The explanation of President Wilson will be found in a certain
inferiority. When all his personal history becomes known, when his
papers and letters have all been published and read, when the
memoirs of others have told all that there is to be told, there
will stand clear something inadequate, a lack of robustness, mental
or nervous, an excessive sensitiveness, over self-consciousness,
shrinking from life, a neurotic something that in the end brought
on defeat and the final overthrow. He was never quite a normal man
with the average man's capacity to endure and enjoy but a strange,
impeded, self-absorbed personality.
History arranged the greatest stage of all time, and on it placed a
lot of little figures, "pigmy minds"--all save one, and he the
nearest great, an unworldly person summoned from a cloister, with
the vision of genius and the practical incapacity of one who has
run away from life, hating men but loving all mankind, eloquent but
inarticulate in a large way, incapable of true self expression in
his chosen field of political action, so self-centered that he
forgot the world's tragedy and merged it into his own, making great
things little and little things great, one of "life's ironies," the
everlasting refutation of the optimistic notion that when there is
a crisis fate produces a man big enough to meet it.
The world finds it hard to speak of Mr. Wilson except in superlatives.
A British journalist called him the other day, "the wickedest man in
the world." This was something new in extravagance. I asked, "Why
the wickedest?" He said, "Because he was so unable to forget himself
that he brought the peace of the world down in a common smash with
his own personal fortunes."
On the other hand General Jan Christian Smuts, writing with that
perspective which distance gives, pronounces it to be not Wilson's
fault but the fault of humanity that the vision of universal peace
failed. Civilization was not advanced enough to make peace without
vindictiveness possible.
This debate goes on and on. Mr. Wilson is either the worst hated or
the most regretted personality of the Great War. The place of no
one else is worth disputing. Lloyd George is the consummate
politician, limited by the meanness of his art. Clemenceau is the
personification of nationality, limited by the narrowness of his
view. Mr. Wilson alone had his hour of superlative greatness when
the whole earth listened to him and followed him; an hour which
ended with him only dimly aware of his vision and furiously
conscious of pin pricks.
You observe this inadequacy in Mr. Wilson, this incapacity to
endure, at the outset of his career. It is characteristic of
certain temperaments that when they first face life they should run
away from it as Mr. Wilson did when, having studied law and having
been admitted to the bar, he abandoned practice and went to teach
in a girls' school. That was the early sign in him of that sense of
unfitness for the more arduous contacts of life which was so
conspicuous a trait during his presidency. He could not endure
meeting men on an equal footing, where there was a conflict of
wills, a rough clash of minds, where no concession was made to
sensitiveness and egotism.
Some nervous insufficiency causes this shrinking, like the quick
retreat from cold water of an inadequate body. Commonly a man who
runs away from life after the first contact with it hates himself
for his flight and there begins a conflict inside him which ends
either in his admission of defeat and acknowledgment of his
unfitness or in his convincing himself that his real motive was
contempt of that on which he turned his back. If he admits to
himself that he is really a little less courageous, a little more
sensitive, a little less at home in this world, then he is gone. If
he does satisfy himself that he is superior, has higher ideals,
worthier ends, despises the ordinary arts of success he becomes
arrogant, merely in self defense.
Mr. Wilson's "intellectual snobbism" was this kind of arrogance,
acquired for moral self preservation, like that of the small boy
who when his companions refuse to play with him says to himself
that he is smarter than they are, gets higher marks in school, that
he has a better gun than they have or that he, when he grows up,
will be a great general while they are nobody. Almost everyone who
feels himself unequal in some direction can satisfy himself that he
exceeds in others. It is a common and human sort of arrogance, and
Mr. Wilson had it inordinately.
He hated and contemned the law, in which life had given him his
first glimpse of his frailty. He would have no lawyers make the
peace or draft the covenant of the league of nations. Lawyers were
pitiful creatures,--he kept one of them near him, Mr. Lansing,
admirably chosen, to remind him of how contemptible they were,
living in fear of precedents, writing a barbarous jargon out of
deeds and covenants, impeding the freedom of the imagination with
their endless citations.
