Wilson's Fourteen Points

On 8 January 1918 the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, stood before a joint session of Congress and read an address on war aims and peace terms. Its core was a programme of fourteen points, which the president called “the programme of the world’s peace” and at the same time “the only possible programme”. The speech came as a surprise. It was known that the president would address Congress, but few, even among members of the cabinet and Allied diplomats, knew its subject. Wilson did not want the newspapers to speculate about the content of the address beforehand, because such guesses were often taken afterwards for what he had actually said. The address went down in history as “Wilson’s Fourteen Points” and became the best-known peace programme of the war.

Origins

The president’s closest adviser, Colonel Edward House, had returned in December from Europe, where at the Inter-Allied Conference in Paris he had tried to persuade the Allies to issue a joint, liberal declaration of war aims. It was meant to keep Russia with the Allies and become a tool of a diplomatic offensive against the Central Powers. It failed. As early as 1 December House cabled the president asking him not to speak on foreign policy until they had met. On a copy of the cable he later added that he had been thinking of Wilson announcing the war aims: “I tried to get this done in Paris, but without success. The next best thing was for the President to do it.”

The material was prepared by the so-called Inquiry, a group of scholars formed in the autumn of 1917 which, under House’s direction, collected data in New York for the future peace conference. At the end of December its secretary, the journalist Walter Lippmann, together with colleagues drew up a memorandum on war aims and the peace terms that followed from them, with proposals for Belgium, northern France, Alsace-Lorraine, the frontiers of Italy, the Balkans, Poland, Austria-Hungary and Turkey. On the evening of 4 January House brought it to the White House together with maps and memoranda from European representatives. The two men conferred until half past eleven at night.

According to House, the president wanted the address to fulfil three tasks. It was to be an answer to the Bolshevik demand that the Allies explain what they were fighting for, and one that would persuade Russia to stand by the principles of democracy. It was to reach the German socialists, who were beginning to suspect that their government was waging not a defensive war but a war of conquest, contrary to the Reichstag peace resolution of July 1917. Finally, it was to make clear to the Entente that the war aims fixed in the secret treaties had to be revised. The president was especially troubled by the Treaty of London, which promised Italy lands inhabited by other nations, and by the agreements on the partition of Turkey.

On the morning of Saturday 5 January Wilson called House into his study and drew up the final list of points. He later regretted that he had not managed to fit them into thirteen, his favourite number. That same afternoon news reached Washington of Lloyd George’s speech to the trade unionists. The British terms were so close to his own that the president briefly considered abandoning his address. House argued that the prime minister had cleared the air and that it was all the more necessary to act. According to the House papers, the two programmes were drawn up independently, and apart from the point on Alsace-Lorraine Wilson changed nothing after reading the British speech. On Sunday he added an introduction and a conclusion; on Monday he gave the point on Alsace-Lorraine a firm form and, on the advice of the Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, made stylistic corrections.

Russia and Brest

Wilson began with the negotiations at Brest-Litovsk. The representatives of Russia, he said, had presented clear principles of peace and a concrete programme for their application. The Central Powers had answered at first with generalities that could be interpreted liberally, but then added practical terms: they wanted to keep “every foot” of occupied territory. The president supposed that the general principles came from the liberal statesmen of Germany and Austria, and the concrete terms from the military men, who thought only of keeping their gains. The negotiations had been broken off. The Russians, according to Wilson, had been sincere and had rightly demanded that the talks be held with open doors. He asked in whose name the delegates of the Central Powers were speaking: the majority of the Reichstag, or the military minority that had so far governed their policy.

Lloyd George, the president went on, had spoken “with admirable candour” on behalf of Great Britain, and the only secrecy and lack of clarity about war aims lay on the side of Germany and her allies. Most moving of all, however, was the voice of the Russian people. The Russians lay prostrate before the power of Germany, but their soul was not subservient: they would not yield either in principle or in action. They were asking what the Allies wanted. Wilson answered that Americans wished with all their hearts to help the Russian people attain freedom and order, “whether their present leaders believe it or not”. The peace process was to be entirely open, with no secret understandings of any kind. The day of conquest was gone, and so was the day of secret covenants. The world was to be made safe for every peace-loving nation.

