NEW LIGHT ON THE TRAGEDY OF PARIS
The events of the past four years in Europe and Asia, coupled with
the final decision of the American people not to enter the League of
Nations, give us the right to call the six months of blasted hopes
in 1919 the tragedy of Paris. For an astonishingly long time the
Peace Conference and the treaties framed by it had their defenders,
especially in the United States, where a group of what the French
would call _intellectuels_ declared that critics of the treaties and
the League Covenant were unreasonable and uninformed. Colonel Edward
M. House organized in Philadelphia a series of lectures on the Treaty
of Versailles by experts and Presidential advisers attached to the
American Commission to Negotiate Peace. The lectures were valuable
contributions to Peace Conference literature. They told much, and
told it well. They were accurate and comprehensive. But some of these
gentlemen directly, and others by inference, said that the American
public had been misled by correspondents whose judgments were based on
gossip and rumor rather than on knowledge of what actually happened.
It is difficult for the professional writer to answer this sort
of charge. Although he has as much pride in his accuracy as the
college professor, and is fully as careful to base statements on
source material personally investigated and tested, the newspaper
correspondent is unable to cite his sources and quote his authorities.
He deals with history in the making. He must be discreet. He must avoid
using names. When he is accused of not knowing what he is talking about
and of making sweeping assertions, he has to bide his time.
I was proud of the men of my craft at Paris. The work of the American
correspondents was as trustworthy as it was brilliant. Tested by
wide knowledge and experience of the field, as well as by training,
some of the correspondents were better qualified to acquaint their
fellow-Americans with what was going on at Paris than any expert or
adviser of the American Commission. For even when they participated in
the work of the various committees the American experts had neither the
knowledge nor training to appreciate the forces at work that determined
the decisions upon the very questions they were deliberating.
Events have fully justified the severe criticism that was made by
correspondents upon the Treaty of Versailles while it was being
drafted. Actual participants in the inner workings of the Peace
Conference have now given us, in narratives and documents, full
corroboration of what was cabled day by day from Paris during those
fateful months. Of no great conference has there ever been given so
complete and faithful a daily picture.
Except in rare instances of anecdote, such as Mr. Lamont’s graphic
story of how President Wilson came to agree to include (against the
advice of the lawyers on the American Commission) pensions in the
reparations, Colonel House’s compilation does not give “What Really
Happened at Paris” in a satisfying manner. Now, if the colonel had only
written for us the frank and unreserved story of a primary witness
instead of editing a volume of testimony of others, the volume would
have contained invaluable pages of contemporary history. For Colonel
House is the American best qualified, aside from the ex-President
himself, to make a contribution to the diplomatic history of America’s
participation in the war and Peace Conference.
Mr. Lansing’s book, “The Peace Negotiations,” makes it clear that
only Colonel House is qualified to write the inside story of Woodrow
Wilson and the world peace. But we do have Mr. Lansing’s contribution,
Mr. Baruch’s “The Economic Sections of the Peace Treaty,” and Mr. Ray
Stannard Baker’s three volumes, “Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement,”
which are indictments of the treaty.
Mr. Lansing was the first of the signers of the Treaty of Versailles
to realize that the consequences of the blunders at Paris were too
disastrous in human suffering to permit the covering up of mistakes and
the glossing over of weaknesses. He told a story that was, in every
important particular, what press correspondents saw themselves or were
told at the time by creditable witnesses. Mr. Lansing agreed with his
predecessors in the State Department, Mr. Root and Mr. Knox, concerning
the weaknesses and dangers of the Covenant and its incompatibility with
American interests and ideals. He gave the text of the letter sent by
General Bliss to President Wilson on April 29, appealing that the great
moral principles for which the United States fought be not abandoned.
Wrote General Bliss:
If it be right for Japan to annex the territory of an ally, then it
cannot be wrong for Italy to retain Fiume taken from the enemy. It
can’t be right to do wrong even to make peace. Peace is desirable,
but there are things greater than peace--justice and freedom.
Mr. Lansing quotes from a memorandum he wrote on May 8, 1919, when the
draft of the treaty was handed to the Germans:
The terms of peace appear immeasurably harsh and humiliating, while
many of them seem to me impossible of performance.... Examine the
treaty and you will find peoples delivered against their wills into
the hands of those whom they hate, while their economic resources
are torn from them and given to others.... It may be years before
these suppressed peoples are able to throw off the yoke, but as
sure as day follows night, the time will come when they will make
the effort. This war was fought by the United States to destroy
forever the conditions which produced it. Those conditions have
not been destroyed. They have been supplanted by other conditions
equally productive of hatred, jealousy, and suspicion.... The
League of Nations is an alliance of the five great military
powers.... Justice is secondary. Might is primary.... We have a
treaty of peace, but it will not bring permanent peace because it
is founded on the shifting sands of self-interest.
To Mr. Baker were entrusted the private papers, letters, and even
minutes of the Council of Ten and the Council of Four, collected by
President Wilson. These have been published at President Wilson’s
suggestion, with the intention of showing that the Peace Conference was
a struggle between the new and the old, the idealism of Mr. Wilson and
the sinister forces of Old World diplomacy. In attempting to explain
and justify Mr. Wilson’s rôle at Paris, the Baker volumes reveal
much--but by no means all--of the sad story of how greed and particular
interests triumphed at the Conference from beginning to end. Mr. Baker
throws more light upon the inner workings of the conference, thanks
to the unrivaled worth of his sources, than any other writer. But his
revelations only tend to confirm the fairness of the judgments of
General Smuts and Mr. Lansing.
The only other writer who has had access to unpublished and
inaccessible material is M. André Tardieu, Clemenceau’s right-hand
man and one of the signers of the treaty. M. Tardieu reveals that
France’s policy had been from the beginning to make the Rhine the
western frontier of Germany, and have all the Rhine bridges permanently
occupied by interallied military forces. The chief advocate of the
extreme French forward policy was Marshal Foch, who urged that the
military occupation of the left bank of the Rhine was essential to the
safety of France and Belgium, but he was not supported in this stand by
the King of the Belgians. The compromise was arranged in April, Wilson
being won over on the twentieth and Lloyd George on the twenty-second.
The evacuation after fifteen years was to be dependent upon two
conditions, the complete fulfilment of the treaty by Germany, and also
the agreement among the Allies that “the guarantees against unprovoked
aggression by Germany are considered sufficient by the Allied and
Associated Governments.” These two jokers nullify the fifteen-year
provision, and make the occupation dependent upon the will of France.
The Lansing, Baker and Tardieu books confirm the impression one had at
the time, that Mr. Wilson gradually abandoned position after position,
that disastrous expedients and compromises were adopted in a spirit
of panic, and that the American president refused to stand with the
British premier at the last minute in an effort to rid the final draft
of the treaty of some of its injustices and absurdities.
The economic clauses of the treaty are ably discussed by Mr. Keynes,
British expert; Mr. Baruch, American expert; and former Premier Nitti
of Italy, one of the greatest European economists. These three men
write from first hand, and are agreed that the economic terms imposed
upon Germany were not only impossible of fulfilment but also ruinous to
the European economic structure. Premier Lloyd George and Sir George
Foster, who signed the treaty for Canada, have openly indorsed this
position, declaring that the reparations terms were impossible from
the beginning and imposed upon Germany a burden that no nation could
possibly carry.
New light on the tragedy of Paris has also come from debates in the
American Senate, the British House of Commons and House of Lords, and
the South African Parliament. The testimony is concordant. The more
light we get the more we realize that the Treaty of Versailles was not
a treaty of peace, and that even those who made it were convinced that
it would not and could not bring peace to the world.