President Wilson Comes to San Francisco to Sell the Versailles Treaty

Wilson on Market Street in San Francisco

After returning from the signing of the Versailles Treaty in June, President Wilson decided to go on the road to convince the American people, and hence the Senate to gain support for the treaty and the League of Nations. Included in the iterinary was a whirlwind visit to the San Francisco Bay Area. He arrived in San Francisco on 17 September 1919 and took part in a procession down Market Street, which was lined with spectators, to the Civic Center Plaza, where 60,000 school children greeted him. President Wilson ascended onto a reviewing stand there to acknowledge the crowd but soon left for the St. Francis Hotel, where he and his wife were staying. 

The President with San Francisco's High Society

His two best-remembered presentations were to a ladies' group representing the upper crust of San Francisco society at the Palace Hotel's lovely Garden Court  and at the city's new Civic Auditorium  when he was introduced by a political enemy, the ever-present Republican Mayor, James "Sunny Jim"  Rolph, who was nevertheless upbeat with his preliminary comments. Newspaper reports indicate that the president, who we now know had begun experiencing some symptoms of his soon-to-strike debilitating illness, was in top form that night, winning over a partly hostile crowd. 

Two Venues: San Francisco's Palace Hotel & Civic Auditorium

The next day the President crossed the bay and spoke at the Greek Theater on the Berkeley campus of the University of California. A transcript from the speech captures what was probably his main appeal for support of the Versailles Treaty in language obviously tailored to an educated audience:

. . . The burden that is upon my heart as I go about on this errand is that men are hesitating to give us the chance. We can not do any effective thinking for the world until we know that there is settled peace. We can not make any long plans for the betterment of mankind until these initial plans are made, and we know that there is going to be a field and an opportunity to make the plans that will last and that will become effective. That is the ground of my impatience with the debate. I admit that there are debatable things, but I do not admit that they need be debated so long. Not only that, but I do insist that they should be debated more fairly. 

A remark was repeated to me that was made after the address I made in San Francisco last night. Some man said that after hearing an exposition of what was really in the treaty he was puzzled; he wondered what the debate was about; it all seemed so simple. That was not, I need not assure you, because I was misleading anybody or telling what was not in the treaty, but because the men he had heard debate it, some of the newspapers he had heard debate it, had not told him what was in the treaty. This great document of human rights, this great settlement of the world, had been represented to him as containing little traps for the United States. Men had been going about dwelling upon this, that, and the other feature and distorting the main features and saying that that was the peace proposed. They are responsible for some of the most serious mistakes that have ever been made in the history of this country; they are responsible for misleading the opinion of the United States; It is a very distressing circumstance to me to find that when I recite the mere facts they are novel to some of my fellow citizens. 

Young gentlemen and young ladies, what we have got to do is to see that that sort of thing can not happen. We have got to know what the truth is and insist that everybody shall know what the truth is, and, above all things else, we must see that the United States is not defeated of its destiny, for its destiny is to lead the world in freedom and in truth.

President Wilson (Seated Lower Center) at the
Greek Theater, University of California

After leaving San Francisco, Wilson continued on his nationwide tour in support of the Treaty.  It came to an abrupt end, however, on 26 September when he suffered a serious stroke in Wichita, KS. By the way, the Palace Hotel—rebuilt after the 1906 earthquake and fire—had been a popular hospitality center for troops during the war and would later be the site of President Warren Harding's death in 1923.