The Illusion of Victory (60 page)

The woman who told the story, poet and novelist Eunice Tietjens, remarked, “I believe every one of us on that boat might have done the same.”
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In Paris, Woodrow Wilson made a public announcement that the League of Nations covenant would not be detached from the peace treaty, and persuaded a plenary session of the peace conference to ratify the conjunction. This move multiplied his political woes. Almost immediately, the French press opened a virulent assault on him. The French foreign minister, Stephen Pichon, contradicted the president in public, insisting on a separation of the two entities. The president’s insistence also split the American delegation into quarreling cliques.

Not a few people, already jealous of House’s influence with Wilson, murmured to the president that the colonel’s readiness to compromise amounted to disloyalty. Some talebearers fastened on a remark that House’s son-in-law and right-hand man, Gordon Auchincloss, supposedly made, revealing his disillusion with Wilson: “Kings and prime ministers and plenipotentiaries come to the Colonel to get the dope and then we have to tell Woody what to say to them.” according to Admiral Cary Grayson, one member of the American delegation threatened to punch Auchincloss in the teeth if he heard him speaking “in that disrespectful manner of the President of the United States.” Next came an editorial in the
Times
of London, purportedly inspired by Auchincloss, which opined that Colonel House had rescued the conference from failure while the president was in the United States and was now its sole hope of success. Not surprisingly,
the coolness between House and Wilson grew more autumnal with every passing day.
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Meanwhile, Wilson had decided to respond to urgent messages from William Howard Taft and several friendly senators to make some modifications in the covenant to satisfy conservative critics in the United States. To try to speed things up, the president accepted Colonel House’s proposal to abandon the Council of Ten and confine future discussions to the leaders of France, Great Britain, Italy and the United States. Promptly dubbed “the Big Four” by the newspapers, this conclave of supposedly major minds seemed to promise progress on several fronts—except for one drawback.
¹³

The Senate’s round-robin vote and their demand for reservations had disastrously weakened the president’s negotiating position vis-à-vis Lloyd George and Clemenceau. The British and French leaders now had unique leverage over Wilson. Every time he balked on an issue, they would threaten to torpedo the league by opposing the senate reservations—and Wilson had to capitulate.

The British prime minister made the first move on March 25. He suddenly announced that he could not support Wilson’s attempt to strengthen the reference to the Monroe Doctrine in the covenant. In fact, he had become convinced that the league should be separated from the treaty. However, he might change his mind if the president agreed to abandon America’s current navy shipbuilding program, which would soon make the U.S. fleet the equal of the British fleet.
¹⁴

A stunned Wilson resisted at first. But he found himself on shaky ground. The league (and the Fourteen Points) called for a disarmament program. He could not claim that the United States wanted an equal fleet because it did not trust the British (Wilson’s chief reason for building it). Lloyd George wanted to avoid an arms race that would cripple his cashstrapped nation. After two weeks of dickering, Wilson agreed to sign a memorandum that called for a naval conference that would work out the details of a compromise. Lloyd George suddenly found no objections to a strengthening of the Monroe Doctrine in Article 10 of the covenant.
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So began the game of breaking Wilson’s resistance to the Europeans’ version of peace. Clemenceau now took his turn. He attacked a reservation Wilson wanted, permitting any nation to withdraw from the league. That might leave France friendless. Clemenceau began making outrageous demands on Germany—and insisted on maintaining the blockade. The premier combined his assault with the continuing drumfire of criticism in the Paris press about Wilson’s supposed unfriendliness to France.

At one point, when the president resisted Clemenceau’s demands, the old man called Wilson pro-Boche and walked out in a huff. “How can I talk to a fellow who thinks himself the first man in two thousand years who knows anything about peace on earth?” the Tiger growled.

