Woodrow Wilson and the Fourteen Points

Some peace settlements are written by the victors, in the language of the victors, and bound by the appetites of the victors. Others are written by a man standing slightly outside the war, holding a different grammar, who believes that the architecture of the next century can be drafted as one drafts a university lecture: numbered, reasoned, and offered as if reason were itself a binding power.

THE SCOTS-IRISH INHERITANCE

He is Thomas Woodrow Wilson, born in the Manse at Staunton, Virginia, on the twenty-eighth of December 1856, son of the Reverend Dr Joseph Ruggles Wilson, southern Presbyterian theologian, and Janet Woodrow. The Wilson line crossed from Strabane in County Tyrone to Pennsylvania in 1807, carrying with it the hard covenanting temper of the Ulster Scots: the belief that a written instrument, plainly worded, can bind men to their better natures. He has been schoolmaster to himself for sixty-one years. Davidson, then Princeton, BA in 1879. A doctorate from Johns Hopkins in 1886, the first earned PhD ever held by an American president. Professor of jurisprudence, then president of Princeton, then governor of New Jersey, then, since the spring of 1913, the twenty-eighth President of the United States. He has spent a working life reducing the disorder of human affairs to clauses and sub-clauses. Now the disorder is the war that has been killing Europeans for forty-one months, and the clauses he is about to read aloud are fourteen.

THE INQUIRY

The document on the rostrum was not begun in Washington but in a quiet suite at 155th Street in New York, where since September Colonel Edward House and a body of some twenty scholars, geographers, historians, ethnographers, gathered under the name of the Inquiry, have been preparing the United States for the peace it has not yet won. They sent their digest to the White House on the fourth of January. He has worked over it through the Christmas week in his own hand, on his Hammond typewriter at the second-floor study, paring, renumbering, sharpening. The Roman numerals run from I to XIV. He has kept Point XIV for the end because Point XIV is the whole purpose of the rest: a general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike. All the other thirteen are the scaffolding of a building whose roof is that one sentence.

THE CHAMBER, TWENTY MINUTES PAST NOON

It is the eighth of January 1918, a clear cold Tuesday. The east windows of the House Chamber admit a pale winter light onto the green carpet, the mahogany rostrum, the rows of representatives and senators in dark suits, the diplomatic gallery where the ambassadors of the Allied and neutral powers have been seated according to protocol. He walks in at twelve-eighteen with the manuscript in a brown leather portfolio. He sets the portfolio on the rostrum and waits for the Joint Session to settle. He is wearing pince-nez. He is thinner than he was in the spring; the year has cost him. The Speaker, Champ Clark, introduces him in a single sentence. He raises the first page.

THE SECOND BEFORE HE BEGINS

In the second before he begins he understands, with the cold lucidity that comes to scholars at the lectern, where the leverage of this moment actually sits. The British are bled out at Passchendaele; the French mutinied at Chemin des Dames last spring and have not yet recovered their offensive nerve; the Russians have collapsed into Bolshevism and signed away at Brest-Litovsk; the Italians broke at Caporetto in October. The Allies have crowns and colonies and old treaties and a war they cannot finish without American men, American wheat, American steel, American credit. He has the credit. The Fourteen Points is the instrument by which the credit becomes a settlement. He has read enough Burke and enough Bagehot to know that the moment of greatest leverage in any negotiation is the moment before the cheque is cashed. He is here to cash it for an idea. He understands also, with the same lucidity, that the Constitution he was raised on requires two-thirds of the Senate to bind the Republic to any treaty; that Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts sits in that Senate as the patient hereditary enemy of every cosmopolitan instinct in him; and that the fight he is about to start in this Chamber will be finished, if at all, in another Chamber across the Capitol, by men who do not love him. He thinks of his father in the pulpit at Augusta, the long Sabbath cadence, the conviction that words plainly read are themselves a kind of deed. He reads.

