Woodrow Wilson:
A Love Scorned

Dedicated to John Bruton, European Ambassador to the United States.

"Books are good enough in their own way, but,
they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life."
(Robert Louis Stevenson, 1876)

The US President Woodrow Wilson loved England and everything English but in the end, England broke Woodrow Wilson's heart. England betrayed every value and principle of civil liberty and democracy which poor Wilson believed were the soul that made England a superior civilization amongst nations instead of "A wolf in lamb's skin".

No man was more able to make an objective study of President Wilson than his friend, Frederic C. Howe. Both were of Scotch-Irish descent "which means that they were Scotch Presbyterians who went over to Ireland and took the land away from the Irish and gave them their Scotch brand of religion in exchange" (The Confessions Of A Reformer, Frederic C. Howe, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925, page Nine).

Howe once shared the same boarding house with Wilson. In 1914, the President appointed Howe United States Commissioner of Immigration at the Port of New York or as the emigrants called it, Ellis Island.

Twenty years ago, Brendan Clifford came across this remarkable man Howe in James Connolly's The Workers' Republic newspaper:

"His paper, The Workers' Republic, is packed with material on Germany all through 1915 and right up to Easter 1916. It includes extracts from "Socialized Germany", by Frederic Howe, an American who made a study of German society before the war.

"I got hold of Howe's book, because those extracts were so persuasive, and found the complete book even more persuasive. Howe, who was not a socialist, gives a detailed description of productive socialism developing in a variety of forms, and flexibly interweaving itself with private industry." (Labour & Trade Union Review, April/June 1988, p17).

On the basis of Howe's findings in 1914, Germany, socially and politically was a far more advanced society than Britain ever was.

---

"At Johns Hopkins, Woodrow Wilson fell under the spell of Walter Bagehot, one of the greatest of British essayists. He urged his students to read and reread Bagehot as he himself had done. His Congressional Government was said to have been inspired by Bagehot's British Constitution, as were many of his essays on public men. Bagehot gave the student Wilson that which his mind wanted; a picture of what a great constitutional statesman should be. Through Bagehot's eyes he saw British statesmen as he saw himself. They were drawn from the best families, trained from youth for the service of the state. They grew up in the atmosphere of Oxford and Cambridge, and were exalted by traditions of disinterested public service. They had no private ends to serve; because of their independent wealth they were influenced only by the welfare of the empire. They were the natural rulers of the constitutional state. England was a gentleman's country. And Mr. Wilson believed in gentlemen, in selected men, in the platonic sense of the term. To Woodrow Wilson the scholar it was easy to idealize a country that put its scholars in politics and kept them there as it kept Arthur Balfour, James Bryce, and other men of his own type." (p36) (The Confessions of a Reformer, Frederic C. Howe, 1925).

"Woodrow Wilson loved England as the mother of civil liberty and of parliamentary government. She had given us the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, and Petition of Rights. She had exiled the Stuarts for their betrayal of English liberties and had called in Cromwell and William of Orange to re-establish them. In his mind England was the literal mother of America. From her we had taken our political institutions. Also our system of jurisprudence. His chief criticism of the American Constitution related to those features which failed to follow the British parliamentary model. It was this love for British forms that led him to read his messages to Congress in person and to treat himself as a Premier rather than as a President. As a matter of fact he was better fitted by temperament to serve as a parliamentary leader than as a President, and he would have felt much more at home at Westminster than in Washington." (ibid. p37).

"Mr. Wilson gave us no glimpse of the economic background of the English ruling class. There was always the assumption that these public men were not moved by private gain. It was never hinted in his lecture-room that the British landed gentry, bankers, and business men enacted laws to protect their own class and group; looked out, in short, for their own interests. Nor that the House of Lords was in the nature of a private corporation representative of special interests even more than the United States Senate. He was not interested in economics" (ibid. p38).

"When Woodrow Wilson landed in France, he was hailed as a Messiah. His presence would bring in the millennium. His photographs cut from newspapers had a place beside the highly coloured representations of the Virgin Mary in peasants' cottages of France, Italy, and Spain. People knelt by the side of the railway when his train passed. Men even expected a new economic order. They dimly hoped for deliverance from war, a deliverance that was to come through the great American emancipator, Woodrow Wilson. For a time, Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and Orlando were apprehensive of this veneration; it was whispered that Wilson might appeal to the people and the people might repudiate their rulers" (ibid. p307).

"At Paris, President Wilson stood on a pinnacle. He had lifted the world to his own idealism, and the world seemed ready for a Messianic dispensation.

