While the Americans were alive to the danger of pushing Germany too far, they were less sensitive to the problems of the Allies in repaying what they had borrowed from the United States. Lloyd George proposed that the United States forgive some of that debt and work with the Allies to foster Germany’s recovery, in return for which Britain and France would reduce their reparations demands. Wilson refused, explaining why Britain and France would have to waive reparations.
“You have suggested,” Wilson wrote to Lloyd George, “that we all address ourselves to the problem of helping to put Germany on her feet, but how can your experts or ours be expected to work out a new plan to furnish working capital to Germany when we deliberately start out by taking away all Germany’s present capital? How can anyone expect America to turn over to Germany in any considerable measure new working capital to take the place of that which the European nations have determined to take from her?”
Oddly, something rather like that was what was going to happen over the course of the next dozen years. There would be negotiations and renegotiations of the reparations due the Allies, which originally had been set as high as $33 billion. When Germany finally defaulted on what remained of her debt in 1931, she had, according to Baruch, “paid less than five billion in reparation, and half of that had been borrowed in the United States.”
But at the Paris conference, the wrangling over reparations wrecked the prospects of a recovery plan for the Continent as a whole. Wilson’s economic advisory staff in Paris, spearheaded by Thomas Lamont of Morgan and Norman Davis of the Treasury, had prepared a far-reaching scheme for the economic reconstruction of Europe, in which America’s financial and manufacturing companies were to join hands under the aegis of the American government in a sort of forerunner of the Marshall Plan. A precondition was that the Allies drop their reparations demands, which they refused to do.
The narrowness and selfishness of the European outlook made a lasting impression upon the young Americans in Paris. According to Lamont, writing to his wife June 7, 1919, the British were telling the small nations that whenever Herbert Hoover’s food aid program came to an end—a program of aid with no conditions attached—Great Britain would take care of them, but only if they did all their business with England. Lamont was the British government’s New York banker, but he wrote in disgust that “Great Britain has been on the make from start to finish.”
TORN BY DISPUTES OVER MONEY, the proceedings in Paris had reached a stage of ugliness in which bitterness was generated on all sides. The reparations madness of the Allies, and the weakness of Wilson in agreeing to them, evoked a protest that surfaced in America at the end of the year, when Lippmann published in The New Republic a serialized version of The Economic Consequences of the Peace by John Maynard Keynes, who had quit the British Treasury in protest. It was a powerful and immensely persuasive indictment of the reparations arrangements, and of the President who had accepted them.
For Congress and the American in the street, what was to lead to the most lasting rift in relations with Europe was the failure of the Allies to pay their war debts to the United States.
In Germany, what added insult to injury was the unintended result of some thoughtless phrase-making by John Foster Dulles, the American attorney who served as legal adviser to the American reparations team. The issue Dulles faced was that although the President had agreed to the full Allied reparations bill, nobody knew how much it amounted to. It would take time to calculate it. Dulles proposed referring the matter to a commission. To define the full parameters of German legal liability broadly enough so that the commission would be free to arrive at almost any figure it chose, Dulles drafted what became Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles, by the terms of which the German government was compelled to admit “the responsibility of Germany and her Allies for all the loss to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her Allies.”
This “war guilt” clause, which flatly contradicted what President Wilson had said when urging Congress to declare war—that the war was not against the German people—was exploited in the years that followed by Nazi demagogues of the street and the beerhall who sought to destroy the peace and the Allies who had imposed it.
31
CLOSING UP SHOP AT THE PEACE TALKS
We lived many lives in those whirling campaigns, never sparing ourselves: yet when we achieved and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to re-make in the likeness of the former world they knew. Youth could win, but had not learned to keep: and was pitiably weak against age. We stammered that we had worked for a new heaven and a new earth, and they thanked us kindly and made their peace.
—T. E. Lawrence
THE BRITISH PRESS LORD George Riddell, a confidant of the prime minister’s, noted in his diary March 21, 1919, “Great dissatisfaction at slow progress of Peace Conference negotiations.” On March 24 he wrote: “Later saw Philip Kerr”—Lloyd George’s secretary—“and told him the feelings of dissatisfaction were growing and that a general attack by all sections of the Press might be expected”; and the same day, after seeing a news release about a minor matter that was taking up the time of the Allied leaders: “I thought it advisable to let the public know that drastic steps were being taken to conclude terms of peace.”
On March 28 Riddell noted that the prime minister “is very angry with the Press for criticizing alleged delay of the Conference.…” Lloyd George told him that “you really must try to get the papers to be more reasonable. They must not lose their heads. They must remember that we are settling the peace of the world. It is a gigantic task.” Indeed, the work of the conference was being carried on not just by the President and the prime ministers, but by fifty-eight committees that were engaged in deciding even the most technical and obscure of questions, including the delineation of the frontiers of far-off countries unknown to most Britons or Americans.