He despised politicians, he despised business men, he despised the
whole range of men who pursue worldly arts with success. He
despised the qualities which he had not himself, but like all men
who are arrogant self protectively he was driven to introspection
and analyzed himself pitilessly.
The public got glimpses of these analyses. Sometimes he called that
something in him which left him less fit for the world than the
average, a little regretfully, "his single track mind." Sometimes
it leaped to light as an object of pride, his arrogance again, a
pride that was "too great to fight," like the common run of men,--in
the law courts or on the battlefields. He kept asking himself
the question, "Why am I not as other men are?", and sometimes his
nature would rise up in protest and he would exclaim that he was as
other men were and would pathetically tell the world that he was
"misunderstood," that he was not cold and reserved but warm and
genial and kindly, only largely because the world would see him as
he was.
But always the one safe recourse, the one assurance of personal
stability was arrogance. Contempt was the most characteristic habit
of his mind. Out of office he is no sage looking charitably at the
fumbling of his successor.
A friend who has seen him since his retirement describes him as
watching "with supreme contempt" the executive efforts of Mr.
Harding. Washington gossip credits him with inventing the phrase,
"the bungalow mind," to describe the present occupant of the White
House. Another remark of his about the new President is said to
have been "I look forward to the new administration with no
unpleasant anticipations, except those caused by Mr. Harding's
literary style."
There is always his contrast of others with himself to their
disadvantage, mentally or morally, as writers, or leaders, or
statesmen. So full a life as Mr. Wilson led in the last dozen or
more years ought to have made him less self-conscious. A robuster
person would have hated with a certain zest, continued with a
certain gaiety, laughed as he fought, found something to respect in
his foes, seen the curtain fall upon his own activities with a
certain cheerfulness.
He seems deficient in resources. He had not that gusto which richly
endowed natures ordinarily have. He found no fun in measuring his
strength with other men's. There was a certain overstrain about
him, which made him cushion himself about with non-resistant
personalities. He lacked curiosity. His fine mind seemed to want
the energy to interest itself in the details of any subject that
filled it, and this was one of his fatal weaknesses at the Peace
Conference. Perhaps it was a deficiency of vital force. Moreover he
came to his great task tired. His life till he was past fifty was
one of defeat. There was the early disappointment and turning back
from law practice, the giving up of his youthful ambition for a
public career to which he had trained himself passionately by the
study of public speaking. Dr. Albert Shaw, who was his fellow
student at Johns Hopkins, says that in the University Mr. Wilson
was the finest speaker, except possibly the old President of the
College, Dr. Daniel Coit Gilman.
Then there were the long years of poverty as a college professor,
when he overworked at writing and university extension lectures, to
make his small salary as a teacher equal to the support of his
family, his three children and his aged parents. There was his
failure at literature, for his "History of the United States"
brought him neither fame nor money, the public finding it dull and
unreadable.
Then the crowning unsuccess as President of Princeton; for when his
luck changed and a political career opened to him as Governor of
New Jersey, with trustees and alumni against him, nothing seemed to
be before him but resignation and a small professorship in a
Southern College. It was a straightened life that he had led when
he came to Washington for the first time as President, scandalizing
the servants of the White House with the scantness of his personal
effects. There had been neither the time nor the means nor probably
the energy for larger human contacts. And something inherent always
held him back from the world, something which diverted him to
academic life, which when he was writing his "Congressional
Government", his best book, held him in Baltimore, almost a suburb
of Washington, where he read what he wrote to his fellow-students
at Johns Hopkins, whose livelier curiosity took them often to the
galleries of the House and the Senate about which he was writing
from a distance.
Those to whom life is kinder than it was during many years to Mr.
Wilson have naturally a zest for it. Robuster natures than his even
though life averts her face, often preserve a zest for it.
Conscious of his powers he seems to have fortified himself against
failure with scorn. He had a scorn for the intellects of those who
succeed by arts which he did not possess. He had scorn for
politicians. He had a scorn for wealth. He had a scorn for his
enemies. He had a scorn for Republicans. He had a scorn for the men
with whom he had to deal in Europe, the heads of the Allied
Governments.
