by G. J. Meyer
In the midst of all the squabbling and logrolling, the president was preaching his Fourteen Points, his League of Nations, his promise of a postwar world so just, so fair to weak and strong alike, and so well designed to deal with aggression that wars would become improbable. The scope of his promises and demands made his situation—the position of the United States—infinitely more complicated than those of Clemenceau or Lloyd George or anyone else at the conference. The complications being largely of Wilson’s own making, it was only fair that the burden of dealing with them fell almost entirely on him.
In the conference’s first days, Wilson’s priority was to put the League of Nations at the center of the Supreme Council’s deliberations and keep it there. In attempting to understand what happened in Paris and then in Washington in 1919, it is necessary to keep in mind that ending the war with the Central Powers and creating a League of Nations were entirely distinct objectives. They could have been handled separately—there was no absolute need for the Paris conference to deal with the league proposal at all—and many Europeans and Americans wanted them disconnected. Wilson was determined not to allow this to happen. He insisted that the league had to be inextricably intertwined with the peace treaty and must not be deferred until some vague future time. Implementation of a treaty that created the league was to mark the dawn of the new world order, the lasting peace, for which Wilson had gone to war. This would be impossible if the league were not in place and functioning almost from the day the treaty was ratified.
It was the treaty’s creation of the league that caused Wilson, back in the United States later in 1919, to call it “the most remarkable document, I venture to say, in human history.” Only the league, he was convinced, could deal with the problems that were certain to arise after the peace conference adjourned and correct deficiencies in the treaty as they became apparent. This last point assumed increasing importance in his thinking as the question of treaty ratification came to dominate American politics. He showed himself willing to accept serious defects in the treaty, even obvious injustices, in the expectation that the league would put things right in due course.
At first, with his prestige still at its peak and the Allied leaders hoping to build up reserves of American goodwill to be drawn upon when they wanted help with their own priorities, the president made fast and substantial progress. As early as January 22, the Supreme Council gave him perhaps his most important victory, agreeing that the league’s constitution (which the president, with evangelical flair, was calling its “covenant”) should be written into the body of the treaty. Three days later a plenary session of all the nations represented at the conference approved the president’s request for creation of a commission to draft this covenant. Wilson insisted on serving as its chairman, and of course no one objected. He had expected to chair the whole peace conference, and had yielded grudgingly when told that that honor had to go to Clemenceau as principal representative of the host country. If he had understood this earlier and foreseen the advantages that Clemenceau would enjoy as chairman, the president likely would have insisted on holding the conference in neutral Geneva, as a number of Americans had urged.
He was not going to make the same mistake with the league, the great achievement of his career and his bid for immortality. It had to stay in his hands. On February 3 he held the first meeting of the league commission, its fifteen members representing ten countries and selected by Wilson himself. Another four members from four smaller countries were soon added. This was far too many cooks for such a broth, especially as from the beginning the commission was under pressure to finish its work by February 14, when Wilson would be departing on a necessary visit to the United States. Most of the commission’s members were window dressing, on hand to help create the impression that the covenant was the work of many nations and expressed the will of the world. Their actual function was to look on from the sidelines as Wilson, House, and a few others, including American advisers on international law, got the job done.
The meetings were held in House’s expansive suite in the Hôtel de Crillon, almost always at night after the Supreme Council completed its business. The commission did not have to start from scratch; Colonel House had presented a first draft of a covenant, complete with twenty-three articles, to President Wilson back in July 1918. It drew on the still earlier work of league advocates in the United States and Britain, and later in 1918 House and Wilson redrafted it more than once. Calling it a covenant was not House’s idea; the president had begun using the word in speeches, then in his reply to Pope Benedict’s peace initiative, in 1917.
Between the Supreme Council and the commission and the need to attend to reports and requests from the White House, where Tumulty was managing things, the president was working harder than he had in years. In Washington, even at difficult times, he had kept short office hours, played golf almost daily, and gone on frequent long drives. There was no time for such things now, especially as his refusal to have a secretary burdened him with routine chores that any competent file clerk could have handled. It was a risky workload for a man in advanced middle age with Wilson’s medical history.
The Supreme Council’s business consisted largely of receiving the delegates of the lesser nations present at the conference and listening to them explain what shards of the old empires they thought their countries were entitled to and why. Even the most vicious of the newly hatched mosquito-states presented a very different face to the council than to their neighbors and rivals. In arguing their cases, they were graciously diplomatic, intent upon seeming ambitious for nothing except what justice and peace required, regretful that the states with which they were in conflict were so deceitful and resistant to the truth. Romania, the member of the Allies that had contributed least to winning the war, was first to be invited to appear before the council, on January 31. The new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes appeared later on the same day, its delegation dominated by its Serbian element. Three days later it was the turn of Greece, followed in another two days by Czechoslovakia. And so on until the number of issues that the council was being asked to resolve became uncountable. Poland proved to be a particularly troublesome case because of the two factions, mutually hateful, that claimed to be her government. Day after day, week after week, new and impenetrable questions arose about which petitioning country should be awarded some obscure, ethnically mixed place that few members of the Council of Ten had ever heard of.
