Wilson · 1918
Woodrow Wilson and the Fourteen Points
On the morning of the eighth of January 1918, in a Joint Session of the United States Congress in the House of Representatives Chamber in the United States Capitol building, Woodrow Wilson, sixty-one years old, the twenty-eighth President of the United States, of Scots-Irish Wilson stock (the Wilson family had emigrated from Strabane in County Tyrone to Pennsylvania in 1807, and Woodrow's father the Reverend Dr Joseph Ruggles Wilson was the Presbyterian theologian of the American South), delivered a speech of about forty-five minutes on the United States' war-aims in the Great War (which the United States had entered in April 1917 on the Allied side). The speech set out fourteen specific points (the Fourteen Points) that the United States proposed as the basis for any post-war peace settlement: open diplomacy, freedom of the seas, removal of economic barriers, reduction of armaments, the adjustment of colonial claims, evacuation of Russia, restoration of Belgium, return of Alsace-Lorraine to France, frontier adjustments along clearly recognisable lines of nationality for Italy, Austria-Hungary, the Balkans and Turkey, an independent Poland, and (the fourteenth and most consequential point) *a general association of nations*, the precursor of the League of Nations of 1920 and the United Nations of 1945. The Fourteen Points became, by the October 1918 German request for an armistice on their basis, the formal framework of the Versailles Peace Conference of 1919. Wilson was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 1919.
It is twenty past noon on the morning of the eighth of January 1918, on the rostrum of the House of Representatives Chamber of the United States Capitol in Washington DC, in pale winter light through the east windows of the Chamber. He is sixty-one years old. He is Thomas Woodrow Wilson (the Thomas dropped at twenty, the Woodrow taken as the Christian first-name), born at the Manse of the Augusta Presbyterian Church in Staunton, Virginia, on the twenty-eighth of December 1856, son of the Reverend Dr Joseph Ruggles Wilson the southern Presbyterian theologian and Janet Woodrow, schooled at the Davidson College and the Princeton College (BA 1879, PhD 1886 the first earned-doctorate PhD of any American president), professor of Government at Princeton 1890–1902, President of Princeton University 1902–10, Governor of New Jersey 1911–13, twenty-eighth President of the United States since 1913.
On the rostrum in front of him is the typescript of the Fourteen Points speech, drafted by the Inquiry team of the Department of State (the Colonel Edward House and the twenty Inquiry specialists) over the previous six weeks and revised by Wilson himself in the personal hand on a hundred-and-twenty-page draft over the Christmas-week. The fourteen points are numbered in the Roman numerals from I to XIV. Point XIV is the key political-philosophical commitment: 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.
He thinks: the United States is, in plain reading, the only Allied power that has, by its late-1917 economic-and-military position, the political weight to force a rational peace settlement on the European Allies. The British and French have, by the 1918 war-debts and the 1917 manpower-exhaustion, no political-credit for the peace-terms negotiation. The United States has the credit and the political-economic-leverage. The Fourteen Points is the leverage-document.
He thinks: the League of Nations of Point XIV is the political-architectural innovation of the twentieth century. The League is the collective-security mechanism that prevents the 1914-style European-power-political collapse into the general war. The League is the American Founding Fathers' Federalist principle applied to the relations between sovereign states.
He thinks: the United States Senate will, on the Article II treaty-ratification requirement of the Constitution, have to ratify the Versailles Treaty and the League Covenant by a two-thirds majority. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee under Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts will, on the domestic-political grounds of the Republican-opposition party-politics, lead the fight against the Covenant. The fight will be the political battle of the next two years.
Wilson delivers the speech in the flat measured Princeton-professor voice that is his public-speaking style. The speech runs forty-three minutes. The Joint Session applauds at the end. The text is on the front page of every American newspaper the next morning and is, by the tenth of January, translated into the major European languages and distributed by the State Department through the American embassies of the belligerent and neutral countries.
The Fourteen Points became, by the fourth of October 1918 German government's request to Wilson for an armistice on the basis of the Points, the formal framework of the armistice of the eleventh of November 1918 and the Versailles Peace Conference of January-June 1919. Wilson attended the Conference in person (the first American president to leave the United States during his term), was the Allied negotiator alongside Lloyd George and Clemenceau, and was the principal architect of the League of Nations Covenant signed at Versailles on the twenty-eighth of June 1919.
He returned to the United States in July 1919 to fight the Senate ratification battle. The fight collapsed in the November 1919 Senate vote (the Treaty failed of the two-thirds majority by seven votes); Wilson, who had been on a nineteen-thousand-mile speaking-tour of the American West to rally support, had suffered a major stroke at Pueblo, Colorado, on the second of October 1919 that partially paralysed him and effectively ended his active political career. The United States never joined the League of Nations.
Woodrow Wilson was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 1919 (announced on the tenth of December 1920). He served the remainder of his second presidential term in the private capacity of an invalid; his wife Edith Bolling Wilson effectively conducted the day-to-day governance of the United States from the stroke of October 1919 to the inauguration of Warren Harding on the fourth of March 1921 (the first and only female-de-facto-acting-presidential-power episode in American history). He died at his Washington home at 2340 S Street NW on the third of February 1924, sixty-seven years old. He is buried in the National Cathedral in Washington DC, the only American president buried in the District of Columbia.