Why Wilson Collapsed in "Line of Duty" Told by Ray Stannard Baker

Title

Why Wilson Collapsed in "Line of Duty" Told by Ray Stannard Baker

Creator

Baker, Ray Stannard, 1870-1946

Identifier

WWP16033

Date

1919 October 4

Source

Cary T. Grayson Papers, Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library, Staunton, Virginia

Language

English

Text

______________________________________

This is the first of six articles by Ray Stannard Baker, descriptive of President Wilson’s fight for his ideals in Paris during the meeting of the peace conference. Mr. Baker stood closer to the President than any other man and is able to tell the inside story of what took place in Paris during the deliberations over the peace treaty. The next article will appear October 28.

BY RAY STANNARD BAKER.

President Wilson has returned from his western tour in behalf of the treaty and the league of nations, and lies ill at Washington. His task has broken him down, worn him out. He is as truly a casualty of the great war as any man who fell in the line of duty.

Many people dislike the President—hate him, if you like. But no one who really saw him in action in Paris, saw what he did in those grilling months of struggle, fired at in front, sniped at from behind—and no one who has seen what he has had to do since he came home, with no opportunity for rest or relaxation—will for a moment belittle the immensity of his task or underrate his extraordinary endurance, energy, courage, both mental and physical.

More than once, there in Paris, going up in the evening to see the President, I found him looking utterly worn out, exhausted, often one side of his face twitching with nervousness. No soldier ever went into battle with more enthusiasm, more aspiration, more devotion to a sacred cause than the President had when he came to Paris; but day after day in those months one saw him growing grayer and grayer, grimmer and grimmer, with the fighting lines deepening in his face.

That story of what the President did at Paris, the battle he fought there, the kind of foes he had to meet, and the poison gases they used, has never yet been told. People do not see the forces that have brought him low, worn him out. The President himself has not told of the fight—he is constitutionally unable to do so.

Outworked Paris Delegates.

Here was a man sixty-three years old—a man always delicate in health. When he came into the White House in 1913 he was far from being a well man. His digestion was poor and he had a serious, painful case of neuritis in his shoulder. It was even the opinion of as great a physician as Dr. Weir Mitchell of Philadelphia that he could probably not complete his term and retain his health. And yet such was the iron self-discipline of the man—that story has also yet to be told, and it is a wonderful human story—and such as the daily watchful care of Dr. Grayson that, instead of gradually going down under the tremendous tasks of the presidency in the greatest, most crowded moments of our national history, he steadily gained strength and working capacity until in those months in Paris he litterally worked everybody at the peace conference to a standstill.

It is so easy and cheap to judge people, even Presidents, without knowing the problems they hace to face. So much of the President’s alleged aloofness, so much of his unwillingness to expend energy upon unnecessary business, unnecessary visitors—especially visitors—was due directly to the determination to husband and expend his too limited eneregies upon taks that seemed to him essential.

As I say, he worked everybody at the peace conference to a standstill. He worked not only the American delegates, but the way he drove the leisurely diplomats of Europe was often shameful to see. One day he suggested a meeting of the big four at 9 o’clock in the morning in Paris. Clemenceau shook his old head and looked despairingly at the President, as though giving him up as hopeless.

Two Meetings at Same Time.

Sometimes he would have two meetings going on at the same time. Once I found a meeting of the big four going on in his study, and a meeting of the financial and economic experts—twenty or thirty of them—in full seesion upstairs in the drawing room—and the President oscillating between the two. It was he who was always the driver, the initiator, at Paris; he worked longer hours, had more appointments, granted himself less recreation, than any other man, high or low, at the peace conference. For he was the central figure there. Everything headed up in him.

Practically all of the meetings of the council of four—the “big four”—were held in his study in the Place des Etats-Unis. This was the true capitol of the peace conference; here all the important questions were decided. Every one who came to Paris upon any mission whatsoever, aimed first of all at seeing the President. Representatives of the little, down trodden nationalities of the earth—from eastern Europe, Asia and Africa—thought if they could only get at the President, explain their pathetic ambitions, confess their troubles to him, all would be well.

Two Extraordinary Figures.