But there were perhaps 500 reporters in Paris in the spring of 1919 looking for the story of the German peace settlement; they had been there all winter, and still there was no story; their readers and editors were impatient; and they themselves were bored. Lloyd George felt pressure not merely from the press, but also from Parliament and the people; ever since the cease-fire, they had demanded the imposition of the harshest terms on Germany and, inconsistently, immediate demobilization of Britain’s troops—whose continuing presence on the European battlefield would be needed if terms were so harsh as to arouse resistance. (Although Winston Churchill warned the House of Commons, “Do not disband your army until you have got your terms,” the advice went unheeded. Military conscription terminated in March 1919, and Britain’s armies melted away.)
Under all of these pressures to show that a settlement finally was about to be achieved, Lloyd George persuaded Wilson and the Allies to invite the German government to send a delegation to Paris to be given a proposed peace treaty—an invitation designed to convince the world that matters were being wound up. The invitation was sent toward the end of April. About 160 German delegates, not knowing what to expect, arrived on April 29 and were confined to the unheated old Hotel des Réservoirs in Versailles, surrounded by barbed wire.
The Allies and Americans were in disarray, for they had no treaty to show, and the disarray turned almost to panic a week later when the Germans, tired of waiting, announced they were going home. Frantic deal-making took place between the leaders of Britain, France, and the United States, and compromises were hammered out on some of the main issues. The Council of Four (the United States, Britain, France, and Italy) scheduled a formal ceremony in the suburbs of Paris, at the Trianon Palace in Versailles, for May 7, on which date they proposed to present a treaty to the German delegation.
The moment of truth was at hand, and a drafting committee of the wartime victors was charged with the task of summarizing what had been decided over the course of the pr
evious four months at the Paris Peace Conference. One of the difficulties in doing so was suggested by a letter that Joseph Grew—who as chief of staff to the American Peace Commission should have been fully informed—wrote on April 13. It said that the “Commission itself knows very little as to just what is going on; all important questions are now discussed and decided by the Council of Four (President Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and Orlando) and as no secretaries or stenographers are present at their meetings and no notes are taken we hear little of the results achieved.… Our right hand does not know what the left is doing. Colonel House never attends the daily meetings of the other Commissioners and his office frequently takes action unknown to them and often disapproved of by them when they finally learn of it. Our only link with the President”—and that was no longer House—“has … become more sphinx-like than the Sphinx.” At a reception Robert Lansing went over to one of the State Department’s most junior employees, Christian Herter, and asked if he knew what agreement the President had reached with the Allies about an Italian-Yugoslav dispute; Herter did not know, and the Secretary of State was overheard to say, “Snoop around a bit and see if you can find out.”
Yet in a matter of days the drafting committee was called upon to set out in writing all that had been decided since January, mostly in secret sessions, by the Councils of Ten, Five, Four, and Three. To these the committee had to add the reports prepared (some as working drafts, some as “asking terms,” some as proposed treaty language) by the committees and subcommittees of the conference: papers composed in ignorance of the broad decisions arrived at by Wilson and the prime ministers, that had not been coordinated with one another and that had not been reviewed by anyone—for the drafting committee had no time. The accumulation of documents, described as the “Conditions of Peace,” was sent to the printers on May 5. It comprised some 200 pages—roughly 75,000 words—and was divided into 440 articles.
On the afternoon of May 6, Clemenceau convened a conference at which the Council of Four went through the motions of consulting the smaller Allies about peace terms. The treaty was not back from the printers, so it was summarized for them in French, a language many of them did not understand. Marshal Foch, the Allied generalissimo, took the floor to protest that Clemenceau had not safeguarded his country’s security, for the French frontier had not been moved to the Rhineland; the French premier angrily dealt with his insubordinate officer by adjourning the meeting.
Foch telephoned the chief of the British Imperial General Staff, General Sir Henry Wilson, to tell him that everything had been mixed up in the treaty as it had gone out from the drafting committee. Decisions had been reversed, clauses had been misnumbered, names had been gotten wrong: it was a shambles.
At a meeting of leaders of the British empire’s delegation, Lloyd George had to read a summary of treaty provisions to his colleagues because the document in its entirety was still at the printer’s. Smuts, the imperial statesman from South Africa, and Andrew Bonar Law, leader of the Conservative party in the House of Commons, had not been able to get hold of a copy of the treaty itself; it was a “hopeless mess,” they told Sir Henry Wilson, who remarked that “no one has ever seen it in its completed form, for it does not exist.” Yet the Allies were about to confront the German delegates and present them with the document, imposing peace terms, as Sir Henry marveled, “without reading them ourselves first. I don’t think in all history this can be matched.”
COPIES OF THE TREATY, fresh off the press, were brought to various of the delegates during the night of May 6–7. Herbert Hoover was awakened at about four in the morning by the delivery of his copy. He read it through immediately, and was horrified. He could not go back to sleep. At daybreak he dressed and went out to pace the empty streets. Within blocks he encountered first Smuts, and then the young British economist John Maynard Keynes. “It all flashed into our minds,” according to Hoover, “why each was walking about at that time of the morning.”
