Wilson arrives in Europe

On 13 December 1918 the transport George Washington, a former German liner seized by the Americans in 1917, entered the port of Brest in Brittany. On board was the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, who was sailing to France to lead the American delegation to the peace conference in person. On the voyage from New York, which began on 4 December, the ship was escorted by the battleship USS Pennsylvania and destroyers, and ten American battleships and several dozen destroyers brought her into Brest. Wilson became the first sitting President of the United States to visit Europe. Critics at home accused him of breaking the unwritten tradition that a president did not go abroad for so long.

The decision to go

Wilson announced that he would go to Paris shortly after the Armistice of Compiègne. He believed that only his personal presence would ensure that the peace was concluded on the principles all sides had accepted, that is on the basis of the Fourteen Points and his later speeches. The most important of these aims was the League of Nations, a permanent association of states that was to guard the new order. He had spoken of such a league as early as January 1917, when he called for peace without victory. Advisers, including Secretary of State Robert Lansing, warned that a president sitting at the negotiating table on an equal footing with prime ministers would lose the advantage of an arbiter settling disputes from afar. Wilson would not be persuaded. His wife, Edith Wilson, went with him.

He left with his position at home weakened. Before the congressional elections of 5 November he had appealed to voters to vote Democrat, and the Republicans, who had supported the government throughout the war, took this as an insult. The elections gave them a majority in both houses of Congress, in the Senate by 49 to 47. It was the Senate that would later have to ratify the peace treaty. Former President Theodore Roosevelt declared after the elections that Wilson had no mandate whatever to speak for the American people. Nevertheless Wilson appointed no senator or prominent Republican to the peace delegation. Besides himself it comprised Lansing; Colonel Edward House, who had represented the President in Paris since the end of October; General Tasker Bliss, the United States representative on the Supreme War Council; and the retired diplomat Henry White, the only Republican, and not a very partisan one.

On board

The George Washington also carried a group of experts, geographers, historians and economists from the team known as the Inquiry, which for more than a year had been preparing material for the negotiations for House. They brought crates of books, documents and maps. On 10 December Wilson gathered them in his cabin. According to the notes of the geographer Isaiah Bowman, later quoted by the President’s biographer Ray Stannard Baker, he said that the Americans would be the only participants at the conference with no interest of their own in it, and that decisions must accord with the opinion of mankind, not with the old plans of diplomats. Without a league of nations that would give the new frontiers security and allow them to be corrected later, the peace would not last. He saw the German colonies as the common property of the league. He asked the experts: “Tell me what’s right and I’ll fight for it.” He had no illusions that it would be easy. Of his programme he said that if it did not work, it would have to be made to work.

Brest and Paris

At Brest, through which hundreds of thousands of American soldiers had passed, Wilson was welcomed by the French authorities and crowds of local people. That same day the President travelled by special train to Paris. On the morning of 14 December the President of France, Raymond Poincaré, and Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau were waiting for him at the station. Wilson drove with Poincaré in an open carriage along the Champs-Élysées and the grand boulevards, and Paris gave him a welcome such as no one could remember. The crowds shouted “Long live America!” and “Long live the President!”, and a banner over the route read “Honour to Wilson the Just”. For millions of Europeans he was then the man who had brought victory and was to bring a just peace. He took up residence in the Hôtel Murat in the rue de Monceau.

The first weeks

The conference could not begin at once. Britain was in the middle of an election, and the Allies had not even agreed on the procedure for the talks. Wilson used the time to travel. He spent Christmas with the soldiers of General John Pershing, whose headquarters were at Chaumont; on 26 December he arrived in London, where he was received by King George V, and then he visited Carlisle, his mother’s home town, and Manchester. At the beginning of January he was in Italy, where he met King Victor Emmanuel III and, on 4 January, Pope Benedict XV. Everywhere crowds greeted him. In talks with politicians, however, it soon became clear that Clemenceau, Lloyd George and the Italian Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando had aims of their own, often at odds with his principles. The peace conference opened on 18 January 1919. Wilson spent almost half a year in Europe, with one short break to return home.