Mr. Wilson is disliked for emotional, not intellectual, reasons. Although he has probably done more to engrave the graving upon the stone that will remove the iniquity of the land than any man who has ever lived, "we don't like" him. There must be some good reason for this other than envy, jealousy, and resentment, and I propose to inquire for these reasons in Mr. Wilson's emotional make-up.
Whether I "like" Mr. Wilson or not does not enter into it. I never knew Pascal or Voltaire or Benjamin Franklin, and still I am sure I could make a statement of their qualities and possessions that would elicit commendation from one who had known them. As a matter of fact, personal contact with men from whose activities the world dates epochs is not conducive to personal liking. I cannot fancy liking Rousseau. I am sure I should not have liked Voltaire. I can even understand why Lincoln was despised and scoffed at by his contemporaries. I am one of those who believe Mr. Wilson is a great man, but I am not concerned to convince others of it. I am concerned alone to explain why he is not beloved of the people.
The esteem or disesteem in which Mr. Wilson is held in this country is due to his personality, and this does not seem to me to be enigmatic. He has the mind of a Jove but the heart of a batrachian. It is to the former that he owed his rise, it is the latter that conditioned his fall. If we were not satisfied to have such a man sail our ship of state in smooth as well as in turbulent seas, in calm and in tornado, we had opportunity to drop him from the bridge gracefully in 1916. Although his possessions and deficits were not so universally known then as now, still they were generally recognized and widely discussed. Instead of dropping our pilot we re-elected him. This could only be construed by him as approval of his conduct. When he continued to display his inherent qualities he excited our ire. We called him names and neither forgave nor wished to forgive him.
Perhaps no one has ever had the opportunity to fix his position so indestructibly at the apogee of human accomplishment by permitting himself kindly indulgences or what is commonly called human feelings as Woodrow Wilson had. If when Roosevelt sought to raise a regiment or division to take to France the President had been sympathetic to the project and had wiped out with a stroke of the pen the obvious difficulties that stood in the way of such project, it would have thrilled the people of this country of every color, or every complexion, political and somatic, as nothing else could possibly do. It would not have taken from his prestige as commander-in-chief of the army one jot or tittle, nor would it have interfered in the smallest way with the disciplinary unity which is the vital spark of the army.
If he had said of General Leonard Wood, "Father, forgive him, for he kneweth not that which he did," and had the emotional exaltation which every one has when he forgives an enemy, and given him a command to which his past performances entitled him, a few soreheads and soulless pygmies wearing the uniform of the United States Army and their congressional wire-pullers might have resented it, but the people by and large would have said: "Our President is a big man: he is magnanimous, he is a man who walks in the pathway of the Lord, he forgives his enemies." General Wood would have received the recompense for having prepared the way for the selective draft that he deserved, for even though he did it in a tactless and tasteless way, he made a contribution of incalculable value to the victory of our arms. Had he sent for the chairman of the committee on foreign affairs and conferred with him on the selection of the Peace Conference personnel, had he shown some signs of deference to that committee, had he discussed with them his peace plan proposals and taken note of their suggestions, modifying his proposals in accordance with their convictions when to do so did not yield a fundamental point, we should not have been on the horns of the dilemma we were for a year following the President's last return from Paris, and the world would have been spared discomfiture—yea, even agony.
Mr. Wilson knows the rules of the game, but he does not know how to play fair. He knows that contests and strife elicit his most deforming qualities—intolerance, arrogance, and emotional sterility; hence he hedges himself about in every possible way to avoid them. He knows that the sure way for him is to play the game alone.
Woodrow Wilson does not love his fellow men. He loves them in the abstract, but not in the flesh. He is concerned with their fate, their destiny, their travail en masse, but the predicaments, perplexities, and prostrations of the individual or groups of individuals make no appeal to him. He does not refresh his soul by bathing it daily in the milk of human kindness. He says with his lips that he loves his fellow men, but there is no accompanying emotional glow, none of the somatic or spiritual accompaniments which are the normal ancillæ of love's display. Hence he does not respect their convictions when they are opposed to his own, he does not value their counsels. His determination to put things through in the way he has convinced himself they should be put through is not susceptible to change from influences that originate without his own mind. He has made many false steps, but none of them so conditioned the fall from the exalted position the world had given to him as his determination to go to Paris and represent this country at the Peace Conference. If one may judge what the verdict of all the voters in this country would have been, had the question of his going been submitted to them, from the expressions of opinion of those one encounters in his daily life, it would be no exaggeration to say that three-fourths of the voters would say he should not have gone. I think I may say truthfully that I never encountered a person who approved his decision. It is possible that his entourage or cabinet and counsellors did not contain a daring soul who volunteered such advice, but it is incredible that both they and the President did not sense the judgment of their countrymen as it was reflected in the newspapers. However, it is likely that he would have gone had he known that the majority of the voters of this country were opposed to it.
In contact with people he gives himself the air of listening with deference and indeed of being beholden to judgment and opinion, but in reality it is an artifice which he puts off when he returns to the dispensing centre of the word and of the law just as he puts off his gloves and his hat. Nothing is so illustrative of this unwillingness to heed counsel emanating from authority and given wholly for his benefit as his conduct toward his physician during the trip around the country in September, 1919. The newspaper representatives who accompanied him say that he had often severe and protracted headache, was frequently nervous and irritable, sometimes dizzy, and always looked ill. These symptoms, conjoined with the fact that for a long time he had high blood pressure, were danger signals which no physician would dare neglect. It is legitimate to infer that his physician apprised him and counselled him accordingly. Despite it Mr. Wilson persisted, until nature exacted the penalty and by so doing he jeopardized his own life and seriously disordered the equilibrium of affairs of the country. Indeed, obstinacy is one of his most maiming characteristics.
The President attempts to mask with facial urbanity and a smile in verbal contact with people, and with the subjunctive mood in written contact, his third most deforming defect of character, namely, his inability to enter into a contest of any sort in which there is strife without revealing his obsession to win, his emotional frigidity, his lack of love for his fellow men. These explain why he did not win out to a larger degree in Paris, and why he did not win out with Congress. When he attempts to play such game his artificed civility, cordiality, amiability are so discordant with the real man that they become as offensive as affectations of manner or speech always are, and instead of placating the individual toward whom they are manifest, or facilitating a modus vivendi, they offend and make rapport with him impossible.
Probably nothing would strike Mr. Wilson's intimates as so wholly untrue as the statement that he is cruel, yet, nevertheless, I feel convinced that there is much latent cruelty in his make-up, and that every now and then he is powerless to inhibit it. He was undoubtedly wholly within his rights in dismissing Mr. Lansing from his cabinet, but the way in which he did it constitutes refinement of cruelty. He may have had a contempt for him because he had not insisted on playing first fiddle in Mr. Wilson's orchestra, the part for which he was engaged, but that did not justify Mr. Wilson in flaying him publicly because he attempted to keep the orchestra together and tuned up as it were during Mr. Wilson's illness.