Imagining Woodrow Wilson in Asia: Dreams of East-West Harmony and the Revolt against Empire in 1919

Extract

Imagination fails to picture the wild delirium of joy with which he [Woodrow Wilson] would have been welcomed in Asiatic capitals. It would have been as though one of the great teachers of humanity, Christ or Buddha, had come back to his home.

Srinivasa Sastri1

When Woodrow Wilson landed in the harbor of Brest on the French Atlantic coast on Friday, December 13, 1918, the city's mayor met him at the dock and greeted him as an apostle of liberty, come to release the peoples of Europe from their suffering. The next morning, Wilson drove along the streets of Paris through cheering throngs, and the French press across the political spectrum hailed him as “the incarnation of the hope of the future.” The U.S. president met similar receptions in England and Italy over the next several weeks.2 H. G. Wells captured the essence of popular sentiments a few years later, when he noted the intense yet fleeting nature of Wilson's apotheosis: “For a brief interval, Wilson stood alone for mankind. And in that brief interval there was a very extraordinary and significant wave of response to him throughout the earth … He ceased to be a common statesman; he became a Messiah.”3 Despite such high passions, however, the story of the ecstatic reception accorded the U.S. president in Europe is remembered today as little more than an ironic footnote to the history of the Great War. Most of the hopes and expectations associated with Wilson were quickly disappointed, and the widespread reverence of the U.S. leader in Europe and elsewhere quickly turned into bitter disillusionment.4 The terms of the Treaty of Versailles, signed on June 28, 1919, fell far short of the expectations that Wilson had inspired, and it was repudiated by most of his former admirers around the world, and also by the U.S. Senate and the American public, who were eager to return to the comforting embrace of “normalcy.”5