Above all he scorned Lloyd George, an instinct telling him that the
British Premier had a thousand arts where he himself, unschooled in
conference with equals, had none. He said of Lloyd George just
before he sailed for Paris, suspecting him of treachery to the
League of Nations, "I shall look him in the eye and say to him Damn
you, if you do not accept the League I shall go to the people of
Great Britain and say things to them that will shake your
government."
When he made this threat he could not foresee that the compromise
of the Peace would leave him with so little character that British
Liberals, their faith destroyed, should in the end couple his name
with their own Premier's and exclaim, "Your man Wilson talks like
Jesus Christ, but he acts like Lloyd George!"
More than all others he scorned Lodge. The Massachusetts Senator
who had put by scholarship for politics and had won the opportunity
to do menial service for a political machine hated the man who had
chosen scholarship, for whatever motive, and come out with the
Presidency. You hate the man you might perhaps have been if you had
chosen more boldly, more according to your heart--if you are like
Mr. Lodge.
A life of demeaning himself to politicians, of waiting for dead
men's shoes in the Senate, had, however, brought some compensations
to Lodge, among others an inordinate capacity to hurt. The
Massachusetts Senator could get under the President's skin as no
other man could. Washington is a place where every whisper is heard
in the White House.
Mr. Lodge's favorite private charge uttered in a tone of withering
scorn was that the President failed to respond as a man would to
the national insult offered by Germany in sinking the Lusitania
because there was something womanish about him and he would tell,
to prove it, how Wilson went white and almost collapsed over the
news that blood had been shed through the landing of American
marines at Vera Cruz.
The President hardly failed to hear this. Perhaps it reminded him
of that something in him which he was always trying to forget, that
something which diverted his life toward failure at the outset,
which once betrayed him, with a strange mixture of the arrogance
and inferiority, into his famous words "too proud to fight."
At any rate mutual comprehension and hatred between these two men
was instinctive, each having the opposite choice in the beginning
and neither in his heart perhaps ever having forgiven himself
wholly for his choice. Mr. Wilson could never get Mr. Lodge wholly
out of his mind in the last two years of his Presidency, a
disability which prevented him from looking quite calmly and sanely
at public questions.
The story of the President's appeal for a Democratic Congress in
1918 which has never been fully told, illustrates the bearing this
Lodge obsession had upon Mr. Wilson's later fate. When the
Congressional election was approaching ex-Congressman Scott Ferris,
then acting as Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, went
to the President and told him that there was danger of losing both
houses of Congress, the lower house not being important, but the
Senate as a factor in foreign relations, Mr. Ferris suggested, was
indispensable to the Democratic party. Mr. Wilson was more hopeful
but agreed to take under advisement some sort of appeal to the
country. It was not desired that this should be anything more than
a letter, perhaps to Mr. Ferris, intended for publication, and
pointing out the need of support for the President's policies in
the next Congress.
Shortly afterward Mr. Tumulty, the President's Secretary, brought
to the Shoreham Hotel in Washington an appeal to the country for a
Democratic Congress and read it to several Democrats gathered there
for the purpose, including Homer S. Cummings, who, by that time,
had become acting Chairman of the Democratic National Committee and
was in charge of the campaign. Mr. Cummings doubted the wisdom of
an appeal, couched in such terms as the one Mr. Tumulty read. He
took it to Vance McCormick, Chairman of the Democratic National
Committee, who, because he was Chairman of the War Trade Board, was
not taking part in the election. Mr. McCormick agreed with Mr.
Cummings that the appeal as written would do more harm than good to
the Democratic party, saying that the war had not been conducted on
a partisan basis, that some of his own associates on the War Trade
Board were Republicans and that Mr. Wilson should ask for the
reelection of all who had been loyal supporters of the war, whether
Republicans or Democrats.
