Historians & doctors: your take on the Spanish flu, Wilson & the Treaty of Versailles

Great Debates
1

I just finished reading an interesting book: The Great Influenza, by John M. Barry. The book is about the Spanish flu epidemic in 1918-1920 and the researchers that tried to understand what was happening (mostly from an American perspective).

One of the things that Barry underscores is that scientists and doctors weren’t sure that they were actually dealing with the flu much of the time, because the virulence and some of the symptoms were so different from the “common” flu. Some of the more unusual reports of illness included complications related to “serious mental disturbances and even psychoses” that weren’t just fever-induced delirium. A decade later, some researchers were apparently relating the flu to an increase in Parkinson’s and even “temporary” schizophrenia. The ability of the flu to occasionally impact the brain and cause neurological problems is supposedly a commonly accepted view these days.

Barry doesn’t do a lot of what-ifs, but he does do one with regard to the flu, Woodrow Wilson, and what happened at the negotiations for Treaty of Versailles in 1919.

The chain of events, in brief:

Barry notes that Wilson, Georges Clemenceau and Lloyd George had already been negotiating for nearly three months, since January 1919, over the terms of the treaty, with Wilson and Clemenceau in particular deeply at odds with each other. (Clemenceau called Wilson pro-German and “a cook who keeps her trunk ready in the hallway”; Wilson called Clemenceau damnable.) Wilson was bound and determined not to have a treaty that was overly punitive against Germany, while Clemenceau wanted harsh penalties.

In the beginning of April, Wilson had threatened to return to the U.S. rather than give up on his principles. Then, on April 3 around 6 p.m., Wilson came got sick so violently and rapidly that his staff first thought he’d been poisoned. It turned out to be a case of the flu. He was running a fever over 103F, had diarrhea and severe coughing fits and suffered total prostration. A 25-year-old aide of Wilson’s came down with the flu on the same day, and died four days later.

Wilson insisted on returning to negotiations on April 8 (actually, George and Clemenceau came to his bedroom since he was still sick). Barry offers quotes and stories from Wilson’s staff about the change in his behavior during this illness (pg 384-386):

  • Gilbert Close, Wilson’s secretary - said, “I never knew the president to be in such a difficult frame of mind as now. Even while lying in bed he manifested peculiarities.”

  • Herbert Hoover - believed Wilson’s mind had lost “resiliency”

  • Col. Starling of the Secret Service - noticed Wilson’s loss of ability to grasp things quickly

  • Chief White House Usher Irwin Hoover - said that Wilson had suddenly come to believe in a variety of strange ideas, including one that his home was “filled with French spies”, and that Wilson was personally responsible for all the furniture in the furnished place he was living in. Added Hoover, " One thing is certain: he was never the same after this little spell of sickness."

  • Ray Stannard Baker, member of the American peace delegation - says Wilson “could not remember without an effort what the council had done in the afternoon”

Without warning, while still in sick in bed, Wilson abruptly gave in to all of Clemenceau’s major demands, without consulting any other Americans and in complete opposition to his position before he got sick. He also gave Italy pretty much whatever it wanted, and let the Japanese take over German concessions in China.

Lloyd George is quoted as remarking on Wilson’s “nervous and spiritual breakdown in the middle of the Conference.” A number of diplomatic aides and advisers resigned in protest. John Maynard Keynes called Wilson “the greatest fraud on earth” for not standing up for his principles.

Four months later, Wilson suffered a stroke from which he never really recovered.

Barry suggests that neurological complications of the flu essentially caused Wilson to lose it at the peace negotiations, and that his subsequent stroke may have been related to blood vessel damage caused by the flu itself (since some autopsied flu victims had shown such damage). He also notes that only one historian, Alfred Crosby, has ever ascribed Wilson’s behavior in Paris in April 1919 as the result of the flu; everyone else who has waded in with a diagnosis after the fact has suggested arteriosclerosis and/or a mild stroke.

Which brings me to a couple of things I think could be debated (though it might get a little unwieldy in here; I suppose a separate thread could be branched off if needed).