"By choice he stood alone. He was without commanding advisers. His aides were inconspicuous men. …He had only the scantiest knowledge of Europe, of the men whom he had to meet. He professed to be ignorant of the secret treaties that confounded his pledges. The Peace Conference was to be a personal affair; he hoped that it would be largely personal to him and Mr. Arthur Balfour. It was to be guided by his Magna Carta, the lineal issue of other great Anglo-Saxon charters, beginning with the barons at Runnymede and ending with Thomas Jefferson. Men had conquered with the pen as well as with the sword. He would bring liberty to a distracted world by the pen. He would bring it alone" (ibid. p308).

"England fed this isolated grandeur. And England knew Woodrow Wilson better than did we. She knew him as she knows so many things that no other country thinks it worth while to know. She had studied his written words; had penetrated into his hidden psychology. She knew his strength and his weakness. England had sent Mr. Arthur Balfour to Washington to win him to the war. Mr. Balfour was the statesman-philosopher, the model of President Wilson's university aristocrat. He best represented the England that Mr. Wilson knew from Walter Bagehot. The England he had written about, the mother of America. The Balfour family had always been a family of rulers. They had no interest in trade. The knew nothing of the vulgarity of practical politics. Other British emissaries had been picked with the same insight. And England bowed to the Messianic Wilson; she accepted him on his own measure of himself. The King received him with sovereign honours at Buckingham Palace. Peers, commoners, people claimed him as their own. The press sanctioned his idealism as the idealism of English peoples. They seemed to accept his leadership of the world" (ibid. p308).

"While England swelled this Messianic vision, France pricked it. The Paris press was cynical; under government direction it sneered. Daily editorials questioned the President's vision of himself. Clemenceau said: 'God gave us Ten Commandments—we have not followed them; but Wilson has given us Fourteen.' His reference to the 'tin Jesus' was quoted all over Paris. It stung. A master of dramatic art, he played on France's sufferings, on her moderation. Balfour, the man on whom Wilson relied, was first of all a Briton. He spoke as a philosopher but acted as a politician" (ibid. p309).

"The President had a contempt for Lloyd George, which he incautiously expressed; and he came to have a hatred of Clemenceau which the latter took no pains to assuage. To these men Woodrow Wilson was impractical, naive. His peace without victory had aided in breaking down German morale. His idealism had deceived the world and helped to win the war. But why did he think his words were different from other war propaganda? It was ridiculous that he should think them so important; his Fourteen Points so sacred. They had never been agreed to, anyhow" (ibid. p309).

"The secret treaties were now brought forward; plans for the distribution of the spoils, for the dismemberment of Germany, the destruction of middle Europe. Mr. Wilson professed to have no knowledge of the secret treaties, which confounded all his pledges, although they had been printed in America. He was indifferent, if not irritated, over imperialism, and was wholly unprepared for criticism and attack from sources from which he has least expected it. Neither France nor England felt gratitude; rather they felt resentment that we had not come in earlier. We had made money from their necessities. That, too, could not be forgotten. Among his confreres he was an inexperienced colonial, to be confused, outwitted, played on; now a saviour of the world, now an obstructionist to speedy peace, now an ingrate to the sufferings of England and France. That it was primarily their war, not ours; that we had come in because of appeals for help; that we had abandoned our traditions and made our own sacrifices, was a point of view to which they were impervious. That we had made these sacrifices because we sincerely believed that they too wanted an end to war, received no credence" (ibid. p310).

"The President's Fourteen Points had no supporters. England would not even consider his freedom of the seas; command of the seas was protection to her empire. She would not renounce conquest. Conquest was a word she did not know. Her empire was a trust, a sacred burden, which could not be discussed. She had seized her winnings by war in Africa, in Mesopotamia, in the islands of the sea. She had gained control of the raw materials of the earth. She would hold them as her spoils. They were not open to disposition by the Peace Conference" (ibid. p310).

"France would draw a cordon about Germany—Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Baltic States, and the Balkans. Austro-Hungary would be dismembered and new countries created. France needed allies, more enemies of Germany. Italy would have the Adriatic; Greece demanded Smyrna, part of Turkey. Japan would have Shantung; she had taken it herself from Germany" (ibid. p310).

"The President was unable to cope with the men about him, who used every device to confuse, to cheat him. He did not trust his advisers. He could not possibly know the significance of what was being proposed, of decisions made, of the things he concurred in. He wanted approval, but was met with a sneer; he reached out for support, but found deceit" (ibid. p310).

"And when he had delivered his sermon, he had exhausted his armour. When he abandoned one principle he abandoned all" (ibid. p310).

