1917

by Arthur Herman, PhD

  The same was pretty much true of Lloyd George. Right after the war, he spoke of squeezing the German orange “until the pips squeak,” meaning insisting on financial reparations. He was also responsible for maintaining, even after the armistice, the punitive British naval blockade, which kept Germany perpetually on the brink of starvation (although the supposedly high-minded humanitarian liberal Wilson never objected to the blockade). Yet, once Britain’s key requirement for peace, the internment of the German High Seas Fleet, was taken care of, Lloyd George was willing to take steps to salve the feelings of Germany, the same Germany that had sunk British merchant ships without mercy and terror-bombed London.

  For example, when the creation of a new, independent Poland involved lavish losses of German territory, it was Lloyd George who insisted there be a plebiscite in Silesia before the territory was handed over to the Poles. (The Germans won the plebiscite, but Poland got Silesia anyway.) He also stood against handing over the port of Danzig, which was overwhelmingly German in population but whose major access to the Baltic Sea Poland said it needed. As a result, Danzig became a free city instead, independent of Poland but economically integrated into the Polish economy. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but by trying to do Germany justice after the First World War, Lloyd George, without knowing it, had helped to set the detonator for the Second.

  As for Italian prime minister Orlando, his entire focus was on his own borders, and what Italy was owed by previous agreements. As far as Germany and the future of the world were concerned, he couldn’t have cared less. He would have signed anything Wilson had crafted, as long as the terms of the London Treaty, which had drawn Italy into the war, were observed.

  It was Wilson and Wilson alone who was the source of the problems that haunted the Peace Conference and, afterward, the Treaty of Versailles. His unabashed admirer, British Foreign Office employee Harold Nicolson, watched from a front-row seat as, week by week, month by month, his hero suffered political, even moral, collapse. There were many reasons for this, Nicolson later reasoned. There was Wilson’s overweening spiritual arrogance, which Nicolson saw as part of the president’s Presbyterian inheritance. There was Wilson’s thin-skinned response to the slightest criticism or opposition, but above all, there was, as Wilson himself admitted, the American president’s “one-track mind.”

  This intellectual disability “rendered him blindly impervious, not merely to human character but also to shades of difference. He possessed no gift for differentiation, no capacity for adjustment to circumstances. It was his spiritual and mental rigidity that proved his undoing.”38

  Like many high-minded people, Wilson, when faced with opposition that he considered evil but which refused to yield to his arguments, felt no compunction about simply crossing his arms and refusing to play the game.

  Early on, for example, there was the issue of what to do about Germany’s former colonies in Africa and the South Pacific. Australia wanted New Guinea; South Africa wanted former German South Western Africa (today Namibia); New Zealand was after former German Samoa. Wilson was shocked. He was opposed to any settlement that involved the annexation of Germany’s former possessions, but he had no better idea of what should happen to these lands—especially those in Africa and Micronesia, where the assumption of the “white man’s burden” still applied. Eventually, the Big Four arrived at the concept of the mandate: passing stewardship of non-European territories to the Great Powers for a limited period, one that would be ratified by the future League of Nations. Mandates were largely a fiction, of course. The distinction between “mandate” and “colony,” especially in highly colonized Africa, was meaningless. But the idea provided a fig leaf for Wilson’s insistence that the Paris conference not become the tool of European imperialism. France and Britain accepted Wilson’s phony compromise.

  Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand did not. They rejected the notion of getting a mandate for the territories they saw as necessary for protecting their national interests—in the case of South Western Africa, adjoining territory. Wilson was horrified. He assumed that evil old Great Powers might want colonies; but Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand were freshly minted republics, democracies by their lights and Wilson’s—of course, blacks had no vote in South Africa, but in effect many of them had no vote in Wilson’s America, either—and therefore his allies.