Eventually, Wilson agreed to French occupation of the Rhineland for fifteen years. As for the Saar basin and its coal mines, the 650,000 people there had been speaking German for 1,000 years. To compensate France for the French coal mines the Germans had destroyed during the war, Wilson agreed to give France ownership of the Saar’s mines for fifteen years, while the region was governed by a League of Nations commission that the French would dominate. Then the people would vote on whether they wanted to belong to France or Germany.

Clemenceau’s allies in the Paris press were infuriated by this compromise. France’s generals were equally discomfited. They had planned to fortify the Saar and make it a key bastion in the next war with Germany. To keep these critics happy, Clemenceau demanded a treaty of alliance between Britain, France and the United States, promising to defend France against a German attack. Wilson argued that this old fashioned diplomacy implied they had no faith in the League of Nations.
¹⁶

Whenever Wilson preached idealism as a policy—Lloyd George called it his “flight[s] beyond the azure main”—Clemenceau would widen his ancient eyes and turn them to the British prime minister as if to say, “Here he is, off again!” at one point, when Wilson invoked the Marquis de Lafayette role in the American Revolution as a symbol of idealism, the French premier bluntly reminded the president that Lafayette could never have achieved his ideals without force.“Force brought the United States into being and [referring to the Civil War] force again prevented it from falling to pieces.”

Wilson capitulated on the treaty of alliance. Only then did Clemenceau approve the change in the covenant, permitting a nation to withdraw from the league. He also approved the modification declaring that the league did not override the Monroe Doctrine. Privately, Clemenceau told his colleagues he thought the Monroe Doctrine was as meaningless as the League of Nations but it was a wonderful bargaining tool.
¹⁷

The Italians soon got into the act, now insisting on Fiume as a city they must have, although the acquisition would deprive the new nation of Yugoslavia of its only deepwater port. Remembering the hysterical crowds that had greeted him as a second Moses in Rome and Milan, Wilson decided to appeal over Premier Orlando’s head and release a statement to the press, explaining why he rejected Italy’s demands.

If historians ever rate acts of presidential political ineptitude, this maneuver would rank near the top of the list. Clemenceau and Lloyd George begged Wilson not to do it, pointing out that it would make it impossible for Orlando to retreat gracefully. Thomas Nelson Page, the American ambassador to Rome, wrote the president on April 17, warning him that the Italian press had made Fiume as important to Italy as Alsace-Lorraine was to France. Wilson ignored them all and asked the Italians to “exhibit to the newly liberated peoples across the Adriatic that noblest quality of greatness . . . the preference for justice over interest.”

The British newspapers called it “Wild-West diplomacy.” Premier Orlando summoned his special train and returned to Rome, where he put Wilson’s challenge before parliament. Who should the Italian people choose, their premier or this Yankee savior? A Vesuvius of vituperation descended on Wilson, from the Alps to Sicily. Even his erstwhile friends, the Social Democrats led by Leonida Bissolati, attacked the president, pointing out that Wilson did not seem to worry about self-determination when the British and the French were asking for territory.

In the United States, Italian-language newspapers took up the cry “Down with Wilson!” The legislatures of Massachusetts, New York and Illinois passed resolutions backing Orlando. The president only grew more stubborn.“They will never get Fiume while I have anything to do with it,” he told his Paris press secretary, Ray Stannard Baker.
¹⁸

Next, in one of the meetings of the league commission, where the revisions in the articles were debated, the Japanese again tried to obtain a statement on racial equality. This time they presented it as “an endorsement of the principal of the equality of nations and the just treatment of their nationals.” the Japanese spokesman argued this statement would be valuable in administering mandates and would add weight to the league’s commitment to the reform of labor conditions around the world. Wilson favored the proposal, but once more, the British objected on behalf of their polyglot empire, where 98 percent of the people were treated unequally.
Fearful that Lloyd George might make another move to scuttle the league, the president let the prime minister get away with it.
¹⁹

