FDR - Jean Edward Smith [107]
Nevertheless, a festive air gripped the city. Those with money could still find wonderful clothes and jewels. The restaurants, when they could get supplies, were marvelous, and the nightclubs sparkled with gaiety. “I never saw anything like Paris,” wrote Eleanor. “The scandals going on would make many a woman at home unhappy. It is no place for the boys [i.e., American soldiers], especially the younger ones.… All the women in the restaurant look to me exaggerated, some pretty, all chic, but you wonder if any are ladies.”10
The Roosevelts were billeted by the Navy in a suite at the Ritz, where the lobby swarmed with foreign dignitaries sent to attend the peace conference that was about to begin. Woodrow Wilson arrived in the city the first week of January, after a triumphal tour of Great Britain and Western Europe. David Lloyd George arrived on January 11. The following day the Supreme Council of peacemakers—Wilson, Lloyd George, Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando of Italy, and Georges Clemenceau—convened for the first time.11 They met in the ornate chambers of the French Foreign Ministry on the Quai d’Orsay, where, as host, Clemenceau presided. For the most part their discussions were conducted in English. Clemenceau, who had lived many years in the United States, spoke English fluently, and Orlando was minimally conversant.12
As the only head of state, Wilson was accorded a chair a few inches higher than the others, but of the four, Wilson was in the most precarious political position.13 Lloyd George was fresh from parliamentary elections in which his coalition had won a huge majority; Clemenceau had just received an unprecedented 398–93 vote of confidence in the Chamber of Deputies; and Orlando headed a left-center government that was virtually unassailable. Only Wilson was fresh from defeat, having unwisely declared the congressional midterm elections in November a referendum on his leadership.14 The electorate had responded by giving the GOP control of Congress for the first time since 1910.15
To compound his problem, Wilson had excluded the Senate from the negotiations. The American delegation, in addition to Secretary of State Lansing and Colonel House, included more than twenty academic specialists but not one member of the U.S. Senate, which ultimately would have to pass judgment on the peace treaty.* Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts would soon become chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and was on record as supporting a league of nations.16 The personal animosity between Wilson and Lodge was notorious, but to have included him would have been an act of statesmanship from which the president would have benefited substantially. Equally damaging, Wilson had thumbed his nose at the nation’s Republican leadership, almost all of whom had supported the war vigorously. William Howard Taft, Charles Evans Hughes, and Elihu Root had all endorsed the idea of a league, and their inclusion would have given the delegation a bipartisan cast.17 Instead, Wilson chose to go it alone, convinced, as always, that his mission was divinely ordained.
The meetings of the Supreme Council were held in camera, and the participants’ discussions remained secret. So much for “open covenants, openly arrived at,” the first of Wilson’s Fourteen Points. But it was just as well the sessions were closed because relations among the Big Four were tepid at best.18 Orlando correctly perceived that he was being patronized; Lloyd George, the quintessential opportunist, had difficulty adhering to a fixed course; Clemenceau was all too fixed, obsessed with the need to provide for French security; while Wilson spoke with the dogmatic assurance of a Presbyterian elder. “What ignorance of Europe and how difficult all understandings were with him,” said Clemenceau. “He believed you could do everything by formulas and his fourteen points. God himself was content with ten commandments. Wilson modestly inflicted fourteen points on us … the fourteen commandments of the most empty theory.”19
FDR played no role at the peace conference.