Woodrow Wilson at Paris Peace Conference

Woodrow Wilson at Paris Peace Conference

Unknown

WWP16129

1919

A description of President Woodrow Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference.

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

English

I believe that the President has in every respect justified his precedent-breaking courage in coming to Europe. I was one of those who feared the consequences of such an experiment. In my judgment it will prove to be a great chapter in American history and in the history of the world.

A newspaper at Milan, Italy, wishing to do special honor to the President, printed its front page in alleged English. Across the top ran a headline, which, to our consternation, read:
THE PRESIDENTS VISIT WILL STRENGTHEN THE TRADITIONAL LIES WHICH UNITE OUR TWO COUNTRIES.

Lies was the nearest the Italian compositor could get to ties.The President was the victim of what was coming to be a widespread network of traditional lies. It was told that he was going to propose a League of Nations scheme so vague and so fantastic that it would be laughed out of court by the practical statesmen of Europe. Furthermore, that the President was pro-German; that he was determined to enact the role of Germanys friend at the Peace Conference and to exert his influence there in securing her acquittal before the bar Bar of International Justice. There were other lies.

When newspapers like the New York Tribune, representing the spirit of uncompromising hostility to the Administrations policies, are constrained to describe the foundation of the League of Nations as President Wilsons Triumph, it sounds like a revolutionary change of opinion in the United States since Woodrow Wilson set out upon his democratic crusade two months ago. The President settled down to real Peace Making on January 10th. He visited cities in France, England and Italy, looked into the eyes of their people, listened to their acclaim, and enjoyed heart to heart talks with other Rulers and responsible Statesmen. Everywhere he was the recipient of the most remarkable popular tributes ever accorded to a foreign guest. Two Kings, a President and a Pope were his hosts and bestowed their confidence upon him. Through the medium of their Prime Ministers many countries came to him. The Vatican sent an emissary to the temporary White House in Paris, while the aspiring new nations of Jugo-Slavia, Czecho-Slovakia, Armenia, Zion and Arabia all found means of communing with the Man from the West with the conquering smile and the silver tongue.

How the world has moved when an Emir of Mecca, the acknowledged lineal descendant of Mahomet, journeys half way around the globe to appeal to the President of the United States for a square deal for the ancient tribes of Syria. Yet, that is only one of the countless political phenomena that have marked the Presidents sojourn in Europe. It is, perhaps, the most notable one, for it incarnates the worlds view that our President and our country have no axe to fgrind except except to lend our influence and prestige to a just settlement that shall render something more than platitudinous lip-sefrvice to mankinds longing for liberty and justice.

Throughout our travels I received one constant impression -- that was that the President is the policeman to whom most of the people of the Universe have come with their troubles. Men and nations turned to him. He represents a great country that wants nothing at Paris for itself, but passionately desires justice for everybody - justice for Germany - for justice implies punishment.

Crowds called to see him every day of high and low degree. The President is a good and sympathetic listener. He is easily approached and a diplomatic genius. His path never seems to cease to bristle with pitfalls. But into them he has neither stumbled nor been precipitated.

Since our arrival over here I have seen President Wilson play many parts. I saw his historic step on the soil of France at Brest - a spot that deserves to be hallowed in our history with Plymouth Rock. I followed him in that magnificently triumphal march through the boulevards of Paris. I behdeeld him the central figure in great assemblies at the Hotel de Ville, the Sorbonne and the French Academy. I watched him - most glorious sight of all -- reviewing 10,000 of our fighting veterans on the snow-flaked fields of France on Christmas Day.

I saw him enter Rome amid plaudits that Caesar would have envied - an unsurpassed welcome in Milan; in Genoa, where the fellow-townsmen of Christopher Columbus acclaimed him as the Discoverer too, of a New World, and in Turin, the hot-bed of Italian Industrialism, I saw the multitude restrained with difficulty from almost throwing themselves at the feet of the man they hailed as Libertys Apostle, - the Moses from across the Atlantic.

I saw Woodrow Wilson conversing with Kings and Queens -- at all times, no matter what the environment, he looked and acted the part of a great American, a gentleman and a scholar always and everywhere. He conducted himself impressively and with quiet dignity, without the slightest suggestion of being carried away with any exaggerated sense of his own importance. He never failed to affirm the belief that the great welcome extended to him was in reality extended to the American people through him. He is modest in the extreme, and he has less craving for personal homage or tribute of any kind than any other man in public life.

In London's Guild Hall, in the presence of England's intellectual aristocracy, he dominated that historic forum as, I venture to say, no man within these Gothic walls ever did before. Wherever her he went, or in whatever atmosphere he found himself, he diffused high-grade Americanism. His personal magnetism seemed to overcome the handicap of foreign language as far as his Continental hearers were concerned. In Paris, at the Sorbonne, or in the Italian Chamber, the President spoke in English, as he did everywhere, and there could have been only a small percentage that understood it. But they seemed to understand him. Those audiences of French intellectuals and Italian parliamentarians followed his every word and gesture with engrossed attention and were able to punctuate his remarks at the psychological moment. It was a very striking tribute to the power of his personality.

