Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him

by Joseph P. Tumulty

Now that the mists of this great question have cleared away, I believe that men will see the trust, eye to eye and face to face. There is one thing that the American people always rise to and extend their hand to, and that is the truth of justice and of liberty and of peace. We have accepted that truth and we are going to be led by it, and it is going to lead us, and through us the world, out into pastures of quietness and peace such as the world never dreamed of before.

CHAPTER XLIII

RESERVATIONS

On June 25, 1919, I received from President Wilson the following cabled message:

My clear conviction is that the adoption of the treaty by the Senate with reservations will put the United States as clearly out of the concert of nations as a rejection. We ought either to go in or stay out. To stay out would be fatal to the influence and even to the commercial prospects of the United States, and to go in would give her a leading place in the affairs of the world. Reservations would either mean nothing or postpone the conclusion of peace, so far as America is concerned, until every other principal nation concerned in the treaty had found out by negotiation what the reservations practically meant and whether they could associate themselves with the United States on the terms of the reservations or not.

WOODROW WILSON.

The President consistently held to the principle involved in this statement. To his mind the reservations offered by Senator Lodge constituted a virtual nullification on the part of the United States of a treaty which was a contract, and which should be amended through free discussion among all the contracting parties. He did not argue or assume that the Covenant was a perfected document, but he believed that, like our American Constitution, it should be adopted and subsequently submitted to necessary amendment through the constitutional processes of debate. He was unalterably opposed to having the United States put in the position of seeking exemptions and special privileges under an agreement which he believed was in the interest of the entire world, including our own country. Furthermore, he believed that the advocacy for reservations in the Senate proceeded from partisan motives and that in so far as there was a strong popular opinion in the country in favour of reservations it proceeded from the same sources from which had come the pro-German propaganda. Before the war pro-German agitation had sought to keep us out of the conflict, and after the war it sought to separate us in interest and purpose from other governments with which we were associated.

By his opposition to reservations the President was seeking to prevent Germany from taking through diplomacy what she had been unable to get by her armies.

The President was so confident of the essential rightness of the League and the Covenant and of the inherent right-mindedness of the American people, that he could not believe that the people would sanction either rejection or emasculation of the Treaty if they could be made to see the issue in all the sincerity of its motives and purposes, if partisan attack could be met with plain truth-speaking. It was to present the case of the people in what he considered its true light that he undertook the Western tour, and it was while thus engaged that his health broke. Had he kept well and been able to lead in person the struggle for ratification, he might have won, as he had previously by his determination and conviction broken down stubborn opposition to the Federal Reserve system.

So strong was his faith in his cause and the people that even after he fell ill he could not believe that ratification would fail. What his enemies called stubbornness was his firm faith in the righteousness of the treaty and in the reasonableness of the proposition that the time to make amendments was not prior to the adoption of the Treaty and by one nation, but after all the nations had agreed and had met together for sober, unpartisan consideration of alterations in the interest of all the contracting parties and the peace and welfare of the world.