by G. J. Meyer
If he shared his feelings with the president, the result can only have been to widen the gulf between them.
Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Wilson now found themselves in a period of anxious waiting. The great questions were whether Germany would sign and, if she did not, how they should respond. While waiting, they remained as immersed in deliberations as ever, reorganizing the world. Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour described them as “three all-powerful, all-ignorant men sitting there and partitioning continents.”
Wilson had by this point been immersed for so long in global affairs, and was so distant from Washington, that he was no longer attuned to what was happening at home. He was so confident of the peace treaty’s eventual ratification by the Senate, so oblivious of the mounting questions about it, that when an extraordinary session of Congress had to be called to secure passage of the appropriations bills filibustered by the Senate back in March, he failed to turn necessity into an opportunity. The special session opened on May 19, but rather than returning home for it, he wrote a speech to be read to Congress on his behalf. Worse, in writing the speech, he limited himself to domestic matters exclusively: labor relations, taxes, tariffs, and the woman suffrage amendment. He promised to speak on “questions which affect the peace of the whole world” upon returning home, presumably thinking that his oratory would work its magic most effectively when delivered personally.
This was a blunder of the first order. A debate on the league was by now far advanced in the United States, and battle lines were firming up. It was time for the president to be arguing his case. In the absence of their leader, the pro-league Democrats tended to keep quiet, remaining passive even in the face of direct challenge. The action was on the Republican side, the side now in the majority in both houses of Congress, the only side where a lively, many-sided, and substantive exchange of views was in full flower.
Leading the nationwide campaign to win public acceptance of the league—not necessarily in quite the form offered by the president—was the League to Enforce Peace (LEP). By 1919 it had three hundred thousand members, thousands of volunteer speakers, a substantial budget, and a printing office capable of producing half a million flyers at a run. Its most visible leader, and much more than a figurehead, was former president Taft. His motivation was expressed in the organization’s name: a conviction that the maintenance of peace and the securing of the fruits of victory was going to require an international body with the authority and power to meet trouble with force. This made the group inherently sympathetic to Article 10.
A rival organization, the League for the Preservation of American Independence (LPAI), had recently sprung up. It professed to be opposed not to the league as such but, vaguely, to “unconditional” approval of a peace treaty containing the covenant. It presented a nonpartisan front by recruiting prominent Democrats known to be unfriendly to the president, but never rivaled the LEP in size or impact. The key figure in the debate, Henry Cabot Lodge, declined to openly associate himself with the newer organization but quietly put its organizers in touch with sources of financial support.
The irreconcilables remained a small minority. The debate that mattered, within the Republican Party, continued to take place among those who accepted that the size, power, and economic reach of the United States imposed global responsibilities. The question, for such people, was not how to evade those responsibilities but how to discharge them in ways that were constructive, responsible, and consistent with American interests and values. It was a question that afforded ample space for reasonable people to disagree.
Wilson had in effect denied the legitimacy of questions about Article 10 in refusing to consider amending it, but it was exactly those questions with which the Senate’s Republicans found themselves grappling through the summer of 1919. Senator Philander Knox, the former attorney general and secretary of state, generated much publicity with a speech declaring that the league was too difficult a matter, its covenant too fraught with uncertainties, to be undertaken without extensive deliberation. He joined Lodge in demanding that it be separated from the peace treaty and set aside for consideration later. “Beware of the possible consequences of haste,” Knox warned. “God forbid that ‘the war that was to end all wars’ shall conclude with a peace that may end all peace.”
Another former secretary of state, Elihu Root, attracted attention with an open letter carried by newspapers across the country. He commented positively on many aspects of the league and did not dispute that it could become a force for good. But he wanted it changed significantly. He said that the Senate must make clear that the United States “refuses its consent” to Article 10 and would insist on its own interpretation of other articles.
The president’s response was by now familiar. He said first that the league was so woven into the text of the peace treaty that the one could not be excised without destroying the other. Second, the peace conference had already amended four articles of the covenant at the insistence of the United States, and to ask it to reopen the matter yet again was simply impossible. The first point was true enough; removing the league would require rewriting much of the treaty when no one thought there was time for doing so. Wilson’s second point, too, seemed unanswerable at first. But Root, whose intellect kept him among the powers of his party in spite of his holding no office and made him the country’s most eminent corporate lawyer, came back with an answer. Instead of demanding new amendments, he said, the Senate in ratifying the treaty should set forth whatever “reservations” it deemed necessary. Unlike amendments, he claimed, reservations would require no action by the peace conference. They would be effective so long as the other signers of the treaty did not explicitly object—something they were not likely to do, for fear of driving the United States out of the league altogether. Though Lodge continued to want amendments, many of his fellow Republicans were delighted with the Root formula and embraced it. It would become the basis upon which they engaged the president when he returned to Washington, and upon which they would come to be known as “reservationists.”
