The Yanks Are Coming! (36 page)

None of this dented Wilson's idealism—and it was his idealism and France's insistence on taming Germany that dominated the Peace Conference. Led by Wilson, the peacemakers sought not only to reform Europe but to create an international settlement that encompassed the world. The fighting, after all, had stretched from Europe to Africa, the Middle East, and the Pacific; the European powers had overseas empires; and the Ottoman Empire, which before the war had extended from Mesopotamia and Armenia through the Middle
East to the borders of Bulgaria and Greece, was kaput, and new borders were being drawn by scimitar and rifle (not to mention British Arabists and French diplomats). The challenges facing President Wilson and his colleagues were economic, diplomatic, and military. Famine and disease were stalking victims in lands where farms had been wrecked and factories destroyed, political arrangements were being settled by force, and while all might be quiet on the former Western Front, elsewhere in allegedly postwar Europe, bullets were still flying.

Wilson disdained to visit the now-quiet battlefields of France and Belgium. He had never been interested in military details. His goal was to shape a liberal peace that used international institutions to defend national self-determination, a byword for democracy and progressivism.
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To this end, America's five delegates to the Paris Peace Conference were himself—never before had a president gone abroad to negotiate a peace treaty—his perpetual emissary Colonel House; his secretary of state, Robert Lansing; the president's rarely consulted military advisor, General Tasker Bliss; and Henry White, who had been President Theodore Roosevelt's ambassador to Italy and France and later became a supporter of President Wilson.

Conspicuously absent from Wilson's delegation were any Republican representatives. Wilson, a highly partisan man, thought they would only get in the way. He paid scant consideration to the possibility that he might later need their support, though Republicans held majorities in both houses of Congress and had no shortage of senior statesmen, including former president William Howard Taft (who had also been governor of the Philippines and a secretary of war), Henry Cabot Lodge (an ally of Theodore Roosevelt and his aggressive brand of foreign policy, soon to be chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee), and former senator Elihu Root (who
had also been secretary of state and secretary of war). Wilson, however, did not suffer political opponents gladly. He had campaigned against Republicans in the 1918 elections, charging them with obstructing the war effort. He had warned the American people that returning Republican majorities would be seen abroad as a repudiation of his leadership—and the American people went ahead and repudiated him anyway.
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Undaunted, Wilson continued to equate progress with Wilsonian idealism, announcing in Boston in February 1919, that “Any man”—by whom he meant, though he did not say, Lodge and other likeminded Republicans—“who resists the present tides that run in the world will find himself thrown upon a shore so high and barren that it will seem as if he had been separated from his human kind forever.”
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The one Republican he did tap was Herbert Hoover, who was placed in charge of Allied relief and saved countless lives across the continent until declaring in the summer of 1919 that the Europeans were now ready to stand again on their own feet—an estimate that significantly exaggerated their recuperative powers.

“A MISSIONARY…TO RESCUE THE POOR EUROPEAN HEATHEN”

Republicans weren't the only ones who felt Wilson's condescension and were subject to his suspicion. He was sniffy to the British—warning them that they and the United States were not kindred nations. He thought the French were trying to subject him to emotional blackmail by arranging for him to see the battlefields of the Western Front. He identified himself with the hidden aspirations of “the people” of Europe, about whom he knew very little, while being wary of the actually elected leaders of the major Western powers.

Lloyd George and Clemenceau felt equally distant from Wilson, though they all grew somewhat closer as the negotiations wore on. The British prime minister noted, “I really think that at first the idealistic President regarded himself as a missionary whose function it was to rescue the poor European heathen from the age-long worship of false and fiery gods.” Lloyd George continued,

           
His most extraordinary outburst was when he was developing some theme—I rather think it was connected to the League of Nations—which led him to explain the failure of Christianity to achieve its highest ideals. “Why,” he said, “has Jesus Christ so far not succeeded in inducing the world to follow His teachings in these matters? It is because He taught the ideal without devising any practical means of attaining it. That is the reason why I am proposing a practical scheme to carry out His aims.” Clemenceau slowly opened his eyes to their widest dimensions and swept them around the Assembly to see how the Christians gathered around the table enjoyed this exposure of the futility of their Master.
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Christian forgiveness was not much on offer. The French had one great idea, and that was to use any peace treaty—and the League of Nations—to put shackles on Germany. With Russia no longer a counterweight to German power, the French supported the creation of small nations between Russia and Germany—a
cordon sanitaire
against the bacillus of Bolshevism and an expansive Germany. Wilson was no friend of the French, but with his penchant for tutoring nations, he agreed that “The world had a moral right to disarm Germany and to subject her to a generation of thoughtfulness.”
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It
apparently did not occur to him that “thoughtfulness” might exercise itself as resentment.

It also did not appear to occur to him that without military power to give its sanctions force, the League of Nations was a league of weak sisters. The British preferred to entrust their security to the Royal Navy. Wilson, the president who kept the United States an affiliated rather than an Allied Power, was equally dismissive about the United States participating in an international military body: it was unconstitutional and yet another tiresome proposal of the French against the Germans. The important thing was for the League to establish the principle of forgoing aggression and of unanimous international decision making. There would be no recourse to military power. The League, after all, was meant to do away with war. Germany, as part of its encouragement to thoughtfulness, would initially be excluded from membership.