One debate is for the medical people: How likely is it that Wilson’s behavior was the result of complications from the flu, rather than simple flu crappiness? I can’t get a good feel for how widely the flu/neurological complications link is accepted from Barry’s narrative. I also don’t know if there are other candidate illnesses that maybe weren’t well understood at that time that would have similar symptoms to what is somewhat vaguely described for Wilson.

The other debate is for the history people: What do you think the outcome of the Paris negotiations would have been if Wilson hadn’t gotten sick, and stuck to his guns? Would Clemenceau ever have caved on his demands? Would the next couple of decades have been radically different for the Japanese in terms of preparations for aggressive action if they hadn’t gotten bits of China?

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bump

3

I don’t know either, but it sheds a whole new light on things for me at least. I’ve never been much of a fan of Wilson, thought getting us into war in what I consider a purely European conflict was a mistake, and always thought the way he caved in to the allies stupid, short sighted demands was appalling. But then, I never knew he had gotten the flu during the conference, or that his position shifted so radically shortly after he got sick.

So, this is also an long elaborate bump…I’m very curious to see what some of our medical and historian 'dopers have to say on this subject.

-XT

4

Barry is a little bit over-dramatic in depicting Wilson as standing firm, then suddenly being stricken with influenza, and then caving in to all of Clemenceau’s demands. There had been a certain amount of give-and-take throughout the Paris Peace Conference. And it’s not as if Clemenceau got everything he wanted–he didn’t get to annex the Saarland or set up an independent Rhenish Republic, and he had to defer the size of the reparations bill to a committee which met after the war. Likewise, Wilson never did concede Fiume to the Italians, and that issue had to be deferred until the 1920’s, when Italy annexed Fiume.

Given that such concessions as Clemenceau made probably cost him the election of 1920, it’s difficult to imagine him conceding more even if Wilson was healthy as an ox. For his part, Wilson had staked his prestige on American participation in the League of Nations, and it would be difficult for him to withdraw from the conference without a treaty. (This was a foolish move on Wilson’s part, since it reduced his leverage.)

I don’t doubt that Wilson was very sick at the worst possible time, and it certainly didn’t help him. But realistically, I don’t see him standing much more firmly or getting a much softer treaty regardless.

5

[hijack]
I have a theory similar to this about the American Civil War. I’m convinced that Robert E. Lee had suffered a second major heart attack at the beginning of the Battle of Gettysburg and made his decisions thinking he had to win the war “right now”.
[/hijack]

6

Then, the proper course of action would be to start a thread in either Great Debates of GQ, and lay out your position.

7

I haven’t read Barry’s book so I can’t really comment on his ideas. But I have to question whether the flu or his stroke changed Wilson in the way this OP describes. Wilson’s capabilities were certainly diminished but I don’t think his essential personaility was changed. He had always behaved in the manner he did over the passage of the treaty. Wilson’s attitude was basically that he was right so anyone who didn’t do things his way was wrong. Wilson saw compromise as a moral failure to do the right thing. The closest he could come to working with opponents was to explain to them why they were wrong and should change their minds. If he was confronted by people who wouldn’t give in to his wishs, his tendency was usually to walk away and lose everything rather than back down and try to gain as much as possible - he’d rather quit the game then accept anything other than a full victory.

8

Interesting thread, Fozzie. My mother still remembers having the Spanish flu 90 years ago and having it run through the family.

I liked Wilson and had just assumed that he went with the intentions of giving in quite a bit. Your post makes me want to read more. I’m not an historian obviously.

9

But I think the contrast with what you say about Wilson’s personality and the speed at which it apparently changed is exactly Barry’s point. Wilson was ready to walk out rather than give up what he felt was proper; Barry quotes him as having said to Ray Baker, “[W]e’ve got to make peace on the principles laid down and accepted, or not at all.” However, he did apparently cave pretty abruptly at the time he got sick. And the change in his personality was dramatic enough to take his acquaintances totally by surprise, and had doctors speculating for years on whether he suffered a smaller stroke that early April. It’s Barry that’s pointing to uncommon neurological complications of the flu as an explanation for those events.

