The Illusion of Victory (53 page)

“Can these Americans have forgotten Grant at Appomattox, sending rations to feed Robert E. Lee’s starving army and letting the soldiers take their horses home to plow their farms?” Senator La Follette wondered. Here were grown men gloating at the prospect of “denying a starving German child something to eat.” La Follette began to think that Wilson’s peacemaking enterprise was a case of “the blind leading the blind,” abroad and at home. The senator made a ferocious attack on Wilson’s proposal, but the appropriation passed the Senate with the German exclusion intact, 53 to 18.
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On January 18, 1919, in the gilded Salle de la Paix of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the Quai d’Orsay, the Paris Peace Conference finally began. Bearded, pudgy Raymond Poincaré, the president of France, opened the first plenary session with a speech that he read in a monotone,
perhaps on the assumption that only a small percentage of the room understood French. Before him, around a horseshoe-shaped table sat representatives from thirty-two Allied and associated states, representing about 75 percent of the world’s population. Absent from the table were any representatives from Russia or from Germany and its allies. Russia’s Bolshevik rulers had refused to come. The enemy had not been invited.
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Poincaré’s speech, translated into English by red-bearded Paul Mantoux, had worrisome overtones for true believers in the Fourteen Points. It also revealed why the French had delayed the opening date of the peace conference.“On this day, forty-eight years ago,” the French president declared, “the German Empire was proclaimed by an army of invasion in the Château at Versailles. . . . Born in injustice, it has ended in opprobrium. You are assembled to repair the evil it has done and to prevent a recurrence of it. You hold in your hands the future of the world.”
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Poincaré was describing the event that he had made the centerpiece of his political career, the German victory in the Franco-Prussian War. He had dedicated his life to revenging this calamitous defeat, which had engraved blind hatred of Germany in his soul. He was the architect of the prewar alliances with Russia and England, which had convinced the Germans they were being encircled as a prelude to extermination.

After a moment of embarrassed silence, Woodrow Wilson rose to nominate Premier Georges Clemenceau as chairman of the peace conference. He praised the old man extravagantly. Lloyd George followed in a seconding speech that was equally effusive. With a twinkle in his eye, the prime minister called him “the Grand Young Man of France.”

Clemenceau accepted the accolades with little or no emotion. His acceptance speech went to the heart of the peace conference, as he saw it. The participants’ task was to decide who was responsible for the war, who should be punished for it and how much Germany should pay for the terrible depredations that had “devastated and ruined one of the richest regions of France.” the premier did not so much as mention a league of nations.
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This was confrontational diplomacy of the most blatant kind—a veritable declaration of war on the Fourteen Points. Wilson was not entirely surprised. Since January 12, the five so-called Great Powers—England, France, Italy, the United States and Japan—had been meeting in executive sessions to discuss the issues, the structure, and the machinery of the peace conference. The president soon had no illusions about what the other major powers wanted from the conference: loot. For the time being, Wilson discounted this gritty fact. His mind remained focused on winning the conference’s backing for a league of nations that would be intertwined with the peace treaty.

In these preliminary sessions and his earlier talks with the Allied leaders, Wilson worked out a rough strategy for winning support for the league. Two members of the British delegation, Lord David Cecil and Jan Christian Smuts, premier of South Africa, favored the idea. Both had even produced drafts of a possible constitution, or “covenant,” as Wilson liked to call it, that were fairly close to the president’s ideas.“It would be good politics to play the British game more or less in formulating the covenant,” the president told Admiral Cary Grayson, who was rapidly replacing Colonel House as a confidant.

Simultaneously the British decided on an overall strategy of cooperating with Wilson as much as possible. A future alliance with the United States stood to benefit Britain far more than clinging to their ties with battered, war-devastated France. If this made Georges Clemenceau unhappy, so be it.
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These backstairs strategies did not come close to solving the conference’s burgeoning problems. Incredibly, in spite of the swarms of experts and advisers that all the governments had brought with them—the Americans eventually had 1,300 people in Paris, and the British staff occupied five hotels—no one had produced an agenda. Even more worrisome was the growing hostility of the press. More than 500 journalists had swarmed to Paris (150 of them American) buoyed by the first of the Fourteen Points:“Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at.”

Both the press and the American people assumed this meant they would have access to all the details of the peace conference. Wasn’t this what the Wilson’s “New Diplomacy” meant? Instead, they found themselves barred from all sessions of the Council of Ten (the Big Five and their foreign ministers), which seldom issued more than a five-sentence press release to summarize its doings. This code of silence left the reporters reduced to peering through the doors at the relatively rare plenary council sessions, where little was debated and the lesser delegates were simply asked to ratify the decisions of the major powers.

Wilson had seen open covenants as a way to ban secret treaties such as the prewar accords Foreign Secretary Grey had signed with the French and Russians and the mercenary deal the Allies had cut with the Italians in 1915. He never dreamed people would want to know about the give-and-
take of negotiations between foreign ministers and leaders. But the reporters were not interested in the president’s clarifications. They called the plenary sessions “washouts” and started writing about a gag rule that made a mockery of Wilson’s idealistic promises. It was the old-style diplomacy in the dark all over again.

