In the Time of the Americans

by David Fromkin

  “Yesterday Bullitt called me in,” he wrote, “and asked that an offensive and defensive alliance be made; wanted to start a new drive on the Russian situation, and asked me to come in on it: and I will though Bullitt is in disgrace in a sense and though it is taking one’s life in one’s hands.”

  ON AN EVENING in the second week of May 1919, a group of the younger members of the staff of the American Peace Commission assembled in a private room at the Hotel Crillon to discuss the proposed peace treaty, the terms of which they now knew. Bullitt, Berle, Herter, and the young historian Samuel Eliot Morison were among them.

  Most of those present agreed with Bullitt that the proposed peace terms were a betrayal of the beliefs for which the United States stood and for which President Wilson had claimed to stand. Like Bullitt, they had come to Paris only months before as enthusiasts for their idealistic President. When Bullitt, returning from Moscow in March, had said that if Wilson took up Lenin’s offer, the President would become “the greatest man in history since Jesus Christ,” he spoke for many and perhaps all of them. But Wilson instead had rejected the Soviet peace offer, and now had joined in proposing peace terms that violated all the principles that he had professed.

  “This isn’t a treaty of peace,” Bullitt argued. “I can see at least 11 wars in it.” It was full of “black inequities.” Young men had won the victory, and now the old men were trying to take it away from them. It was time to take a stand, Bullitt urged. He proposed that all of them—all the brilliant young men who staffed the American delegation—should resign in protest. It was on that issue that Bullitt lost some of his audience, for while all seemed to agree that the treaty was shameful, many said it would do no good to give up their jobs.

  After the meeting the young men went in to dinner at the hotel. The Crillon had decorated their tables with red roses and yellow jonquils. At the end of the meal, as some remembered it, Bullitt took up the flowers, awarded the red to those who would join him in resigning—and tossed the yellow at those who would not.

  Over the course of the next few weeks, about thirty experts (as Bullitt later recalled it) told their superiors that they were thinking of resigning from the American delegation in protest. Most were talked out of doing so. About a dozen went ahead to resign, spelling out in some cases those provisions of the Conditions of Peace they found most offensive.

  In letters to Joseph Grew for the secretariat, one of the experts, John Storck, wrote (May 14): “Protesting vigorously against the treaty …” which “will by wronging Germany make her eager for revenge.” Another, Joseph V. Fuller, charged (May 15) that “we have bartered away our principles in a series of compromises with interests of imperialism and revenge.…” Yet another, George B. Noble, termed it “an exceedingly dangerous settlement—if it could be called a settlement … provocative of future wars.… I feel that the idealism of America has been very largely sacrificed on the altar of imperialism.”

  Asking to be relieved of his duties, Adolf Berle wrote to Grew on May 15 that the proposed treaty violated “both letter and spirit” of the principles to which the United States was pledged in declaring and waging war; some of its provisions, “notably the Japanese clauses,” would “create a situation thoroughly dangerous to the interests of the United States.” (His reference was to the privileged position Japan was being awarded on Chinese territory.)

  Samuel Eliot Morison, who served with Berle in the Russian section, wrote at the same time describing the treaty as in flagrant contradiction “both to the interests of the United States and to the ideals and principles for the vindication of which the United States was supposed to be waging war.…” Though both young men were pressed to stay on, Morison resigned and Berle was released from duty a month later. Writing at that time, Morison protested in particular the Allied decision to back the tsarist Whites in the Russian civil war.