In Europe, the final deadline for German acceptance of the treaty was drawing near, and a shaky Weimar government was failing to come to a decision. On June 20 the German cabinet abandoned hope of resolving its deadlock and resigned. Brockdorff-Rantzau, as foreign minister, was among those who quit. He departed Paris, leaving behind a small staff in the vain hope that the Council of Four might show itself willing to discuss Germany’s concerns. Suddenly the question was not whether the German government would sign but whether there was a German government.
The Supreme Council announced that if Germany did not accept the treaty, she would be invaded. Marshal Foch was ordered to prepare the Allied forces and mustered thirty divisions. The council added a second and rather gross threat: without the treaty, it would not only continue the blockade but tighten it—if such a thing were possible. Learning of this, Herbert Hoover wrote to Wilson that it was his understanding that the blockade was continuing “without any authority from the Council of Four” and that “I should be very glad, if it is in accord with your views, that this order be rescinded.” Since the end of March, Hoover had been doing what he could, with extremely limited success, to get some food into Germany. He, along with many of the American soldiers occupying the Rhineland, was sickened by the spectacle of emaciated children, skeletal wraiths with distended stomachs, fighting over the AEF’s garbage.
But nothing changed. The blockade had been removed from Austria some weeks before, less out of compassion than because of fears that if the country continued its slide into chaos, the result would be Bolshevism. Hungary did not share in Austria’s good fortune because it was already a Bolshevist state, Europe’s second after Russia. When ships carrying food managed somehow to reach German ports, they were not permitted to unload. When intercepted at sea, such ships were diverted to Britain.
On June 22 the German National Assembly informed Paris that it was prepared to accept the treaty with a single rese
rvation. This involved the same war guilt clause to which Brockdorff-Rantzau had objected so vehemently. The Assembly declared “with the greatest emphasis” that it “cannot accept Article 231 of the Treaty of Peace which requires Germany to admit herself to be the sole and only author of the war.” The vehemence with which the whole German nation—public and press as well as political leaders—persisted in reacting to this article came as a surprise to the victors. As for the treaty as a whole, Weimar told the Council of Four, Germany’s decision to sign “is to be understood in the sense that it yields to force, being resolved to spare the German people, whose sufferings are unspeakable, a new war, the shattering of its national unity by further occupation of German territories, terrible famine for women and children, and mercilessly prolonged retention of the prisoners of war….The conditions imposed exceed the measure of that which Germany can in fact perform.”
The council’s response was that no reservations, and therefore no such acceptance of the treaty, would be accepted. German politicians conferred with their generals about whether armed resistance might be possible. The soldiers had only to look to Foch’s hundreds of thousands of troops, and to the eager and almost equally formidable Polish and Czech forces, to declare the idea ridiculous. In the streets of Berlin and other cities, meanwhile, starving crowds were taking to the streets to beg for peace now, peace at any price.
Admissions of guilt aside, few in Paris were surprised by the Germans’ reluctance to sign such a draconian settlement, one so obviously designed to reduce a large and powerful nation, a nation now attempting to function as a democracy, to open-ended servility. Some at the peace conference pointed to the awkwardness of treating a republican government as an outlaw because of the policies and acts of the regime it had overthrown.
Ironically, Article 231 had been inserted into the treaty almost as an afterthought, to provide justification for unlimited reparations. It was drafted by a young American lawyer named John Foster Dulles, a nephew of Secretary of State Lansing’s wife, a onetime student of Woodrow Wilson’s at Princeton, and himself a future secretary of state. Some historians maintain that it should never have been called the war guilt clause because it was nothing of the kind—that those Germans who insisted on making it an issue were being disingenuous. It is simply not true, they complain, that the clause forced the Germans to accept sole responsibility for starting the war. To test that claim, one must look at what the article says:
The Allied and Associated governments affirm and Germany accepts the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies.
If Dulles—presumably a better lawyer than prose stylist—had stopped after the word “subjected,” or even “as a consequence of the war,” he would have done no more than state the obvious fact that the German armies had done a great deal of damage. To read the clause’s last eleven words and claim that they do not impute exclusive guilt, however, is to strain credibility. What else can be the purpose of “imposed upon” and “the aggression of Germany”? In 1919 surprise at the bitterness of the German reaction required only uncritical assent to the generally accepted Allied account of how the war had begun. Today it requires willful blindness to what has since come to light about the events of July 1914.
The deadline for German acceptance was seven P.M. on June 23. At noon on that day nothing had been heard in Paris. That remained true all afternoon. The wait was almost down to the final hour, and one can imagine the relish with which Foch and the Poles must have been readying their troops for a move into a hated and defenseless enemy’s heartland, when the answer came at last. It arrived at 5:40 P.M.: acceptance by a new Weimar government thrown together with a socialist named Gustav Bauer at its head. The message said Germany accepted terms imposed by the victorious powers. It said that in doing so it was yielding to overwhelming force. Such complaints could have been used by the Council of Four as justification for rejecting this acceptance just as brusquely as it had the one of June 22. Evidently, however, there was not sufficient stomach for a resumption of the war.