The fourteen points

The programme of the world’s peace ran, in brief, as follows:

1. Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there should be no private international understandings of any kind. Diplomacy should proceed always frankly and in the public view.
2. Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas outside territorial waters, alike in peace and in war, except as the seas might be closed in whole or in part by international action for the enforcement of international covenants.
3. The removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers and equal conditions of trade among all nations consenting to the peace and associating themselves for its maintenance.
4. Adequate guarantees that armaments would be reduced to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety.
5. A free, open-minded and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, in which the interests of the populations concerned would have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title was to be determined.
6. The evacuation of all Russian territory and such a settlement of Russian questions as would secure for her an unhampered opportunity for the independent determination of her own political development, and a sincere welcome into the society of free nations, as well as assistance of every kind she might desire. The treatment accorded Russia by her “sister nations” in the months to come would be, according to Wilson, “the acid test of their good will”.
7. The evacuation and restoration of Belgium without any attempt to limit her sovereignty. No other single act would so restore confidence in international law.
8. The freeing of all French territory, the restoration of the invaded portions, and the righting of the wrong done to France by Prussia in 1871 in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine, which had unsettled the peace of the world for nearly fifty years.
9. A readjustment of the frontiers of Italy along clearly recognisable lines of nationality.
10. The peoples of Austria-Hungary, whose place among the nations the United States wished to see safeguarded, should be accorded the freest opportunity of autonomous development.
11. The evacuation of Romania, Serbia and Montenegro, the restoration of occupied territories, free and secure access to the sea for Serbia, the determination of the relations of the Balkan states to one another by friendly counsel along historically established lines of allegiance and nationality, and international guarantees of their independence and integrity.
12. Secure sovereignty for the Turkish portions of the Ottoman Empire, but for the other nationalities under Turkish rule an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development. The Dardanelles were to be permanently opened to the ships and commerce of all nations under international guarantees.
13. The erection of an independent Polish state on the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations, with free and secure access to the sea and with international guarantees of its independence and territorial integrity.
14. The formation of a general association of nations under specific covenants, affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.

The first five points concerned the causes of the war and the principles of future international relations: secret diplomacy, freedom of the seas, trade, armaments and colonies. The next eight were territorial questions, and the last announced an organisation that later took the form of the League of Nations. Many of these ideas the president had already foreshadowed a year earlier in his speech on peace without victory. The wording was carefully considered. In the point on Austria-Hungary Wilson did not speak of breaking up the monarchy, and in the Italian point, which he himself had written in the margin of the Inquiry memorandum, he in practice rejected the Italian claims to the Adriatic coast and German-speaking Tyrol laid down in the Treaty of London. To the suggestion that the Turkish point should name Armenia, Mesopotamia and Syria, House replied that what had been written was sufficient. The Balkan point was, as the editor of the House papers later admitted, the weakest part of the whole programme.

After the programme the president gave his assurance that in these matters the United States were “intimate partners” of all the governments and peoples fighting the imperialists and were ready to fight for them to the end. They did not envy Germany her greatness and did not wish to harm her, if she was willing to take “a place of equality instead of a place of mastery” among the nations. Nor did they intend to dictate her form of government, but they had to know in whose name her representatives were speaking. Through the whole programme, he said at the end, ran one principle: justice to all peoples and their right to live in liberty and safety, whether they were strong or weak. For this principle Americans were ready to devote their lives, their honour and everything they possessed.

The thirteenth point

For the Poles the thirteenth point was the most important. In Polish translation it read: “An independent Polish state should be erected which should include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations, which should be assured a free and secure access to the sea, and whose political and economic independence and territorial integrity should be guaranteed by international covenant.” It was the first so concrete commitment by a great power to the Polish cause. In January 1917 Wilson had still spoken generally of “a united, independent and autonomous Poland”. Now an independent Poland with access to the sea and international guarantees became an official war aim of the United States. Three days earlier Lloyd George had spoken only of a Poland comprising the lands whose population wished to belong to it, with no mention of the sea.

Poles influenced the wording of the point. According to the House papers, when Poland was discussed on 5 January, the colonel gave the president memoranda of the Polish National Committee in Paris, which the United States had recognised in November as the official Polish organisation. They contained a paragraph that the Committee had wanted written into the declaration of the Inter-Allied Conference, but it had been rejected. Wilson and House decided that it could not be adopted in full, and the thirteenth point came as close to it as the president thought reasonable. For years Ignacy Jan Paderewski had pressed the Polish cause with House and Wilson; in January 1917 he had prepared a memorandum for the president demanding access to the sea. Roman Dmowski later wrote that Wilson’s taking up of the Polish question was owed to Paderewski’s personal influence.

