Hoover commandeered the railroad system of central Europe, sent battleships hither and yon, took control of coal mines, distributed food only through his own officers, dictated policy to municipal and other authorities, and actively intervened in all sorts of areas of life and politics in the chaos that once had been the German, Austrian, and Russian empires. At House’s request, Hoover also used his operation as a cover for military intelligence officers, who wore civilian clothes and were provided by Hoover with titles in his organization. Lewis Strauss, one of Hoover’s chief aides and a future head of the Atomic Energy Commission, reported to the American delegation in Paris at the end of 1918 that this had been done. Although time and again Hoover said that his provision of aid to the starving and needy of Europe was intended to save them from communism, he regarded the work he was doing as nonpolitical.
Earlier, House had asked Hoover about his politics. Hoover said he could support either the Democratic or Republican party: whichever had “a progressive program.” He claimed that he had no wish to be President, but House thought Hoover was fooling himself. The colonel had been dealing with politicians all his life; he knew a man who wanted to be President when he saw one.
YOUNG WILLIAM BULLITT also had his own agenda, and was well placed to get a hearing for it, for he had the ear of the commissioners, of his State Department superiors, and through House, of the President. Bullitt’s goal was to seize for Wilson and the United States the leadership of the noncommunist Left in Europe, so as to mobilize the masses against what he saw as the reactionary tendencies of their own governments, and also against the Bolsheviks, with their leaning toward dictatorship. He proposed to summon up British and French support against Lloyd George and Clemenceau and their old politics, and at the same time, socialist and working-class support against Lenin and his version of the new. Bullitt’s vision, though, was a clouded one, and at times he imagined that Lenin could be won over to democracy, while at other times he recognized that the Bolshevik leader was not open to persuasion.
Bullitt pressed his case in January 1919, as the peace conference was beginning, because European socialist and labor leaders proposed to hold their own international conference in the same city at the same time to deal with the same agenda, publicly urging the governments to heed the promptings of those who claimed to represent the masses.
In the end, the leaders of the Left were persuaded to hold their conference elsewhere, so they met not in Paris, but in Bern, Switzerland. Bullitt wrote a memorandum to House and Wilson asking that Samuel Gompers, leader of the American Federation of Labor, be persuaded to attend. Gompers was in Paris as an adviser to the American delegation. Staunchly antisocialist, Gompers refused to go to Bern.
Won over by Bullitt, the American peace commissioners on January 29 sent him to Bern as their representative. The International Labor and Socialist Conference convened on February 3, with representatives from twenty-six countries in attendance. The debates showed sharp differences along national lines—for example, between French and German delegates as to who should be blamed for having supported the war in 1914—but Bullitt, as Americans often did, tended to downplay the importance of the nationalist feelings that were expressed. He was fully satisfied by the program the conference finally adopted. It called for a league of nations open to all countries, in which parliaments (rather than the executive branch of government) would be represented; disarmament; an international court; free trade; no territorial annexations; carrying on the class struggle only through democratic means; freedom of speech, press, and assembly; parliamentary government; everybody to have the right to vote; and the establishment of a charter for labor outlining the rights of working people.
One of the socialist leaders remarked at the Bern conference that “the President of the bourgeois U.S. Republic … represented a higher stage of humanity than the bourgeois governments of Europe.” Bullitt, when he returned to Paris, reported that “the entire conference showed an almost pathetic confidence in President Wilson.”
Yet when the Paris Peace Conference convened, it was not the American but the British delegation that proposed giving priority to international labor legislation, and it was Wilson who was not prepared to deal with it. On the President’s agenda, which he was about to try to persuade the others to adopt, the League of Nations question was to be taken up first; but he had been sidetracked, first by Hoover’s issue of food distribution, and then by this, which led Lloyd George to propose the creation of an agency that came into existence three months later and still exists: the International Labor Organization (ILO).
WILSON HAD BEEN WAITING in Europe impatiently and uncomfortably for nearly a month before he was able to sit down with the Allied leaders in Paris January 12. The conference was somewhat informal, and it assembled in an overheated conference room at the quai d’Orsay. It took the form of an enlarged meeting of the Supreme War Council, but when the military leaders left the room, it became the Council of Ten: the heads of government and foreign ministers of the United States, Great Britain, France, and Italy, and two spokesmen for Japan.
Wilson was squeezed for time. He would have to go back to the United States in mid-February to sign legislation at the end of the congressional session, and while he would return to Paris thereafter, he hoped to have something in hand to bring back with him to Washington in February.
At the January 12 meeting a revised French plan of procedure for the peace conference was presented that put territorial and economic issues first and the creation of a league of nations last. To Wilson’s mind, that was the wrong way round; and on January 13 he urged his colleagues to put the league first.
Nobody will ever know what Wilson really thought, but what he often said was that with a league of nations in place, any decisions made at the peace conference that turned out to be wrong could be put to rights later. It would provide an insurance policy against the possibility that the conference might fail to adopt the peace terms Wilson had advocated—which in fact turned out to be the case. And the President ignored the objection that once it was agreed that decisions of the league had to be unanimous, every country would have a veto. So whoever benefited from the existing state of affairs was bound to veto any change in it.
