John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

Colonel House’s choice was expected. He was already in Paris. Nobody objected to Mr. Lansing. After all he was Secretary of State. The idea of picking Henry White to represent the Republicans was received with scornful laughter. During that estimable gentleman’s long diplomatic career, though nominally a Republican, he had hardly ever voted in an election. Nobody had anything against selfeffacing old General Bliss, but nobody had much to say in his favor either. The fifth name was Wilson’s own.

Congress was still somewhat stunned by the fact that the list included neither a Republican nor a Democratic senator, when the President appeared before the two houses to wish them farewell. Secretary Houston sorrowfully noted the lack of enthusiasm among the legislators. The President’s speech was received with unusual silence. He tried to explain that, although he was departing from precedent by sailing overseas, under modern conditions, through the use of the cables, he would be as near as if he had remained in Washington. “I shall be in close touch with you and you will know all that I do … I shall not be inaccessible.” It was his duty to attend the Peace Conference in person to complete the good work so many brave boys had given their lives for, and to redeem America’s pledge to mankind.

It was not one of Woodrow Wilson’s most successful addresses. Houston described the scene: “Many Republicans and some Democrats looked as sullen and stolid as wooden men.”

President and Mrs. Wilson sailed from New York on the old Hamburg-Amerika liner George Washington , long since converted into a troopship and operated by the navy. As the steamer warped out from the Hoboken dock into the turgid Hudson, full of tugs and launches packed to the gunwales with people come to see the President’s departure, the presidential pennant was broken out from the mainmast. Five destroyers churning in midstream, fired a twentyone gun salute. Every steamship in the harbor let loose with its siren. The din was terrific.

Two army airplanes and a dirigible circled overhead. From every dock and from the glittering windows of Manhattan skyscrapers flags rippled under the wintry sky. When the guns ceased booming, the President and Mrs. Wilson, who were enjoying the scene from the captain’s bridge, could hear faintly, fading into distance as the ship eased down the river, the cheers of an immense crowd, waving flags and handkerchiefs, that packed the Battery.

In the Narrows a gun on the old Monitor , of Civil War fame, anchored for her last sea duty at the opening of the submarine net, boomed a salute. A faint trilling could be heard, above the hiss of the wind through the rigging, of the voices of hundreds of schoolchildren singing “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” on the grassy slopes of Staten Island. The George Washington was joined by an escorting battleship in the Lower Bay and nosed out past Ambrose lightship into the heavy Atlantic swells in the center of a formation of destroyers.

Long before that the President and Edith Wilson had gone below to their quarters, where, amid what she described as “a wilderness of flowers,” they were served, in their private diningroom, in the company only of Cary Grayson and of Edith Wilson’s secretary, Miss Benham, a most delicious lunch. Edith noted that the luncheon was so surprisingly good because one of the best chefs from the Hotel Biltmore had been sent along to cater to the presidential party. When the President learned of it, detesting special privileges of this sort, he insisted that on his next trip he’d eat the same meals as the rest of the ship’s company. Immediately after lunch the President, worn out by long days at his desk in Washington preparing for the trip, and by a bad night on the train down, went to his stateroom and slept for three hours.

Later in the afternoon, refreshed by his nap, and marshalling the air of crisp smiling charm he could assume when he felt like it, the President accompanied by Mrs. Wilson walked about the promenade deck greeting the members of their party.

There was the Secretary of State and Mrs. Lansing. Mrs. Lansing was already feeling the first qualms of seasickness, and the Secretary was hiding a torment of doubt under his huffy but deferential air. At this point he was conscientiously keeping his doubts to himself or entering them bit by bit in his private diary. He had misgivings about the entire enterprise. He was not reconciled to the President’s attending the Peace Conference. His secret opinion of the Fourteen Points coincided with Theodore Roosevelt’s. Particularly he could see misery and bloodshed arising out of clashing interpretations of “self-determination of nations.”

There was the French Ambassador and Madame Jusserand. Monsieur Jusserand had just delivered to the President the Quai d’Orsay’s proposals for the organization of a preliminary interallied conference. Any expectations Jusserand may have had that the President would confer with him on the subject during the Atlantic crossing were destined to be disappointed.

If the President gave this document any attention at all he thrust it aside without comment as another evidence of the reactionary tendencies he was going to have to combat. Neither Wilson nor his advisers seem to have given the French plan enough study to discover that it contained valuable suggestions as to procedure. Preliminary terms, including the federalization of the German empire, were to be imposed immediately. A general congress, modelled on the Congress of Vienna, where neutrals and enemy states would be represented, was to follow to take up the question of a League of Nations and the permanent pacification of the world. There was a sketch of a timetable according to which questions were to be brought up in order of their immediate importance; and, first of all — by a clause which, if it had been carried out, would have cleared up many difficulties — every secret treaty was to be cancelled.

Possibly it was some inkling of this memorandum, which threatened the Treaty of London so dear to the aspirations of Italia irredenta, that made the Italian ambassador decide all of a sudden that if Jusserand sailed on the George Washington , he had to go too. He threw a diplomatic tantrum in Frank Polk’s office at the State Department and suitable accommodations were found at the last moment for him and for his countess and their four children and attendant servants.

Another passenger was the affable Henry White, who carried in his briefcase suggestions by Elihu Root and Henry Cabot Lodge, which were to get no more attention than the French proposals. There was the irrepressible George Creel, who still hoped, in spite of almost hysterical opposition against him building up in Congress and on newspaper row, to go on transmitting to the world the Wilsonian slogans as they fell from his master’s lips. There was George W. Davis and his wife. The eminent New York lawyer was on his way to London to replace Walter Hines Page, who had come home to die in a New York hospital, as Ambassador to the Court of St. James.

Ray Stannard Baker was aboard, Wilson’s fervent acolyte who was to handle the press bureau for the American commissioners, and a few other newspapermen picked as rightthinking. (The great mass of the working press had to follow on the less comfortable Orizaba. ) Then there were the members of Colonel House’s Inquiry, history professors, geographers, sociologists and experts in political economy, who were to furnish the President with the facts and figures he needed to back up his remaking of the map in accordance with principles of right and democratic justice. Along with three truckloads of printed matter the experts had been installed on the ship the night before she sailed.