  A discussion of this issue with Australian prime minister William Hughes exploded into a heated argument. Hughes viewed Wilson with nothing short of contempt; he thought Wilson’s high-minded idealism a lot of humbug, and dismissed the League of Nations as the president’s toy: “He won’t be happy until he gets it,”* Hughes would say with disgust.39 He also noted, as others did, that Wilsonism had been repudiated in the last American election. Hughes found it “intolerable,” he said at a British Cabinet meeting in December—Australia, like South Africa, had a seat in Lloyd George’s expanded War Cabinet—“for President Wilson to tell us that the world is to be saved on his terms.” Australia, for one, wasn’t going to stand for it.40

  So, when Wilson rose up in indignation as they discussed the issue of New Guinea and asked archly, “Am I to understand that if the whole civilized world asks Australia to agree to a mandate in respect of these islands, is Australia still prepared to defy the appeal of the whole civilized world?” Hughes’s answer was prompt and forthright. “That’s about the size of it, President Wilson.” Prime Minister William Massey of New Zealand grunted his agreement.41

  In the end, a compromise was struck. The mandates were split into three groups: former Turkish colonies in the Middle East, which were judged close to running their own affairs, were A class; colonies in places such as Africa, where the mandate power would run things, were B class; and C-class territories were those close to or adjoining the mandate powers, which would administer the areas and peoples living in them as their own national territory. It was this C class into which Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand were judged to fall, so the issue went away. But the whole mandate system was clearly a face-saving farce, and in places such as the Middle East, where France received a mandate for Syria and Britain for Palestine, it sowed the seeds of much trouble later on.*

  Then there was Italy and the question of Trieste. To get the Italians to switch sides and join the Entente powers during the war, France, Britain, and Russia had signed the Treaty of London, which promised Italy a wide swath of Mediterranean islands and territory in the Balkans, including the important port of Trieste and sizable portions of the Austrian Tirol, in the Alps. The Treaty of London was precisely the kind of Bismarckian balance-of-paper diplomacy President Wilson most despised: arranged in secret, involving annexations from other countries with no consideration of the feelings or wishes of the people living there (a quarter million German-speakers, in the case of the Tirol), all in order to further a war. But Britain and France had put their names, and national honor, to the treaty; their ally Italy arrived at the Peace Conference expecting to see that pledge redeemed. It was, as Harold Nicolson observed, a clear case of the clash between the “old diplomacy” and the new, based on the Fourteen Points. “Here, if ever, was the opportunity for the Prophet of the new World to enforce his message upon the old.”42

  Yet Wilson did not do this. “He failed us,” Nicolson wrote later. “We ceased, from that moment, to believe that President Wilson was the Prophet whom we had followed.”

  Wilson started well. On January 13, he informed Italian prime minister Orlando that, in his mind, the Treaty of London was all but dead (although it is not entirely clear if Wilson had even read the text of the treaty).43 Unfazed, Orlando used the conversation to reaffirm his own personal commitment to Wilsonism, but warned that Italy had been placed in a difficult position with the collapse of Austria-Hungary. Annexation of the Tirol became a matter not of imperialist greed but of national security; surely the United States could understand that, given its own interests in the Western Hemisphere. Here Italy offered a deal. It wo
uld support exempting the Monroe Doctrine (the U.S. policy of opposing European colonialism and intervention in the Americas) from the Covenant of the League of Nations, an exception Wilson himself supported. Wilson would find no better friend and supporter for the League of Nations he wanted than Italy, Orlando averred, if the American president could see his way clear on the Tirol and the Brenner, a mountain pass through the Alps forming the border separating Italy and Austria.44

