John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

In My Memoir Edith went to some length to describe the magnificence of the Hôtel de Mûrat; the gleaming parquet, the tall mirrors, the flame-colored brocades, the broad sweeping stairway. “Enchanting suites” were reserved for the President and herself. The hangings were embroidered in fiery gold with the Napoleonic eagle. There was a gold toilet set with the Mûrat crest in her marble bathroom and tall crystal bottles of orange-flower water.

In the President’s bedroom the walls and draperies were of green damask studded with the gold bees of the Empire.

Edith Wilson hardly had time to glance into the cabinets full of objets d’art in her crimson and ivory parlor, before they had to change their clothes for the official luncheon at the Elysée Palace. The party was thrown into a dither by the announcement by a flustered young American liaison officer that everybody at the Elysée would be wearing a frock coat. These garments were already considered obsolete in America except by a few rural senators. The President was planning on striped pants and a cutaway. After a search through the trunks, Brooks, the President’s colored valet, triumphantly produced not only one but two frock coats. He’d guessed they might be needed, he said, grinning. “One never knows different customs in different countries.”

So much of the afternoon was taken up by the luncheon, and the breakneck exchange of official visits demanded by protocol between President and Madame Poincaré and President and Mrs. Wilson, to the accompaniment of the rolling of drums from the guard of honor, that it was late before Wilson could get in a private word with his confidential colonel.

House found the President in a disgruntled mood. He seemed to be suffering a reaction from the exultation of his welcome. House, who may have suspected Wilson was a little miffed because his alter ego had not come to Brest to meet him, hastily explained that he hadn’t yet recovered his strength after the bout of influenza that had kept him ten days in bed. Other members of American missions were dangerously ill. Willard Straight died of it. House’s doctor had forbidden him to make the trip. House turned to pleasanter matters. He congratulated the President on having induced the British and French to lift the censorship of American press cables.

Wilson was inquiring with some bitterness why the conference on peace terms couldn’t start immediately. He had planned on December 16. House pointed out that Lloyd George would not make a move until he knew the results of the general election in the United Kingdom. The French were quite content to wait while the Germans and Austrians starved a little more. All the Allies were sabotaging Herbert Hoover’s efforts to get food and supplies moving towards populations in desperate need.

Wilson had already taken a dislike to Poincaré. He suspected the sawedoff little Président de la République of being behind the French Government’s refusal to let workingclass delegations meet him at Brest. Permission was withdrawn at the last moment for the labor unions to lead a mammoth parade through Paris to greet the American President and to endorse the Fourteen Points. Wilson had planned to address them from the balcony of the Hôtel de Mûrat. The French Government was getting between him and the French people.

Then there was Lansing. The President complained that Lansing had tried to pack the George Washington with State Department people. “I found him in an ugly mood towards Lansing,” House noted in his diary. House took advantage of that mood to put in a plug for his own organization by telling the President how favorably impressed the specialists of the Inquiry were by his frank chat with them on the boat.

House admitted that Lansing was tactless. Still the President must remember that Lansing was playing a minor part and playing it without complaint. Jealousies between the State Department crowd and the Inquiry were inevitable. “I am sure Lansing does not mean to be brusque and impolite but he has an unfortunate manner.”

During the days that followed, President and Mrs. Wilson had every moment taken as they hurried from formal luncheons to formal dinners. They were always changing their clothes. They visited hospitals, they laid a wreath on Lafayette’s tomb, they listened to interminable speeches at the Hôtel de Ville, where the President was presented by the city authorities of Paris with a handsome gold pen to sign the treaty with, and Edith Wilson with “a beautiful Lalique box containing a most unusual pin composed of six doves of peace made of rose quartz.”

Whenever Wilson wasn’t delivering speeches or listening to speeches he was kept busy receiving callers: Clemenceau, Foch, Pershing, Venizelos with a pair of bodyguards in starched white kilts; military and civilian leaders from countries great and small. “Each day brought more interesting people,” Edith Wilson wrote, “and every hour was parcelled out.”

House meanwhile was trying to build a fire under the Allied statesmen. He got hold of Northcliffe, the selfrighteous lord of a large section of the British press, and tried to scare him with Herbert Hoover’s documented reports that the most fearful famine since the Thirty Years War impended in Europe. Famine threatened the defeated nations and the newborn republics with disintegration and chaos. The heirs of chaos would be the Communists.

House urged Northcliffe to use the power of his great press to bring some sense of urgency to the politicians.

“Northcliffe and I agreed that the President should visit England at once and receive the reception there which we knew awaited him.” According to House’s notes Northcliffe further agreed with him that Wilson’s reception by the Paris populace had already changed the attitude of the French politicians. “We believe that if he goes to England and gets such an endorsement from the English people, Lloyd George and his colleagues will not dare oppose his policies at the Peace Conference.”

It was clear by this time that it would be the middle of January before the interallied conference, still thought of as preliminary to the real Peace Conference, could get started. In the interval House advised the President to make state visits to England and to Italy.

The colonel, who had moved his organization to the Crillon when that handsome old hostelry became the headquarters of the American commissioners, chaperoned some preliminary meetings between the President and Clemenceau. House considered the first meeting a success. “Neither said anything that was particularly misleading. They simply did not touch upon topics which would breed discussion.”

A few days later, when Clemenceau called on the President for a second time at the Hôtel de Mûrat, House noted that in the hour and a half they were together the President did nearly all the talking. “Clemenceau expressed himself in a mild way in agreement … He thought a League of Nations should be attempted, but he was not confident of success either of forming it or of its being workable after it was formed.”

A meeting, carefully stagemanaged by House, between the President and bland Premier Orlando and avid hawkfaced Sonnino, the redheaded Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs, was similarly ineffectual. “The President talked well but he did not convince the Italians that they should lessen their hold on the Pact of London.”

The French presidential train was brought out once more to take the Wilsons to Chaumont to spend Christmas with the A.E.F. Edith Wilson found it more uncomfortable than ever. The heat didn’t work. “The sheets in the icy beds felt damp and dangerous.” She wondered how they lived through the miserable night without catching pneumonia. They reached Pershing’s general headquarters in a snowstorm and toured the barns and farmyards where the doughboys were billeted. Edith Wilson found touching their efforts at Christmas decorations with green sprays and bits of red paper. Both she and her husband were impressed by the discomforts the doughboys were undergoing through the French winter.