by Oliver Stone
Few of Wilson’s Fourteen Points remained in the final treaty. The victors, particularly Great Britain, France, and Japan, divided the former German colonies and holdings in Asia and Africa along the lines established by the secret 1915 Treaty of London. They also carved up the Ottoman Empire. They sanitized their actions by calling the colonies “mandates.” Wilson resisted but ultimately went along. He rationalized his acquiescence by arguing that the Germans had “ruthlessly exploited their colonies,” denying their citizens basic rights, while the Allies had treated their colonies humanely115—an assessment that was greeted with incredulity by the inhabitants of those Allied colonies, like French Indochina’s Ho Chi Minh. Ho rented a tuxedo and bowler hat and visited Wilson and the U.S. delegation to the conference, carrying a petition demanding Vietnamese independence. Like most of the other non-Western world leaders in attendance, Ho would learn that liberation would come through armed struggle, not colonialist largesse. Mao Zedong, then working as a library assistant, expressed similar frustration: “So much for national self-determination,” he vented. “I think it is really shameless!”116 Wilson went so far in compromising his principles that he even accepted a U.S. mandate over Armenia, leading Clemenceau to comment wryly, “When you cease to be President, we will make you Grand Turk.”117
Allied leaders did little to hide the racism that underlay their continued subjugation of dark-skinned peoples. This was most apparent when Japan’s representatives—Baron Nobuake Makino and Viscount Chinda—proposed that a clause on racial equality be included in the Covenant of the League of Nations. The clause read, “The equality of states being a basic principle of the League of Nations, the High Contracting Parties agree to accord, as soon as possible, to all alien nationals of States members of the League, equal and just treatment in every respect, making no distinction, either in law or fact, on account of their race or nationality.” The Japanese proposal was rejected outright by defenders of the British Empire, including British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour and Australian Prime Minister William Hughes. As one British cabinet member, Lord Robert Cecil, explained, the clause raised “extremely serious problems” for the British Empire.118
Having admitted to Lloyd George before the proceedings began that he was less interested in the details of the settlement than in the League of Nations—which he considered crucial to preventing future war—Wilson’s attempt to secure the kind of nonpunitive treaty he publicly advocated failed miserably. The treaty dealt very harshly with Germany. It included a “war guilt clause,” drafted by future secretary of state John Foster Dulles, that placed the entire blame on Germany for starting the war and required Germany to pay extremely heavy reparations. Wilson, intently focused on the League, repeatedly compromised on these and other crucial matters, disappointing even his strongest supporters. Clemenceau snidely remarked that Wilson “talked like Jesus Christ but acted like Lloyd George.”119 Economist John Maynard Keynes condemned Wilson’s capitulation to this “Carthagenian Peace”—a tragic repudiation of his Fourteen Points—and predicted that it would lead to another European war.120
Ho Chi Minh rented a tuxedo and bowler hat and visited Wilson and the U.S. delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, carrying a petition demanding Vietnamese independence. Like most of the other non-Western world leaders in attendance, Ho would learn that liberation would come through armed struggle, not the colonizers’ largesse.
Although Lenin wasn’t invited to Paris, Russia’s presence cast a pall over the meetings, like “the Banquo’s ghost sitting at every Council table,” according to Herbert Hoover.121 Lenin had dismissed Wilson’s Fourteen Points as empty rhetoric and said that the capitalist powers would never abandon their colonies or accept the Wilsonian vision of peacefully adjudicating conflicts. His call for worldwide revolution to overthrow the entire imperialist system was finding a receptive audience. Colonel House wrote in his diary in March, “From the look of things the crisis will soon be here. Rumblings of discontent every day. The people want peace. Bolshevism is gaining ground everywhere. Hungary has just succumbed. We are sitting upon an open powder magazine and some day a spark may ignite it.”122 The Allies were so worried about Communist revolutions in Eastern Europe that they inserted a clause in the armistice agreement forbidding the German army to evacuate the countries on its eastern frontier until “the Allies think the moment suitable.”123 Though Béla Kun’s Communist government in Hungary would soon be toppled by invading Romanian forces and an attempt to seize power by the Communists in Germany failed, House and Wilson had reason to be alarmed at the radical tide sweeping Europe and beyond.
