperation to which Europe has been reduced.

CHAPTER XLII

THE WESTERN TRIP

Tentative plans for a Western trip began to be formed in the White House because of the urgent insistence from Democratic friends on the Hill that nothing could win the fight for the League of Nations except a direct appeal to the country by the President in person.

Admiral Grayson, the President's physician and consistent friend, who knew his condition and the various physical crises through which he had pa.s.sed here and on the other side, from some of which he had not yet recovered, stood firm in his resolve that the President should not go West, even intimating to me that the President's life might pay the forfeit if his advice were disregarded. Indeed, it needed not the trained eye of a physician to see that the man whom the senators were now advising to make a "swing around the circle" was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. More than once since his return from the Peace Conference I had urged him to take a needed rest; to get away from the turmoil of Was.h.i.+ngton and recuperate; but he spurned this advice and resolved to go through to the end.

No argument of ours could draw him away from his duties, which now involved not only the fight for the ratification of the Treaty, but the threatened railway strike, with its attendant evils to the country, and added administrative burdens growing out of the partisans.h.i.+p fight which was being waged in Congress for the ostensible purpose of reducing the high cost of living.

One day, after Democratic senators had been urging the Western trip, I took leave to say to the President that, in his condition, disastrous consequences might result if he should follow their advice. But he dismissed my solicitude, saying in a weary way: "I know that I am at the end of my tether, but my friends on the Hill say that the trip is necessary to save the Treaty, and I am willing to make whatever personal sacrifice is required, for if the Treaty should be defeated, G.o.d only knows what would happen to the world as a result of it. In the presence of the great tragedy which now faces the world, no decent man can count his own personal fortunes in the reckoning. Even though, in my condition, it might mean the giving up of my life, I will gladly make the sacrifice to save the Treaty."

He spoke like a soldier who was ready to make the supreme sacrifice to save the cause that lay closest to his heart.

As I looked at the President while he was talking, in my imagination I made a comparison between the man, Woodrow Wilson, who now stood before me and the man I had met many years before in New Jersey. In those days he was a vigorous, agile, slender man, active and alert, his hair but slightly streaked with gray. Now, as he stood before me discussing the necessity for the Western trip, he was an old man, grown grayer and grayer, but grimmer and grimmer in his determination, like an old warrior, to fight to the end.

There was another whose heroism was no less than his, Mrs. Wilson. She has since referred to the Western trip as "one long nightmare," though in the smiling face which she turned upon the crowds from Columbus to San Diego and back to Pueblo none could have detected a trace of the anxiety that was haunting her. She met the shouting throngs with the same reposeful dignity and radiant, friendly smile with which she had captivated the people of England, France, Italy, and Belgium.

At home and abroad she has always had a peculiar power to attract the populace, though she herself has never craved the spotlight. Like her husband, she finds home more congenial, and, like him, she prefers not to be written about.

In her husband's career she has played a notable role, the more n.o.ble because self-effacing. She has consistently disavowed intention to partic.i.p.ate actively in public affairs, and yet in many a crisis she, out of her strong intelligence and sagacity, has been able to offer timely, wise suggestion. No public man ever had a more devoted helpmeet, and no wife a husband more dependent upon her sympathetic understanding of his problems. The devotion between these two has not been strengthened, for that would be impossible, but deepened by the President's long illness.

Mrs. Wilson's strong physical const.i.tution, combined with strength of character and purpose, has sustained her under a strain which must have wrecked most women. When the strong man broke, she nursed him as tenderly as a mother nurses a child.

Mrs. Wilson must have left the White House for that ill-omened journey with a sinking heart, for she knew, none better, that her husband was suffering from acc.u.mulated fatigue, and that he should be starting on a long vacation instead of a fighting tour that would tax the strength of an athlete in the pink of condition. For seven practically vacationless years he had borne burdens too great for any const.i.tution; he had conducted his country through the greatest of all wars; he had contended, at times single-handed, in Paris with the world's most adroit politicians; he had there been prostrated with influenza, that treacherous disease which usually maims for a time those whom it does not kill, and he had not given himself a chance to recuperate; he had returned to America to engage in the most desperate conflict of his career with the leaders of the opposition party; and now, when it was clear even to his men friends, and much clearer to the intuition of a devoted wife, that nature was crying out for rest, he was setting out on one of the most arduous programmes of public speaking known even in our country, which is familiar with these strenuous undertakings. Mrs. Wilson's anxieties must have increased with each successive day of the journey, but not even to we of the immediate party did she betray her fears. Her resolution was as great as his.

When the great illness came she had to stand between him and the peril of exhaustion from official cares, yet she could not, like the more fortunately obscure, withdraw her husband from business altogether and take him away to some quiet place for restoration. As head of the nation he must be kept in touch with affairs, and during the early months of his illness she was the chief agent in keeping him informed of public business. Her high intelligence and her extraordinary memory enabled her to report to him daily, in lucid detail, weighty matters of state brought to her by officials for transmission to him. At the proper time, when he was least in pain and least exhausted, she would present a clear, oral resume of each case and lay the doc.u.ments before him in orderly arrangement.