The Japanese now decided to abandon all pretense to idealism, as everyone else was doing. They demanded the Big Four’s approval of their takeover of China’s Shantung Province and its port of Tsingtao. Here was imperialism at its most naked. Neither China, the nation that possessed the territory, nor the 20 million Chinese who lived there were to be seriously consulted, although the Japanese claimed that the pathetically weak Chinese government had given its approval. To back themselves up, the Japanese flourished the secret treaty they had signed with the British and French in 1917, promising them the peninsula and all the Pacific islands owned by Germany, north of the equator.
²⁰

Here was another mockery of open covenants openly arrived at. The British insisted their treaty with Japan could not be abrogated. The Japanese threatened to join the Italians in a departure from the peace conference if they did not get their way. Wilson argued in vain with the British. Clemenceau offered no help whatsoever. Finally, the president capitulated, fearful that a Japanese withdrawal on top of the Italian walkout would wreck the conference. Secretary of State Lansing, not consulted as usual, called the deal an “iniquitous agreement.” the United States had abandoned China and surrendered its prestige in the Far East for “a mess of pottage—and a mess it is.”
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At one point in these negotiations, Wilson, almost talking to himself, said,“I am obliged to remain faithful to my Fourteen Points, but without inflexibility.” the words convey an image of a man desperately refusing to face the truth about what he was doing—what his precious covenant, for which he had permitted hundreds of thousands of German civilians to starve, was becoming. Behind his back, Clemenceau laughed at the president. “I never saw a man talk more like Jesus Christ and act more like Lloyd George,” the French premier remarked. Lloyd George also expressed bemused bafflement.“He believed in mankind but distrusted all men,” the Welsh Wizard remarked.
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Even more humiliating—and ultimately embarrassing—was the peace conference’s disposition of the mandates. Before the diplomats finished divvying up their 1,132,000 square miles (about a third the size of the continental United States), some 17 million people had been handed over to the victorious Allies.

The most flagrant decision in this imperialist landgrab was giving the 3.5 million people of Ruanda-Urundi to Belgium, whose record in the Congo should have disqualified it from running a colony until the end of time. On the A mandate list, the British acquired Palestine and Iraq, and the French got Syria and Lebanon—exactly the way they had divided up the remains of the Turkish empire in a secret agreement signed in 1916. Largely ignored were British promises of independence made to lure the Arabs into the war on the Allied side—and the indubitable fact that all four Middle East countries had manifested strong desires for freedom. An American investigative team Wilson sent to the Middle East found Muslim animosity toward the French particularly strong. These investigators also reported that “anti-Zionist feeling in Palestine and Syria is intense and not lightly to be flouted.”
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Overall, thanks to Wilson’s collapse and the reduction of the mandates to the status of hypocritical fiction, the British empire acquired an additional 8,156,475 people and 862,549 square miles. The French empire gained 5,568,191 people and 238,168 square miles. Neither in the Middle East nor in Africa was there the slightest attempt to apply the principle of self-determination.
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Perhaps the best example of the total cynicism that pervaded the Europeans on the mandates was a scene recorded by Harold Nicolson, one of Britain’s key players. Lloyd George and his foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, were arguing with the Italians about what mandates they might get from the breakup of the Turkish empire. In the course of the discussion, they consulted the covenant to make sure they were following the correct procedures. One of them read aloud the lines that an “A” mandate required “the consent and wishes of the people concerned.” Nicholson was struck by how heartily everyone laughed. Premier Orlando’s eyes filled “with tears of mirth.”
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Worst of all was Wilson’s capitulation on Germany’s reparations. For a while, he thought he had Lloyd George on his side in calling for a reasonable figure, based mostly on an estimate of the damage done to property in Belgium and France. But this hope evaporated when Andrew Bonar Law, the conservative leader, arrived from London in a Royal Air Force plane. Bonar Law informed the prime minister that numerous people in England, from Lord Northcliffe to the vast majority of the Tory backbenchers in Parliament, were growing unhappy with the liberal noises Lloyd George was making about Germany. Had the prime minister forgotten he had been elected on a platform of making the Huns pay?