Wilson, the anti-imperialist, opposed France's desired to expand her empire by annexing former German possessions in Africa. The French wanted these colonies not just for the
gloire
of France but for their potential military manpower. Instead, Wilson was taken by the notion, advanced by Jan Smuts of South Africa, of League “mandates” that would give specified League members responsibility for the temporary governing of territories that could not govern themselves—essentially territories without European majorities. Germany would lose its colonies and be given no mandates. Germany, in Wilson's view, and in the view of the Allies, was guilty of starting the war; and Germany's harsh exactions from its conquered provinces overseas and in Europe from Belgium to Bolshevik Russia did not encourage sympathy. Wilson, not surprisingly, thought the Germans needed to be taught a lesson. While the president and Lloyd George proclaimed they sought justice, not vengeance, Wilson had doubts
about the French, doubts that Clemenceau fed, telling Wilson, “The President of the United States disregards the depths of human nature. The fact of the war cannot be forgotten. America did not see this war at a close distance for its first three years; during this time we lost a million and a half men. . . . You seek to do justice to the Germans. Do not believe that they will ever forgive us; they only seek the opportunity for revenge. Nothing will destroy the rage of those who wanted to establish their domination over the world and who believed themselves so close to succeeding.”
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PUNITIVE MEASURES

There was general agreement that Germany should be disarmed, but to what degree—especially given the Bolshevik menace—was a matter of heated debate. In the end the victors attempted to almost completely demilitarize what had been a highly militaristic German society. The German army was limited to one hundred thousand men and the navy to fifteen thousand, police forces were limited to prewar levels, and school cadet corps were eliminated. Beyond that, Germany was denied an air force, a tank corps, submarines, heavy artillery, and much else besides. The German military would amount to a constabulary force that might be able to handle domestic Bolshevik revolutionaries, but not much else.

There was also general agreement that Germany should be made geographically smaller, and there were several countries, not just France, that were eager to assist in this scheme, including Poland, Lithuania, and Denmark. France laid claim not only to Alsace-Lorraine but to the Rhineland—wanting either to annex it, make it independent (a second Belgium), or at the very least occupy and demilitarize it—and even to the coal-rich Saarland, which by any
reasonable definition was entirely German. No matter how it was sliced and diced, Germany would still dwarf France in population. Even so, the French wanted to erect as many obstacles as possible to ensure that Germany could never again invade France.

But this was to neglect the role that resentment can play in human affairs. Germany, stripped of the trappings of a sovereign nation and a great power, was then stuck with the bill for the Great War. Germany bore the costs because Germany bore the guilt, as stated in Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles (written by two Americans, Norman Davis and John Foster Dulles): “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.” Austria and Hungary signed treaties with similar clauses, but it was Germany on whom the brunt fell.

Lloyd George put the case for imposing financial reparations on Germany: “Somebody had to pay. If Germany could not pay, it meant the British taxpayer had to pay. Those who ought to pay were those who caused the loss.”
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Lloyd George had trained as a lawyer. For him it was a simple matter of damages and liabilities. He was also insistent that his client, Great Britain, get its fair share of any financial settlement, which, to get near the level of French demands, would have to include pensions for British war widows and orphans. Nevertheless, the British share of German payments was set at only slightly more than half of what the French were to receive.

The Americans were creditors, and though they sought no reparations payments for themselves, they did want repayment on wartime loans. The British were technically creditors too, but their loans to Russia, Italy, and other countries, including France, were unlikely
to be repaid, and, in turn, the British owed the United States $4.7 billion. In 1923 Britain reached an agreement on a repayment schedule, with interest, to the United States. Writing many years later, after the conclusion of yet another world war, Winston Churchill noted, “The basis of this agreement was considered, not only in this island, but by many disinterested financial authorities in America, to be a severe and improvident condition for both borrower and lender. ‘They hired the money, didn't they?' said President Coolidge. This laconic statement was true, but not exhaustive.”

Churchill had a further point: “Payments between countries which take the form of a transfer of goods and services, or still more of their fruitful exchange, are not only just but beneficial. Payments which are only the arbitrary, artificial transmission across the exchange of such very large sums as arise in war finance cannot fail to derange the whole process of world economy. This is equally true whether the payments are exacted from an ally who shared the victory and bore much of the brunt or from a defeated enemy nation.”
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Magnanimity, in other words, was the better course politically and economically. This was a minority view in 1919, especially among the French, who saw German reparations payments as another shackle on German recovery, and hence on Germany's potential for aggression. One who shared Churchill's view was economist John Maynard Keynes, who believed in canceling debts and encouraging free trade, which in the end would benefit everyone. Keynes attended the Paris Peace Conference as an advisor from the British Treasury and returned as one of the most influential critics of the Treaty of Versailles. In the end, however, the total bill presented to the Germans—$34 billion—was a large but not fantastical sum, rather smaller than the more than $17 trillion the United States owed to its creditors in 2013.
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On 25 March 1919 Lloyd George's staff drafted a memorandum that he presented to the Council of Four (the United States, France, Italy, and Great Britain). The “Fontainebleau Memorandum” tried to carve out a moderate middle ground, stripping Germany of her colonies, demanding reparations payments, and demilitarizing the Rhineland, but otherwise warning against further punitive exactions. We “cannot,” he said, “both cripple” Germany economically and “expect her to pay” reparations. The victors could not surround Germany with small states carved out of her own territory without creating a “cause for a future war” with “large masses of Germans clamouring for reunion with their native land.”
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Finally, he warned, as Churchill had, that “The greatest danger I see in the present situation is that,” if punished too severely, “Germany may throw in her lot with Bolshevism and place her resources, her brains, her vast organizing power at the disposal of the revolutionary fanatics whose dream is to conquer the world for Bolshevism by force of arms.”
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Wilson agreed, Clemenceau was furious, and Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando of Italy was irrelevant. Clemenceau, however, won further concessions, including a limited French occupation of the Rhineland with a phased withdrawal over fifteen years; French ownership of the Saarland's coal mines, in reparation for Germany's destruction of France's coal industry; and a League of Nations mandate over the Saar, with the disposition of the country eventually to be settled by a popular vote.
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