Hoover, Smuts, and Keynes (who wrote to his mother: “I’ve never been so miserable.… [T]he Peace is outrageous and impossible and can bring nothing but misfortune …”) were not so alone in their reactions as they may have believed when setting out on their solitary walks at dawn that morning. All of the American peace commissioners were dismayed by the treaty. One of them, Secretary of State Lansing, set down in writing his first impressions of the document he had just read; the words he used were “… disappointment … regret … depression.”
Ray Stannard Baker, the press secretary of the American delegation and (since the rift with House) the only official who spent time with the President every day, called the proposed treaty “a terrible document … with scarcely a parallel in history.” The President himself told Baker: “If I were a German, I think I should never sign it.”
THE PROPOSED TREATY denied to Germany, for the moment, membership in the League of Nations. It forbade the unification of Germany with Austria. It presented to Germany for payment a bill for the entire cost of the war incurred by the Allies—without adding it up and without fixing a ceiling on the amount that might be due. At the same time that this potentially ruinous fine was levied, Germany was to be deprived of the assets she would need in order to raise the money to pay it. She was to be stripped not only of her colonies and her merchant fleet, but also of one-eighth of her metropolitan area holding 10 percent of her population, 10 percent of her industry, and 15 percent of her arable land for agriculture.
The younger members, in particular, of the American and British delegations saw in the transfer of so many Germans to Czech and Polish rule a violation of the principle of self-determination that Woodrow Wilson preached and in which they believed. Regardless of the merits of that principle, it was a fatal weakness in the proposed treaty that it ran counter to the strong beliefs of those who were proposing it. It meant that when the time came to stand up and fight to enforce the treaty, Americans and Britons would be loath to do so; they would be unwilling to defend a settlement in which they did not believe. In the 1930s, as Hitler went about undoing the Versailles treaty by occupying and militarizing the Rhineland, merging with Austria, and seizing the predominantly German-speaking areas of Czechoslovakia, the leaders and opinion makers of Britain were going to be paralyzed in their response—for, as a glance at the 1939 edition of E. H. Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis will show, they believed that Germany was in the right: that the Treaty had been unfair to Germany.
In retrospect, what really was wrong with the proposed treaty was not that it was too hard on Germany, though it was, while in some ways it was also not hard enough. What was wrong was that it made no sense—from any point of view. Nobody had written, nobody had edited, and nobody had even read the treaty as a whole; and its terms contradicted and defeated one another.
A treaty that expressed the political philosophy professed by Woodrow Wilson would have been so generous to defeated Germany that she would not have been provoked to start a future war to try to change its terms. On the other hand, a treaty that accomplished the goals of Georges Clemenceau would have destroyed German power so completely and permanently that Germany would have been unable to wage war successfully ever again. But the treaty that the Allies were about to propose at Versailles fell between the two. It hurt Germany enough to provoke her to start another war, but not enough to keep her from winning it.
“When you strike a king,” Mr. Justice Holmes is alleged to have said, “you must kill him.” It was advice the victors en route to their encounter with the German delegates at Versailles ought to have heeded: they should have struck to kill—or else they should not have struck at all.
WEDNESDAY, MAY 7, the day set for imposing the “Conditions of Peace” on the Germans at Versailles, outside Paris, was (as Harold Nicolson wrote in his diary) “a lovely day: great chestnut trees drinking gulps of sunlight.” There was not a cloud in nature’s sky. In the midafternoon the newspaper magnate Lord Riddell was enjoying a leisurely drive from Paris throug
h the woods toward Versailles when he heard insistent honking from behind, and found his car overtaken by Clemenceau—“the Tiger,” as he was called—racing in a Rolls-Royce toward the scheduled confrontation with the Germans. There was “a smile on the face of the Tiger,” Riddell observed.
The ceremony was scheduled for 3 p.m. in Versailles at the Trianon Palace. It was a large, white luxury hotel set in a private park, and had served as Allied headquarters throughout the war.* On the stroke of three the victors began to take their assigned places around a horseshoe of three tables in the formal conference room, looking like a judicial panel. The defeated Germans were led in later and were seated at a fourth table, facing their accusers.
Clemenceau rose to his feet and addressed the Germans briefly. He said, “You have asked us for peace. We are disposed to give it to you. The volume which the secretary general of the conference will shortly hand to you will tell you the conditions which we have fixed.…” He stated that the Germans would have fifteen days in which to respond in writing to the proposed terms.
During the weeks that followed in May and June, German officials bombarded their counterparts on the Allied and American side with objections to the various and numerous terms of the Conditions of Peace, while Wilson and his colleagues pushed to achieve agreement on an early signing date for a formal treaty.
ON MAY 6, the day before the Conditions of Peace were formally presented in Versailles, the precociously brilliant young head of the American delegation’s Russian section, Adolf A. Berle, was writing to his father of his bitter disappointment in Woodrow Wilson: “I have come to the conclusion that no statement of ideals by anybody will ever get any reaction from me again.” Like most of the world, Berle was still ignorant of the proposed peace terms; but he was disgusted by what was being done and not done about Russia.
In the Time of the Americans Page 34
