General John Pershing, commander-in-chief of the American Expeditionary Force, and President Woodrow Wilson are shown together as they review troops in France during Wilson's peace conference mission, Christmas, 1918. | AP Photo This Day in Politics President Wilson lands in France, Dec. 13, 1918

A century has passed since, on this day in 1918, Woodrow Wilson became the first U.S. president to visit Europe while in office. In the aftermath of World War I, Wilson, the nation’s 28th president, would spend the next six months, on and off, in Europe, the longest time any chief executive would remain abroad. The focal point of his trip was to champion the League of Nations, which he hoped would peacefully arbitrate international conflicts and prevent another war like the one just ended.

Wilson sailed to France abroad the S.S. George Washington, a German-built passenger liner that spent the initial war years docked in New York. After the United States entered the conflict in 1917, it became a troopship.


The battleship U.S.S. Pennsylvania protected the vessel on its nine-day crossing. In a show of American naval strength, nine more battleships and 28 destroyers escorted the ship as it entered Brest harbor. (After carrying 4,000 soldiers back home to the United States, the George Washington returned to France in January 1919, carrying Franklin D. Roosevelt, the assistant secretary of the Navy.)

A month before Wilson sailed, Republicans had scored major gains in the midterm congressional elections, returning the Senate to GOP control. Nevertheless, Wilson left behind Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge (R-Mass.), chair of the Foreign Relations Committee. Lodge subsequently became Wilson’s chief nemesis when the president asked the Senate to ratify the League, which sprouted from the negotiations among the Allied powers that culminated in the Treaty of Versailles.

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Joseph Tumulty, Wilson’s private secretary, proposed that Wilson take along Elihu Root, a Republican secretary of War under Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, and later Roosevelt’s secretary of State.

At first, Wilson “appeared to be delighted with this suggestion,” Tumulty reported in his 1921 biography. However, after Robert Lansing, Wilson’s secretary of State, was consulted, the president apparently changed his mind, telling Tumulty that Root “had gained [a reputation] of being conservative, if not reactionary, which would work a prejudice toward [the talks] at the outset.”

At Versailles, the leaders of the victorious Allied Powers opposed Wilson’s concept of a “just and stable peace.” The final treaty called for stiff war reparations from the former Central Powers, who did not participate in the negotiations. Wilson found that “rivalries and conflicting claims previously submerged” made it difficult — if not impossible — for the French and British delegations to accept his Fourteen Points, the basis on which the armistice was struck which ended the war.

The French and the British sought to appease Wilson by consenting to the establishment of a League of Nations. However, in the face of domestic isolationist sentiment and because some of the articles in the League's charter seemingly conflicted with the U.S. Constitution, the Senate never ratified the Treaty of Versailles.

SOURCE: “This Day in Presidential History,” by Paul Brandus (2018)