The point was, however, ambiguous. It was not known which lands were inhabited by an “indisputably Polish” population, and the mixed areas in the west and east were to become the subject of disputes. Access to the sea could be understood as the annexation of Pomerania and Danzig or as free transit along the Vistula. German commentators understood at once what was at stake. The Berlin Volkszeitung wrote that the president was demanding “in veiled language” the separation of the Polish-inhabited parts of Prussia. A German liberal who passed on the views of moderate circles in Berlin to the Americans considered the point acceptable, but on condition that it did not mean the surrender of any part of Prussia and that the question of access to the sea could be settled by an agreement on the Vistula.

In the Polish lands the address, like the speech of 1917, was received with enthusiasm and awakened great hopes connected with America. From these two speeches came the legend of Wilson as a friend of Poland, alive throughout the interwar period. The diplomat Michał Sokolnicki later wrote that point XIII “raised Polish minds to the proper measure and assessment of events in the world” and gave a glimmer of hope, “still seeming, at the dawn of 1918, an illusory mirage”.

Reception

In the United States the address was received almost unanimously. It was supported both by the Republican Theodore Roosevelt and by the socialists. The New York Tribune, usually unfriendly to the president, called it a “second Emancipation Proclamation”: just as Abraham Lincoln had freed the slaves, so Wilson had pledged the country to fight for the liberation of the Belgian and the Pole, the Serb and the Romanian.

In Britain the press praised the idealism of the address, but even the liberal dailies friendly to the president wrote with mistrust of the freedom of the seas, which struck at the British blockade. The Times complained that in his lofty flight the president did not take account of hard realities. The American ambassador in London, Walter Hines Page, reported that the address together with Lloyd George’s speech had dispelled the New Year gloom. On 10 January the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress, the executive of the Labour Party and representatives of the co-operative movement issued a joint statement declaring that there was no point in Wilson’s programme on which the allied democracies could differ. They called the address one of the “classic utterances” of the war, valuing especially its demand for open diplomacy and its support for revolutionary Russia.

In France the point on Alsace-Lorraine was received most warmly. The American ambassador in Paris, William Sharp, wrote that no event had so stirred the French. The publicist Gustave Hervé called the address “a new victory of the Marne”. The prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, is credited with the barbed remark that the good Lord had been content with ten commandments, while Wilson needed fourteen. The ambassador of the former Russian government, Vasily Maklakov, came to Sharp to give moving thanks for the words about Russia. In Italy the reception was cool. The foreign minister, Sidney Sonnino, warned the American ambassador that the Germans would use such speeches to break the unity of their opponents, and the press feared that the ninth point cancelled the Italian claims to the eastern coast of the Adriatic.

In Germany the press was almost unanimously hostile. The Kölnische Zeitung called the address “a clumsy trap”, and the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung wrote that the fourteen points were not a peace programme but “a symphony of the will to discord”. Even the Social Democratic Vorwärts suspected that the president merely wanted to lure Russia back with the mirage of a general peace into the bloody swamp of war. The German government remained silent for more than two weeks. On the Bolsheviks the programme, as the editor of the House papers, Charles Seymour, later wrote, made no great impression, although the Americans distributed its text in Russia in hundreds of thousands of copies.

Significance

The address did not achieve its immediate aims. Russia did not return to the war, the Entente did not give up the secret treaties, and the German Supreme Army Command was preparing a great offensive in the west. On 24 January Chancellor Georg von Hertling and Foreign Minister Ottokar Czernin replied publicly to Wilson and Lloyd George, and the president answered them on 11 February. In time, however, the Fourteen Points became more than a wartime appeal. In October 1918 it was to Wilson that the German government turned with a request for an armistice on the basis of his programme, and the Fourteen Points, with the Allies’ reservations on the freedom of the seas and reparations, served as the basis of the Armistice of Compiègne and the peace negotiations in Paris. On 7 October 1918, citing the president’s programme, the Regency Council proclaimed the independence of Poland in Warsaw. The Treaty of Versailles gave Poland access to the sea through Pomerania and created the Free City of Danzig. After the war one of the squares of Warsaw was named after Wilson.