The Illusion of Victory (63 page)

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.
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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!”
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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.”
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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?”
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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.
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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 delegate 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.”
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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.”
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At Versailles, the Germans toiled on a response to the treaty. Count Brockdorff-Rantzau refused to obey his government’s order to abandon the argument and retreat to Berlin. He remained convinced that the Germans had signed a contract in the armistice agreement for a peace based on the Fourteen Points. He and his staff sent a stream of objections to Clemenceau, who shared them with Wilson and Lloyd George, and ordered staffers to prepare rebuttals.

The rattled German delegation did not improve its case by objecting to everything, from the reparations to minutiae such as the refusal to permit German missionaries to operate in the surrendered colonies. But most of the delegates’ wrath focused on the war guilt clause. They linked this objection to the open-ended reparations article, sensing that if they could eliminate the guilt clause, bargaining on reparations would be tilted in their favor.

The Allies were startled by the intensity of the Germans’ resistance to the war guilt charge. But they had no inclination to yield the point, especially after the Germans published the treaty. Once the guilt charge became public knowledge in England and France and United States, hatred of “the Hun” became part of the political atmosphere in which the politicians were operating. Woodrow Wilson felt no compunction about backing it unreservedly, even though it violated his previous statements about the origin of war.

Not a single objection was made in the U.S. Congress or the British Parliament about the treaty’s harshness. Instead of backing down, the Allies raised the denunciatory ante by telling the Germans that “the war was the greatest crime against humanity and the freedom of peoples that any nation calling itself civilized has ever consciously committed.”
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Herbert Hoover was appalled to discover that if Germany refused to sign, the Allies were ready to reimpose the blockade. Clemenceau and Lloyd George had overruled Wilson’s objection to this decision. Hoover announced if this atrocity was repeated, he would resign instantly. He and his staff were in “a daily race” against the spread of Bolshevism. The food supplies they were importing barely fed Germany’s “pitifully undernourished” children, which left their elders still on the brink of starvation.
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While the Allies rebutted the Germans’ objections, behind the scenes, Hoover and his relief staff worked to persuade Wilson and other members of the American delegation to make major changes in the treaty. A similar effort began among the British delegation, led by Jan Christian Smuts and John Maynard Keynes. The latter two dissenters made astonishing progress. As Lloyd George absorbed the implications of the whole treaty, his long-dormant liberal conscience began tormenting him. Not a little of these pricks were coming from genuine liberals in England, who were denouncing the treaty as ferociously as their American counterparts. Before long the prime minister was wondering aloud if major changes were needed.

Lloyd George was especially shaken by a letter from Brockdorff-Rantzau on the economic consequences of the treaty, which the liberal
Manchester Guardian
published on May 15. The foreign minister noted that since Germany had become an industrial nation with a population of 67 million, it had been importing 12 million tons of food a year. This food was paid for by exports—about 15 million Germans made their living in foreign trade before the war. Now, stripped of its merchant fleet and its
colonies, which supplied raw materials as well as foodstuffs, this already dire need for imported food was being compounded by the treaty, which deprived Germany of 21 percent of its homegrown corn and potato crops. Simultaneously, a third of its coal was being given to France and Poland, crippling its industrial capacity. All this added up to the deaths of many millions of people in Germany in the next few years. The nation’s health was already “broken” by the blockade. The treaty was nothing less than a mass “death sentence,” Brockdorff-Rantzau wrote. Lloyd George was so disturbed, he summoned the entire British cabinet to Paris for a weekend-long debate on whether the treaty should be revised.
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The American dissenters made no such progress with Woodrow Wilson. He seemed unbothered when Joseph V. Fuller, one of the best minds on the delegation staff, resigned with a scorching letter that declared the treaty “bartered away our principles in a series of compromises with interests of imperialism and revenge.” General Tasker Bliss said he could not sign a statement that he “heartily and unreservedly” approved the treaty. In a letter to his wife, Bliss summed up his discouragement: “What a wretched mess it all is.” Henry White was similarly despondent:“We had such high hopes of this adventure; we believed God called us and now we are doing hell’s dirtiest work.”