It may be, however, as he sometimes suggested, that the President attributed such importance to establishing a league because he believed that it would be a first step toward changing the nature of world politics, and that once a first step was taken, a second and a third were bound to follow.
The issue of where the league question should be placed on the agenda remained to be decided when the peace conference opened formally on January 18 in the airless nineteenth-century quarters of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the quai d’Orsay. Seated at a giant horseshoe-shaped table covered in green, around which were arranged sixty-nine red chairs, the delegates were welcomed by Raymond Poincaré, president of the French Republic, in terms that outlined concisely his country’s conception of the task at hand. Reminding the delegates that this was the anniversary of the taking by the Germans of the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine from a prostrate France, he said: “On this day, forty-eight years ago, on the eighteenth of January, 1871, the German Empire was proclaimed by an army of invasion … at Versailles.… Born in injustice, it has ended in opprobrium. You are assembled in order to repair the evil that it has done and to prevent a recurrence of it.”
Moving that Georges Clemenceau, the head of the French government and its premier, be elected chairman of the conference, Wilson tried to return to universal themes (the “fortunes of all peoples are involved …”), but in accepting the chairmanship Clemenceau announced: “The greater the … catastrophes which devastated and ruined … France, the more ample and splendid should be the reparation.”
There in a nutshell, as France’s leaders saw it, was what had to be done: compensate France for the evil that Germany had wrought, and protect France against German wickedness in the future. But Clemenceau, especia
lly after conversations with the persuasive Colonel House, saw no reason why Wilson should not have what he wanted, too. So long as France’s security could be assured, he had no objection to establishing a league, nor even to incorporating the agreement establishing the league in the peace treaty (which Wilson wanted, on the unsound theory that then the U.S. Senate would have to swallow its objections to the league in order to obtain an agreement ending the war).
So when Wilson argued that the question of a league of nations ought to be the first item on the agenda of the peace conference, it followed, in the powerful logic of the French premier, that even before discussing that first item, he had to be assured that France’s security needs and reparations claims were satisfied. And as the future of Germany’s colonies was related to reparations, the question of colonies and empires had to be discussed before the first item on the agenda, too.
DURING THE WAR Great Britain and her dominions had captured many of Germany’s colonies in Africa and the Pacific. Japan also had taken German possessions in the Pacific and had assumed the German position in China. Britain in addition had liberated the Middle East from the Ottoman Empire on behalf of herself as well as France and Italy.
Not even Woodrow Wilson advocated returning these territories to Germany or to the Turkish sultan. He had told the Inquiry aboard the George Washington that his thought was to turn them over to the proposed League of Nations; such territories would be administered by small countries, with their resources to be exploited for the benefit of all mankind. It was odd of him, even if in the American tradition, to imagine that small nations were morally superior to large ones and would be altruistic in dealing with colonies: little Belgium, in the Congo, was the most rapacious of the European colonialists in Africa. In any event, Wilson found no support in Paris for his plan.
As an American, Wilson had inherited the belief that the European powers ought not to possess colonies overseas. Face-to-face with the leaders of the victorious Allies, he was realist enough, however, not to go through the useless motions of asking them to divest themselves of their empires. Moreover, he found himself unable to resist their insistence on keeping the territories they had taken from the Germans and the Turks.
One of the weaknesses in America’s anti-imperialist program was that Americans agreed with Europeans that “natives” were not, at least as yet, capable of governing themselves. When the United States forced a European power to abandon one of its overseas colonies (as it did in the 1898 war, pushing Spain out of the Philippines), it knew of no alternative government to propose but its own (as it did in annexing the Philippines). This made Americans look like hypocrites who were as much disposed to imperialism as anybody else, and whose real objection to Europe’s colonies was that America coveted them for herself.
Turning that weakness into a strength, George Louis Beer, forty-six, a successful tobacco merchant who had retired at thirty-one to begin a second career as a historian and who was now a member of the Inquiry, provided Wilson with a face-saving formula on the issue of occupied German and Turkish territories: he offered the concept of trusteeship, of League of Nations “mandates.” Jan Christiaan Smuts, the much-admired South African statesman, proposed something similar. The idea was that the Allied powers should govern former German colonies and Turkish domains only temporarily, in order to educate and develop them with a view toward eventual self-government and independence.
On the face of it, this allowed the President to claim that he had achieved America’s anti-imperialist goals in dealing with lands captured from the enemy. If it were granted that they were not ready to govern themselves, it followed that he had set them on the only available path headed in the right direction: one that would lead them to responsible independence at some point down the road.
Of course, much depended on the good faith in which the mandatory powers took up their responsibilities. France, for one, frankly imperialist, regarded the business of being awarded a mandate as no more than a charade; in sending in an army in 1920 to occupy Syria (for which France was to receive a mandate from the League of Nations), the then premier of France, making no reference to eventual independence, proclaimed Syria to be a possession—“the whole of it, and forever.”
