A Patriot's History of the Modern World

by Larry Schweikart

  Meanwhile, German officials, who expected genuine peace negotiations, arrived in Paris to find a fait accompli. Despite the perceptions and the publicity of the Fourteen Points, Clemenceau was basically running the conference, doggedly attaining his goals while Wilson pontificated. This was hardly auspicious, as Clemenceau was a former editor of a radical newspaper, La Justice, and was not a conciliator. His nickname, le Tombeur de ministères (“the destroyer of ministries”), aptly described his disdain for traditionalism. As interior minister he had used the military to crush strikes in May 1906, and he relished his role as the premier flic de France (“the first cop of France”). Seeing an opportunity to position himself between the Socialists and the Right, Clemenceau had used his new newspaper, L’Homme libre (“the Free Man”), to criticize the government while at the same time supporting the war. When the paper was censored anyway, he changed the title of the publication to “The Man in Chains” (L’Homme enchaîné). He had refused the position of justice minister in the new wartime government, preferring, in the words of Lyndon Johnson, to be “outside the tent pissing in,” and was rewarded with the prime ministership in 1917, whereupon he took an active role in visiting the trenches and encouraging the troops. His speeches demanded total war, he promised retribution against traitors, and, despite his Progressive/radical views, supposedly championing liberty, he imposed a harsh censorship on the press. But Clemenceau was devoutly condescending toward the United States, as evidenced by his well-known quip, “America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.”13 When Wilson announced his Fourteen Points, Clemenceau saw the opportunity to use them in bargaining for the transfer of Alsace-Lorraine to France, a sticking point since 1871 when the Germans had seized it during the Franco-Prussian War, creating a festering sore of resentment for nearly five decades.

  David Lloyd George was less enthusiastic about a Carthaginian peace. The son of a teacher, he was a lifelong champion of Welsh rights, winning a seat in Parliament as a Liberal in 1890. He opposed the Second Boer War, during which he charged British generals with failing to care for their sick and wounded. Brought into the cabinet of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, he became chancellor of the exchequer in 1908, where he attempted to reduce military spending while lobbying for old age pensions and unemployment benefits. Going into the war he had been considered a pacifist, but during the conflict he reversed course and supported military action, becoming minister of munitions in 1915 and secretary of state for war the following year. Even as prime minister, however, Lloyd George faced strong opposition from the Conservatives until the end of the war, when his reputation reached its apex and even his opponents respected him. As one Conservative gushed, “He can be dictator for life.”

  Having previously insisted that Germany bear the entire brunt of postwar burdens, Lloyd George changed his mind when he arrived at Versailles. Destroying the German economy, he concluded, would achieve nothing, and he attempted to persuade Wilson to ameliorate the terms, fearing both the dominance of a resurgent France and a lingering thirst for revenge on the part of Germany. But his last-minute change of heart had no effect on “Jesus,” as he called Wilson. The president and his delegation, shaped in part by an anti-German contingent that included John Foster Dulles, remained wedded to their call for reparations.

  Had more Republicans been included in the American peace delegation, some argue, the opinions of its members might have extracted some concessions from Wilson. It is true that many did not trust the British, and also true that most were isolationist and distrusted Wilson’s internationalist assumptions. Wilson, however, may well have been impenetrable: he routinely lectured George, Orlando, and Clemenceau in moral terms throughout the conference. At any rate, he surrounded himself with yes-men, including the lone Republican peace commissioner, White, keeping his own counsel. As a result there were no negotiations between equals, only terms of surrender, including a deadline before which Germany had to accept the peace. Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, Germany’s representative at the conference, accepted the Treaty, “yielding to overwhelming force,” but it was clear to other participants and observers that not only was this a shock to the Germans but it would also likely lead to more problems later on. Wilson’s secretary of state, Robert Lansing, surmised as much, watching the German representatives sign “with pallid faces and trembling hands,” as if “called upon to sign their own death warrants.”14

  To those outside the “big three” of Britain, France, and the United States, the conference offered an opportunity to address colonialism and to end European imperial domination of their lands. A small army of colonial representatives arrived with their own hopes and frustrations—all of which should have fallen perfectly within Wilson’s goal of “national self-determination.” Among them: Nguyen Tat Thanh, a busboy at the Ritz Hotel who sought freedom for French Cochin China and later became Ho Chi Minh; Faisal bin Hussein, a Bedouin Hashemite prince who arrived with dreams of Arab unity (under his rule, of course); Edvard Beneš, a foreign minister of the future Czechoslovakia; Chaim Weizmann, who wanted a Jewish national homeland; and a host of others, from Japanese princes to Polish freedom fighters and Balkan revolutionaries. Some had received promises from European statesmen such as Arthur Balfour or from living legends such as British lieutenant colonel Thomas E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), but all had bought into the premise that they would receive a fair and open hearing from the proceedings. Yet when it came time to address their concerns, the conference all but ignored them; the British and French in particular saw an opportunity to expand their dominance over African and Asian lands at Germany’s expense, not diminish it. Versailles’s failure to deal with the colonial issue turned what might have been a potentially orderly transition of power in the 1920s into a series of recurring bloodbaths after World War II, when the imperial forces could no longer moderate or co-opt independence movements.

