Wilson's "21 Blunders"

OPINION

"So costly were his mistakes--and ours --and so strong is the likelihood that we shall run through the same tragic cycle again, that I regard it as a solemn duty to lay aside all personal predilections and present some pertinent if disagreeable truths."

The speaker was Thomas A. Bailey, Stanford historian, addressing the American Historical Association in Manhattan last week. The mistakes he spoke of were Woodrow Wilson's. Professor Bailey proceeded to cap Woodrow Wilson's 14 points by listing no fewer than 21 "peacemaking blunders" committed by the World War I President. Professor Bailey, author of the most readable modern book on U.S. diplomacy, A Diplomatic History of the American People, scored as "perhaps Wilson's most tragic blunder" his belief "that mankind could attain a kind of international millennium at one bound. He confused the task of making peace with Germany, which was an immediate need, with that of remaking the world, which was the long-range need."

But in many ways the President's "supreme blunder," argued Professor Bailey, was in "forcing the full text of the League Covenant into the Treaty, for Article X of the Covenant (mutual protection against aggression) was the rock upon which ratification finally foundered." Had Wilson been content with a brief statement committing the signatories of the Treaty to the general principles of the League, Historian Bailey thinks that a Covenant drawn up after the 1920 elections might well have been approved by the Senate.

Among the other 19 blunders: 1) Wilson's "vague, unrealistic" 14 Points;* 2) his failure to educate Americans during the war in their postwar responsibilities; 3) his premature forcing of a republican government on Germany; 4) his appeal for a Democratic Congress in October 1918; 5) his appointment of a single, uninfluential Republican to the five-man peace commission; 6) his snubbing of the Senate; 7) his inept handling of publicity; 8) his badly timed stand against the Allied secret treaties; 9) his failure to publicize his League ideas before going to Paris; 10) "his sabotaging the whole idea of a preliminary treaty"; II) his choice of "shell shocked" Paris for the conference.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, ardent student of Wilson's peacemaking mistakes, has often told friends that he is resolved not to repeat them.

*"The fact that in 1918 the German nation, led astray by the lying words of the United States President [Wilson], believed it could hasten the end by a voluntary armistice not only drove Germany into the deepest disaster but was responsible for the present war."--Adolf Hitler in his 1944 New Year's Proclamation to the German People.

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