The bolt of the Progressives in Chicago from Taft to T.R. made his election sure;
so he left the State of New Jersey halfreformed
(pitiless publicity was the slogan of the Shadow Lawn Campaign)
and went to the White House
our twentyeighth president.
While Woodrow Wilson drove up Pennsylvania Avenue beside Taft the great buttertub, who as president had been genially undoing T.R.’s reactionary efforts to put business under the control of the government,
J. Pierpont Morgan sat playing solitaire in his back office on Wall Street, smoking twenty black cigars a day, cursing the follies of democracy.
Wilson flayed the interests and branded privilege refused to recognize Huerta and sent the militia to the Rio Grande
to assume a policy of watchful waiting. He published The New Freedom and delivered his messages to Congress in person, like a college president addressing the faculty and students. At Mobile he said:
I wish to take this occasion to say that the United States will never again seek one additional foot of territory by conquest;
and he landed the marines at Vera Cruz.
We are witnessing a renaissance ofpublic spirit, a reawakening of sober public opinion, a revival of the power of the people the beginning of an age of thoughtful reconstruction…
but the world had started spinning round Sarajevo.
First it was neutrality in thought and deed, then too proud to fight when the Lusitania sinking and the danger to the Morgan loans and the stories of the British and French propagandists set all the financial centers in the East bawling for war, but the suction of the drumbeat and the guns was too strong; the best people took their fashions form Paris and their broad “a’s” from London, and T.R. and the House of Morgan.
Five months after his reelection on the slogan He kept us out of war, Wilson pushed the Armed Ship Bill through congress and declared that a state of war existed between the United States and the Central Powers;
Force without stint or limit, force to the utmost.
Wilson became the state (war is the health of the state), Washington his Versailles, manned the socialized government with dollar a year men out of the great corporations and ran the big parade
of men munitions groceries mules and trucks to France. Five million men stood at attention outside of their tarpaper barracks every sundown while they played The Star Spangled Banner.
War brought the eight hour day, women’s votes, prohibition, compulsory arbitration, high wages, high rates of interest, cost plus contracts and the luxury of being a Gold Star Mother.
If you objected to making the world safe for cost plus democracy you went to jail with Debs.
Almost too soon the show was over, Prince Max of Baden was pleading for the Fourteen Points, Foch was occupying the bridgeheads on the Rhine and the Kaiser out of breath ran for the train down the platform at Potsdam wearing a silk hat and some say false whiskers.
With the help of Almighty God, Right, Truth, Justice, Freedom, Democracy, the Selfdetermination of Nations, No indemnities no annexations,
and Cuban sugar and Caucasian manganese and Northwestern wheat and Dixie cotton, the British blockade, General Pershing, the taxicabs of Paris and the seventyfive gun
we won the war.
On December 4th, 1918, Woodrow Wilson, the first president to leave the territory of the United States during his presidency, sailed for France on board the George Washington,
the most powerful man in the world.
In Europe they knew what gas smelt like and the sweet sick stench of bodies buried too shallow and the grey look of the skin of starved children; they read in the papers that Meester Veelson was for peace and freedom and canned goods and butter and sugar;
he landed at Brest with his staff of experts and publicists after a rough trip on the George Washington.
La France héroïque was there with the speeches, the singing schoolchildren, the mayors in their red sashes. (Did Meester Veelson see the gendarmes at Brest beating back the demonstration of dockyard workers who came to meet him with red flags?)
At the station in Paris he stepped from the train onto a wide red carpet that lead him, between rows of potted palms, silk hats, legions of honor, decorated busts of uniforms, frockcoats, rosettes, boutonnières, to a Rolls Royce. (Did Meester Veelson see the women in black, the cripples in their little carts, the pale anxious faces along the streets, did he hear the terrible anguish of the cheers as they hurried him and his new wife to the hôtel de Mûrat, where in rooms full of brocade, gilt clocks, Buhl cabinets and ormolu cupids the presidential suite had been prepared?)
While the experts were organizing the procedure of the peace conference, spreading green baize on the tables, arranging the protocols,
the Wilsons took a tour to see for themselves: the day after Christmas they were entertained at Buckingham Palace; at Newyears they called on the pope and on the microscopic Italian king at the Quirinal. (Did Meester Veelson know that in the peasants’ wargrimed houses along the Brenta and the Piave they were burning candles in front of his picture cut out of the illustrated papers?) (Did Meester Veelson know that the people of Europe spelled a challenge to oppression out of the Fourteen Points as centuries before they had spelled a challenge to oppression out of the ninetyfive articles Martin Luther nailed to the churchdoor in Wittenberg?)
January 18, 1919, in the midst of serried uniforms, cocked hats and gold braid, decorations, epaulettes, orders of merit and knighthood, the High Contracting Parties, the allied and associated powers met in the Salon de l’Horloge at the quai d’Orsay to dictate the peace,
but the grand assembly of the peace conference was too public a place to make peace in
so the High Contracting Parties
formed the Council of Ten, went into the Gobelin Room and, surrounded by Rubens’s History of Marie de Medici,
began to dictate the peace.
But the Council of Ten was too public a place to make peace in
so they formed the Council of Four.
Orlando went home in a huff
and then there were three:
Clemenceau,
Lloyd George,
Woodrow Wilson.
Three old men shuffling the pack,
dealing out the cards:
the Rhineland, Danzig, the Polish corridor, the Ruhr, self determination of small nations, the Saar, League of Nations, mandates, the Mespot, Freedom of the Seas, Transjordania, Shantung, Fiume and the Island of Yap:
machine gun fire and arson
starvation, lice, cholera, typhus;
oil was trumps.
Woodrow Wilson believed in his father’s God
so he told the parishioners in the little Lowther Street Congregational church where his grandfather had preached in Carlisle in Scotland, a day so chilly that the newspaper men sitting in the old pews all had to keep their overcoats on.
On April 7th he ordered the George Washington to be held at Brest with steam up ready to take the American delegation home;
but he didn’t go.
On April 19 sharper Clemenceau and sharper Lloyd George got him into their little cosy threecardgame they called the Council of Four.
On June 28th the Treaty of Versailles was ready