Behind the scenes, Wilson tried to improve the situation. He persuaded the British and French to stop censoring the Atlantic cable traffic. He asked Admiral Grayson to talk to reporters on his behalf. But it was too late. Alarmed cables from Joe Tumulty back in Washington reported a public-relations disaster. The president compounded the problem by refusing to meet regularly with American reporters for give-and-take press conferences. He tried it only twice, insisting in advance that everything he said was off the record. When two reporters quoted him, he was infuriated and never talked to a newsman again. The other Allied leaders met regularly with the press of their individual countries.
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Kansas newsman William Allen White, on his way to fame as the voice of Middle America, summed up the situation in mournful terms. “The newspapermen, for the most part eager to support the American position, were not permitted to know even semi-officially what the American position was. It is not surprising under this state of facts they began to lose confidence in American leadership.”
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Where was George Creel while this public-relations disaster was occurring? He had been shunted to the sidelines by the astute infighting of Secretary of State Lansing and Colonel House. Lansing detested Creel because the CPI had usurped the State Department’s powers and privileges in its overseas propaganda campaign. House disliked Creel’s brash style and considered him ill suited to deal with European news reporters and politicians. The colonel had wanted Frank Cobb for the job. But Cobb’s conviction that Wilson should not come to Europe had disqualified him.
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Another influential American with a negative opinion of Creel was Walter Lippmann, who considered the CPI propaganda campaign in Europe “one of the genuine calamities” of the war.“The general tone of it was one of unmitigated brag accompanied by unmitigated gullibility. . . .” It left Europeans with the impression that a “rich bumpkin had come to town with his pockets bulging.”
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For want of something better to do, Creel volunteered to go to the newly liberated countries of the Austro-Hungarian empire. He would set up propaganda offices there, touting the Fourteen Points and the rest of the Wilsonian world vision, and distributing wireless sets that would enable people to hear CPI broadcasts. Unfortunately, Creel’s performance in Prague and points east left much to be desired from a diplomatic point of view. He described himself as Wilson’s secretary and made speeches in which he declared,“America is ready to give you everything.” In Budapest, he proposed that the liberated nations of Austria-Hungary should form an American-style federal union, with the Hungarian president as its head. At one point, members of Creel’s staff participated in a Czech invasion of the duchy of Teschen, on the border of Poland, to seize its valuable coal mines. All in all, it was a performance that convinced Wilson and the other Americans in Paris that Creel should go home as soon as possible.
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Meanwhile, Wilson persevered in his single-minded struggle for the League of Nations, which he saw as the eventual answer to almost every problem confronting the conference. On January 25, he went before the second plenary session and proposed the creation of a special commission to hammer out the structure of the league. Two days earlier, he had persuaded Clemenceau and Lloyd George to accept the league as an essential part of the peace treaty. Now he wanted the plenary session to confirm this decision. Wilson swiftly won the approval he sought—and surprised his colleagues on the Council of Ten by nominating himself as chairman of the commission that would draft the covenant.

Simultaneously, in the Council of Ten, the president was fighting a ferocious battle with his putative allies over the disposition of Germany’s colonies. It started on January 24, with two declarations. First, the prime ministers of New Zealand and Australia announced that they wanted Samoa, New Guinea and other Pacific islands formerly controlled by Germany. Second, Jan Christian Smuts, the leader of the Union of South Africa, declared his determination to annex German southwest Africa, a colony just north of his country, now known as Namibia. The three men were backed by Lloyd George, although he piously said he agreed with the U.S. president that most liberated territories should be placed under mandates. But the dominions had a right to insist on these “exceptions.” the prime minister also made no objection when France announced it wanted two other German colonies in Africa, Togoland and the Cameroons.
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Alone, Wilson stood up to the rest of the Council of Ten, vehemently declaring that these blatant annexations showed “a fundamental lack of faith in the League of Nations.” this reproach got him nowhere, because almost everyone in the room lacked this fundamental faith. For days the Allies and their advisers debated the question, while Wilson made ominous noises about their roads to peace fatally diverging. Outside the conference room, the French leaked reports of Wilson’s “impracticable ideals,” and Paris papers opened a ferocious attack on him. The British tried a subtler approach. They argued that the League of Nations already existed and proposed to divide the colonial spoils as mandates under its aegis.

Jan Christian Smuts proposed creating three types of mandates, labeled A, B and C. Because the C mandates were too primitive for self-government, they would be administered as if they were part of the state to which they were assigned. Lloyd George told Wilson that if he refused this compromise, he might break up the peace conference. Also doing not a little bullying was the prime minister of Australia, William “Billy” Hughes, who had taken a violent dislike to Wilson and his ideas and was fond of pointing out that Australia, with barely a tenth of America’s population, had suffered more casualties in the war.

Wilson capitulated, agreeing to let a League of Nations commission decide the disposition of the spoils. In the first week of its deliberations, the peace conference thus undermined the principle of no more annexations, as well as the principle of self-determination. No wonder the watching Germans grew cynical. The Berlin newspaper
Vorwärts
remarked on Wilson’s impotence: “It appears more and more as if . . . the Western imperialists [intend] to leave to Mr. Wilson the merely musical declamatory roles of the performance and to reserve to themselves the business end of the show.”
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A byproduct of the British elections was a political revolution in Ireland. Before the war, most Irish voters had backed the moderate leader John Redmond, who called for home rule for Ireland, on the theory that it would lead gradually to independence. This seemed far more reasonable than a military revolt against the immensely more powerful British crown. But the 1916 Easter Rebellion and the British execution of its leaders destroyed that patient mind-set. In the 1918 elections, a new party, Sinn Féin (“Ourselves Alone” in Irish Gaelic) had swept the field, winning 73 of the 105 seats in England’s Parliament.

The Sinn Féin candidates boycotted the British Parliament. Instead, they set up the Dáil Éireann (Assembly of Ireland) and on January 21, 1919, issued a declaration of independence that proclaimed themselves representatives of the “ancient Irish people in National Parliament Assembled.” Only 27 of the 73 Sinn Féin members of Parliament were present for the ceremony; the rest were already in British jails for various kinds of civil disobedience. The Dáil appointed three delegates to the peace conference to plead Ireland’s cause. Two of the three were in jail. The whole performance seemed closer to playacting than political reality.