If the treaty was an outrage in German eyes, who in Germany would consent to sign it? No one wanted the job, and many were prepared to refuse it. Hermann Müller, a Social Democrat, was now foreign minister and therefore more or less obliged to accept. With him went Johannes Bell, who as minister of colonial affairs held the Bauer cabinet’s most laughably empty portfolio. The signing ceremony took place in the glorious Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles—the very room where the Germans had declared the creation of their new empire after defeating France in 1871. It happened on June 28, the date on which, five years earlier, Franz Ferdinand and his wife had been shot to death.
Clemenceau as chairman presided, and turned the event into a celebration that veered into tawdriness. “They lack only music and ballet girls, dancing in step, to offer the pen to the plenipotentiaries for signing,” said France’s ambassador to London. “Louis XIV liked ballets, but only as a diversion; he signed treaties in his study.” Colonel House would confess to “a feeling of sympathy for the Germans who sat there quite stoically. It was not unlike what was done in olden times, when the conqueror dragged the conquered at his chariot wheels. To my mind, it is out of keeping with the new era which we profess an ardent desire to promote. I wish it could have been more simple and that there might have been an element of chivalry, which was wholly lacking. The affair was elaborately staged and made as humiliating to the enemy as possible.”
The two Germans left at the first opportunity. They had maintained a stony reserve throughout, wanting the victors, in Müller’s words, “to see nothing of the deep pain of the German people, whose representative I was at this tragic moment.”
Wilson departed for Brest and home that night. Almost his last act was to create a diplomatic stink by refusing an invitation to dine with French president Raymond Poincaré, at whom he was suddenly directing all the rage and frustration built up by months of negotiating with the Allies. Colonel House finally persuaded him that refusal was impossible and would create a scandal. But the damage had been done; Poincaré was aware of Wilson’s feelings and was furious himself in return.
When the hour of departure came, it brought House and Wilson face-to-face for what neither could have known was the last time. When the colonel himself returned to the United States, he would become the latest but not quite the last of the intimate associates—one hesitates to use the word friends—to be banished forever by Woodrow Wilson. A day after bidding the Wilsons farewell, House noted in his diary that “my last conversation with the president yesterday was not reassuring. I urged him to meet the Senate in a conciliatory spirit…in reply he said, ‘House, I have found one can never get anything in this life that is worth while without fighting for it.’ ”
He reflected on the question of whether everything might have gone better if Wilson had taken his advice and never gone to Paris at all. “It may be that Wilson might have had the power and influence [to achieve his aims] if he had remained in Washington and kept clear of the conference,” the colonel mused. “When he stepped down from his lofty pedestal and wrangled with representatives of other states upon equal terms, he became as common clay….To those who are saying the Treaty is bad and never should have been made and that it will involve Europe in infinite difficulties in its enforcement, I feel like admitting it….I wish we had taken the other road, even if it was less smooth, both now and afterward, than the one we took. We would at least have gone in the right direction and if those who follow us had made it impossible to go the full length of the journey planned, the responsibility would have rested with them and not us.”
Lloyd George departed the day after the ceremony, leaving only Clemenceau to keep a wary eye on the battalions of diplomats and functionaries responsible for wrapping up the conference’
s work. It was not until two weeks later, seven and a half months after the Armistice went into effect, that the blockade of Germany was lifted. It has been called the worst atrocity of the Great War.
Wilson’s arrival in the United States on July 8 marked the opening of one of the nation’s epic political contests. The struggle to decide whether to join the League of Nations, and if so on what terms, would go on for eight months. It bears comparison with the debates over the drafting of the Constitution and the future of slavery—those rare times when the whole nation focused on a question understood to have profound importance for the future. That big crowds turned out to greet the president when his ship docked in New York, and later when his train arrived at Washington’s Union Station, suggests that the public shared in his understanding of the importance of what was being decided and that he had much support. It suggests also that he was not deceiving himself in believing that much of the country still expected that victory in the war was going to change the world for the better, and that it looked to him as the man who could make it happen.
Nevertheless, he should have had no lingering illusions about Senate approval being a sure thing. A newspaper poll indicated that forty senators (almost all of them Democrats) supported ratification of the treaty as it stood, while another forty (almost all Republicans) were ready to support it if certain reservations were attached. The number of irreconcilables had risen to eight, and five senators were classified as too undecided to fit into any more specific slot. This meant that ratification was definitely possible but was going to require winning another two dozen votes. Most if not all would have to come from the reservationists.