  “SENSATION AT CONFERENCE—NINE AMERICAN PEACE DELEGATES RESIGN FROM MISSION TO PARIS—DISGUSTED WITH TREATY” was the headline of a London Daily Herald story May 22, 1919. The newspaper reported that “practically the whole of the membership of the American Commission at Paris are disgusted and disappointed with the Peace Treaty. You will not find a half dozen of them who approve it. They are convinced that so far from being a basis of lasting peace, the Treaty will be the direct and certain cause of further wars.… They find that they have assisted in the making of a peace based, not on the ideals for which America fought, but upon the greeds and ambitions of European Imperialists. The general feeling of the delegation is that they have been duped.…”

  Bullitt’s was the biggest name in the group of young rebels. Before taking his stand, he had discussed his course of action with the three “outside” American commissioners, Lansing, Bliss, and White—all of whom shared his dismay at the proposed peace terms. Henry White, foreign affairs veteran that he was, had lectured Bullitt on his responsibilities as an official, and counseled him against resigning; it was the duty of a diplomat to further his government’s policies, said White, not his own. Nonetheless, Bullitt resigned on May 17. Typically, he broke the rules: first, by sending his letter of resignation not to Grew, but directly to the President, and second, by having the letter published in the press.

  “I was one of the millions who trusted … in your leadership,” he wrote, “and believed that you would take nothing less than ‘a permanent peace’ based upon ‘unselfish and unbiased justice.’ But our Government has consented now to deliver the suffering peoples of the world to new oppressions, subjections, and dismemberments—a new century of war.” Listing some of these injustices that he claimed would lead to new conflicts, Bullitt made the point that when taken together with the Covenant of the League of Nations, they would drag the United States into one war after another, turning the League not into an instrument of peace, but into an engine of war.

  “That you personally opposed most of the unjust settlements,” Bullitt concluded, was not enough; “if you had made your fight in the open, instead of behind closed doors, you would have carried with you the public opinion of the world.…” This was a Wilsonian concept in which Bullitt still believed. “I am sorry that you did not fight our fight to the finish and that you had so little faith in the millions of men, like myself, in every nation who had faith in you.”

  Publication of the letter caused a sensation. Bullitt was only six years out of college, as his detractors were able to remind one another. “How about Bullitt?” Frank Polk of the State Department in Washington cabled to Gordon Auchincloss, who had helped to undermine the Bullitt-Lenin accord. “A spanking seems desirable.”

  Bullitt, in turn, wondered how he and his talented friends ever had come to admire Woodrow Wilson—and decided that it all was because of tiny, plausible Edward House. He and such friends as Lippmann (he wrote to Lippmann) had been “bamboozled” by “little Eddie.”

  AS LATE AS MAY 6, the day the proposed peace treaty was at the printers in Paris, Walter Lippmann, back in New York City in his old editorial position with The New Republic, supposed that although its terms would not be to his liking, he would be able to support it. To his friend the art historian Bernard Berenson, he wrote that “I expect a compromise all along the line.… We here shall grumble and accept the results for two reasons—no peace means Bolshevism everywhere in Europe, and we don’t want that; and the League is enough to build on …” so that in future, if more enlightened governments were to come to power in England and France, it would be possible to revise the peace terms through decisions of the League.

  But a week later, as the terms approved by Wilson became known, Lippmann was appalled (“For the life of me I can’t see peace in this document …,” he wrote to Ray Stannard Baker in Paris) and was persuaded by The New Republic’s other editors that the magazine ought to oppose the treaty, “IS IT PEACE?” the magazine asked on its May 17 cover; “THIS IS NOT PEACE,” it answered the following week.

  To his former chief, Secretary of War Newton Baker, Lippmann
wrote two long letters explaining in detail why he now felt compelled to oppose the administration that, until a short time before, he had supported and served. The denial of self-determination to persons of German nationality (and to others) was not merely contrary to the principles Wilson had proclaimed but, Lippmann argued, as had Bullitt, it would lead to many wars. Focusing, as had Bullitt, on the League of Nations pledge of existing frontiers as well as on the separate and special American guarantee of France’s frontier with Germany, Lippmann concluded, as Bullitt had, that the United States would be dragged into endless wars. As for Wilson, whom he once had admired so much, Lippmann wrote, “I can find no excuses in the fact that he had a difficult task in Paris. No one supposed that he would have an easy one.”