American workers also participated in the radical upsurge; 365,000 striking steelworkers led the way, followed by 450,000 miners and 120,000 textile workers. In Boston, police voted 1,134–2 to strike, leading the Wall Street Journal to warn, “Lenin and Trotsky are on their way.” Wilson called the strike “a crime against civilization.”124 And a general strike in Seattle was led by a Soldiers’, Sailors’, and Workmen’s Council modeled on the Russian Revolution. Seattle Mayor Ole Hanson denounced it as “an attempted revolution.” The strikers, he charged, “want to take possession of our American Government and try to duplicate the anarchy of Russia.”125 Over 5 million workers struck that year alone. When strikebreakers, protected by armed guards, local police, and newly sworn in deputies, were not sufficient to defeat the strikes, state militias and even federal troops were called in to finish the job, sending the labor movement into a tailspin from which it would not recover for well over a decade. Though the use of federal troops on behalf of powerful capitalists had been highly controversial in 1877, workers had increasingly learned that police, courts, troops, and the entire apparatus of the state would be arrayed against them when they struggled for higher wages, better working conditions, and the right to join unions.
Having badly weakened the Left during the war, government officials now tried to finish it off. In November 1919 and January 1920, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer used a spate of largely ineffectual anarchist bombings as an excuse to unleash federal agents to raid radical groups and labor organizations across the country. Though called the Palmer Raids, the operation was actually run by the twenty-four-year-old director of the Justice Department’s Radical Division, J. Edgar Hoover. Over five thousand alleged radicals were arrested, many incarcerated without charges for months. Russian-born Emma Goldman and hundreds of other foreign-born activists were deported. This flagrant abuse of civil liberties not only devastated the progressive movement, it deliberately identified dissent with un-Americanism. But for Hoover, it was just the beginning. By 1921, his index-card system, cataloguing all potentially subversive individuals, groups, and publications, contained 450,000 entries.126
From left to right: British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, Italian Premier Vittorio Orlando, French Premier Georges Clemenceau, and Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference. At the conference, most of the lofty rhetoric of Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” was rejected by the other Allies, who were out for revenge, new colonies, and naval dominance in the postwar world.
In 1919, over 4 million U.S. workers struck for higher wages, better conditions, and organizing rights. As illustrated by this leaflet from the Seattle General Strike, the Russian Revolution helped inspire this intensified labor militancy.
After the Paris conference, Wilson gushed, “At last the world knows America as the savior of the world!”127 Back in the United States, Wilson was greeted like anything but a savior by treaty opponents, who attacked from both the left and the right. Wilson fought back, touring the country. He argued that the United States needed to ratify the treaty so it could join the League of Nations, which was the only way it could rectify the problems created by the treaty. Senator Borah, leading the opposition among progressives like Senators La Follette, Norris, and Johnson, denounced Wilson’s proposed international body as a league of “imperialists” bent upon defeating revolutions and defending their own imperial desi
gns. Borah thought the treaty, despite Wilson’s efforts to soften it, was “a cruel, destructive, brutal document” that had produced “a league to guarantee the integrity of the British empire.”128 Norris condemned the treaty provision handing Shandong, the birthplace of Confucius, to Japan as “the disgraceful rape of an innocent people.”129 They were joined by isolationists and others who wanted guarantees that the United States wouldn’t be drawn into military actions without authorization by Congress.
Ironically, Wilson’s own wartime policy had deprived him of many of his best allies. CPI head Creel pointed this out to the beleaguered president in late 1918, telling him “All the radical, or liberal friends of your anti-imperialist war policy were either silenced or intimidated. The Department of Justice and the Post Office were allowed to silence and intimidate them. There was no voice left to argue for your sort of peace. The Nation and the Public got nipped. All the radical and socialist press was dumb.”130 Wilson’s obstinacy made a bad situation worse. Rather than compromise on proposed treaty modifications, Wilson watched the treaty and the League go down to defeat, finally falling seven votes short of ratification.
