President Wilson, in the memories of thinking men, is the only enduring leader of those statesmen who conducted the First World War and its aftermath of peacemaking. I served under him in those times. I was a witness to the ordeal and tragedy of Woodrow Wilson. I had some background and a point of vantage from which to evaluate his endeavor to serve mankind.
And the rest of the volume logically unfolds from this premise. Herbert Hoover, given his position as U.S. Food Administrator in the First World War, organizing and negotiating with governments throughout Europe to ensure that food and supplies reached the millions displaced and traumatized by war, had an insider’s view on President’s Wilson’s, in Hoover’s view, noble and doomed quest to secure a lasting peace for the world.
Like Freedom Betrayed, The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson is chock full of actual correspondence between its principal characters, Hoover admitting in his preface that putting these many documents into their proper order is fully his intention.
Writing this memoir some four decades after that war has one advantage. There were many discussions, minutes of meetings, agreements and reasons for decisions and compromises which were only disclosed gradually over years long after. In fact, some important items are now available for the first time. Literally tens of thousands of articles and hundreds of volumes have been published on these events and actions. My own files alone relating to the period when I served with Mr. Wilson exceed a million items. The documentation in other libraries comprise several million more. And the task has been to sort the material from the immaterial.
As I have gone over thousands of these musty papers, memories have sprung vividly to life and often have attested the amount of error and misrepresentation in what has been written about Woodrow Wilson.
In this regard, it can be said that Hoover has done history a great service. But the most interesting parts of this volume are not the letters, but the summarized analysis that Hoover offers between them.
A great case in point is Chapter 8, which Hoover titled, “What Woodrow Wilson Met in Europe.”
To understand the immense tragedy which befell Woodrow Wilson and the whole world, it is necessary to understand the forces which dominated the new stage upon which he now appeared.
That’s how the chapter begins, and what follows is twelve pages of insightful analysis of how the New World, represented by America, and the Old World, represented by the many countries of Europe, were still, in 1918-19, very different things.
By the time the President arrived in Paris, revolutions creating seventeen constitutional republics had swept over Europe. Ten new nations had declared their independence and had set up constitutional governments, or soon were to do so. The peoples of the old enemy states had discarded their dictators or rulers. All of Europe, outside of Russia, was now to be under constitutional government and enjoy personal freedoms.
When the President arrived, the delegations of twenty-seven nations of the Allied and Associated Powers had been approved to sit at the peace table. The delegations of seven nations who had declared themselves self-governing peoples, not yet “recognized,” and seven little nations neutral in the war came there to peer into the windows, anxious for their future. The representatives of the five enemy countries were later allowed to sit on a hard bench outside the halls while their fate was discussed. And the Communists, from their stronghold in Moscow, were lurking in the shadows, creating trouble for all the new nations and their elders.
For Hoover, it seems, Communists are always “lurking in the shadows,” but don’t let that distract you from the larger point. This is an extremely complex situation that President Wilson is walking into, and Hoover is not even done describing it.
To add to the turmoil, each of the forty-one delegations of those nations had, from extensive headquarters, organized propaganda agencies and employed press agents. The military and some departments of the Allied Governments also had press agents and issued propaganda. To these were added a host of representatives from social, scientific and economic organizations from over the earth, each with propagandist weapons with which to instill the higher thought.
Also the sixty-odd inter-Allied agencies, which I shall mention later, found that their life expression required periodic press statements and reports for circulation to all those who had desires or hopes and sufficient wastepaper baskets. And there were present 300 reporters from all over the world.
It’s almost an impossible situation. Impossible to control, at least. Especially when so many of these representatives, delegations and agencies did not share the same peace objectives as Woodrow Wilson.
Many of the forces confronting Mr. Wilson were no help to him in finally establishing the “Fourteen Points and the subsequent addresses” to which the Allies and enemy states had agreed.
In other words, the Great War had been ended when all the warring parties agreed that a peace should be established on the concepts that Woodrow Wilson had laid out in a short series of speeches, the most famous of which included his “Fourteen Points.” Hoover helpfully outlines all of these concepts in Chapter 4, coming up with 38 “Points” in all, some admittedly amplifications of others. But although agreed to in concept, hammering out a treaty that would see them all practically implemented was not something neither some Allies nor some enemy states were willing to help happen.
As an example, there was Point Two:
Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas, outside territorial waters, alike in peace and war, except as the seas may be closed in whole or in part by international action for the enforcement of international covenants.
Sounds good in concept, but even before the details starting to be worked out, the British realized that such a principle enforced would end their mastery of the seas, upon which so much of their commerce and national integrity was based. In this case, it was an ally, not an enemy state, that worked at cross purposes with Wilson.
And then there all the secret treaties.
A maze of secret agreements had been entered into by the Allies, before America entered the war, by which they had already allotted the spoils of victory among their four Allied empires. These treaties were themselves proof of the implacable forces of imperial expansion which dominated the Allies. If the treaties were to be respected, the results would be far removed from Mr. Wilson’s gospel of peace for mankind. They would nullify many of the “Fourteen Points and the subsequent addresses,” which the Allies had reluctantly adopted for the basis of peace.
Hoover lists seven of these treaties -- what he calls the major agreements -- but the larger point here is more important. The Old World, with its centuries of political treaties, empires, and entanglements, offered a very different stage than the one the New World, with its “all men are created equal” rhetoric, was used to strutting upon.
But in the larger sense, the forces which weakened the President’s influence at Paris were far deeper than the intrigues or the secret agreement between Allied statesmen. Here was the collision of civilizations that had grown centuries apart. Here the idealism of the Western World was in clash with the racial mores and the grim determination of many nations at the peace table to have revenge, reparations and territorial spoils.
At the Peace Conference the ordeal of Woodrow Wilson began and the forces inherent in the Old World took over the control of human fate.
In this situation, Hoover seems to say, the odds of Wilson succeeding in securing a lasting peace were remote. Indeed, destiny seemed almost foreordained against it. And although Wilson would heroically try, in suffering setbacks and exhaustions of both the diplomatic and physical character, Hoover carefully documents the inevitable unravelling that would claim both peace and the president who sought it.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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