I remember vividly one such delegation which symbolized the instinctive trust of the smaller nations in America, and their hope in Wilson’s leadership. I came into the office one morning and found two as extraordinary figures as ever came to Paris. They were Polish peasants, clad in their own home-spun natural wool, red-embroidered, with Cossack caps of shaggy black fur. They had with them a Polish priest to tell what they wanted. It seems that they were from a little pocket settlement of Poles in the mountains of northern Austria, and that in the boundaries that had been set at Paris they were included in the new nation of the Czechoslovaks.

They told, and the priest interpreted, how they had heard in their mountain homes that the American President, who was at Paris, had said that people should be free, should have a right to determine how and by whom they should be governed. They wanted to be in Poland, not in Czechoslovakia, and so they had set out to walk to Paris to tell the President so. As soon as they got out of their own native mountains they lost their way—so they told me—and turned aside to inquire of a Polish sheep-herder. “He was a man,” said the priest, “who knew the stars and the way to go.” This sheep-herder, when they told him their story and what they were going to do said he, too, “wanted to be free” (so the priest expressed it), and came along with them to watch the stars and point out the way to go.

Walked Hundred Miles.

They walked some hundred or more of miles into Warsaw, where their story attracted the attention of a patriotic Polish society, which sent them on to Paris. And they came down the boulevards straight to the Crillon Hotel to find President Wilson. They actually did find him. I saw the three of them—the two peasants and the astronomer who knew the stars, and the priest who talked for them—going up the carpeted stairs of the President’s house and into his booked–walled study. And I could smell the very odor of their thick woven wool garments, redolent of the soil, in that unfamiliar place.

I think that no one who was in Paris will ever forget the way in which the people of of the little oppressed nations of the world turned to America for leadership—or staked their passionate hope in the principles of justice laid down by President Wilson. And it now appears that there are those in America who would shake off every claim to such leadership because it involves new duties and responsibilities!Well, the President saw and heard scores of such foreign delegations; he received patiently the representatives of many organizations of workingmen, business men, journalists, women; he saw groups of Jews, Irish, Armenians, Poles, and I don’t know how many others; he labored day after day with the disputatious experts of all the delegations; he attended innumerable committee meetings.

Accepted Chairmanship.

In addition to meeting all the problems that Mr. Lloyd George, Mr. Clemenceau and Mr. Orlando had to meet, he took upon himself, as his especial task, the chairmanship of the league of nations commission which, in order not to interrupt the regular sessions of the council often of the council of four, often met at night, with the discussions sometimes extending far beyond midnight. It was the hardest worked commission at the conference.

I saved the list of the President’s appointments for a single day (May 16, 1919), on which there happened to be no meeting of the council of four. It gives a vivid glimpse of his activities. Here it is:

I recall asking, when I received this list of appointments: “Is this all?”

Also Had Lunch Appointment.

No, it was not all; he had had guests in for luncheon and he had completed on that day his important message to the extraordinary session of Congress which he had called to meet on May 20. This was a document of some 3,500 words, and he had written it himself on his typewriter. It must not be forgotten, in thinking of the President’s task at Paris, that he was constantly required to face problems and make decisions regarding affairs at home, some of them requiring much time and thought.

Besides all of these things, he was called upon as no other man of any nation at the conference was called upon—almost forced—to attend public functions of various sorts, to make speeches, to visit neighboring countries—and he was often bitterly censured because he did not do more of this, did not visit more frequently the devastated districts of France, did not review this parade, or accept that exhausting hospitality. How he stood up to these stupendous responsibilities, these innumberable tasks, day after day, month after month, is a marvel to those who were there and really knew what was going on.

Once, as is well known, he broke down entirely and was ill in bed for several days at a very critical moment in the peace conference. Yet such was his power of self-discipline, and such the care of Dr. Grayson, that he recuperated swiftly, and each morning seemed as full of energy and as eager to go on with the fight as ever.

Never Failed to Impress.

Even when hardest pressed he never failed to make a powerful impression upon every one who came into contact with him. I saw many of his visitors soon after they left him, and the reaction was unfailing. I remember asking a famous Dutch editor—a man who had come into personal contact with nearly every important leader in Europe—what he thought of the President.

