It is a mistake to regard the armistice as forced upon the Allies by President Wilson. Many persons abroad, as in this country, felt, it is true, that it was wrong to permit the peaceful withdrawal of the German armies, even though the full military advantages of victory were secured by the armistice conditions; the Allies ought, they argued, to impress on the Germans the magnitude of their defeat on the field of battle, and this could not be done so long as German soil had been free from warfare. General Pershing was strongly opposed to the granting of an armistice. The Allied chiefs knew, however, that although the continuation of the fighting would lead to the surrender of a great German force, every day would cost the victorious armies a heavy toll of killed and wounded, and the advantage to be gained thereby was at least questionable. This fact was emphasized even by Marshal Foch. They hesitated, certainly, to accept the Fourteen Points as the basis for peace, for they feared lest the interpretation put upon them at the Peace Conference might rob them of what they believed to be the just fruits of victory. In both France and England there was, it is true, a body of liberal opinion which would not brook open repudiation of the ideals that Wilson had sponsored during the war and to which Allied ministers had themselves paid tribute. In each country there was another group demanding a "peace of annihilation," with the payment of all war costs by the defeated, but Lloyd George and Clemenceau feared at the moment to raise this issue. Both England and France were dependent upon American assistance for the immediate future as they had been during the war. They needed American food, raw materials, and money. A break with Wilson, who for the moment was the popular hero of Europe, taken in conjunction with an economic crisis, might be the signal for domestic disturbances if not revolution.
Thus with Germany helpless and the Allies at least outwardly accepting his peace programme, Woodrow Wilson seemed to be master of the situation. And yet his power was more apparent than real. Apart from that moral influence which he exercised over the European liberals and which among some of the working classes was so extreme that candles were burnt before his picture, but which also was inevitably unstable and evanescent, Wilson's power rested upon the fact that he was President of the United States. But the nation was no longer united behind him or his policy, if indeed it had ever been so. That hatred and distrust which had marked the electoral campaign of 1916, and which, stifled for the moment by entrance into the war, had flamed out early in 1918 in the attack upon his war administration, now in the autumn threatened an explosion of popular disapprobation in some parts of the country. Men had long whispered "autocrat" but had generally been silenced during the war by the admonition not to weaken the government by factious criticism. Now they began to shout it from the house-tops. Because of his inability to grasp the importance of either tact or tactics, the President made the way of his opponents easy for them.
Shortly before the Congressional elections of November, at the moment when he felt the need of national support in order to strengthen his position with the Allies, the President was prevailed upon to issue an appeal to the electors, asking them to vote for Democratic candidates on the ground that the nation ought to have unified leadership in the coming moment of crisis, and that a Republican Congress would divide the leadership. There was nothing novel in such an appeal; in 1898, McKinley had begged for a Republican Congress on the ground that "this is no time for divided councils," the same ground as that taken by Wilson in 1918. Roosevelt in the same year (1898) had said: "Remember that whether you will or not your votes this year will be viewed by the nations of Europe from one standpoint only.... A refusal to sustain the President this year will, in their eyes, be read as a refusal to sustain the war and to sustain the efforts of the peace commission." Wilson's appeal in 1918 was merely an echo of Roosevelt's in 1898. Yet it was a mistake in tactics. It enabled the Republicans to assert that, whereas they had sunk partisan differences during the war in order to secure the victory of the nation, Wilson was now capitalizing the war and foreign problems to win a partisan advantage. The result of the elections was Republican success, assuring to that party a slight majority in the Senate and a goodly majority in the House after March 4, 1919.
The President made other tactical mistakes. Instead of taking the Senate into his confidence by entering upon numerous conferences with its leaders, he stood upon the letter of the Constitution and gave the clear impression that he would conduct the peace negotiations himself without Senatorial assistance, leaving the Senators merely their constitutional privilege of "advice and consent" when a treaty should be laid before them. He would have done better to remember a remarkable passage in one of his own lectures, delivered ten years before. Speaking of the difficulty of bringing pressure to bear upon the Senate, he had said that there is a "course which the President may follow, and which one or two Presidents of unusual political sagacity have followed, with the satisfactory results that were to have been expected. He may himself be less stiff and offish, may himself act in the true spirit of the Constitution and establish intimate relations of confidence with the Senate on his own initiative, not carrying his plans to completion and then laying them in final form before the Senate to be accepted or rejected, but keeping himself in confidential communication with the leaders of the Senate while his plans are in course, when their advice will be of service to him and his information of the greatest service to them, in order that there may be veritable counsel and a real accommodation of views, instead of a final challenge and contest." Had Wilson in 1918, and after, followed his own advice, the outcome might have been different. But nothing describes so perfectly the exact opposite of his attitude as the passage quoted above.
