Penguin History of the United States of America (91 page)

At much the same time he made two bad mistakes. The Congressional elections had been held as usual in the autumn of 1918;
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and Wilson, who had suffered much from the refractory behaviour of the outgoing Congress, tried hard to secure a more amenable successor. It was the sort of task that Lloyd George and Clemenceau carried out easily enough; but it defeated Wilson. He published a statement asking the voters to return a Democratic majority, so that he might continue to be ‘your unembarrassed spokesman at home and abroad’. The President was driven into this blunder by the campaign the Republicans were waging against his foreign policy and conduct of the war: just as he was beginning negotiations with the Germans, the opposition leaders began to howl for ‘unconditional surrender’ (Theodore Roosevelt was especially vicious), and they were campaigning widely against the third of the Fourteen Points, which advocated universal free trade. Wilson warned that a Democratic defeat would be interpreted in Europe as a repudiation of his leadership. All the same, he would have done better to be silent, for it was already clear that the Democrats would probably lose; by coming out for the defeated side the President exposed his prestige to a sharp deflation. Worse, he thus put an end to the wartime truce which had previously kept the Republicans under some sort of restraint. They had not been very scrupulous in observing the truce, but they had on the whole given the President the support he needed, while a faction of his own Democratic party, the Southern, Bryanite, pacifist section, had frequently deserted him in Congressional votes. And it was widely believed by voters in the North and West, chafing at the same time under wartime price controls and wartime inflation, that the Democratic South had made unreasonable profits out of the sale of cotton, the price of which, unlike that of wheat, was unregulated. This belief greatly helped the Republicans on election day, and Wilson’s attack enabled them to associate him with his unpopular party and denounce all his policies. It would have been wiser for the President
to issue a ‘coupon’ endorsing all those members of Congress, whether Republican or Democratic, who had supported him during the war. As it was, he alienated the Republicans without gaining anything, for as expected the Democrats lost heavily, in large part because their constituents knew that they had obstructed the war effort.

Even then Wilson might have redeemed his defeat by taking chosen Republicans into his confidence and counsel, thereby gaining their support: by appointing former President Taft, or former Secretary of State Root, to the Paris delegation, for example. He did nothing of the kind: the only Republican he took to Paris was of no political weight. Wilson’s enemies (now led by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge: Theodore Roosevelt died that winter) girded their loins for his return. He would have to bring back a very good treaty indeed to defeat them.

The task proved to be beyond his powers. In Paris, Wilson learned, slowly and painfully, just how limited are goodwill, intelligence and hard work when unsupported by more material forces. He arrived in Europe and made a triumphal tour through France, England and Italy. Soldiers cheered, children presented him with bouquets, peasants dressed up in their traditional costumes for him, George V brought out the gold dinner service at Buckingham Palace, the Milanese showered him with violets and mimosa and serenaded him with a band which he was kind enough to conduct for a few bars himself. But the acclamations of the peoples were of no help in the conference rooms. Rather the reverse: they deluded Wilson about his strength. Thus on one occasion he appealed to the Italians for support against their own leaders and was resoundingly rebuffed. This humiliation did not strengthen his hand in the negotiations. And the war was over. America was no longer in a commanding position. Her soldiers were streaming homewards across the Atlantic in hundreds of thousands (he had passed a shipload of them on his way out of New York harbour): their going symbolized the weakening of the President’s position. No longer could he compel European realities to bend to his will. He would have to compromise, as if he were a politician and not the Messiah.