As woman and wife, the first thought of her mind and the first care of her heart must be for his health. Once at an acute period of his illness certain officials insisted that they must see him because they carried information which it was "absolutely necessary that the President of the United States should have," and she quietly replied: "I am not interested in the President of the United States. I am interested in my husband and his health."

With loving courage she met her difficult dilemma of s.h.i.+elding him as much as possible and at the same time keeping him acquainted with things he must know. When it became possible for him to see people she, in counsel with Admiral Grayson, would arrange for conferences and carefully watch her husband to see that they who talked with him did not trespa.s.s too long upon his limited energy.

When it became evident that the tide of public opinion was setting against the League, the President finally decided upon the Western trip as the only means of bringing home to the people the unparalleled world situation.

At the Executive offices we at once set in motion preparations for the Western trip. One itinerary after another was prepared, but upon examining it the President would find that it was not extensive enough and would suspect that it was made by those of us--like Grayson and myself--who were solicitious for his health, and he would cast them aside. All the itineraries provided for a week of rest in the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, but when a brief vacation was intimated to him, he was obdurate in his refusal to include even a day of relaxation, saying to me, that "the people would never forgive me if I took a rest on a trip such as the one I contemplate taking. This is a business trip, pure and simple, and the itinerary must not include rest of any kind." He insisted that there be no suggestion of a pleasure trip attaching to a journey which he regarded as a mission.

As I now look back upon this journey and its disastrous effects upon the President's health, I believe that if he had only consented to include a rest period in our arrangements, he might not have broken down at Pueblo.

Never have I seen the President look so weary as on the night we left Was.h.i.+ngton for our swing into the West. When we were about to board our special train, the President turned to me and said: "I am in a nice fix. I am scheduled between now and the 28th of September to make in the neighbourhood of a hundred speeches to various bodies, stretching all the way from Ohio to the coast, and yet the pressure of other affairs upon me at the White House has been so great that I have not had a single minute to prepare my speeches. I do not know how I shall get the time, for during the past few weeks I have been suffering from daily headaches; but perhaps to-night's rest will make me fit for the work of tomorrow."

No weariness or brain-f.a.g, however, was apparent in the speech at Columbus, Ohio. To those of us who sat on the platform, including the newspaper group who accompanied the President, this speech with its beautiful phrasing and its effective delivery seemed to have been carefully prepared.

Day after day, for nearly a month, there were speeches of a similar kind, growing more intense in their emotion with each day. Shortly after we left Tacoma, Was.h.i.+ngton, the fatigue of the trip began to write itself in the President's face. He suffered from violent headaches each day, but his speeches never betrayed his illness.

In those troublous days and until the very end of our Western trip the President would not permit the slightest variation from our daily programme. Nor did he ever permit the constant headaches, which would have put an ordinary man out of sorts, to work unkindly upon the members of his immediate party, which included Mrs. Wilson, Doctor Grayson, and myself.

He would appear regularly at each meal, partaking of it only slightly, always gracious, always good-natured and smiling, responding to every call from the outside for speeches--calls that came from early morning until late at night--from the plain people grouped about every station and watering place through which we pa.s.sed. Even under the most adverse physical conditions he was always kind, gentle, and considerate to those about him.

I have often wished, as the criticisms of the Pullman smoking car, the cloak room, and the counting house were carried to me, picturing the President's coldness, his aloofness and exclusiveness, that the critics could for a moment have seen the heart and great good-nature of the man giving expression to themselves on this critical journey. If they could have peeped through the curtain of our dining room, at one of the evening meals, for instance, they would have been ashamed of their misrepresentations of this kind, patient, considerate, human-hearted man.

When he was "half fit," an expression he often used, he was the best fellow in the little group on our train--good-natured, smiling, full of anecdotes and repartee, and always thinking of the comforts and pleasure of the men gathered about him. The illness of a newspaper man, or of one of the messengers or conductors, or attaches of the train was a call to service to him, and one could find the President in one of the little compartments of the train, seated at the bed of a newspaper man or some attache who had been taken ill on the trip. There is in the President a sincere human sympathy, which is better than the cheap good-fellows.h.i.+p which many public men carefully cultivate.

It was on the Western trip, about September 12th, while the President, with every ounce of his energy, was attempting to put across the League of Nations, that Mr. William C. Bullitt was disclosing to the Committee on Foreign Relations at a public hearing the facts of a conference between Secretary Lansing and himself, in which Mr. Bullitt declared that Mr.

Lansing had severely criticized the League of Nations.

The press representatives aboard the train called Mr. Bullitt's testimony to the President's attention. He made no comment, but it was plain from his att.i.tude that he was incensed and distressed beyond measure. Here he was in the heart of the West, advancing the cause so dear to his heart, steadily making gains against what appeared to be insurmountable odds, and now his intimate a.s.sociate, Mr. Lansing, was engaged in sniping and attacking him from behind.