  And so, Wilson did. And “if Wilson could swallow the Brenner,” Nicolson noted sourly, “he would swallow anything.” One by one, Italy’s claims under the Treaty of London (Dalmatia, Istria, a protectorate over Albania, Rhodes, and eleven other islands in the Dodecanese entirely populated by Greeks) were established and validated. Clemenceau and Lloyd George were inclined to say nothing; they left it up to Wilson to draw the line with Orlando, which Wilson did not. He did, however, finally balk at Fiume. One of the new states recognized by the conference, Yugoslavia, claimed it as well. Fiume’s population was largely South Slav; by the principle of self-determination, it belonged to Yugoslavia. Italy, however, was an Allied Power and threatened to walk out if the Yugoslavs won the argument. Wilson tried to go over the heads of Italian leaders and speak directly to the Italian people—and got a faceful of nationalist backlash instead. On April 19, the Italians did walk out of the Peace Conference. Wilson had suffered his most serious rebuke.45

  In the end, the Paris Peace Conference could not arrive at a solution for Fiume. It was left to Rome and Belgrade to sort out, which they did, to no one’s ultimate satisfaction. The Fiume issue did, however, mobilize two new voices for Italian nationalism. One was the poet and soldier of fortune Gabriele D’Annunzio; at one point, he would lead an armed revolt to seize Fiume for Italy. The other was a socialist journalist named Benito Mussolini. He had experienced firsthand the disastrous retreat from Caporetto in 1917; he would spend the rest of his political career determined never again to let Italy be humiliated on the international stage. The political party he would head, and its Blackshirts and Fascists, found a spark in the battle over Fiume and in Wilson’s cavalier treatment of Italy, including, at one point, his halting of famine-relief shipments to the country. Mussolini would be a powerful example of how the events of 1917 shaped the future—and of the unexpected product of a failed and increasingly bankrupt Wilsonism.

  The same was true in the case of Japan and China. Japan had proved itself America’s indispensable ally in the Siberian expedition. It had also provided aid to Britain and France from the other side of the world, including loaning money when those financially strapped nations were at their most desperate.46 Then, in January 1917, Japan also sent a flotilla of destroyers to help deal with the Austro-German submarine threat (more than two hundred Japanese sailors died fighting the U-boat menace, thousands of miles from their Pacific home). In gratitude, the Entente powers secretly agreed to let Japan take over German’s treaty rights in the Shandong Peninsula, in China—a move that set the stage for a long and dismal future for China, and for East Asia more generally.

  But it wasn’t just Britain and France that agreed to let the Japanese take over. The government of Chinese premier Gen. Duan Qirui, in Peking, also signed on. The deal would have allowed Japan to maintain a garrison in Shandong in exchange for its support for revising the entire structure of unfair treaties with China.47 And because Japan had also agreed to Wilson’s Fourteen Points, its delegates arrived in Paris assuming they were in a strong position both to get what they wanted for Japan and also to act as the conscience of Asia—a strong enough position, in fact, to ask the Peace Conference to insert in the Covenant of the League of Nations then being drafted a clause embracing the principle of racial equality. The Japanese saw this as a way to assert their own equality with the Western Allies, that is, as a Great Power, but also to boost their position as defender of China’s interests and to offset their image as imperial aggressor.

  Yet to a generation of westerners reared on white supremacist dogmas and Darwinism, the clause seemed to offer a dangerous precedent. Such a clause might apply to the Japanese, British foreign minister Balfour pointed out, but what about central Africa?48 The proposal went nowhere.

  At the end of March, as the conference was entering the home stretch, the Japanese delegation tried offering a watered-down version of the League agreement. It, too, failed to pass muster, with Wilson casting the final veto. This led Japan to threaten to leave the conference altogether, unless its participants recognized Japan’s rights in Shandong according to Japan’s agreement with Peking. The Chinese delegates complained that they had signed the agreement under duress. As one of Japan’s delegates scoffed to U.S. secretary of state Lansing, it was “ridiculous for a nation of 400 millions to go around complaining that they had signed a treaty under duress.”49

  In the end, the Japanese won their concession. On April 22, in one of the conference’s last acts, Wilson and the others had to inform the Chinese delegation that the Allied powers were bound by the prior treaty. The result was a double disaster. The Chinese delegates refused to sign the final treaty, and left Paris in high dudgeon. When the news reached China, anti-Western and anti-Japanese riots exploded across the country. On May 4, some five thousand Chinese students stormed into Tiananmen Square in Peking to protest the Treaty of Versailles. The so-called May Fourth Movement set the stage for decades of turmoil and collapse at the center in China, and led to civil war and, ultimately, war with Japan.50

