1920 (28 page)

Young Tommie was exposed to the best that Augusta (Georgia) offered in religious education. In the Sunday school, of which Uncle James Bones was superintendent, the boy memorized the Shorter Catechism. To his roving mind this was as painful as formal schooling, and he did not remember the work permanently.

Yet Tommie … [o]ften rode in his father's buggy when the preacher made parish calls. His favorite playground was the shady churchyard. … Even as he lay in bed on summer evenings the strains of the organ soothed him. Music affected his emotions; he would sometimes weep at the communion service when moving hymns were sung.

This was Tommie Wilson's foundation for maturity, and if it seems more appropriate for a minister than for a politician, that is exactly what it should do, for it indicates the kind of elected official Wilson would eventually become. He was sure of the dictates of proper morality and determined to follow them, regardless of storms of disapproval, both public and legislative. It was this certitude that probably killed him.

At the start, though, it seemed that Wilson would reside in the academe. It was there that the Holy Grail of tenure awaited him; and of the first forty-six years of his life, he would spend almost half as a Princeton faculty member, devout as ever in his faith but teaching primarily jurisprudence and political economy.

In 1902, to the surprise of many, even Wilson himself, he was appointed the university's president. His goals, he decided, once regaining his composure, were twofold, and both extremely ambitious. “First,” says historian John Milton Cooper, Jr., “he wanted to make Princeton the nation's top university. Second, he sought to quash the pseudo-rebellious student hedonism that already held sway in the clubs and was making headway in colleges across the country. His symbolic antagonist was a boy who did not enter Princeton until three years after Wilson left—F. Scott Fitzgerald.”

While pursuing these goals, Wilson lost a good number of battles with various faculty and alumni committees—not on merit, but because he was unskilled at the fine points of campus politics. Taking on men who believed that Princeton was too noble an institution to require alteration, as well as insufficiently endowed to meet requests for expansion of both the curriculum and the campus, Wilson found himself being continually struck down in his attempts at reform. As a result, he started to think seriously not just about campus politics, which he eventually began to master, but about politics in the larger world of national government and whether that might be a more suitable place for him than an academic cloister. In 1904, establishing his credentials as a conservative Democrat, he spoke publicly and often against the liberal presidential candidate, Democrat William Jennings Bryan, as well as the eventual winner, Republican Theodore Roosevelt.

In 1906, when U.S. senators were still elected by state legislatures, Wilson received a few votes as a minority Democratic nominee. In another two years, there was talk of him as a vice-presidential candidate and even, in some quarters, as a presidential contender, although Wilson does not seem to have encouraged support for either position. He was still observing, still learning, his heart still committed to Princeton. But wavering. In fact, two years later, in 1910, believing he had learned all
that Princeton had to teach him about politics, Wilson decided he was ready for a big leap forward and entered the contest for the New Jersey governorship.

Running on a platform that denounced the state's political bosses and promising that he would not be their tool once in office, which was just what the electorate wanted to hear, the scholar conquered the State House, perhaps surprising himself again by entering the world of government in such a prominent position.

And although campaign promises are seldom able to be kept, especially one of this magnitude, Wilson in fact turned out
not
to be a tool of the bosses, refusing to divide the spoils according to the old-time politicos' whims, at times even refusing to grant them appointments to plead for their whims in person. The growth and prosperity of the state, he believed, depended on the best-qualified men, not the best-connected. In fact, once Wilson proved victorious in a hard-fought battle against the Senate and Assembly to institute a system of state primaries, the political bosses of New Jersey had little left to boss. Wilson was right. Princeton had taught him well. He knew how to play the game now, and would play it for high stakes, but with a beacon of morality to guide him.

AFTER SERVING AS GOVERNOR FOR
another two-year term, Wilson accepted the pleas of national Democratic leaders and ran for president. His reputation for independence, his introduction of workers' compensation to New Jersey, and his restructuring of the state's decayed, inefficient public utilities commission attracted so much attention that, despite continuing to appear like a cleric and act, occasionally, in the prissy manner of a schoolmaster, he was elected to the nation's highest office in 1912.

Actually, the White House was a gift to Wilson from Theodore Roosevelt. Republicans got 1.3 million more votes than Democrats that year, but the problem was that there were two Republicans in the race, and the bull-headed Bull-Moose rebel, former president Roosevelt, despite knowing that his candidacy would split the GOP vote with his enemy and successor, William Howard Taft, ignored the advice of virtually everyone who offered it and ran anyhow, seeing to it that the opposing party, the minority party, achieved the nation's highest elective office.

Nonetheless, Wilson set out superbly. In his first term, he was one of the most productive chief executives the United States had ever had. His accomplishments included the Federal Reserve Act, antitrust legislation that actually worked, low-interest loans for farmers, unreserved support for woman's suffrage, and the dubious but necessary introduction of a federal income tax.

His second term, however, started out poorly and then began to worsen, finally ending divisively and disastrously, although the reasons were not entirely of the president's making. Wilson ran in 1916 under the banner “He kept us out of war”—and he did, longer than he should have in the opinion of many. Eventually, though, he had to enter the European conflict, and he seems never to have forgiven himself for going back on his word. He believed, however, that he had no choice, and believed further that he would atone for his broken campaign promise by taking steps to make the Great War the last one in which the United States ever participated, perhaps the last war ever to be fought anywhere, by anyone. Woodrow Wilson the idealist now became Woodrow Wilson the fantasist. Unfortunately for him, he also became a preacher to a an assembly of atheists.