No one on earth, no ten men as ignorant of the history and geography of eastern Europe as the members of the Supreme Council, could possibly have sorted all this out. The council’s response was to set up commissions, each of which was responsible for studying some specific point of contention and reporting back with recommendations. Ultimately there were more than sixty of these commissions, many of them dominated by the teams of American academics and specialists created for the Inquiry and brought to Paris with Wilson. By the end of the conference, they had met more than sixteen hundred times, done immense amounts of work, and presented the council with overwhelming quantities of information and proposals. Human nature being what it is, many questions were decided not on the basis of the experts’ findings but according to what various council members found most expedient or most consistent with their personal preferences. Clemenceau, for example, would find it to France’s advantage to champion a large, strong Poland incorporating a great deal of German territory and a great many German nationals. Lloyd George would champion Greece’s ambitions in the Near East less for strategic than for romantic-sentimental reasons. The result was often resentment, disillusion, and a storing up of trouble for the future.
Wilson’s stated objective, where disputed territories were at issue, was to adhere to his Fourteen Points’ emphasis on self-determination for all peoples. He was insistent that, as he had said in a 1918 Fourth of July speech, every territorial question must be resolved with “the free acceptance [of] the people immediately concerned, and not upon the basis of the ma
terial interest or advantage of any other nation or people which may desire a different settlement for the sake of its own exterior influence or mastery.”
This was nothing less than a call for an end to power politics as traditionally played on the international stage. The nobility of the idea was unmistakable, but even with the purest of intentions it could be almost impossible to put into practice. Europe’s turbulent history had intermingled ethnic and religious populations to an extent that in many places was impossible to sort out. The commissions would sometimes find it impossible to obtain conclusive evidence of how many Greeks or Italians or Slavs lived in some contested city or region. As Secretary of State Lansing observed, the notion of self-determination, so central to Wilson’s vision for the world, was “simply loaded with dynamite.” It raised questions for which there were no answers.
Sometimes with the best of intentions and sometimes not, the Supreme Council gradually turned Europe from the Rhineland to the Black Sea into a mass of festering geopolitical wounds. Populations were consigned to countries that they did not want to be part of and would never have consented to join. In their new countries, people would find themselves treated as aliens and would burn with resentment while waiting for the wheel of history to turn again and give them an opportunity to escape or take revenge. Sometimes this happened inadvertently, out of an unhappy coupling of greed, ignorance, and carelessness. Thus when Vittorio Orlando told Wilson that he wanted Italy’s northern frontier to extend to the Brenner Pass, the president offhandedly agreed. He had only the vaguest notion of where the Brenner Pass was, and no idea at all that the consent he had so casually given would turn a quarter of a million ethnic Germans into baffled subjects of the king of Italy.
More often the people making the decisions had some understanding of what they were doing but thought they were justified by having won a terrible war against criminal enemies. The war’s losers, naturally, paid the price. The three million Germans of Bohemia’s Sudetenland and a million Hungarians were never asked if they wanted to become part of the new nation of Czechoslovakia. They were put there because they were German and Hungarian and therefore had no rights, and because the Czechs had friends on the Supreme Council. Romania, too, fattened at the expense of her neighbors. When someone suggested a plebiscite to find out whether the people of Alsace and Lorraine wanted to be French or German, Clemenceau reacted as though he had been asked to put his mother up for auction. Things got ugly only when the Allies or the favored new nations came into conflict with each other—when Poland and Czechoslovakia, for example, began fighting for possession of Galicia. The result, in the long term, was the creation of grievances that would remain dormant for years, even decades, before erupting in violence.
President Wilson’s second success, after getting the league covenant into the treaty, was more ambiguous. It had to do with the disposition of Germany’s colonies. The German Empire, not created until 1871, had been a late entry in the European race to acquire overseas possessions. Nevertheless, by 1914 Germany had accumulated four pieces of Africa, three of them substantial in size if not terribly desirable, plus a scattering of islands in the western Pacific, valuable mainly as coaling stations for her navy and merchant fleet. She also shared special status in Morocco with France and had a ninety-nine-year lease on a hundred square miles of China’s Shantung Peninsula. When the war came, Germany had no way of maintaining contact with, much less defending, almost any of these possessions.