He found the process painful and exhausting, but also instructive and challenging. The myth, so mischievously propagated by J. M. Keynes, that Wilson was the stupid victim of the guile of George and the obstinacy of Clemenceau, has no truth to it (Clemenceau, indeed, recorded that, next to General Pershing, Wilson was the most obstinate man he had ever met). To Wilson’s mind the overriding interest of the world, and therefore of the United States, lay in the creation of the League of Nations. He put this item on the conference agenda and made sure that the League Covenant was written inextricably into the peace treaty. In spite of subsequent arguments and rearrangements, this achievement endured, surviving even the defection of the United States. The League functioned as an instrument of international co-operation and pacification, on the whole quite impressively, throughout the 1920s. Wilson was also able to redraw the map of Europe,
substantially according to the great principle of national self-determination that his speeches had proclaimed. Soon ten new or resurrected states (such as Poland, Czechoslovakia and Finland) joined the community of nations: it was Wilson who had secured the recognition of their independence, and through the exertions of his Food Administrator, Hoover, rescued their populations from starvation. Winston Churchill calculated that the Versailles Treaty left less than 3 per cent of the European peoples under foreign rule. Even Germany remained united and independent, and lost only a handful of outlying provinces.
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Wilson would have added that all remaining difficulties could, should and would be referred to the League, there to be settled according to the dictates of democratic law and justice. In spite of much buffeting, the Franco-Anglo-American entente emerged in one piece from the negotiations. All in all it was a mighty achievement, substantially warranting Wilson’s belief that it secured the future peace of the world. It would also act, he thought, as a bulwark against the extremes of Left and Right – of the Bolsheviks and those who were soon to be known as fascists. He had paid a price for it; but the politician and idealist in him agreed in thinking that it was not too high. Compromise and concession were after all of the essence of democracy, whether it was seen as an ideal or as a mode of practical politics.

Nevertheless the concessions he had made had been enormous, and many of them deeply affronted elements of American opinion. Britain, for example, who owed her survival in the war to her success in using the Royal Navy to starve her enemy while preventing him from starving her, forced the abandonment of ‘freedom of the seas’, Clemenceau concurring (‘with freedom of the seas, war would cease to be war’). Japan, who had taken all Germany’s Pacific colonies north of the Equator (Japan’s ally, Great Britain, taking everything south of that line), insisted on helping herself to Germany’s Chinese possession, Shantung, and although American diplomacy eventually succeeded in dislodging her, Woodrow Wilson had to accept the
fait accompli
for the time being, although it was a flat contradiction of self-determination in a part of the world in which many Americans were extremely interested. The French, the British and the British Dominions took over the German Empire in Africa and elsewhere, and immense stretches of the former Ottoman Empire in the Middle East; the nature of the transaction was delicately disguised by the pretence that the imperialist powers were merely exercising ‘mandates’ under the League of Nations, and Wilson thankfully accepted the fiction (it was a perversion of one of his own pet ideas); but not all Americans could be depended on to do so, for their anti-colonial tradition was still vigorous. Furthermore, Wilson had let himself be inveigled into taking part in the disastrous attempt by Britain and France to crush the Bolsheviks by supporting the White Russians. The
Americans were never very deeply involved and soon withdrew; but the whole affair did look very much like an entanglement in those distant quarrels of no concern to the United States which Washington and Jefferson had warned against so earnestly.

Overshadowing everything was the question of Germany. That country had surrendered on the express promise of a magnanimous peace; the sort of ‘peace without victors’ which Wilson had recommended in January 1917. The idea of such a peace had warm and wide support in both Britain and America: it did not take a genius to see that a vindictive settlement might breed another war.
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Wilson’s advisers in Paris were deeply committed to leniency. The President owed his towering prestige in large part to his association with such ideas. To his admirers it seemed inconceivable that he would put his name to such a treaty as that of Versailles: one which exacted formidable compensation from the Germans under humiliating conditions (the treaty which the Germans had to sign contained a formal assertion that Germany was guilty of starting the war). Yet he did so, and his reputation has never quite recovered. Much later it was to be argued that Germany could well afford the reparations that were exacted from her; but at the time informed opinion thought otherwise (Keynes put the case with the utmost brilliance in his
Economic Consequences of the Peace);
the Germans themselves thought they were being deliberately reduced to beggary (the more so, as the Allied blockade continued for months after the armistice, in spite of American protests); the vindictive nature of the terms was plain to see, and so was the risk, thus created, of another war.