In a speech to a joint session of Congress on January 8, 1918, the president introduced his Fourteen Points, known derisively by those incapable of tolerating Wilson's self-righteousness as the Ten Commandments. They were a detailed plan for a postwar world in which armed conflict would no longer have a place. Among other things, the points stressed open diplomacy rather than secret treaties, free trade, freedom of the seas, worldwide disarmament, and the rebuilding or restoration of France, Belgium, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Poland, the Ottoman Empire, and the Balkan states. It was a program of totally unrealistic breadth. It sounded wonderful.

It was because of such humanitarian goals that, when Wilson went to Paris to take part in negotiations for the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, he was hailed by the French as no American since Benjamin Franklin had been hailed. In the words of historian Gene Smith,

It seemed the whole of France stood in the streets. From the Madeleine to the Bois de Boulogne not a square foot of space was clear. Stools and tables were put out by the concierges of
houses along the parade route, with places on them selling for ten, twenty or fifty francs, depending on the affluence of the customer. Carpenter horses and boards were arranged into improvised grandstands, and men and boys clung to the very tops of the chestnut trees. The housetops were covered with people … [who] had gathered hours before [Wilson's] train was due in Paris and stood waiting and looking down toward the station, a tiny bandbox on the edge of the Bois reserved for official arrivals of visiting royalty.

In practical terms, the Fourteen Points ended up serving as the first draft for the constitution of the League of Nations, forerunner of the United Nations. The delegates to Versailles, many of whom had initially supported both the war and the complex web of treaties that led to its outbreak, needed something to atone for their sin, a penance for the fatalities and ruination caused by their earlier bellicosity. Their war-battered constituents demanded it. More important, they needed something hopeful to take home with them, something promising, optimistic. Given Wilson's overwhelming reception in Paris, support for the League, the delegates reasoned, would be just what their nations wanted to hear. They would return home not just with a treaty, as expected, but with a treaty that would eliminate the need for treaties in the future. The League's Covenant began as follows:

THE HIGH CONTRACTING PARTIES,

In order to promote international co-operation and to achieve international peace and security

by the acceptance of obligations not to resort to war,

by the prescription of open, just and honourable relations between nations,

by the firm establishment of the understandings of international law as the actual rule of conduct among Governments, and

by the maintenance of justice and a scrupulous respect for all treaty obligations in the dealings of organised peoples with one another,

Agree to this Covenant of the League of Nations.

Forty-two countries assented to the League. The United States was not one of them. Wilson was stunned. That his own nation, a nation whose citizens had elected him president twice, the second time without a bifurcated Republican vote, would reject so nobly intended a peace proposal, one that was certain to go down in history and make every man who signed it a hero to posterity, was the greatest embarrassment of Woodrow Wilson's life.

WILSON HAD BEEN AS SHATTERED
by the brutality overseas as the soldiers who had returned from it, soldiers who would form the core of the “lost generation.” Never again, Wilson vowed, never again such pointless carnage. But was the League of Nations the solution? The majority of Americans seemed to agree not with their president about the League, but with Congress, led by Senate Republican Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts. He, too, shared the president's revulsion to the Great War. All Americans shared it. But Lodge, among many other members of the House and Senate, thought a return to the battleground would be
more
likely, not less, if the United States were part of an association of European countries, thus allowing its actions to be governed by diplomatic ties that were made abroad and allowing the League to call America to arms again if its members couldn't play together nicely. Lodge believed in his own country's law, not “acceptance of obligations,” as the Covenant put it, imposed by others. And he did not believe in a “respect for all treaty obligations,” only those into which the United States had entered of its own will, without having been reduced to a single voice among a chorus of nations, its vote a mere one forty-second of the final decision.

After all, the United States had already achieved world hegemony in many ways—and it continued to increase its production of railroads, automobiles, and airplanes; continued to manufacture steel and literally thousands of products made of steel; dominated trade with other nations; controlled sea lanes with its management of the Panama Canal; provided weaponry for a small but dynamic military; and created wealth as it had never been created before. Why should America be a team player when it already owned the entire sporting franchise?

To Wilson, these arguments made no sense; they were not rebuttals so much as evidence of “narrow, selfish, provincial purposes,” a destructively
competitive nature, and that is what he told Lodge and his followers. After which he issued a warning: “I have fighting blood in me and it is sometimes a delight to let it have scope, but if it is challenged on this occasion it will be an indulgence.” And fight he did, pushing himself well beyond the limits that his frail body could tolerate in pursuit of the unattainable.

At first, the League was voted down. In fact, two versions of it were voted down in rapid succession. With Lodge leading the way, the Senate rejected President Wilson's plea for League membership, 53–38; and then it turned its attention to another bill, full of amendments added by Lodge and his followers to frustrate what he believed were the president's attempts to yield American sovereignty. This diluted version of the League of Nations, which should have had a better chance of passing, since it satisfied many of the opposition's objections, also lost, this time by the almost identical margin of 55–39. The Senate, apparently, wanted nothing to do with a foreign alliance of any kind.

Wilson surely expected defeat, but that is not the same thing as accepting it. He considered himself a man of principle as well as one of faith, and as long as there was an ounce of energy left in him he would do what he believed was right. There would be one more congressional vote on the League, and perhaps, Wilson deluded himself into believing, if he simply worked hard enough, and explained the League's purposes clearly and eloquently enough, even more clearly and passionately than he had done numerous times before, the American people would pressure their representatives to do the right thing, to ensure peace for all time. How, he asked himself time and again, could the United States not cast a vote for a purpose so noble?

Refusing to heed the pleas of doctors, staff members, and friends, the president set out on a journey all the way across the country to the western states, where opposition to the League seemed to be at its greatest. He would confront the beast in its own lair.