The Big Four turned their attention to a treaty with Austria-Hungary, a job that could best be compared to putting together pieces of a dropped puzzle. Here Wilson confronted another dismaying problem. The French, still obsessed by their fear of Germany, were unilaterally turning the states born of the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires into military satellites on Germany’s borders. French officers and weaponry poured into Poland, Czechoslovakia and Rumania. Poland had raised an army of 600,000, and the Czechs 250,000; the Rumanians were industriously imitating them. All these armies soon began shooting at each other over disputed slices of territory. Ray Stannard Baker, Wilson’s press secretary, glumly informed the president that there were no less than fourteen small wars in progress in supposedly pacified Europe.
“Yes,” wilson said wearily.“They all prefer to fight.”
Around the same time, Baker overheard Lloyd George denouncing Europe’s small states as troublemakers and expensive in the bargain. The prime minister assailed the “monstrous demands of Czechoslovakia” as typical of the “miserable ambitions of the small states. ”
So much for the war to end all wars on behalf of small countries such as poor little Belgium.44
X
Meanwhile, the draft of the final peace treaty was in frantic progress. Staffers toiled on technicalities and wording. Other bureaucrats scurried around Paris to find out what had been decided about Poland’s claims to Upper Silesia and similar matters. When it came to the section on reparations, they discovered that no one, including Woodrow Wilson, had paid serious attention to a decision to preface it with a statement asserting that Germany was responsible for starting the war. To the British and the French, this was an article of faith, of course. Their propaganda had reiterated it almost every day for four years. But Wilson was on record as saying no one—or everyone—was responsible.
On the face of it, the accusation was bizarre. No one claimed that the Germans had shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo in 1914, nor that this murder of the crown prince of Germany’s chief ally did not have a great deal to do with precipitating the conflict. The war guilt clause pretended this central event never happened. Instead, the document curtly demanded that Germany acknowledge its responsibility “for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated governments have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed on them by the aggression of Germany and its allies.” Compounding the irony, this statement was written by a former Wilson pupil at Princeton (and future secretary of state), John Foster Dulles.45
The source of the assertion was a memoir by Henry Morgenthau, Sr., Wilson’s ambassador to Turkey from 1913 to 1916. Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story told of a secret meeting of the kaiser with Germany’s top generals, admirals, industrialists and bankers plus numerous prominent members of the diplomatic corps on July 5, 1914, seven days after the Sarajevo assassinations.“ Are you ready for war?” the kaiser had purportedly asked. Everyone except the bankers supposedly said yes. The bankers wanted time to unload securities they held on Wall Street and other financial markets. The kaiser gave the money men two weeks to take care of these matters.
Morgenthau cited the “astonishing slump in prices” on Wall Street from July 5 to July 22 by way of proof that the Germans dumped their stocks. But the pièce de résistance in the evidence department was the ambassador’s revelation that he had been told the entire story of the Potsdam conclave by Baron Hans Von Wagenheim, Germany’s ambassador to Turkey, who had supposedly attended the meeting. One can easily see why a harried young staffer such as John Foster Dulles might buy this story. In a report filed on March 29, 1919, it had been cited as perhaps the primary piece of evidence by the Commission on the Responsibility for the Authors of the War and on Enforcement of Penalties.
Historians examining the evidence in the next decade concluded that Morgenthau was lying. In the early months of the war, Germany was trying to convince the United States that hostilities had been forced on it. Wagenheim would never have boasted to an American official that the precise opposite was the truth. Nor was there an “astonishing slump” in stocks in July 1914. State Department files show no report from Morgenthau of his conversation with Wagenheim, who had conveniently died in 1915. If such an exchange had taken place, Morgenthau should have (and would have) instantly informed his government.46
XI
The Germans, in the midst of fighting Bolsheviks and imminent starvation, had managed to stay in close touch with the peace process in Paris. They had even set up a Bureau for Peace Negotiations, soon shortened by slangy Berliners to Paxkonferenz. The bureau’s existence testified to the widespread German conviction that Germany had signed a contract with Woodrow Wilson to negotiate peace on the basis of the Fourteen Points. The country put forty bureaucrats to work on Wilson’s various statements on peace, backed up by more than one hundred experts on agriculture, industry, education and almost every other conceivable topic that might come up when negotiations with the Allies began.
When the Allied note asking Berlin to send representatives to hear the preliminary terms arrived in Berlin, the German foreign minister, Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, assumed that the document could be picked up by a messenger. He would dispatch an ambassador, an aide and four clerks to do the job. Back came a stiff reply from the Allies. They wanted a delegation of “plenipotentiaries” ready to discuss all aspects of the proposed peace. The count, a veteran diplomat, was not in the least nonplussed. He quickly assembled politicians, soldiers and top-level bureaucrats, and soon, 180 Germans were on their way to Versailles.
When they arrived on April 29, 1919, the French escorted them to the Hôtel des Réservoirs, one of the better hostelries in Versailles. The French dumped their bags in the courtyard and announced there were no porters willing to carry a German suitcase upstairs. Around the hotel was a barbed-wire fence, patrolled by French sentries. For the next week, the Germans waited—and waited—and waited. In Paris the drafting committee was still writing the treaty. Meanwhile, groups of French patriots showed up at the hotel’s barbed-wire fence to scream insults at the Germans.
