The day House cabled President Wilson for his approval of Geneva, the newspapers carried sensational news of a general strike in Switzerland. The Bolsheviks were repaying the hospitality of the Swiss during their years of exile by subsidizing revolutionary agitators there. Though the strike proved a flash in the pan Wilson took fright and cabled House that Switzerland was “saturated with every poisonous element.” Clemenceau described the advantages of Paris hotels and of the stately huge buildings at Versailles. Allied statesmen were worn out from years of strain and effort, they were already in Paris: why move? They settled on Paris from sheer lassitude. To House’s surprise Wilson readily agreed. Clemenceau had his way.
House confided his disappointment to his diary: “It will be difficult enough to make a just peace, and it will be almost impossible to do so while sitting in the atmosphere of a belligerent capital.”
That left the final question to be decided between House and the President. On what terms should Wilson attend? Wilson had all along insisted that he must preside over the opening sessions. House’s suggestion, like Houston’s, was that the President should attend the preliminaries and then turn the detail work over to plenipotentiaries. It had been decided that the four victorious powers, Italy, France, Great Britain and the United States, should each be represented by a commission of five. House jotted down in private that he would like to be chairman of the American commission himself, with McAdoo and Herbert Hoover as his chief assistants.
Clemenceau’s first thought when he heard that President Wilson was surely coming to Paris was that the arrival of another head of state would give Poincaré a chance to take the chair. That would never do; the Tiger intended to preside.
Lloyd George and Orlando were equally flustered. They feared Wilson would be hard to deal with. They dreaded the prospect of his appealing over their heads to their people back home. When they communicated their doubts to the colonel, House affably assured them that they would not find the President stiff and dictatorial in personal relations. Quite the contrary, House declared, he always found him amenable to advice.
The Americans whom House consulted in Paris were equally opposed to the President’s trip, but for different reasons. Frank Cobb got up an impassioned memorandum on the subject:
“The moment President Wilson sits at the council table with these Prime Ministers and Foreign Secretaries he has lost all the power that comes from distance and detachment … In Washington President Wilson has the ear of the whole world. It is a commanding position, the position of a court of the last resort of world democracy … He can go before Congress and appeal to the conscience and hope of mankind … This is a mighty weapon, but if the President were to participate personally in the proceedings, it would be a broken stick.”
Mindful of his determination “to follow his bent rather than my own” in representing Wilson in Paris, House, who knew how the President and Mrs. Wilson were looking forward to a state visit to Europe, felt he could not oppose the President’s coming. He employed all his diplomatic finesse in wording a cable to the White House: “If the Peace Congress assembles in France Clemenceau will be presiding officer. If a neutral country had been chosen, you would have been asked to preside. Americans whose opinions are of value are practically unanimous in the belief it would be unwise of you to sit in the Peace Conference. They fear that it would involve a loss of dignity and your commanding position. Clemenceau has just told me that he hopes you will not sit in the Congress because no head of a state should sit there. The same feeling prevails in England. Cobb cables that Reading and Wiseman voice the same view. Everyone wants you to come over and take part in the preliminary conference.”
When the President and Mrs. Wilson decoded House’s cable in the privacy of the inner study they were not at all pleased. “It upset every plan we had made,” Wilson cabled back waspishly. “I infer that the French and British leaders desire to exclude me from the conference for fear I might lead the weaker nations against them … I play the same part in my government that the prime ministers play in theirs. The fact that I am head of the state is of no practical consequence. No point of dignity must prevent our obtaining the results we have set our hearts upon and must have … I am thrown into complete confusion by the change of programme.”
House’s reply was soothing. “My judgment is that you should … determine upon your arrival what share it is wise for you to take in the proceedings.”
Wilson had already intimated he was willing to yield the chairmanship to Clemenceau.
November 19, the morning after the President broke in on Lansing’s dinner party to announce his final decision, he issued a formal announcement along the lines of House’s suggestion: “The President will sail for France immediately after the opening of the regular session of Congress … It is not likely that it will be possible for him to remain throughout the sessions of the formal Peace Conference, but his presence at the outset is necessary … He will of course be accompanied by delegates who will sit as representatives of the United States throughout the Conference.”
The announcement was sullenly received in Washington. In his recollections of those days Tumulty wrote that the President was profoundly distressed by the criticism “heaped upon him by his enemies on the Hill.” Tumulty had never seen him look more weary or careworn: “Well Tumulty,” he remembered Wilson’s saying, “this trip will either be the greatest success or the supremest tragedy in all history; but I believe in a Divine Providence … it is my faith that no body of men, however they concert their power or their influence, can defeat this great world enterprise.”
The choice of the commissioners was the subject of much correspondence. Lansing and Tumulty both backed up House in urging the President to appoint some leading Republicans such as Taft or Root or Senator Knox.
Wilson was very definite about not wanting Taft. Possibly he feared Taft might have his own ideas about how a League of Nations should be constituted. Root he wrote off as impossibly reactionary. For a while he toyed with the idea of taking Samuel W. McCall, the very Wilsonian Democratic governor of Massachusetts, or Justice Day of the Supreme Court. He was so firm in turning down Knox that none of his advisers dared suggest any other member of the Senate Committee for Foreign Affairs. Throughout the discussion Tumulty and the State Department were bombarded with names; everybody and his brother wanted to go to Paris. At last to quiet the rumormongering Tumulty gave out five names to the press.
Colonel House’s choice was expected. He was already in Paris. Nobody objected to Mr. Lansing. After all he was Secretary of State. The idea of picking Henry White to represent the Republicans was received with scornful laughter. During that estimable gentleman’s long diplomatic career, though nominally a Republican, he had hardly ever voted in an election. Nobody had anything against selfeffacing old General Bliss, but nobody had much to say in his favor either. The fifth name was Wilson’s own.
Congress was still somewhat stunned by the fact that the list included neither a Republican nor a Democratic senator, when the President appeared before the two houses to wish them farewell. Secretary Houston sorrowfully noted the lack of enthusiasm among the legislators. The President’s speech was received with unusual silence. He tried to explain that, although he was departing from precedent by sailing overseas, under modern conditions, through the use of the cables, he would be as near as if he had remained in Washington. “I shall be in close touch with you and you will know all that I do … I shall not be inaccessible.” It was his duty to attend the Peace Conference in person to complete the good work so many brave boys had given their lives for, and to redeem America’s pledge to mankind.