Wilson

All schools of thought and politics agree in recognizing an elevated mentality, austere psychology, and a generous orientation in Woodrow Wilson. But naturally, they have divergent opinions about the transcendence of his ideology and his place in history. Men of the right, perhaps the most distant from Wilson’s doctrine, classify him as a head-in-the-clouds utopian. Men of the left consider him the last strongman of liberalistatm and democracy. Men of the center exalt him as an apostle of a clairvoyant ideology, which, though frustrated by national chauvinism and bellicose fervor, will in the end conquer the consciousness of mankind.

These different opinions and attitudes mark Wilson as a centrist leader and reformist. Wilson has obviously not been a politician in the mold of Lloyd George, Nitti, or Caillaux. More than the mindset of a politician, he has had the mindset of a teacher, an ideologue, or a preacher. His idealism has displayed, above all, an ethical base and orientation, but these are modalities of character and education. Wilson has set himself apart from other democratic leaders by his religious and collegiate temperament. His ancestry led him to occupy just such political territory, and he has been a genuine representative of the democratic, pacifist, and evolutionary mentality. He has tried to reconcile the old order with the nascent one, nationalism with internationalism, the past with the future.

Wilson was the true commander-in-chief of the Allied victory. The deepest critics of the World War think that the victory was the result of political, not military strategy, that the psychological and political factors had more influence and importance in the War than the military factors. Adriano Tilgher writes that the war was won “by those governments which knew how to direct it with an appropriate mentality, giving it purposes capable of becoming myths, states of mind, passions and popular sentiments,” and that “none more than Wilson, with his Quaker and democratic preaching, contributed to reinforcing in the peoples of the Entente the belief in the justice of his cause and the will to pursue the war until final victory.” Really, Wilson made the war against Germany a holy war. Before him, the statesmen of the Entente had baptized the Allied cause as the cause of rights and liberty. Tardieu in his book Peace cites some declarations of Lloyd George and Briand that contain the germs of the Wilsonian program. But the language of the Entente politicians contained a conventional and diplomatic tone. Wilson’s language, on the other hand, had all the religious fire and prophetic timbre necessary to stir the hearts of humanity. The Fourteen Points offered the Germans a just, equitable, generous peace, a peace without annexations or indemnities, a peace that would guarantee to all peoples the right to life and happiness. In his declarations and speeches, Wilson said that the allies did not fight against the German people but against the aristocratic and military caste that governed it.

This demagogic propaganda, which railed against the aristocracy, announced the government of the masses and proclaimed that “life springs from the earth,” on the one hand strengthened the adhesion of the masses to the war in the Allied countries, and on the other hand weakened in Germany and Austria the will to resist and fight. The Fourteen Points prepared the break of the Ruso-German front more efficiently than the tanks, cannons, and soldiers of Foch and Díaz, of Haig and Pershing. Ludendorf and Erzberger’s memories and other documents of the German defeat prove it to be so. The Wilsonian program stimulated the revolutionary spirits fermenting in Austria and Germany; it awoke in Bohemia and Hungary ancient ideals of independence; it created, in sum, the state of mind that engendered capitulation.

Wilson won the war, but lost the peace. He was the winner of the war, but was the loser in the peace. His Fourteen Points wore down the Austro-German front, they gave the victory to the Allies, but they did not manage to inspire and dominate the peace treaty. Germany surrendered to the Allies on the base of Wilson’s program, but the Allies, after disarming Germany, imposed upon it a peace different from that which Wilson spoke of, which they had solemnly promised it. Keynes and Nitti sustained, for this, that the treaty of Versailles is a dishonest treaty.

Why did Wilson accept and sign this treaty which broke his own word? In their books, Keynes, Lansing, Tardieu, and other historians in the Versailles conference provide different explanations for this attitude. Keynes claims that Wilson’s thought and character “were more theological rather than philosophical, with all the strengths and weaknesses implied by this order of thoughts and feelings.” He maintains that Wilson could not argue against the nimble, flexible, and astute Lloyd George and Clemenceau. He alleges that he lacked plans both for the League of Nations and the execution of his Fourteen Points. “He could have preached a sermon on any of them or have addressed a stately prayer to the Almighty for their fulfillment, but he could not frame their concrete application to the actual state of Europe. He not only had no proposals in detail, but he was in many respects, perhaps inevitably, ill-informed as to European conditions.” He pridefully isolated himself, rarely consulting the experts in his entourage, never ceding to his lieutenants, or to colonel House, any real influence or collaboration in his efforts. As a result, the Versailles conference’s tasks based themselves on a French plan or an English plan, apparently adapted to the Wilson Plan, but in practice aimed at bolstering French and English interests. In the end, Wilson did not feel supported by a people in solidarity with his ideology. All these circumstances conducted him into a series of transactions. His sole resolution consisted in rescuing the idea of the League of Nations. He believed that the creation of the League of Nations would automatically assure the revision of the treaty and its defects.

Wilson’s hopes have been dashed in the years since he signed off on peace. France has not simply made prudent, but rather excessive use of the Treaty of Versailles. Poincaré and his parliamentary majority have not employed it against the German aristocratic and military caste but against the German people. Furthermore, they have exasperated Germany’s suffering to the point of feeding within that country a reactionary and jingoistic atmosphere favorable to a monarchic restoration or military dictatorship. The League of Nations, impotent and anemic, has failed to develop. Democracy, simultaneously assaulted by reaction and revolution, has entered into a period of acute crisis. The bourgeoisie has renounced in some countries the legal defense of its control and bet on its democratic faith, and the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie has come face to face with the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Fascism has administered, in the most benign of cases, a liter dose of Castor oil to many proponents of Wilson’s ideology. The cult of the hero and of violence has been ferociously reborn in humanity. Wilson’s program appears on the historical stage in these times as the last vital manifestation of democratic thought. Wilson is not, in any case, the creator of a new ideology, but the frustrated renewer of an old one.