The appeal to the country as it then stood contained a bitter
denunciation of Senator Lodge. What Wilson chiefly saw in a
Republican victory was himself at the mercy of the man he hated
worst, the Massachusetts Senator. Mr. McCormick thought that if the
President was going to name names he must, at least, denounce
Claude Kitchen, the Democratic leader of the House, as well as
Senator Lodge. If Mr. Wilson would ask for the reelection of those
who had been loyal, of whatever party, listing the offenders, of
both parties, including Mr. Lodge if he must, Mr. McCormick
believed that the impression on the country would be favorable and
thus a Democratic Congress might be elected.
Being agreed, Mr. Cummings and Mr. McCormick went to the White
House and argued for a less partisan appeal. All they accomplished
was the striking of Mr. Lodge's name out of the appeal by
convincing Mr. Wilson that he could not attack the Republican
Senator while ignoring the worse offenses of Mr. Kitchen and Champ
Clark in his own party.
For the rest, the President made the appeal more purely personal
and more partisan than before. He could not get the Lodge obsession
out of his mind. He could not bring himself to ask for the election
of members of Mr. Lodge's party. The wisdom of Mr. Cummings and Mr.
McCormick was soon vindicated. The appeal with Mr. Lodge's name out
was only a shade less impolitic than it would have been with his
name in. It gave Mr. Lodge his majority in the Senate and turned
the peace into a personal issue between the two "scholars in
politics."
By this time Mr. Wilson had lost his sense of actuality. He could
ask the nation for a Congress to his liking as a personal due. He
could condemn Mr. Lodge as an enemy of those purposes with which we
entered the war, simply because Mr. Lodge could hurt him as no
other man could. The President had been talking for some months to
the whole world and the whole world had listened with profound
attention. His mission had taken, unconsciously perhaps, a
Messianic character. His enemies were the enemies of God. The
ordinary metes and bounds of personality had broken down. The state
of mind revealed in the appeal as originally written was the state
of mind of the Peace Conference and of the fight over the Treaty
and the League which succeeded the Peace Conference. All that
happened afterwards, including the pitiful personal tragedy, had
become inevitable.
For a while at Paris amid the triumphs of his European reception
and the successes of the first few months up to the adoption of the
League covenant Mr. Wilson forgot Mr. Lodge, forgot him too
completely.
It was my fortune to see him at the apex of his career. He was
about to sail for America on that visit which he made here in the
midst of the treaty making. His League covenant had just been
agreed to. The world had accepted him. Fate had led him far from
those paths of defeat and obscurity into which his sensitiveness
and shyness had turned him as a youth. He was elated and confident.
He looked marvelously fresh and young, his color warm and youthful,
his eye alive with pleasure.
He talked long and well, answered questions freely, told stories of
his associates at the peace table, especially of one who never read
the memoranda his secretaries prepared, who was so deaf that he
could not hear a word spoken in conference and who spoke so loudly
that no one could interrupt him. "What could one do," Mr. Wilson
asked, "to penetrate a mind like that?" M. Clemenceau, who unlike
this other commissioner, had eyes and saw not, had ears and neither
would he hear, had said to him once, in response to a firm
negative, "You have a heart of steel!" "I felt like replying to
him," flashed Mr. Wilson, "I have not the heart to steal!"
So well poised, so sure of himself he felt that he could do an
extraordinary thing. He could laugh off a mistake. Robuster natures
accept mistakes as a child accepts tumbles. Mistakes for Mr. Wilson
were ordinarily crises for his arrogancy.
You may judge, then, how confident he was at that supreme moment.
He could brush aside a great mistake lightly. Someone asked him,
"What about the freedom of the seas?"
"The freedom of the seas!" he answered, "I must tell you about
that. It's a great joke on me. I left America thinking the freedom
of the seas the most important issue of the Peace Conference. When
I got here I found there was no such issue. You see the freedom of
the seas concerns neutrals in time of war. But when we have the
League of Nations there will be no neutrals in time of war. So, of
course, there will be no question of the freedom of the seas. I
hadn't thought the thing out clearly."
From that moment the decline began. Mr. Wilson had unwisely chosen
to have his victory first and his defeats afterward, always bad
generalship.
