Patricia O’Toole’s The Moralist is yet another hagiographic account of the mission and martyrdom of Woodrow Wilson, the patron saint of American internationalists. With minor variations, O’Toole sticks to the Received Account as told by John Milton Cooper in Woodrow Wilson: A Biography (2009) and by A. Scott Berg in Wilson (2013). In this view, the 28th president came close to ushering in the millennium after World War I, but his prickly self-righteousness lost the great moment. Under the diabolic influence of Republican Henry Cabot Lodge, the story goes, the Senate refused to ratify the League of Nations treaty that Wilson had brought back from the Versailles Peace Conference. Wilson then destroyed his health in a desperate effort to persuade the American public about the League, and the world plunged back into a dark age of atavistic nationalism. O’Toole, whose previous books include biographies of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Adams, thinks of Wilson as a moralist rather than a politician, and attributes his failure to a combination of excessive high-mindedness and an inadequate blood flow to the brain that ultimately led to his incapacitating stroke in October 1919. She deduces the latter from the translucence of the president’s ears upon his return from Versailles.
It is quite wrong to speak, as this book’s subtitle does, of the world that Woodrow Wilson made, for he made no world at all; he merely signed the Versailles Treaty by which Britain’s David Lloyd George and France’s Georges Clemenceau turned the Great War into the opening salvo of a new Thirty Years’ War. So utterly utopian was Wilson’s vision that it is unfair to characterize the internationalism of Bill Clinton or George W. Bush as “Wilsonian.” Clinton and Bush threw America’s weight around after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but they did not propose—as Wilson did—to replace America’s sovereign decision-making with a global council. Wilson’s League of Nations was closer to the conspiracy theorists’ notion of the United Nations. The commonplace belief that minor concessions on his part would have won ratification of the League of Nations treaty is untenable.
The Moralist: Woodrow ...
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Wilson was a latecomer to the matter of collective security. William Howard Taft, whom he defeated in the 1912 presidential election, formed the League to Enforce Peace in 1915, which proposed a collective security agreement that pledged members to arbitration and to wield economic and military force against aggressors. Wilson’s nemesis of 1919, Henry Cabot Lodge, endorsed Taft’s League the following year, remarking that “[p]robably it will be impossible to stop all wars, but it certainly will be possible to stop some wars and thus diminish their number.” Wilson at that time still was reluctant to enter World War I, to the frustration of hawks like Theodore Roosevelt.
After unrestricted German submarine warfare paralyzed America’s Atlantic trade in early 1917, Wilson proposed to help arm American civilian ships, an impractical measure that gave the appearance of action without committing America to war. Not until the British leaked the Zimmermann Telegram in February, which revealed German plotting against the U.S., was Wilson ready to go to war in earnest. Even so, as O’Toole observes, Lodge did not quite trust Wilson to take the plunge into hostilities. He introduced a Senate resolution asking the president to attest to the authenticity of the diplomatic memo. “In truth, Lodge had no doubts about it, but he realized that if he could wring a verification from Wilson, Wilson would find it difficult to go on defending U.S. neutrality.”
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Wilson had pledged to keep America out of the war and surrounded himself with pacifists like his first secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan. His last newspaper advertisement before the 1916 presidential election proclaimed, “You are Working—Not Fighting! Alive and Happy;—Not Cannon Fodder!” He famously called for “peace without victory” in January 1917, weeks before his declaration of war. Two years later Wilson backed the Carthaginian peace that Lloyd George and Clemenceau imposed upon Germany in return for British and French backing for the League of Nations. John Maynard Keynes, a famous critic of the Versailles Peace, ridiculed Wilson as “a blind and deaf Don Quixote,” a dupe of the Anglo-French cabal. Britain and France got something concrete—namely, the humiliation of Germany—and gave Wilson in return a castle in the clouds. As O’Toole puts it,
The president of the United States had insisted to the prime minister of Great Britain and the premier of France that they could not have their peace treaty unless he got his League. But after they paid his price, he was obliged to pay theirs…. Solely to spare Lloyd George and Clemenceau the wrath of their electorates, Wilson agreed to demand the kaiser’s trial and force Germany to sign a blank check for reparations.
Woodrow Wilson: A Biog...
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If only Wilson’s health hadn’t failed, and if only he had accepted Lodge’s half-loaf, O’Toole contends, America would have joined the League of Nations in 1919. That conclusion is not supported by the historical record, not even by the snippets O’Toole presents. Wilson may have suffered from diminished blood flow to the brain, as O’Toole contends, but that is not why the League failed. He wanted to compromise American sovereignty and most of the Senate did not. Wilson weaseled and wiggled around the issue: did the League treaty (and a second mutual defense treaty with France and Britain) obligate the United States “legally” or only “morally” to intervene in foreign wars? And if so, who would decide when such an obligation went into effect, and on what terms the United States might withdraw from the treaty? Even Wilson’s allies balked; Senator Henry Fountain Ashurst, a Democrat, wrote that the president’s lack of detail left him “petrified with surprise.”
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Lodge’s reservations to the treaty centered on sovereignty: “He wanted to clarify the terms of withdrawal from the League (Article I): spell out that Congress, not the League, would decide when to use force abroad (Articles X and XI); state explicitly that only the US government would set policy on its domestic issues (Article XV); and exempt the Monroe Doctrine from interpretation by the League (Article XXI),” reports O’Toole. In short, Lodge wanted a clear statement that the United States was under no obligation to go to war at the insistence of the League of Nations. Wilson refused to give one. His exchanges with Republican senators were maddeningly evasive.
For three and a half hours (on August 19, 1919), the president and the [members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee] went round and round, devoting more time to the military obligations that might arise form Article X than to any other subject. Wilson had already described the obligations as moral rather than legal, and Senator Warren G. Harding of Ohio raised a basic question: if League members had only a moral obligation to commit troops, what good was Article X? Wilson was taken aback. Harding persisted. Suppose a League member was under attack and every other member said, Well, this is only a moral obligations, and we don’t think this situation merits our participation. What then? Harding asked.
It was a matter of “national good conscience,” Wilson said. “Now a moral obligation is of course superior to a legal obligation and, if I may say so, has a greater binding force; only there always remains in the moral obligation the right to exercise one’s judgment.”
Wilson
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It seems clear from this exchange that Wilson would have liked to impose a legal obligation from a foreign body upon the United States, but could not say so openly. Instead, he hoped that once in the League, the U.S. would be more disposed towards globalism, and the League would bolster the position of interventionists at home. O’Toole concedes that Wilson was “mistaken” in at least one critical instance about moral vs. legal obligations:
Senator William E. Borah of Idaho inquired whether the second treaty that Wilson had submitted, the one promising that the United States and Britain would rush to the defense of France in the event of another German invasion, imposed a moral obligation or a legal obligation. Moral, Wilson replied. He was mistaken, but no one bothered to correct him.
Wilson was unwilling to admit before the Senate that he had brought home a treaty that entailed a legal commitment for American military intervention on behalf of France or Britain, and it is not surprising that the Senate declined to trust his account of Article X of the League Covenant. O’Toole allows that “Wilson’s critics wondered why he imagined that the Senate would consent to an alliance binding the United States to take part in a European war. Wilson did not explain himself.”