President Wilson speaks no foreign language. To know English properly, he says, has kept me so busy all my life that I havent had time for anything else.France gave the President a magnificently enthusiastic reception. But he had not been on French soil very long before the French let him know what he was there for. France above all desired that he see soon and thoroughly the frightful ravages inflicted by German savagery. The French wanted him, before he began thinking about peace with Germany, to obtain eye-witness proof of what German barbarism meant. They were open, candid and even insistent. President Wilson returned candor for candor. He declined to be hustled into visiting the devastated region. The French felt and stated that the President did not see red enough. His position was that he had seen red throughout the war; that he was thoroughly conversant with German brutality; that he loathed them and their methods of warfare. But that he did not think that a man ought to see red when sitting down with fellow-statesmen to make peace and to readjust international relations on a basis of permanency.

While in Rome in the Kings Palace the President said to a group of newspapermen: I have now been among the people of France, England and Italy. I dont understand much French and no Italian, but I do understand English, and I understood not only what the English people were saying to me as I passed among them, but I think I also interpreted what was in their hearts, when they chorused at me, as they did nearly everywhere, League of Nations, League of Nations.

Friday, December 27, 1918, was a great day in the annals of the whole English-speaking race when the President spent seven hours in conference with Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Balfour. It was a day of cleared-up misunderstandings, of obliterated misconceptions, of removed prejudices, of straight talk and healthy discussoions on both sides. I have reason to think that this was precisely what happened behind the closed doors of Buckingham Palace and No. 10 Downing Street on that December day. On that day we came nearer to that ideal of fraternal feeling between Great Britain and the United States - a grand permanent result free from narrow selfishness.

In Italythe President was the object of much the same sort of frontal attack on his sympathies as he weathered in France. The French were keen to impress the magnitude of the devastation which the invader had spread through their country. Notwithstanding all this clamor to visit the devastated region, the President wanted to approach the subject with a judicial attitude. The very thing he did not want to do was to poison himself with bitter feelings.

The Italians were anxious to imbue the President with the justice of their territorial claims. The French made speeches at the President for the purpose of accomplishing their purpose. The Italians not only made speeches but put up posters. The walls and buildings of Milan, for example, were covered with enormous fa flaming red bills, printed in English and readable a hundred feet away, bearing inscriptions like this:And then there were other posters in lurid red, white and blue calling the Presidents attention to some of his own noble utterances, reading like this:

However, in addition to bill poster propaganda, the Italians gave the President undoubtedly the most enthusiastic greeting accorded him anywhere, but he was not stampeded into their political camp. How he evaded the burning issue he naively disclosed in a speech at Turin. Signor Orlando in conversation at Rome had been eloquently airing Italys territorial claims in Dalmatia, Albania, and Trentino, basing them on the right to assert her sovereignty over lands whose inhabitants, language and institutions were predominantly Italian. Well, I told Signor Orlando, said President Wilson, with his most persuasive smile, TT that he hoped he wouldnt extend the doctrine to Manhattan Island, which, as King Victor informed me, contained more Italians than any city in Italy. Orlando is a wise man and I imagine he got President Wilson.

The President invariably made the impression of a political Messian preaching a new doctrine with great ardor, invincible boldness and unquenchable enthusiasm, but always revealed himself as an intensely human man. He is fond of driving home a point with a story:Mr. Asquith, at the American Embassy in London said: Mr. President, the British League of Nations Union hopes you will not go home until some form of machinery for preventing war has been established. With a twinkle in his eye the President responded: Mr. Asuith Asquith, I will give you a reassurance on that score by telling you a story. The other day M. Clemenceau was saying to an American: I think the most stubborn man I ever met is General Pershing; and in saying that I am not forgetting that you have a President named Wilson. I think the President has made good on that story.

He loves good stories and likes telling them - a trait that of itself stamps him as a simon-pure American.The President drifts naturally and easily from solemnity to wit. At Free Trade Hall, Manchester, he coined one of the finest phrases of his trip: There is abroad in the world the great compulsion of a common conscience, which, if any statesman resist it, will earn for him the most unenviable eminence in history.Just before uttering this characteristic bit of Wilsonian diction, the President had been in humorous strain. He was thanking his audience for its splendid welcome. The audience had greeted him by singing: He is a jolly good fellow. A friend of mine, the President said, was once sitting in a restaurant when a man stepped up to him, slapped him on the back, and cried: Well, Ollie, old man, how are you? Ollie looked up at the fellow and replied: I dont know your name and I dont know your face, but your manners are mighty familiar. And from that the President went on to say that though Manchester was a complete stranger to him, he found its manners delightfully familiar.

A member of our party told the President that if he did not hurry home they would proclaim a Republic -- a sally which tickled him mightily - much more than it did an Englishman present, who said: But, how extraordinary -- surely the United Statesis a Republic.

Wherever the President went his capture of the hearts of the people was unquestionably complete. You are no longer merely the President of the United States, remarked Signor Cortesi, the leader of the Italian Press, at the conclusion of an address of greeting to the President; you have become the President of all the people of the world. That was a remarkable sentiment to be uttered within the walls of a Kings Palace to the head of a democratic Republic. Yet, to my mind, it typified and epitomized the Presidents whole vis to visit to Europe: He came, he saw, he conquered.

The President has an extremely orderly mind. He lays out a subject or campaign and sticks to essentials. To him it is an abomination to mix the unnecessary and the necessary in a jumble. He never goes off the track. He keeps his mind glued on the matter in hand.

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