"Mr. Wilson could not bear criticism… after he had decided for war, he allowed to other men scarcely a day in which to change their opinions as had he; he denounced as 'wilful men' members of Congress who did not accede to his superior wisdom; he set the Department of Justice in motion to speedily imprison men for saying one day the things he had said the day before" (ibid. p312).

"Had the President remained a Messiah, content with approval from himself alone, he might possibly have won. He might have failed, but his failure would have been a Messianic failure in keeping with his vision of himself. It might have upset governments, widened revolutions; it would have left an imperishable influence on the world" (ibid. p313).

"But he choose to barter. When he began to barter, he lost all; he lost his own vision of himself, and he had to keep this vision of himself intact. It and his principles were all that he had brought to Paris" (ibid. p313).

"A man less idealistic would have been betrayed as he was betrayed, but he would have been a better bargainer. He would have used America's financial power. He would have brought pressure to bear. He might have threatened. He would have descended more frankly to the world in which he found himself. But the evangelist could do none of these things frankly, and the President was an evangelist" (p313).

"Mankind needs evangelism as well as achieving statesmanship. Had Wilson remained the evangelist he might have broken Clemenceau and Lloyd George. But he chose political power. As the politician he failed. But his words carrying promise of a new dispensation fell on soil that had been made ready by the pledges of the war and the common sufferings of peoples. And the winged words of the President ripened these aspirations into revolution in Ireland, in Egypt, in Mesopotamia, in Africa, in India. As an evangelist he achieved what he possibly least wanted to achieve. He helped to free Ireland. He heartened the Egyptians, the Arabs, and the Indians. He set aflame fires that are slowly driving the white men from other people's countries. It was as an evangelist that President Wilson realized his reveries of himself. As an evangelist he takes his place among the great men of history" (ibid. p314).

"President Wilson's sense of insecurity, when outside of his study, made him vulnerable. He was unwilling to face defeat. He would not face failure. To escape failure he sacrificed principles. To save appearances he made gestures against Italy over Fiume, against France over Syria. His constant struggle was to preserve the semblance even when the substance was lost" (ibid. p314).

"When President Wilson returned to America the people were ready to accept his failures and understand the cause. It was his assertion that he had brought back the peace he had promised that turned the tide. The people did not believe what he said. They heckled him in his meetings. They forced him to see himself. It was then that his strength gave way, his health broke. He lost his vision of himself when he discovered that it was no longer held by others. The pinnacle from which he fell was within himself. That was the tragedy of the Peace Messiah" (p316, The Confessions of a Reformer, Frederic C. Howe, 1925).

---

"Very quickly, the values of the Ulster-Presbyterians became the values of Americans, evolving to what is commonly referred to today as the "American way"." (Woodrow Wilson—A Presbyterian President, Ronnie Hanna, Ulster Society (Publications) Ltd., 1992).

---

In the 1916 election, the Democratic campaign slogan, "He kept us out of war", helped return Wilson to the White House; Charles Evans Hughes, his main opponent was defeated by a very close margin. Wilson immediately attempted to mediate between the warring nations, but without success.

"In 1917 he proclaimed American entrance into World War I a crusade to make the world "safe for democracy" (White House Web site, 2008).

The peace treaty went down to defeat in the Senate, as a consequence of Wilson's stroke-induced rigidity. He demanded that Democratic senators spurn all efforts at compromise with Cabot Lodge and the Republicans. Twice, on 19th November 1919, and 19th March 1920, the Treaty of Versailles failed to gain the two-thirds vote necessary for ratification, in fact the United States never ratified the Treaty of Versailles (The Paris Peace Conference). Later, under Warren G. Harding, Wilson's Republican successor, the United States made a separate peace with Germany, something Wilson had believed "would place ineffable stain upon the gallantry and honor of the United States". The United States never joined the League of Nations.

Wilson went on a whirlwind political "tour of the States but the Irish were everywhere to heckle and interrupt him, causing him to have a severe stroke…" (Accepting The Challenge, Memoirs Of Michael Flannery, Clo Saoirse, Irish Freedom Press, 2001).

At the eve of the World War I Britain needed the support from the World Jewry, which had been neutral, and which represented a large part of the population of Germany and Austria-Hungary. The declaration was drafted by Arthur James Balfour, with the help of US President, Woodrow Wilson, who was a strong supporter of Zionism.

Woodrow Wilson
and Irish Independence

The following extracts are from: Accepting The Challenge—The Memoirs Of Michael Flannery (Clo Saoirse, Irish Freedom Press, 2001).