I admit I’m no historian or doctor, which is why I thought I’d post this thread. All I can say is, from reading Barry’s book I get the impression that Wilson’s about-face and dramatic personality change is not in question - just the reason(s) for them.

Freddy the Pig, I’m probably not doing justice in trying to summarize here. There’s nothing in what Barry writes to make it sound as though there wasn’t any give and take in the negotiations; in fact, Barry himself says (p. 382):

It’s interesting that you think Wilson’s illness ultimately wouldn’t have made any real difference in the terms of the treaty. Let’s say, then, that Wilson never got sick, and that he DID actually walk out, difficult as that may have been for him. What do you think that would have done for Wilson’s/America’s rep then between the two wars (assuming that the path to WWII was set by the treaty terms)?

10

I’m not sure what your asking here.

Do you feel that if Wilson did not “cave in” for whatever reason, that the terms reached at Versailles would have been acceptable enough to the US Senate for that body to ratify the treaty?

I don’t know enough about the politics and politicians of 1919/1920 to be able to hazard a guess in that regard. It’s possible (considering the degree of in fighting that I perceive in politics today) that the Versailles Treaty may not have been ratified, no matter what. (Don’t want to give President wilson or the incumbent party anything to crow about, for example.) It’s possible that there was a segment of the US Senate that did not want to be involved in Europe’s power struggles, and did not want to reward the victors with any territorial or monetary concessions at all. (Wilson tried to express his viewpoint that the (Great) War as a struggle between good & evil, democracy vs autocracy, etc, but I imagine few people accepted and viewed the war quite the way he did. Most were probably a little more cynical about it.)

Also, the isolationist feelings were strong in the US after that war, and it’s possible that there was a strong bloc of politicians that wanted to be involved in no more foreign entanglements. (And thus would not approve joining the LoN in any case.)

I don’t know what it would have taken to reduce the turmoil in post-Great-War Germany exactly. But that turmoil was what lead to WW2. To claim that WW2 was a direct result of the terms of the Versailles Treaty is to be less than complete, IMO.

Versailles exasperated the post-war conditions in Germany, but it wasn’t the sole root of the problems:

Germany suffered from the chaos of having to toss away the government it had run under for almost 40 years, and come up with a whole new government and constitution. During this period of uncertainty, many many groups of folks pulled this way and that to try and get their ideas and agendas into the system, somehow. (Everything from the very fundamental types who wanted a particular system or society, like the hard core communists, to special interest groups, like the industrialists, farmers, church groups, and so on.) Some of these “growing pains” were particularly violent, as passions flared. Versailles had a limited impact on that. (Heh. Other than deposing the Kaiser…)

Germany suffered from a severe economic crisis, stemming from the crushing wartime blockade (and loss of foreign markets, which were difficult to get back once lost) and war debts, and millions of suddenly unemployed and disgruntled young men, and the loss of consumer confidence in the banks and other economic apparatus.

Germany suffered (as it will post WW2) from what I will call “loser’s quilt”, which is a society were the people (to some degree or other) struggle to try to figure out what went wrong, who is to blame, and come to terms with the losses (of life or property), which were all apparently for nothing. Versailles would not have aleviated that, even if Versailles was a more even handed treaty, IMO.

11

No, that’s more my take on what Barry wrote. He writes from what one might call a “flu-centric” perspective–naturally enough, since he’s writing a book about the flu. He presents it as, Wilson was standing firm, and then he got sick, and then he caved.

Which is somewhat true, chronologically. But, that’s common in any negotiation. You stake out a position, you stand as firmly as you can, the other side stakes out their position, and eventually you compromise. I believe that pattern would have held regardless.

See, that’s the thing–I don’t think he would have walked out, because he had already committed himself to a strong League of Nations, with American participation, as the be-all and end-all of the post-war world. If he walked out, it would have killed any chance for American participation in the League, and the remaining parties might have flushed the League altogether.