THE FORTY-THREE MINUTES

He delivers the speech in the flat, measured cadence of the Princeton lecture-room, the voice that has trained two generations of American undergraduates to mistrust ornament. Point I: open covenants of peace, openly arrived at. Point II: absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas. Point III: removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers. Point IV: reduction of national armaments to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety. Point V: a free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims. VI, the evacuation of Russian territory. VII, Belgium restored. VIII, Alsace-Lorraine returned to France, the wrong of 1871 undone. IX, the frontiers of Italy along clearly recognisable lines of nationality. X, autonomy for the peoples of Austria-Hungary. XI, the Balkans evacuated and restored. XII, the Turkish portions of the Ottoman Empire assured a secure sovereignty, the other nationalities under Ottoman rule assured an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development. XIII, an independent Polish state with free and secure access to the sea. Then the breath before XIV. Then XIV. Forty-three minutes from the first word to the last. The Joint Session is on its feet.

THE INTERLUDE IN BERLIN

Nine months later, on the fourth of October 1918, a cable goes out from the new German Chancellor, Prince Maximilian of Baden, to Washington by way of the Swiss legation in Bern. It requests an armistice on the basis of the address of the eighth of January, the Fourteen Points, and the subsequent pronouncements of the President of the United States. The cable is the silent ratification of the leverage. The German General Staff, which in the spring still spoke of a victorious peace in the east, now asks for the American framework by name. Ludendorff, the architect of the March offensive, has resigned in tears. In Vienna the Habsburg structure is already coming apart along the nationality lines the speech named. The fourteen numbered clauses, read out on a cold Tuesday in Washington, have become the surrender terms of the Central Powers. No document of the twentieth century has so quickly travelled the distance from one man's typescript to the law between nations.

THE PEACE ROOM AT VERSAILLES

He sails for France on the George Washington in December. He is the first sitting American president to leave the United States. At Brest the crowds cry Vive Wilson in a register he has never heard given to a politician. In Paris the workmen along the Champs-Elysees have hung his portrait in their windows beside the Virgin. At Versailles he sits across the green baize from Lloyd George and Clemenceau, the old tiger, who tells Colonel House that the Almighty managed with ten commandments and Wilson has needed fourteen. The bargaining is line by line and clause by clause, six months of it. He concedes the Saar, he concedes Shantung, he concedes reparations he believes will ruin the peace. He concedes because Point XIV is the prize and Point XIV survives. The Covenant of the League of Nations is signed in the Hall of Mirrors on the twenty-eighth of June 1919, four years to the day after the Archduke was shot at Sarajevo.

THE RETURN, AND PUEBLO

He comes home in July to fight for ratification. Henry Cabot Lodge has had nine months to dig his trenches in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The reservations multiply; the votes do not. On the third of September he leaves Washington on a private train and crosses the country to put the case to the American people directly, nineteen thousand miles in twenty-two days, forty speeches in twenty-nine cities. At Pueblo, Colorado, on the twenty-fifth of September 1919, he speaks of the war dead at Suresnes and weeps openly on the platform. That night the headache begins. Within a week, in the bedroom of the White House, the stroke takes the left side of his body. Edith Bolling Wilson closes the door and, for seventeen months, decides which papers reach the bed and which do not. In November the Senate fails the Treaty by seven votes. The United States does not enter the League it has fathered. The Nobel Committee awards him the Peace Prize for 1919, announced on the tenth of December 1920. He receives the cable in silence.

CODA

He dies on the third of February 1924 in the house at 2340 S Street Northwest in Washington, sixty-seven years old, and is laid in the crypt of the National Cathedral, the only American president buried in the District of Columbia. The League he drafted fails in 1939. The instrument is rebuilt on the same architecture in San Francisco in 1945, under a different name, with the United States this time inside the door. Some men are remembered for the wars they win. A few are remembered for the peace they fail to ratify, which becomes, half a century after they are buried, the working law of the world. In a Pennsylvania churchyard the Strabane Wilsons lie under plain Presbyterian stones, the same hard cut letters his father set above his mother. The covenant outlives the covenanter.