In Paris, the completed treaty, 440 articles in 75,000 words, went to the printer on May 5. It ran to more than 200 printed pages. Before dawn on May 7, messengers rushed copies to Allied delegations and collaborating officials such as Herbert Hoover, who had finally managed to get some food into Germany, though not nearly enough. Hoover received his copy at 4 A.M. Recently the food administrator had written a letter to Wilson, advising him that if they could not get a peace treaty on the basis of the Fourteen Points,“we should retire from Europe, lock stock and barrel.”
Hoover finished reading the treaty as dawn brightened the Paris sky. He could not believe his own disappointment. The thing was an abomination, a parody of the Fourteen Points. The economic clauses, aimed at crippling Germany, would “pull down the whole continent.” Unquestionably, the terms “contained the seeds of another war.” dressing, the Iowan wandered disconsolately into the streets, where he met the British economist John Maynard Keynes and the South African leader Jan Christian Smuts, both of whom had obviously just finished reading their copies. They stared at each other, disillusion and dismay on their faces.47
No one, including Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau or Orlando (who returned from his sulky retreat to Rome on May 5), had read the entire treaty from beginning to end until the day it was presented to the Germans. The cumulative effect of its cynical deals and cruel demands struck almost every American at the conference with the impact of a high-explosive shell, annihilating whatever illusions the participant may have still nourished about their mission in Paris.
Secretary of State Lansing made one of the more powerful statements in a memorandum he put in his files. He called the terms “immeasurably harsh and humiliating.” He dismissed Wilson’s ploy of putting the league into the treaty, because the treaty made a mockery of the league. The secretary deplored the way the document de
livered “peoples . . . against their will into the hands of those they hate.” Lansing called the league “an instrument of the mighty to check the normal growth of national power and national aspirations” among the defeated. Instead of a Triple Alliance, he believed the world now had a Quintuple Alliance,“which is to rule the world.” the members could surround this alliance with a halo and call it the League of Nations, but it was still an alliance of “the five great military powers.” what did it all add up to? “Disappointment, regret, depression.”48
If this was the treaty’s impact on the Americans, not much imagination is needed to picture the German reaction. At 3 P.M. on May 7, Count Brockdorff-Rantzau and five fellow delegates were ushered into one of the most spectacular rooms in the Trianon Château, across the Park of Versailles from the immense royal palace of the French kings. Large windows filled two walls. Outside one window was a flowering cherry tree. A third wall was covered with mirrors, filling the room with reflected light.49
The German delegates sat down at a table, which French newspapers had labeled le banc des accusés. The table of the accused. Opposite them sat Clemenceau, flanked by Lloyd George and Wilson. Clemenceau rose and spat out a venomous speech. He said it was “neither the time nor place for superfluous words . . . the hour has struck for the weighty settlement of your account.” In this “Second Peace of Versailles,” the victors were “unanimously resolved” to obtain “all the legitimate satisfactions which are our due.”
The reference to the second peace of Versailles made it clear that the French appetite for revenge was still in charge. In 1871, the victorious Germans had forced the French to sign a humiliating peace treaty in the city where France’s kings had once dominated Europe. The premier informed the Germans that they would have fifteen days to send “written observations” about the treaty to the Allies—along with a date on which they would sign it.
The Germans registered shock and disbelief. Clemenceau was telling them there would be no face-to-face negotiations. The premier asked if any of the Germans wished to speak. Brockdorff-Rantzau raised his hand, and picked up a speech he and his associates had stayed up most of the night writing. Exhausted and extremely nervous, the foreign minister read his remarks seated, which many people considered a sign of disrespect. (In fact, he was so nervous, he was unable to stand.) The forty-nine-year-old count had been one of the few members of the foreign service who had defied Generals Ludendorff and von Hindenburg and called for an early compromise peace. But he happened to be the kaiser’s first cousin and looked like a classic German aristocrat, complete with a monocle and a precise mustache. He began by saying, “We know the intensity of the hatred which meets us” and went on to discuss the clause, already broadcast through newspaper leaks, that fastened guilt for the war on Germany. The count said he would never admit such a thing.“Such a confession in my mouth would be a lie.” He told his audience that the continuing British blockade had killed hundreds of thousands of German noncombatants. He reminded them that they had offered peace on the basis of the Fourteen Points.
One British delegate dismissed these words as “the most tactless speech” he had ever heard. Clemenceau’s face turned magenta as he listened. Lloyd George’s grew so angry, he snapped an ivory letter opener in half. Woodrow Wilson turned to the prime minister while the count was speaking and whispered,“Isn’t it just like them?” Earlier in the day, after Wilson had read the full treaty, he had confessed to Ray Stannard Baker,“If I were a German, I think I should never sign it.” these were the words of a man who had abandoned interest in fighting for his Fourteen Points.