  Seeing the Covenant of the League of Nations as a guarantee of the peace terms, Lippmann argued that it was in the interests of Britain and France to persuade the United States to adhere to it. They needed America’s support, in his view, but Wilson had failed to understand this: that they, not America, needed the League. Instead of buying European support for the League by agreeing to imperialism, he should have done the reverse, and forced Europe to buy American support for the League by renouncing “the Imperial program.”

  Then there was the matter of American support for the White armies in Russia. To Baker in Washington and to House in Paris, Lippmann addressed the same reproach: “I can understand these things happening in a reactionary administration. I can’t understand them happening where Woodrow Wilson is President.…”

  Lippmann now inclined to the late Willard Straight’s view that Wilson should have forced the Allies to agree to American terms before coming to their aid in the war. He did not offer to explain why he had not suggested it at the time. Nor did he come to grips with the real difficulties of such a position: that the Allies, even under pressure, might not have concurred; that even had they consented under duress, they would have disavowed the agreement later; and that the United States, while it could have threatened to withhold aid from the Allies, could not have carried out the threat without jeopardizing its own national interests—for America supported the Allies to help herself, not to help them.

  It was an essential element of Woodrow Wilson’s greatness that he lifted people’s eyes to higher things. He made the otherwise unbearable sacrifices and tragedies of the war meaningful by asserting that they would lead to a world without war or injustice in which no one nation would dominate another. The dark side of his gift for arousing hopes was that in the end he was bound to dash them, for there was no way in which he could fulfill such promises. Walter Lippmann, who ought to have asked at the very beginning how Wilson could possibly achieve the war goals he proclaimed, now blamed the President but not himself. The trouble with Wilson, said Lippmann, was his “curious irresponsibility in the use of language which leads him to make promises without any clear idea as to how they are to be fulfilled.”

  The President remained in Paris in May and June, impatient to conclude matters by signing a treaty with Germany so that he could return home. In their written responses to the Allied Conditions of Peace, the Germans, however, called into question practically every proposal; so that an agreement with them on a treaty seemed maddeningly far away.

  Isolated from others, as he always insisted on being, Wilson was startled to be told on May 22 that Smuts, the most respected figure on the British delegation, and American Peace Commissioners House, Lansing, and Bliss were thinking of not signing the treaty. The President found it impossible to believe, but an envoy he sent to sound out Lansing confirmed that the secretary of state described the proposed treaty as “unjust and unprincipled,” and rejected Wilson’s argument that it could be revised by the League, pointing out that the veto power wielded by each member of the League made that impossible.

  The President also was surprised by the attitude of Great Britain. Spurred on by Smuts, Lloyd George began to worry about the treaty. Questions arose; with the British army largely demobilized, what if the Germans refused to sign? He himself had never been in favor of harsh terms; he had insisted on them only because the press, the Parliament, and the public had demanded them. But now the German reply to the Allied proposals, received on May 29 (an extension of time had been granted by the Allies), made some points that the prime minister and his political partner, Andrew Bonar Law, found persuasive.

  To consider the German reply, Lloyd George invited to dinner all of the British cabinet then in Paris. Among the prime minister’s guests were Bonar Law, Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, Lord Robert Cecil, Winston Churchill, and a number of their colleagues. One of them noted in his diary that “For 3 hours after dinner we discussed the peace Terms … and it was amazing what unanimity there was in criticizing all the Peace terms.”

  On June 2 Lloyd George informed the Council of Four that after two days of meetings the British empire delegation had decided unanimously that the terms of the proposed treaty had to be revised to meet the German objections, and that unless major concessions were made to Germany, Britain would not join the others if the war resumed.

  But the revolt in American ranks took a different turn. In the wake of Bullitt’s rebellion, Wilson’s four fellow peace commissioners wrote to the President (May 27) suggesting that he call the first general conference of the staff of the U.S. delegation to let everyone have his say. It was actually Hoover’s suggestion, House wrote to Wilson—“for your own protection.” And of the staff experts, House wrote that “if you do not confer with them, I have a feeling that some of them will be disgruntled and perhaps make trouble.”