  Paris provided the backdrop to the diplomacy. With its Parisian social scene and parties, the conference attracted sophisticates and artists from around the world such as actress Sarah Bernhardt, celebrity designer Elsie de Wolfe, writers Jean Cocteau and Marcel Proust, and China’s ambassador to the United States, Wellington Koo, a Columbia University graduate who “still delighted in singing his college fight songs” to a kaleidoscope of socialites, soldiers, journalists, and hangers-on.15 Hotels gleefully overcharged these foreign rubes, particularly the bureaucrats.16

  Many of the relatively young attendees of the revelries were diplomats, and they received assignments that were breathtaking in their audacity. They redrew maps of the Hapsburg Empire and generated policy papers for the delegations. A secret group of 126 researchers (recruited mostly from Ivy League schools) churned out more than a thousand reports for the Wilsonian delegation and later subcommittees on ethnicities, tribes, borders, history, populations, and other relevant topics. They had begun their work at the New York Public Library even before the conference, and were often lacking in any expertise whatsoever for their assignments. Members of the Arab group included a specialist on American Indians and two Persian language instructors, all chaired by a scholar on the Crusades. Ultimately, some 250 foreign service officers versed in the dialects of Central Europe would arrive in Paris to determine the fate of Poland, the former provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Balkans. And, of course, every delegation had its own bevy of espionage agents gathering information on every other attendee. The U.S. spies employed a code based on sports and college slang. “ARCHIE ON THE CARPET 7 P.M. WENT THROUGH THE HOOP AT 7:05” reported one operative assigned to watch a Hapsburg archduke.17 But despite the antics of spies and the massive network of private relief workers delivering food, delegations confronted real, serious work when it came to restoring peace and confidence in Europe.

  The Failure of Wilson’s Vision

  In his efforts to reshape Europe at Versailles, Wilson may have been i
dealistic and unrealistic, but he was not deceitful: he genuinely expected American-style democracy to work in Europe’s new states as it had in North America and in line with the Progressive worldview. But we should recall that the context of terms used by Wilson—“democracy,” “representation,” “self-determination,” and others—all flowed from a heritage in the United States that went back more than 120 years, enmeshed in and enriched by a tapestry that took on an entirely different meaning in Europe. When he spoke of “representative democracy,” it was entirely within his understanding of the checks and balances that had served America so well. Indeed, none of the newly created states (and few of the Great Powers) in Europe possessed the four pillars of American exceptionalism or even understood why they might be necessary. The Dutch and some of the Scandinavian countries were Protestant, had (more or less) free markets and private property, but lacked the tradition of common law. Elsewhere, even Britain had no separation of powers in the American sense (especially after the House of Lords was stripped of its veto power in the early 1900s). In Italy, Pope Benedict XV only allowed Catholics to participate in the political process by voting for the first time in 1919—having held out for the re-creation of the Papal States until that time. Poland had no history of independent democratic governance before Versailles and rapidly fell to the dictatorship of Józef Piłsudski; Romania, Greece, and Bulgaria were prewar monarchies; Serbia and other provinces of the Hapsburg Empire became Yugoslavia in a monarchy. Although Hungary had a four-year stretch of independence in the 1800s, it had subordinated itself to Austria in 1867. Hungarian princes traded effective control in their own land for greater standing in the Empire (just as the Scottish lords did with England for generations). Perhaps Czechoslovakia could be counted as a republic, but it possessed other gnawing problems in the form of radical ethnic and cultural diversity that eroded its nationality.

  So Wilson indeed meant for Europe to have “national self-determination,” civil rights, and so on; but no one in Europe had ever seen the American iteration of such concepts and no one possessed the religious, economic, or legal heritage to adopt them even if they understood what they meant. Of course, the British and the French knew this, which is partly why they supported Wilson, knowing full well the new Europe would not look like America. And Wilson had the endorsement of all the aspiring colonial states that wanted independence (which Britain and France were intent upon squelching). On the mainland, in the newly created states, Britain and France paid lip service to democracy and tolerated it only when it weakened Germany or served their ends in Europe; neither intended to actively apply it to imperial possessions, nor did they intend to enforce democracy in Russia—yet another example of a European power entirely lacking America’s exceptional foundations. On the other hand, Versailles scarcely considered any system other than democracy as an acceptable form of government in this new order. A somewhat perverted interpretation of European history arose from this view in which such nondemocratic systems as fascism later were seen as “a form of mass madness over which reason must eventually prevail,” and Europe became “a continent led astray by insane dictators [instead of] one which opted to abandon democracy.”18 An old Right—a monarchical conservatism of emperors and dictators—was passé; the Left, its legitimacy compromised by its support of the Great War, was also temporarily impotent. What emerged was a group of new fascists: strong men of Europe, such as Francisco Franco of Spain (named head of state in 1936), or Ioannis Metaxas of Greece, who grabbed power that same year.