“I have never met any man,” he said, “who gave an impression of greater distinction and dignity than your President. He has outward strength and inward gentleness.”

Whatever may be said by his enemies at home—and he has plenty of them—the President never upon any occasion whatsoever, no matter how difficult, failed to represent America and the American people with distinction. He never represented what was cheap or crude in American life, but unfailingly what was highest and best; and he was not less successful in capturing the critical audience at the Sorbonne, where he made one of his notable speeches, than he was with the mass of the workers who swarmed around the Crillon Hotel on May day shouting “Vive Wilson, vive le President.”

In spite, however, of all the discussion and inquiry that has been going on at Washington during the last three months, in spite of all the President’s own explanations and speeches, his exact service at Paris, so it seemsthe President calls “accommodation”—and would no doubt have come out about where the commission came out and would have adopted much the same kind of covenant.

But there was no such dramatization—with the result that there has had to be a stupendous fight here at home. There are many reasons, of course, outside of the President’s constitutional inability to dramatize people and events, why such publicity would have been very difficult. Few people realize how tremendous and explosive was the situation throughout Europe during the conference. All the governments were shaky; a little misstep on the part of Mr. Lloyd-George, Mr. Clemenceau or Mr. Orlando, and their ministries might have gone down. They were all sensitive to publicity; all desperately afraid; all dominated by the old European system of diplomacy, which hates publicity.Sitting in Common Council.

And while Mr. Wilson had not that problem to face—for he was assured of the stability of his own situation until March, 1921—nevertheless he was sitting in “common council” with these men; and if it was to be a real conference, with any real result, there had to be a genuine working together, give and take. Moreover, it has been more difficult to inform the American public than the English public, for example. We have been throughout our history detached in our interest in foreign affairs; we had not the basic information regarding international affairs, to begin with; and everything that reached America promptly had to go through a few overcrowded cables or an overloaded wireless system at an enormous cost for tolls. Under these circumstances, with the affairs of the entire world under review, with hundreds of committees at work and scores of nations represented, it was next to impossible to give any connected idea of what was happening without going to a length of explanation that the cables could not carry and the people at home would not read.

But it is possible, now that it is all over, to look back along the troubled history of the peace conference and to measure, with a little clearer vision, what it was that happened there and what President Wilson did. A public man is perhaps best exhibited at the critical and decisive moments where all his forces are engaged, where he is tested to the uttermost.

As one looks back there appear clearly five crises in the peace conference, five decisive battles. Each one of them centered upon some point in the President’s leadership and arose directly out of the clash between President Wilson’s principles and ideals with the interests of other nations or groups of nations.

Peace Conference Threatened.

In at least three of these crises the peace conference was much nearer breaking up than the world yet knows. Some of these crises, like the one that centered around the Shantung decision, are fairly well known to the public, while others, though equally important, like that which attended the struggle to decide the future colonial policy of the world, attracted almost no attention, either at the time or since—this largely because the discussions were kept so secret. These five crises briefly were as follows, in the order in which they occurred:First, the settlement of world colonial policy by the adoption of the new mandatory system.

Second, the fight between those who wanted the league of nations covenant made an integral part of the treaty and those who wanted it left for discussion after the treaty was adopted. It was really the struggle between those who wanted an effective league and those who did not want one.

Third, the crisis of May which led President Wilson to order the George Washington and to consider the possibility of the withdrawal of America from the conference.Fourth, the President’s note to the Italian people regarding the situation at Fiume which caused the Italian delegates to withdraw from the conference.Fifth, the Shantung settlement.

A brief account of each of these crises—to be presented in following articles—will show with some clearness exactly what Mr. Wilson did at Paris and why he did it.

Original Format

Letter

Files

http://resources.presidentwilson.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/D04020.pdf

Citation

Baker, Ray Stannard, 1870-1946, “Why Wilson Collapsed in "Line of Duty" Told by Ray Stannard Baker,” 1919 October 4, WWP16033, Cary T. Grayson Papers, Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library & Museum, Staunton, Virginia.