The victors were agreed that Germany, as an outlaw nation, had no right to colonies. There, however, agreement ended. Wilson was disgusted to discover that the Allies intended to annex not only the African colonies but much of what had been the Ottoman Empire, turning vast tracts of the supposedly liberated Middle East into their property. He declared this to be unacceptable, such a gross violation of the Fourteen Points’ assertion of the right of all people to choose their own rulers that it would make a mockery of both his program and the league.
The result was the first great fight of the peace conference. Lloyd George initially showed himself to be sympathetic to Wilson’s position, seeing the question as not worth a breach with the United States. His failure to defend what British dominions such as Australia and South Africa saw as their legitimate aspirations, however, drew heavy fire. Jan Christian Smuts, the onetime Boer general so respected by his former British foes that in 1917 he became a member of their war cabinet, insisted that the British Empire must absorb German East Africa (now Burundi, Rwanda, and part of Tanzania), thereby completing a chain of colonies extending without break from north Africa to the Cape of Good Hope. Other South Africans demanded German Southwest Africa (today’s Namibia), which would give their country the whole southern end of the continent. Australia wanted New Guinea and German Samoa in the South Pacific, Japan wanted to take over the German concession in Shantung along with various North Pacific islands, and France wanted (in addition to sharing the Middle East with Britain) the former German colonies of the Cameroons and Togoland and the rights previously enjoyed by Germany in Morocco.
This was old-fashioned smash-and-grab imperialism, impossible to reconcile with the Fourteen Points. The president was prepared to agree, however, that at least some of the territories in question—the “savages” of sub-Saharan Africa and the Pacific islands most certainly—were not ready to govern themselves and might never be. He hoped that all of them could become, temporarily in some cases but if necessary permanently, wards of the League of Nations. He proposed that each, under league auspices, should be governed and developed (economically, politically, and in other ways) as the “mandate” of one or another of the supposedly more civilized powers. They could be assured of the right—when ready—to become autonomous nations.
Benign as this scheme appeared—benign as it was as a theory—it infuriated Britain’s dominions and got a cold reception from the French. Feelings ran so strong that it began to appear that the dispute might bring the whole process of working out a peace treaty to a halt. The situation was saved by the resourceful Smuts, who in cooperation with the British diplomat David Cecil came up with a compromise. Everyone was to agree to the introduction of a system of Wilsonian mandates, of which there would be three types. The crucial type, so far as Smuts’s plan was concerned, would consist of territories adjacent or near to their “mandatory” powers—the ones responsible for governing and developing them. Mandates in this category could, with minor limitations, be administered as though they were part of the nation or dominion responsible for them. Theoretically they would be prepared for independence, but there would be no monitoring of progress, no consulting with subject populations, and certainly no date by which independence must be granted. In practical terms, this meant that South Africa could absorb German Southwest Africa, Australia could annex New Guinea, et cetera.
In assenting to this, in accepting a fig leaf in place of a program of real progress toward self-government for colonies around the world, Wilson allowed his Fourteen Points to be deeply compromised. He thereby failed the first test of his own seriousness, signaling to those who did not share his aspirations that he might not fight to achieve them. His reasons can only be guessed at, but are not necessarily obscure. He may have seen the Smuts scheme as of relatively minor importance, a mere technicality when balanced against the need to get the entire covenant completed and approved in a matter of days. His acquiescence was an early manifestation of his inclination, which would become increasingly pronounced, to accept measures that were grossly at odds with his own stated principles in the expectation that the league would one day prescribe the necessary remedies. And the mandate’s compromise had the advantage of exacting no domestic political costs; few Americans knew anything about Germany’s colonies, and most of the politicians who did know were content to let Britain take them.
It is likely that the president, if challenged, would have defended this compromise as being of minor consequence. As irrelevant to what lay ahead.
About that he would have been wrong.
Background
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Lost?
As the peace conference got under way, something else was happening in Paris. What is arguably the most romantic myth of the Great War was putting down roots: the notion that the war had left in its wake a Lost Generation.
To be a member in good standing of the Lost Generation, it was necessary to have served in the war or, failing that, to have been in Europe, preferably France, while it was going on. It was also desirable almost to the point of necessity, at least from an American perspective, to be an American.
The best candidates were those who could claim to be artists of some kind: writers or painters or sculptors or even all three. If one returned to the United States at war’s end, which could be difficult to avoid if one was in uniform, it was advisable to get back to Europe as soon as possible and spend enough time in Paris to become part of the expatriate community there.
But none of this was enough if one did not also look back on the war with bitter contempt, demonstrating that one had been permanently disillusioned by the experience. That one was alienated, torn from one’s roots and in that sense lost. A fair number of the best young American artists of the time really were these things. They contributed to making the Paris of the 1920s the cultural center not only of Europe but of the world.