The peace proved particularly onerous for Germany. Reparations totaled $33 billion—less than one-fifth what France demanded but more than double what Germany had expected, at a time when its ability to pay was severely compromised by its loss of colonies and Polish-speaking territories. Germany also surrendered the port of Danzig and the Saar coal region. And the German people were embittered by the “war guilt clause.”
The House of Morgan’s fingerprints were all over the treaty’s economic clauses. As award-winning Morgan biographer Ron Chernow noted, “Morgan men were so ubiquitous at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 that Bernard Baruch grumbled that J. P. Morgan and Company was running the show.” The most prominent among the Morgan men was Thomas Lamont, the House of Morgan’s leading partner, upon whom Wilson relied. Another Morgan partner, George Whitney, observed that Wilson appeared to trust Lamont’s financial views more than anyone else’s. Lamont advocated setting German reparations at $40 billion and later held to the belief that, if anything, the Germans had gotten off easy. At Paris, he and the other bankers made sure that Morgan’s interests were well protected.131
Although the reparations and the “war guilt clause” created a hostile and unstable environment in postwar Germany, their impact has sometimes been exaggerated. The reparations were more onerous on paper than in practice. Beginning in 1921, the actual payments were repeatedly revised downward based on Germany’s ability to pay. And the “war guilt clause”—Article 231—does not actually mention “guilt.” It holds Germany accountable for reparations for “all the loss and damage” resulting from “a war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies.”132 It is certainly true, however, that Hitler and other right-wing Germans exploited the postwar sense of victimization that came with defeat and Allied retribution. The fact that little of the fighting took place on German soil and that wartime government propaganda had led most Germans to believe that victory was imminent made the settlement even more difficult to swallow and lent credibility to Hitler’s allegations.
As this December 1919 Punch cartoon shows, the Senate’s rejection of U.S. participation in the League of Nations rendered the League largely ineffectual. Wilson had helped guarantee the League’s defeat by silencing potential anti-imperialist allies in the U.S. during the war.
Economic, social, and political instability also rocked postwar Italy, where armed fascisti—followers of Benito Mussolini—repeatedly clashed with leftist demonstrators and strikers. U.S. Ambassador Robert Johnson warned of the dangers of a takeover by Mussolini’s extreme right-wing forces. The U.S. Embassy reported in June 1921: “the fascisti seem to be the aggressors, while the communists . . . have . . . shift[ed] the imputation of lawlessness and violence from the party of ‘Red’ revolution to the self-constituted party of ‘law and order.’ ” Later, when Richard Child, Warren G. Harding’s ambassador to Italy, replaced Johnson, he did an about-face, praising Mussolini and castigating the Communists. Child and other embassy officials downplayed Mussolini’s right-wing extremism, extolling instead his anti-Bolshevism and willingness to use strong-arm methods to defeat labor. U.S. support continued even after Mussolini’s imposition of a Fascist dictatorship. Mussolini’s defenders included American business leaders like Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, Thomas Lamont of J. P. Morgan, and Ralph Easley of the National Civic Federation.133
Historians have long since discredited the myth that revulsion caused by the war and European entanglements plunged the United States into isolationism in the 1920s. In fact, World War I marked the end of European dominance and the ascendancy of the United States and Japan, the war’s two real victors. The twenties saw a rapid expansion of American business and finance around the globe. New York replaced London as the center of world finance. The era of U.S. domination of the world economy had now begun. Among the leaders in this effort were the oil companies.