  As for Japan, the rejection of the racial equality clause and, by implication, of Japan’s status as a Great Power equal to France or Britain doomed those Japanese politicians arguing for an accommodationist, pro-Western slant to their country’s foreign policy, especially toward the United States. The forces of the militaristic right in Japan took heart from the setback, just as the extreme nationalists in Italy had done with Fiume. The roots of a future war were planted that fateful spring; Wilson’s failure to support Japan’s highest aspirations would end with bombs dropped on Pearl Harbor.

  And so it went, with one issue after another. Some discussions, such as that over the borders for the new Czechoslovakia (Professor Masaryk’s great dream), went relatively well; many others, such as those concerning the borders of Poland and the mandate for Syria, did not. Most important, the number of violations of the Fourteen Points kept mounting. Having conceded on one or two, Wilson seemed to see no point in not conceding on almost all of them.

  He convinced himself by reasoning that he could make these concessions because he was now staking everything on his League of Nations. This had become the remaining Holy Grail of his failed crusade. Whatever injustices or inequities had to be tolerated to arrive at a final peace treaty, they could all be corrected by the League of Nations—or so he believed. And the Holy of Holies of the League would be its Covenant, the document that dictated the basic principles that this gathering of all nations would commit itself to observing in its future deliberations. That the Fourteen Points would themselves be at the heart of that Covenant, Wilson did not doubt from the moment he set foot in Paris.

  On April 28, nine days after the Italian delegation walked out and after Wilson had made his concession on Shandong, the conference met in a plenary session to review the revised League of Nations Covenant. Wilson was speaking when observers noticed that he seemed unusually lackluster and muted; his presentation included several factual errors that caused him to start over.

  That morning, something was wrong. Wilson had been signing documents with his usual strong hand. By afternoon, however, the handwriting had deteriorated; it “became more heavily slanted to the right,” his biographer, Arthur Link, noticed in reviewing the documents half a century later; “[it] was more and more heavily inked, and became almost grotesque.”51

  Others noticed a physical change. The U.S. secretary of war, Newton Baker, noted that “the left side of his face twitched sharply, drawing down the under lid of his eye.” Later, Wilson had trouble recalling in the a
fternoon what he, Lloyd George, and Clemenceau had discussed in the morning. As April turned into May, others described his forgetfulness, his irritability, and a growing “suspicion bordering on paranoia.”52

  Did Wilson suffer a stroke on that day in late April? The evidence strongly suggests he did. It may not have been severe enough to render him unable to attend meetings or to cause him to withdraw from public settings, but that he was physically and mentally a different man after the date seems indisputable. If it was a stroke, it would leave him impaired just when he most needed his strength.

  For one thing, there were still the Germans to deal with.

  The German delegation, led by a clutch of Social Democratic politicians, arrived in Paris in early May. They expected to be treated, especially by Wilson, as a fellow democratic nation, there to negotiate a final equitable peace. Instead, to their shock and humiliation, they were received as a beaten adversary to be punished and reduced to impotence, while Wilson sat mutely by, doing nothing.

  On May 7, the very day of the fourth anniversary of the sinking of the Lusitania, the German delegates were escorted into the Hall of Mirrors at Palace of Versailles and presented with a peace treaty to sign. The venue was an additional humiliation. The Hall of Mirrors was where the German Empire had been proclaimed in 1871, following Germany’s triumph in the Franco-Prussian War. Now there was a peace treaty that overturned the earlier triumph by restoring to France the two eastern provinces it had lost in the war, Alsace and Lorraine, and depriving Germany of the Saarland and of control over its Rhineland. The national shame of France was at last vindicated, with interest.