Wilson threatened to walk out at several points, even after his illness, but the other parties called his bluff because they knew he wouldn’t leave as long as they promised him the League.

12

The Treaty of Versailles, IMHO, is too often viewed in isolation, and with hindsight. For an idea of the type of peace that Germany would have imposed, given a chance, take a look at the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk which it signed with Russia.

Under this treaty, Russia lost:

[ul]
[li]1/3 of its population[/li][li]1/2 of its industry[/li][li]90% of its coal mines[/li][/ul]

Versailles could have been a LOT tougher. Germany had only existed as a country for a very short time. Breaking it back up into individual states would have been possible.

The short sighted part was probably the reparations. However, given the utter devastation wrecked upon France, I can understand their motivation. Allowing Germany to simply retreat back to behind its prewar borders after fighting a war of aggression on the soil of its enemy would seem a tad unfair.

13

I’ve read this theory elsewhere, and think it a little bit facile to blame the turn of history on Wilson’s getting sick (or even FDR’s being sick at Yalta, for that matter).

Wilson may have wanted to sit astride his high horse and blame all of Europe equally for starting the war, and establish the peace based on an armistice between all combatants rather than as a victory for the Entente, but the facts remain:

Germany started the war (the Kaiser gave the Austrians a blank check to attack Serbia so he could take land from Russia)

The Central Powers behaved badly during the war (atrocities in Serbia, Belgium and Armenia),

They lost the war (after 11/11, the German army dissolved while the French and British stayed in order)

Besides these irrefutable facts, what powers did Wilson have to bring to bear on the French & British? Refuse to supply any more troops to fight a war that was already over? Not lend any more money for uneeded munitions? Not provide naval power to protect sea lanes that were now clear of U-boats? Kind of like the kid who threatens to end the game by taking his ball home - after the game is over.

The US just wasn’t in the same position to call the shots as it would be after WWII: everyone was afraid of revolution in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, but that wasn’t the same as the specter of Stalin’s armies sweeping all the way to the Atlantic. Times were lean, but not as bad as they would be in 1945: the French and British still had their colonies to draw upon, so beyond help for the poor Belgians and enough aid to keep the starving Germans from going Red, nothing as big as the Marshal Plan would have gotten off the drawing board.

14

I don’t see any change in Wilson’s position. His position all along was that accepting half a loaf was not an option. He insisted on either having the whole loaf or foregoing bread entirely. His threats of walking away were an attempt to make the other delegates give in to him. His later agreement with Clemenceau was the equivalent of him walking away - being unable to convince Clemenceau to give him everything he wanted, he instead gave Clemenceau everything Clemenceau wanted. Wilson was unable to understand the idea of compromise and splitting the differences between two positions. He saw politics as being a choice between two alternatives - you either gave full support to one position or you gave full support to the opposing position. Once Wilson realized he couldn’t win the only alternative he saw was for Clemenceau to win. The best outcome Wilson could see at that point was that history would later realize that he had been right and Clemenceau had been wrong.

The same thing happened with the subsequent Senate battle over the League of Nations. Wilson’s allies in the Senate told him that there was not enough support to get the entire treaty passed. But they told him that if they made a few concessions on some issues, they could swing some votes and get the substantial majority of the treaty passed. But Wilson refused to make any changes. He insisted that the treaty be submitted as is and voted on in its entirety. He figured anything less than a complete victory was a defeat and that once again history would prove that he had been right and the Senate had been wrong.

These personality traits existed in Wilson for years and predated his political career. The only changes that I see that possibly originated from the flu or a stroke was that it moved ahead the point where Wilson stopped trying to persuade his opponents to accept defeat and accepted his own defeat. But it was always inevitable that Wilson would surrender to Clemenceau at some point - Wilson did not have the capability to make Clemenceau surrender and his own surrender was the only alternative he was capable of.

15

Yeah, but to be fair, that was when the Kaiser and his government were still in power, and Lenin just wanted Russia out of the war and didn’t give a shit.