  As the years between the world wars unfolded, Europe sank into a dark abyss. Versailles provided no mechanisms for encouraging or promoting democracy, let alone enforcing it. Fledgling states, unfamiliar with elections, voting, separation of powers, consent of the governed, private property, individual freedom, and bills of rights—yet steeped in a recent tradition of socialist ideology—did not stand a chance when it came to erecting an edifice that could withstand a crisis. When these states were artificially packed with ethnic subgroups with axes to grind, the result was short-lived experiments in self-rule. Instead, dictatorships of one sort or another rapidly emerged. Greece drifted from constitutional monarchy to dictatorship; Hungary was a monarchy with a regent; Bulgaria, an autocratic monarchy; and Yugoslavia, an unproven experiment melding Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, and Slovenes into a constitutional monarchy. Albania’s King Zog I turned his country into a fascist state resembling Mussolini’s Italy. Poland yielded democratic rule to the dictator Piłsudski, then to a military junta that overthrew him. Germany embraced full-blown fascism under Hitler, Spain endorsed a slightly softer fascism with Franco, and Portugal adopted the proto-fascist Salazar government. Only a handful of constitutional monarchies—Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Great Britain, and Norway—existed alongside France, Czechoslovakia, and the Communist Soviet dictatorship (which absorbed the Baltic states) in making up the hodgepodge of European states that would drift into World War II.

  If democracy was the goal in the post-Versailles era, it was remarkably absent. António Salazar, who ascended to power in Portugal in 1932, would note two years later, “the political systems of the nineteenth century are generally breaking down and the need for adapting institutions…is being felt…. I am convinced that within twenty years…there will be no legislative assemblies left in Europe.”19 Time almost proved Salazar right: by 1941, thanks to Hitler’s war machine, England, Sweden, Turkey, and Switzerland had the only reasonably operational republics in Europe (with Sweden and Switzerland existing only through the indulgence of Nazi Germany). Even in France before 1940, some called for the ouster of liberal democracy in favor of the new crypto-fascism parading as nationalism. Writers such as Charles Maurras, prominent in Action Française (and aptly demonstrating that Europeans never seem to have understood the difference between a democracy and a republic) insisted, “There is only one way to improve democracy: destroy it.”20

  How had Woodrow Wilson’s quest to remodel the Continent with American-style democracies gone so awry? How had he and other architects of the Versailles Treaty been so tone-deaf to the demands for true popular government—no matter how distasteful that government’s policies may have been to the American and British nation builders? The answer lay in part with the nearly universal multiparty system which constituted one of the main impediments to establishing American-style democratic institutions in Europe. America’s “winner-take-all/single-member-district” structure, a feature of American exceptionalism and the U.S. constitutional system, never took hold in the European states. A popular joke of the day was that three Englishmen would establish a colony, three Germans would start a war, and three Frenchmen would form five political parties—a commentary that contained a kernel of truth. America’s system allowed for broad constituencies to gather under only a few (usually two) parties. This two-party system inexorably pushed both sides to the middle, leading to the pejorative phrase, “There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties.” But this was the point—the sharp edges were dulled by the need to appeal to 51 percent of the public, and the separation of powers and staggered elections made change slow and difficult. The Europeans, on the other hand, employed proportional representation which increasingly produced parties with a much narrower focus. Politics frequently drifted into legislative paralysis. Few countries could boast a cabinet that lasted as long as two years, and in the post–World War I period, the average lifespan of a cabinet was measured in months: eight in Germany and Austria, five in Italy, and in Spain after 1931, four. More often than not, coalitions of parties were necessary to form a government in almost all of the European nondictatorships, under which each party would receive various government ministries, departments, and functions to administer. Legislatures tended to be unicameral, and the bureaucracies reported to an individual in the cabinet headed by a prime minister, premier, or chancellor elected not by the people but by the members of the majority party in the legislature. That meant that most European leaders la
cked separation from their legislatures, and few were subject to checks and balances of the American sort, which often condemned them to unceasing bickering and in-fighting, with an endless procession of ministers resigning and being replaced. After Joseph Paul-Boncour formed his French government in 1932, he declared, “Restoring the authority of the State in a democracy…will be…the first and most essential element of our intended programme,” whereupon his Cabinet shortly disintegrated.21 America, of course, had already had over a century’s worth of experience as a republic with democracy, while most European states were still developing their first constitutions and possessed real fears of tyranny by either a monarch or the masses. Legislative bodies with genuine power were a rarity. Daily activities of the most mundane sort continued to be performed by the bureaucracies: licenses were granted, garbage collected, and paperwork churned out, but important national decisions spiraled into a cycle of emergency decrees as crises developed. In Germany, which had only sixteen such decrees from 1925 to 1931, nearly sixty emergency orders were issued in 1932, almost twice the number of laws enacted by the legislature. It was an emergency decree by Chancellor Franz von Papen that imposed martial law that year, legitimating Hitler’s authoritarianism before he ever took office. Constant agitation by the Communists, as well as parties on the Right, made the public yearn for stability and order. This was, for many Europeans, precisely what democracy was failing to deliver on a wide scale.