The war proved that controlling oil supplies was central to projecting and exercising power. Great Britain and Germany tried to cut off each other’s oil supplies during the war. Great Britain, hurt by German attacks on its oil supply ships, first expressed concern about an oil shortage in early 1916. The Allies also blockaded Germany’s access to oil resources, and British Colonel John Norton-Griffiths attempted to lay oil supplies in Romania to waste when Germany moved to seize them in late 1916. Underscoring the importance of these developments, Britain’s Lord Curzon pronounced soon after the armistice that “the Allied cause had floated to victory upon a wave of oil.” The United States was key to that victory, having met 80 percent of the Allies’ wartime petroleum needs.134 But once the war ended, oil companies were poised to grab whatever new oil-rich territories they could. As Royal Dutch Shell asserted in its 1920 annual report, “We must not be outstripped in this struggle to obtain new territory . . . our geologists are everywhere where any chance of success exists.”135
Royal Dutch Shell trained its sights on Venezuela, where General Juan Vicente Gómez’s government offered friendly, stable conditions that seemed much more hospitable than the ongoing volatility and declining production in Mexico.136 Concerned about Great Britain’s predominance in Venezuela and believing that production during World War I had largely depleted U.S. domestic supplies, U.S. companies soon joined the competition for Venezuelan oil.137 In The Prize, Daniel Yergin’s pioneering book on the oil industry, the author describes Gómez as a “cruel, cunning, and avaricious dictator who, for twenty-seven years, ruled Venezuela for his personal enrichment.”138 Indeed, according to historian Steven Rabe, Gómez essentially made the country “his private hacienda” as he “amassed a personal fortune estimated at $200 million and landholdings of 20 million acres.” Tellingly, the dictator’s passing in 1935 would be greeted in Venezuela with a weeklong “spontaneous popular outburst” in which demonstrators vented their rage by ravaging “his portraits, statues, and buildings,” and even “massacred” some of his “sycophants.”139
Gómez’s power rested upon local caudillos (strongmen), an army staffed by his loyalists, and a network of domestic spies. Detractors faced harsh persecution. U.S. Chargé d’Affaires John Campbell White reported that prisoners in Venezuela were treated with “medieval severity.” The United States was always ready to step in if needed. In 1923, the United States sent a Special Service squadron to the country as a show of support in response to what turned out to be unfounded rumors of an impending revolution.140
With an economy increasingly dependent on petroleum revenues, Gómez enlisted the oil companies to write parts of Venezuela’s business-friendly 1922 Petroleum Law. The companies reaped massive profits. Oil company workers and the environment fared less well. Spills and accidents occurred frequently. One oil well blowout in 1922 spread twenty-two miles, releasing nearly a million barrels of oil into Lake Maracaibo.141
While Gómez was bus
y enjoying his wealth and fathering his alleged ninety-seven illegitimate children, his family and hangers-on, known as Gomecistas, bought up the choice properties and then sold them to foreign companies, accumulating vast fortunes for themselves and their leader, while their countrymen remained mired in poverty. In the process, Venezuelan oil production jumped from 1.4 million barrels in 1921 to 137 million in 1929, trailing only the United States in total output and first worldwide in exports. Of the three companies dominating the Venezuelan market, two were American-owned—Gulf and Pan American, which had been purchased in 1925 by Standard Oil of Indiana.142 Combined, the two companies replaced Great Britain’s Royal Dutch Shell as Venezuela’s majority oil producers in 1928 and were responsible for 60 percent of production in the country by the time of Gómez’s death.143
But left-wing opposition to the dictatorships of Gómez and his successors was growing. Oil workers occasionally went on strike for better conditions and pay, and in 1928 students at the Universidad Central in Caracas, known as the “Generation of ’28,” staged an uprising condemning the dictatorship and calling for a more democratic government. After years of struggle, in 1945, Rómulo Betancourt’s leftist Democratic Action (AD) succeeded in overthrowing the regime of Isaías Medina Angarita. Betancourt forged a relationship with the oil companies that was more representative of Venezuela’s interests. He was ousted in a 1948 military coup. While acknowledging the need for outside investment, these progressive reformers established a legacy of radical nationalist and anti-imperialist resistance to exploitation of Venezuelan resources by foreign oil interests.144