  With some thirty-nine persons attending, the American commissioners met with their staff of experts on June 3—in Lansing’s study, not (as would previously have been the case) in House’s quarters. Flaws in the treaty were pointed out by the experts, but in the end nobody was prepared to join the British in reopening issues that had been fought through and settled. For the exhausted President, it was out of the question; he was too tired even to think of it. “The time to consider all these questions was when we were writing the treaty,” he said.

  Later that day the President met with the Allies and told them that the United States was against making any major changes in the treaty proposals. As a result, the British initiative failed.

  MY MONTHS at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 were probably the saddest in my life,” Felix Frankfurter later recalled.† “The progressive disillusionment of the high hopes which Wilson’s noble talk had engendered was not unlike the feelings that the death of near ones brings.” These were feelings that the young Harvard Law School professor shared with his patron, Justice Brandeis, and with his protégé, Dean Acheson, who in June 1919 became Brandeis’s clerk.

  Frankfurter found the atmosphere of the peace conference at the end of spring much like that when a congressional session draws to a close. In the rush to wind up, legislative proposals previously thought to be of vital importance are put out of mind, while other matters are resolved arbitrarily with a quick stroke of the pen just to close them out. “Paris was like a session of Congress,” Frankfurter reminisced. “You finally had to shut up shop.” The delegates, he said, would do “any old thing to close up shop.”

  Domestic disturbances demanded their attention, and the world’s leaders could not afford to spend any more time on the German settlement. In June there were mutinies in the French army and strikes in Paris. In America there were bomb outrages; across the street from Franklin Roosevelt’s house, the home of the attorney general was blown up, and a nationwide Red scare ensued.

  It was time to close up shop at the peace conference.

  THE GERMAN CABINET resigned rather than accept the treaty that the Americans and the Allies sought to impose. It was what Lloyd George, among others, had dreaded; for if Germany refused to sign, the belligerents would have to go back to war—and what was left of the Allied armies was in no fit condition to do that. But the high command of what remained of the German army
, more keenly aware of the weaknesses of its own forces than of those of the Allies, advised the politicians that the military could not defend against a renewed Allied attack. So a new cabinet was formed in Berlin to do its bitter duty—which was to take upon itself the onus of signing the hated treaty.

  ON JUNE 28, 1919, five years to the day after the assassinations at Sarajevo that provided Germany and Austria with an excuse to launch the world war, the treaty of peace was ready to be signed. Places at the historic ceremony were eagerly sought. Lansing wrote that the American secretariat “has had a very unhappy time with the applications for tickets” and that the conference secretariat “must have been nearly wild with the pressure brought to bear to obtain admission.” He added that “there were some heart-burnings I know but that was unavoidable”; there was not room enough for everyone.

  Clemenceau opened the ceremonies promptly at 3 p.m. on June 28 in the long (240 feet), narrow (35 feet) seventeenth-century Hall of Mirrors of the Palace of Versailles, where in 1871 Kaiser Wilhelm I, in a ceremony meant to humiliate a defeated France, had been crowned emperor of Germany. The French premier, with his strong sense of the historic moments in the blood feud between France and Germany, had deliberately chosen not only the day—the anniversary of Sarajevo—but also this setting. He was bringing the Germans to the bar of justice at the very scene of their decades-old crime against France.

  Clemenceau was nearly seventy-eight, and for half a century he had been waiting for the hour between three and four o’clock on the afternoon of June 28, 1919. But spectators that day in the Hall of Mirrors were seated too close to view the old warrior’s triumph in its fullness. They would have had to be seated nearly a quarter of a century away to see the irony of it: to see French officers, in a mirror image of the scene at Versailles, endorsing an armistice of surrender in 1940 in the same railroad car at Rethondes, outside Compiègne, in which German delegates had been forced to sign such an armistice in 1918.