Compromise followed compromise, each one destructive. The fourteen
points were impaired until Mr. Wilson hated to be reminded of them
by Lloyd George, in the case of Dantzig and the Polish corridor.
The dawn of a better world grew dubious. The ardor of mankind
cooled. They were at first incredulous, then skeptical.
The President saw only slowly the consequences of that chaffering
to which Mr. Lloyd George and M. Clemenceau led him. He was a poor
merchant. He dealt in morals and could cast up no daily balance. He
was busy with details for which his mind had no sufficient
curiosity or energy. Mr. Keynes, in his remarkable description of
Mr. Wilson making peace, says that his mind was slow.
Doubtless it was slow in political trading about the council table,
just as a philosopher may be slow in the small talk of a five
o'clock tea.
Mr. Wilson was out of his element in the conference; Mr. Lloyd
George and M. Clemenceau were in theirs. Gradually the conviction
entered Mr. Wilson's soul that what was being destroyed at Paris
was Mr. Wilson. The figure of Senator Lodge began to rise across
the Atlantic, malevolent and evil, the Lodge against whom he had
wanted to appeal to the American people.
The strain was telling upon him. He had to sit beside his
destroyers with that smiling amiability which Mr. Lansing records
in his book. He had to deal with men on a basis of equality, a
thing which he had run away from doing in his youth, which all his
life had made too great demands upon his sensitive, arrogant
nature.
One whose duty it was to see him every night after the meetings of
the Big Three reports that he found him with the left side of his
face twitching. To collect his memory he would pass his hand
several times wearily over his brow. The arduousness of the labor
was not great enough to account for this. M. Clemenceau at nearly
eighty stood the strain and an assassin's bullet as well. Mr. Lloyd
George thrived on what he did. But the issue was not personal with
them. Neither was assisting, with difficult amiability, at his own
destruction. The time came when he might have had back some of the
ground he had given. Mr. Lloyd George offered it to him. He would
not have it. What it was proposed to amend was not so much the
peace treaty as Mr. Wilson himself, and he could not admit that he
needed amendment.
The issue had become personal and Mr. Lodge, upon Mr. Wilson's
return, with malevolent understanding, kept it personal. The
Republicans made their fight in the one way that made yielding by
the President impossible. They made it nominally on the League but
really on Mr. Wilson. The President might have compromised on the
League, but he could not compromise on Mr. Wilson. Of such
involvement in self there could be only one end.
Like a poet of one poem, Mr. Wilson is a statesman of one vision,
an inspiring vision, but one which his own weakness kept him from
realizing. His domestic achievements are not remarkable, his
administration being one in which movements came to a head rather
than one in which much was initiated. He might have cut the war
short by two years and saved the world much havoc, if he had begun
to fight when the Lusitania was sunk. Once in the war he saw his
country small and himself large; he did not conceive of the nation
as winning the war by sending millions of men to France; he saw
himself as winning the war by talking across the Atlantic. At the
Peace Conference he did not conceive of his country's winning the
peace by the powerful position in which victory had left it; he saw
himself as winning the peace by the hold he personally had upon the
peoples of Europe. Like Napoleon, of whom Marshal Foch wrote
recently, "Il oublia qu'un homme ne peut etre Dieu; qu'au-dessus de
l' individu, il y a la nation," he forgot that man can not be God;
that over and above the individual there is the nation.
In politics he knew at first better than any other, again to quote
Foch, that "above men is morality." This knowledge brought him many
victories. But at critical junctures, as in his 1918 appeal to the
voters and in the treaty fight, he forgot that morality was above
one man, himself. He excelled in appeals to the heart and
conscience of the nation, a gift Mr. Harding has not; the lesser
arts of the politician, tact and skill in the handling and
selecting of men, were lacking.
He forgot in his greatness and aloofness the national passion for
equality; which a more brilliant politician, Mr. Roosevelt,
appeased by acting as the people's court jester, and which a
shrewder politician, Mr. Harding, guards against by reminding the
country that he is "just folks"; and in the end the masses turned
upon him, like a Roman mob on a defeated gladiator.