The President might at least have assuaged the sense of injury that rankled in the hearts of the Senators by asking for their advice in the appointment of the Peace Commission. Instead he kept his own counsel. He decided to go to Paris himself as head of the Commission, and chose for his associates men who were not qualified to win for him the support that he needed in the Senate or in the country. Robert Lansing, as Secretary of State, was a necessary appointment. Colonel House was probably the best-fitted man in America for the approaching negotiations, alike by his temperament, by the breadth of his knowledge of foreign questions, and by his intimacy with foreign statesmen. But at least two places on the Commission should have been given to eminent Republicans and to men universally known and respected. If Wilson was unwilling to select members of the Senate, he might have heeded public opinion which called definitely for William Howard Taft and Elihu Root. Both were pledged to the most important item of Wilson's programme, the League of Nations; both exercised wide influence in the country and in the Republican party. The Senate, with a Republican majority, would almost certainly ratify any treaty which they had signed. But the President, for reasons of a purely negative character, passed them over and with what looked to the public like mere carelessness, chose General Tasker Howard Bliss and Henry White, formerly Ambassador to Rome and Paris under Presidents Roosevelt and Taft. Both were men of ability and experience, but neither enjoyed the particular confidence of the American people; and what Americans chiefly wanted was the assurance of persons they knew and trusted, that the peace was right. In the existing state of public opinion, the assurance of the President was not in itself sufficient.
President Wilson's decision to go to Paris as a member of the Commission aroused still fiercer opposition, but had reasons infinitely more cogent. He knew that there would be great difficulty in translating his ideals into fact at the Peace Conference. He believed that he could count upon the support of liberal opinion in Europe, but realized that the leading politicians had not yet been won sincerely to his policy. The pledge they had given to accept the Fourteen Points might mean much or little; everything depended upon interpretation. A peace of justice and a League of Nations still hung in the balance. At this moment, with Germany clearly helpless, opinion abroad appeared to be tending, naturally enough, toward the old-style division of the spoils among the victors. More than one influential French and British newspaper began to sound the cry Væ victis. Moreover, in America broke forth a chorus of encouragement to the Allies to pay no attention to Wilsonian idealism. On the 27th of November, shortly before the Commission sailed, Roosevelt wrote: "Our Allies and our enemies and Mr. Wilson himself should all understand that Mr. Wilson has no authority whatever to speak for the American people at this time. His leadership has just been emphatically repudiated by them.... Mr. Wilson and his Fourteen Points and his four supplementary points and his five complementary points and all his utterances every which way have ceased to have any shadow of right to be accepted as expressive of the will of the American people.... Let them [the Allies] impose their common will on the nations responsible for the hideous disaster which has almost wrecked mankind." It was frank encouragement to the Allies, coming from the American who, with Wilson, was best-known abroad, to divide the spoils and to disregard all promises to introduce a new international order, and it must have brought joy to Clemenceau and Sonnino.
Wilson feared that having won the war the United States might lose the peace: not by softness towards Germany—as yet there was no danger of that—but by forgetting the ideals for which it had entered the war, by forgetting that a peace of injustice sows the seeds of the next war, and by a relapse into the old bankrupt system of the Balance of Power. He realized that the peoples of France, England, and Italy had felt the pinch of war as the American people had never done, and that it was demanding too much of human nature to expect that their attitude would be one of moderation. He knew that in the negotiations Clemenceau and Sonnino would be definitely opposed to his programme and that he could not count upon Lloyd George. He decided therefore that he must himself go to Paris to fight for his ideals. The decision was one of tremendous significance. At the moment when domestic problems of reconstruction would be most acute, an American President was going to leave the country because of the interest of America in European affairs. The United States was now so much a part of the world system that domestic issues seemed of less importance than the danger that Europe might fall back into the old international system which had proved unable to keep the peace. The President's voyage to France was the clearest manifestation yet vouchsafed of the settled position of the United States as a world power.
If the justice of his policy and the necessity of full participation in the peace as in the war be admitted, Wilson was probably right in going to Paris. No one else could have secured so much of his programme. No one else was possessed of the political power or the personal prestige which belonged to him. The history of the Conference was to show that when he absented himself in February and after he left Paris in June, his subordinates found great difficulty in meeting Allied opposition. But the decision of the President to attend the Peace Conference furnished fresh material for criticism at home. It was a new thing in our history; people did not understand the importance of the issues involved and attributed his voyage to vanity. Unquestionably it weakened Wilson in America as much as it strengthened him abroad. When on the 4th of December, the presidential ship, George Washington, sailed out of New York harbor, saluted by the wild shrieks of a thousand sirens and the showers of glittering white papers streaming from the windows of the skyscrapers, preceded by the battleship Pennsylvania, flanked by destroyers, with acrobatic airplanes and a stately dirigible overhead, external enthusiasm was apparently at its height. But Wilson left behind him glowing embers of intense opposition which, during the next six months, were to be fanned into a dangerous flame.