It was Clemenceau’s doing. Presiding at the conference, with grey gloves and weary eyes, he displayed all the characteristic virtues and vices of French diplomacy: above all, its brilliant short-sightedness. Clemenceau’s only concern was to prevent another German invasion of France; he was indifferent to what happened outside Europe and not even very concerned with the Russian Revolution: he disliked the Bolsheviks, of course, because they had repudiated the Tsarist loans to which hundreds of thousands of French investors had subscribed before the war, and because he had always fought the Socialists, and because a left-wing fanatic wounded him in an assassination attempt during the negotiations; but his attitude was essentially one of ‘bored acquiescence’
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– it did not occur to him that France might one day need a strong and friendly Russia, just as she had before 1914. Still less did he see the wisdom of, if possible, making friends with the late enemy. So his actions created the very disaster he sought to avoid. He did not particularly trust the British or the Americans (as a matter of fact, he trusted nobody very much) and would have liked even more radical measures for weakening and disarming Germany than he got: for instance,
the establishment of an independent buffer state in the Rhineland. But since neither Britain nor the United States would agree to this, he heaped what chains he could on the defeated foe and gladly accepted the offer of an Anglo-American guarantee against another invasion from the east. It was a fatal, perhaps a fated, mistake: the offer was soon withdrawn, and the Germans bitterly resented their chains.
Realpolitik
had overreached itself, not for the first time: a generous peace could not have lasted a much shorter time than did the actual ‘Carthaginian’ peace of Versailles, and it would not have alienated British and American opinion.

In face of French obstinacy, there was little that Wilson could do on the central issue. He secured the acceptance of the League of Nations and comforted himself with the reflection that the reparations provisions were so absurd as to be unenforceable: they would soon be compromised.
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Meanwhile he had to be content to instil a little moderation and realism into British and French claims, which originally added up to $320,000,000,000. Finding himself forced to acquiesce in Clemenceau’s policy, he, characteristically, took it over. By the time that Lloyd George (much too late) awoke to the dangers that the treaty was creating, Wilson and Clemenceau had formed a working partnership, which seems to have given great satisfaction to both of them. They made no concessions to Lloyd George, and Wilson indulged his Presbyterian zeal by exacting strict terms from the fallen foe. It was at this time that he offered Clemenceau his military guarantee, though he should have known that no treaty embodying it was likely to pass the US Senate. It was probably Wilson’s hope that, by playing the balance of power game which he had formerly repudiated, he could avert another war, since his own game had been abandoned. Certainly it is unlikely that Germany would again have attacked in the West if she had been confronted with a solid Anglo-Franco-American alliance. (Unfortunately the combined effect of a horrible war and an unpopular treaty meant that no such alliance was to be possible.) If this was indeed Wilson’s calculation, it shows better than anything how much he had learned in the school of reality since 1914.

Too much: he had got far ahead of his countrymen. Henry Cabot Lodge and the other Republican intractables in the Senate had been busy taking soundings since the winter, and had settled on a list of conditions which they could insist on attaching to the treaty in return for ratifying it (since the passage of a treaty requires a two-thirds majority of the Senate). Most of these conditions related to the League and were reckoned acceptable by the Allies, whose prime concern was to secure American co-operation on any terms. But it is clear, from the course of the controversy, that underlying
the dispute about the League lay another, about America’s place in the world. The terms of the treaty, League or no League, were too clear and painful a challenge to preconceptions to go unquestioned. Liberal intellectuals such as the journalist Walter Lippmann, who had actually drafted many of the Fourteen Points, read their Keynes and repudiated Versailles. Men like Herbert Hoover, who had experienced the horrors of war and its aftermath at first hand and laboured mightily to relieve it, were so sickened by European folly and ingratitude (already the United States was being called ‘Uncle Shylock’ because it insisted on repayment of war loans) that they wanted to turn their backs on the continent for ever. The hundreds of thousands of American men who had fought in Europe had hated the experience and were resolved never to repeat it. Lodge and the nationalists feared that the League and the treaty would fatally hamper America’s ability to go her own way: for instance, they said, the Monroe Doctrine was incompatible with the Covenant. Provincial pacifists shrank in horror, as Wilson had once done, from the pollution of the Old World: as Wilson had once hoped, so they hoped, to save mankind by preachment. Above all, there was a general return to the maxims of the past. Americans were still isolationists at heart; the unpleasant experiment of 1917 had never been intended to be a prelude to permanent involvement in the affairs of the world, and its results changed few minds on this point. Against these forces, what had the President to offer? Only his eloquence and devotion; his diminishing prestige; and the unsatisfactory document that had been all he could squeeze out of intractable circumstances in Paris.