"In January of 1917, President Wilson addressed Congress and outlined the conditions under which America would be justified in entering the War. He said, among other things, that the only conditions under which America would be justified in entering the war and accepting the peace settlement that would result at its ending were:

"'That every nation should adopt the doctrine of President Monroe, as the doctrine of the world. No nation should extend its rule or politics over another nation or people. That every nation should have the right to control its own destiny, unhindered, unthreatened, and unafraid, the small as well as the most powerful. I am proposing government by the consent of the governed. Those are American principles. They are the principles of mankind and must prevail. There must be a spirit of justice and freedom and of right.'" (p29).

"We believe these fundamental things. First, that every people has the right to choose the sovereignty under which they shall live. Second, that the small nations of the world have the right to enjoy the same respect for their sovereignty and for their territorial integrity, that great and powerful nations expect.". (p28).

"British leaders had no qualms in agreeing with Wilson. Bonar Law pointed out that it was for that they were fighting. Lloyd George said: 'We are fighting for the freedom of small nations as well as big ones'" (ibid. p29).

The Peace Conference was held in Versailles, Paris, with President Wilson presiding. Ireland was not allowed representation at the Peace Conference. Even though she had lost a proportionate number of soldiers in the war, her plea would not be heard.

"The Irish delegates meeting with President Wilson were told there was an agreement between the Committee of Four [Britain, France, Russia and the U.S.A.], that no small nation could appear before them without the unanimous consent of all four, allowing England to veto the proposal. [Frank P.] Walsh reminded the President of his own declaration about the rights of small nations to self-determination. Wilson gave a lengthy answer which ended:

"'You do not know the anxieties I have experienced as a result of the millions who had their hopes raised by what I said.'" (p46).

Wilson's grandfather, James, came from Dergalt, Strabane, Co. Tyrone. It is claimed he worked in the printing trade in Strabane. Woodrow Wilson was a generation closer to Ireland than either the Kennedys or the Fitzgeralds. Ronnie Hanna claims "…at heart he remained what he was born, an Ulster Presbyterian". Yet, in all the books and web-sites, very little mention is made of his Ulster birth, his Scotch-Irish is emphasised all the time, i.e. Scotch Presbyterian.

Wilson was conferred the Freedom of Cork City in 1919, and therefore an Honorary Burgess of the City of Cork:

"Dr. Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States, elected 10th January, 1919, as a mark of approval of the high principles laid down by him for the settlement of the peace of the world, of justice between nations, and the rights of people" (Cork Corporation handbook, 1979).

Woodrow Wilson's
Fourteen Points

I. Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.

II. Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas, outside territorial waters, alike in peace and in war, except as the seas may be closed in whole or in part by international action for the enforcement of international covenants.

III. The removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers and the establishment of an equality of trade conditions among all the nations consenting to the peace and associating themselves for its maintenance.

IV. Adequate guarantees given and taken that national armaments will be reduced to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety.

V. A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined.

VI. The evacuation of all Russian territory and such a settlement of all questions affecting Russia as will secure the best and freest cooperation of the other nations of the world in obtaining for her an unhampered and unembarrassed opportunity for the independent determination of her own political development and national policy and assure her of a sincere welcome into the society of free nations under institutions of her own choosing; and, more than a welcome, assistance also of every kind that she may need and may herself desire. The treatment accorded Russia by her sister nations in the months to come will be the acid test of their good will, of their comprehension of her needs as distinguished from their own interests, and of their intelligent and unselfish sympathy.

VII. Belgium, the whole world will agree, must be evacuated and restored, without any attempt to limit the sovereignty which she enjoys in common with all other free nations. No other single act will serve as this will serve to restore confidence among the nations in the laws which they have themselves set and determined for the government of their relations with one another. Without this healing act the whole structure and validity of international law is forever impaired.

VIII. All French territory should be freed and the invaded portions restored, and the wrong done to France by Prussia in 1871 in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine, which has unsettled the peace of the world for nearly fifty years, should be righted, in order that peace may once more be made secure in the interest of all.

IX. A readjustment of the frontiers of Italy should be effected along clearly recognizable lines of nationality.

X. The peoples of Austria-Hungary, whose place among the nations we wish to see safeguarded and assured, should be accorded the freest opportunity to autonomous development.

XI. Rumania, Serbia, and Montenegro should be evacuated; occupied territories restored; Serbia accorded free and secure access to the sea; and the relations of the several Balkan states to one another determined by friendly counsel along historically established lines of allegiance and nationality; and international guarantees of the political and economic independence and territorial integrity of the several Balkan states should be entered into.

XII. The Turkish portion of the present Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty, but the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development, and the Dardanelles should be permanently opened as a free passage to the ships and commerce of all nations under international guarantees.

XIII. 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.

XIV. A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.