Back at the Hôtel des Réservoirs, the Germans spent the night translating the treaty. By dawn, they saw what confronted them. Along with the confession of guilt for the war were reparations that would be decided later—which meant Germany’s economy would be at the mercy of the victors for as long as they pleased. Added to this were the loss of crucial coalfields to the Poles and French; the separation of the Rhineland, the Saar, and Upper Silesia from the Reich; the loss of the port city of Danzig (given to the Poles); the all-but-total destruction of their army and navy—and a demand that the kaiser and an unspecified number of other leaders be surrendered for trial as war criminals. The terms drove one member of the delegation, a socialist who had risen from the working class to become postmaster general, to drink. In an alcoholic rage, he smashed glasses and shouted, “I believed in Woodrow Wilson until today. I believed him an honest man and now that scoundrel sends us such a treaty!”50
XII
The Germans rushed a copy of the translated treaty to Berlin. Overnight, Woodrow Wilson went from the most admired to the most hated man in Germany. In their rage and despair, the Germans printed several thousand copies of the treaty and distributed them all over Berlin. President of the republic Friedrich Ebert called it a “monstrous document.” General Ludendorff roared that it was time to tell America to go to hell. Chancellor Philipp Scheidemann called Wilson a hypocrite and said the treaty was “the vilest crime in history.” A crowd gathered outside the American military mission to chant,“Where are our Fourteen Points? Where is Wilson’s peace?” Chancellor Scheidemann ordered the delegates in Versailles to inform the Allies that the treaty was “unbearable and unfulfillable.”51
Alert American reporters obtained copies of the treaty in Berlin and cabled them to the United States. The document was soon being discussed in American newspapers and magazines. Many liberals, already distressed by Article 10 of the League of Nations, with its implicit support of the British empire in perpetuity, were appalled when they saw the league linked to the punitive treaty. They lost all confidence in Wilson.
Oswald Garrison Villard led the attack in The Nation. The league’s tilt toward the conservative side of things was bad enough, he said. But now it was tied to a peace of “intrigue, selfish aggression and naked imperialism.” Villard grew more merciless with each succeeding issue. The Nation described the peace conference as “the madness at Versailles” and dismissed Wilson as “discredited.”
On May 24, 1919, Villard published “Out of His Own Mouth,” a collection of quotes from Wilson’s speeches, in which the president opposed the venal things that had been done with his apparent approval in fashioning the treaty. Getting to the heart of the matter, Villard asked how anyone with liberal sympathies could expect “the managers of this bastard League of Nations to right the wrongs the treaty contains?”52
For the New Republic, which had supported Wilson’s decision to go to war and had accumulated a heavy burden of doubt as the editors watched him throw Socialists and other dissenters in jail, destroy the Industrial Workers of the World, and muzzle magazines and newspapers, the treaty was the proverbial last straw. On May 24, they published a special issue, “This Is Not Peace.” It was, editor Herbert Croly told Justice Louis Brandeis, a confession that the magazine had made a terrible mistake, backing Wilson and his war. Sparing no one, the magazine called the treaty an “inhuman monster” and announced that, thanks to Wilson, liberalism had “committed suicide.” americans would be “fools” to approve a peace that “cannot last.” the article saw only one solution—an American withdrawal from the whole sordid business.53
Walter Lippmann, after devoting much of the previous two years to Wilson’s war, called the League of Nations “fundamentally diseased” and began denouncing it everywhere. When a group of Boston Unitarians invited him to speak on behalf of the treaty, he nonplused them by calling it an unmitigated disaster. In a long letter to Secretary of War Newton Baker, Lippmann did not try to conceal his anger and heartbreak. He went over the treaty, article by article, pointing out the gross violations of the Fourteen Points.
Grimly, Lippmann laid the responsibility for the mess at Wilson’s door. He declined to excuse him because he had a “difficult task in Paris.” Numerous people had warned the president about the problems he would face—and had urged him not to go. Lippmann blamed part of the disaster on Wilson’s inability to de
legate responsibility—and tolerate strong men in his entourage. Another reason was the president’s “curious irresponsibility in the use of language which leads him to make promises without any clear idea of how they are to be fulfilled.”54
In the mainstream press, a very different reaction to the treaty prevailed. The New York Times editorialized:“It is a terrible punishment the German people and their mad rulers have brought upon themselves. . . . Can Germany live under these conditions? All the world can see that they are terribly severe. But the world knows, too, that they are just.” the Times demonstrated that German hatred did not make for accurate readings of the future:“The punishment Germany must endure for centuries will be one of the greatest deterrents to the war spirit.”
The New York Tribune, Germanophobe since 1914, wrote: “The wild beast that sprang at the throat of civilization has been muzzled.” The Chicago Daily News took a more mocking tone: “What did Germania think—that the Allied nations were going to make her Queen of the May?” the Cleveland Press taunted:“It’s a hard bed, Heinie, but who made it?” war rage was still alive and well in most of America.
In London, the Tory Daily Telegraph still breathed the hatred and envy of Germany that had brought England into the war. In prose that could have been written by Wellington House, the editors gloated that the treaty would leave Germany “an unrecognizable ghost of the empire of five years ago, bloated as it was with criminal annexations, arrogant with wealth, and crazed with the consciousness of unparalleled military power.”55
The Illusion of Victory Page 48