AT THE SECOND FULL SESSION of the peace conference, on January 25, Wilson proposed a resolution calling for the establishment of a league of nations. Speaking without notes but with eloquence, though still suffering from a cold, he argued that such a league had to be established if the human race was to survive. House was enthusiastic: “What you have said today will hearten the world as nothing that you have said before …,” he wrote in pencil on a note he passed to the President. The Europeans were less impressed, and the secretaries omitted to report Wilson’s statement that the league would do a better job of keeping peace than Christianity had done. (Lloyd George later recalled Wilson as having said that Jesus Christ had failed to get the world to follow his teachings because he had not thought of a practical way for people to achieve ideals, and that “that is the reason why I am proposing a practical scheme to carry out His aims.”)
Once the colonies issue was settled to their satisfaction, the Allies agreed to let the President head a committee that would draft the charter (the “Covenant,” as Wilson would call it, reminding his colleagues of his Presbyterian background) of an international organization; and he did so in ten meetings at the beginning of February.
Meanwhile, Clemenceau explored the question of how such an international entity would help ensure French national security. One approach (which the United States and Britain opposed) was for the proposed League to have an army at its disposal. The army would be the French army, and in effect it would be deputized by the world community to act in the world’s name, enforcing the decisions of the League. Under cover of a league of nations, a French military hegemony in Europe would be established.
A rival concept was proposed from America by Walter Lippmann, who published a proposal calling for U.S. and British seapower to be combined as “the nucleus of world organization.” Picturing seapower as essentially nonaggressive, he saw in it the ideal weapon with which to keep the peace in a world in which Britain and America would be the main arbiters between the nations. As for the League, it should be in continuous session, he wrote; it should be perceived as a process, taking the place of war. Quoting Smuts, Lippmann offered a bold solution to the threat (stressed by Bullitt) of chaos in the former Central empires. “Europe is being liquidated,” Smuts had written, “and the League of Nations must be the heir to this great estate. The peoples left behind by the decomposition of Russia, Austria, and Turkey are mostly untrained politically; many of them are either incapable or deficient in power of self-government.…” Lippmann, in quoting Smuts, seemed to be suggesting that the international organization Wilson was creating ought to govern much of Europe and the Middle East.
At a general session of the peace conference February 14, the day he was scheduled to return to the United States, Wilson, with his hand on the Bible, read aloud the proposed Covenant of the League of Nations that he, House, Britain’s Lord Robert Cecil, and others had drafted over the past fortnight. He then spoke in its favor. A French representative pointed to flaws in the proposed League, and a Japanese envoy repeated a request, always denied, for a written commitment by the framers of the League to racial equality. But Wilson’s draft now was before the conference with the general expectation that it would be approved.
Wilson then left for Brest to board the George Washington. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt went aboard, too, returning to Washington at the same time. On the boat train carrying them to Brest, they read the draft of the Covenant, which they obtained from a journalist. Aboard ship, they hoped to spend time with the President and discuss it with him, but as he so often did, Wilson kept to himself. In the end, though, he did invite the Roosevelts to lunch, and spoke of American entry into the League: “The United States must go in or it will break the heart of the world for she is t
he only nation that all feel is disinterested and all trust.”
ON THE VOYAGE HOME, Roosevelt stood on the bridge of the ocean liner one afternoon and spoke of his disappointments to a cousin, Sheffield Cowles. There was the old matter of having been blackballed from the Porcellian at Harvard, and the new matter, of which he would not speak, of the fragility of his marriage. For him the death of TR cast a pall over everything, personal and political. Roosevelt said that he recognized now that he should have followed TR’s advice and joined in the fighting during the war. Usually hopeful, the charmed and charming young politician looked his future in the face and found that it had turned bleak.
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WAR OR PEACE WITH COMMUNISM?
IN LEAVING PARIS for a few weeks, the President left affairs in the charge of Colonel House, nominally in tandem with Secretary Lansing. He told House what he wanted him to negotiate in his absence, but on the understanding that he would make no binding agreements until the President returned.
The day of his departure, Wilson told the Supreme Council of the Allies that he would like to open informal talks with the Soviets—not to recognize them, or even to reach agreement with them, but to get information. During Wilson’s absence, House and Lansing decided to follow up on this, having earlier been told by their own advisers, too, that the United States lacked reliable current data about Soviet Russia.
House, who was sensitive to currents of liberal opinion, was aware that the publication of the Soviet Constitution in the Nation had aroused some sympathy for the communists. He knew, too, that Bullitt on January 19 had suggested that America and the Allies send missions to Russia “to examine conditions in Russia with a view to recommending definite action.”
On February 16 Lansing told House that he was in favor of sending Bullitt on such a mission to Russia to “cure him of Bolshevism.” House instructed Bullitt to go to Russia secretly “for the purpose of studying conditions … for the benefit of the American commissioners.” House and Lansing took into their confidence Lloyd George’s aide Philip Kerr, who supported the project strongly, phoned the prime minister about it, and—as historians are inclined to believe—obtained his approval. Kerr drafted for House an unofficial statement of the terms on which he believed a settlement with the communists could be achieved. House sent the statement to Wilson.
In the Time of the Americans Page 31