I’m currently reading a book entitled The Kings Depart, the Tragedy of Germany: Versailles and the German Resolution, by Richard M. Watt. I think had the Allies not been so eager to punish the Germans after the war so severely, we might have avoided that whole Hitler thing.

(That and the Kaiser and his buddies had already been kicked out of there-the German people shouldn’t have had to suffer as they did).

16

But if Germany had won the war, the Kaiser would still have been in power to impose draconian peace terms on the West. And it isn’t so much that the Bolsheviks “didn’t give a shit”–they walked out of the first round of negotiations over Brest-Litovsk because of the harshness of the German terms. However, they were powerless to resist. The Germans pushed their troops hundreds of miles into Russia, made it clear that their demands would get harsher with each passing month, and finally got the Bolsheviks to sign a peace treaty in March 1918.

I agree with villa that the Versailles Treaty wasn’t as harsh as is sometimes made out. Germany’s loss of the Polish Corridor and Alsace-Lorraine had to be expected; those territories were populated mostly by non-Germans and had originally been seized by Prussia and Germany by war.

As for the reparations, nations had been collecting indemnities from war victims for centuries. Napoleon lived on indemnities from his defeated foes, and the Allies had in turn imposed them on France after 1815. Germany imposed an indemnity on France after the Franco-Prussian War, and on Russia as noted above. The indemnity imposed on Germany was unrealistically large, in keeping with the greater scale of WWI compared to earlier wars. But then, the Germans only paid an eighth of it before the Allies imposed a moratorium, and Hitler repudiated the remainder.

The Versailles Treaty gets bad press because Hitler demagogued it during his rise to power, so it gets blamed for leading to the unique evil of Nazism. But Hitler was a grievance-monger. Other nations have suffered from far harsher peaces than Versailles.

17

Germany launched a war of aggression that it fought almost exclusively on the territory of its enemies. When it defeated one of those enemies, it imposed a treaty of extreme brutality. I have little doubt had Germany been able to do so, it would have imposed similar terms on the Western Allies. Fortunately they weren’t.

I think Hitler was helped into power more by the idea that Germany had not been beaten on the battlefield than by the Versailles Treaty. I can understand the need of Britain and France to end the war in 1918, but a Germany militarily humiliated, occupied, and broken up into its consitutent states, preferably with Prussia demilitarized, broken up further into a series of hopefully squabbling principalities, would have been a more desireable outcome.

Versailles seems to me to fall between two stools. On the one hand the reparations (though totally understandable) were ruinous to Germany. On the other it did not territorially castrate Germany sufficiently.

18

Currently reading America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918 by Alfred W. Crosby.

Homefront info, but very good.

Get the new edition, if possible.

19

You’re right about Alsace and Lorraine. Those provinces were captured by Germany in 1870 and were ethnicly mostly non-German. But Danzig and the Polish Corridor had been continously part of Germany or Prussia since the 18th century and had been inhabited by Germans since the sixteenth century. The problem was that the area where the Poles lived was inland from the Baltic coast. But the delegates at Versailles felt that Poland needed a port and access to the sea to be a viable country. So they gave Poland the port of Danzig and a strip of land to connect it with the rest of Poland. But the people actually living there all considered themselves Germans.

20

Wilson made another bad call in World War I with his refusal to negotiate with the existing German government. He believed that the Kaiser and the military which ran Germany did not truly represent the German people. He felt that only a democratic republican government would be representative and able to negotiate a treaty that would be acceptable to the Germans. It’s a high-minded principle but it backfired badly in reality.

When the army high command decided Germany could no longer fight, they were told that the United States would not negotiate with them for an armistice. So they forced the Kaiser to abdicate and turned over power to a civilian government which then, in accordance with the army’s direction, asked for an armistice. So while it was the generals that wanted to end the war it was the civilians who formally did so. The result of this was that the generals were later able to claim that they had kept fighting and it was the civilians who had quit as soon as they got power.