Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership (62 page)

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Authors: Conrad Black

BOOK: Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership
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Under its terms, Germany would evacuate all occupied territories, the left bank of the Rhine, and the bridgeheads of Mainz, Cologne, and Coblenz; the Allies retained a full right to claim damages; all submarines would be surrendered and the entire German fleet would be interned in British ports; the treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest (when the Germans conquered Romania, which had been induced by the British into declaring war on Germany in 1915) were abrogated; all German aircraft, tanks, and heavy artillery were to be destroyed; prisoners of war and deportees were to be returned; and Germany was to hand over 150,000 railway cars, 5,000 locomotives, and 5,000 trucks. So ended the greatest war in history. Sixteen million people had died and 21 million had been wounded. Of the main combatants, the dead and wounded totals, including civilians, were, in millions of people: Russia, 3.3 and 4.95; Turkey, 2.92 and 0.4 (indicating poor medical facilities); Germany, 2.47 and 4.25; France, 1.7 and 4.27; Austria-Hungary, 1.57 and 3.6; Italy, 1.24 and 0.95; the United Kingdom, 1.0 and 1.66; the United States, 117,000 dead and 206,000 wounded, and more than half the American dead were from the terrible pandemic of influenza that swept the camps at the end of the war.
Wilson began at once to make serious tactical errors; he called for a Democratic Congress in the midterm elections and was sharply rebuked by the voters, who delivered both houses to the Republicans, irritated by what was seen as a violation of his pledge to avoid politics. Roosevelt jubilated that “Mr. Wilson has no authority to speak for the American people” and denounced “his Fourteen Points and his four supplementary points and his five complementary points.” He issued his statement from Roosevelt Hospital, where he was convalescing, but he died 10 weeks later, aged just 60, leaving Wilson unchallenged in American public esteem, but on a slippery slope of overheated expectations.
If Roosevelt had not weakened his health with his Amazon trip in 1913, he would almost certainly have lived longer, and, healthy, would have been the Republican presidential nominee in 1920, and would have been elected. His quarrel with Taft, splitting of his party, denigration of Irish and German Americans as insufficiently American, and extreme vitriol in reference to a distinguished incumbent (who replied with equally damaging, if less bombastic, strictures) all indicated that Roosevelt could not live easily with his mistaken pledge in 1904 not to seek reelection. If he finally had been reelected, he would presumably have been more temperate in his conduct. He was widely mourned as a gifted and popular leader. Wilson announced on November 18 that he would attend the peace conference in Paris in person, and that he would take no one from the Senate, nor any representative Republicans, with him. The conference opened on January 18, 1919.
6. THE PARIS PEACE CONFERENCE
 
It was clear from the outset that Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and the Italian premier, Vittorio Orlando, were not going to cooperate with Wilson’s relatively altruistic view of the late enemy. Wilson’s tactic was to gamble on acceptance of the League of Nations, as the new world body was to be called, before everything else, and the other terms could follow. The Allies accepted this sequence only on condition of various concessions, and the tug of war began between Wilson’s attachment to the League and the desire of the other Allies to pick the carcass of the Central Powers. Wilson gave a draft of the Covenant of the League to the conference plenary session and returned to the United States on February 24. He had a dinner meeting with leading members of the Congress, which was a rather stormy session. Thirty-nine senators, more than enough to block passage, expressed their desire on March 2 to kill the League in its existing form. Their legal draftsman was Philander Knox, Taft’s secretary of state and Roosevelt’s attorney general, though Taft himself was pro-League. Two days later, Wilson declared in New York that any such effort would kill the entire peace agreement, and he returned to France on March 13.
The next day, in Paris, he was presented by Marshal Foch, who enjoyed great prestige as commander of the victorious armies, with a demand for heavy but unspecified reparations by Germany and Allied occupation of Germany to the Rhine, or at least the creation of a neutral Rhineland buffer state. Wilson refused and called for the liner
George Washington
to return to take him and his party back to America. He also had preliminary symptoms of acute stress. Foch and Clemenceau reduced their demand to a temporary occupation of parts of Germany, and Wilson promised a defensive treaty in which Britain and the U.S. would promise to come to France’s assistance in the event of an unprovoked attack on her by Germany. This was really the key to the future: an American guarantee of France and Britain would probably have deterred even the lunatic government that eventually did rule in Germany. The Senate leaders expressed grievous reservations about the arrangement from the start and Wilson concentrated entirely on the Allies and not at all on the equally treacherous and even more intractable problems under the dome of the United States Capitol.
The Italians demanded specific performance on the Treaty of London, which had brought them into the war in 1915, under which they were to move their border up to the Brenner Pass, which would bring 200,000 German-speaking Austrians into Italy. Wilson agreed to this before the demographers on his staff could warn him that this was contrary to his national-ethnic self-determination policy. The further Italian demand of the Adriatic port of Fiume, promised in 1915, was unacceptable to Wilson, and the Italian leaders, Premier Orlando and Foreign Minister Sidney Sonnino, walked out. Wilson then appealed directly to the people of Italy for a fair peace. Orlando and Sonnino did come back in May, and Italy did succeed in taking Fiume by negotiation with the new kingdom of Yugoslavia, but for Wilson to squander this much credibility and capital on a trivial matter with the Italians left little room for optimism that he could deal with the much more formidable leaders of much stronger countries, Britain and France, or the faction heads of a U.S. Congress that was now almost in open revolt. Italy was only asking for what it had been promised, before there were any Fourteen Points, and Italy had taken 10 times as many war dead as the United States had. If it had been as confident of its martial ability as the other conferees were, it would just have taken what it wanted, but in these conditions, that would have been hazardous, though the poet and aviator Gabriele d’Annunzio took Fiume and was only dislodged by the Italian Navy, after governing for a year in proto-fascist manner, in 1920.
More of a problem were the Japanese, who had taken advantage of the war to enter it on the Allied side in August 1914 and confine their war-making activities to trying to take over permanently all German interests in China, especially the province of Shantung. The European powers were not minded, during the war, to argue the point, though the United States did, and the ambiguous Lansing-Ishii Agreement of November 1917 gave what Lansing considered temporary, and the Japanese emissary, Viscount Kikujito Ishii, considered permanent, “paramount” interests in China, based on the enunciation that “territorial propinquity creates special relations.” Of course, this was diplomatic humbug, and at the Paris Peace Conference Japan demanded, and did not receive, a declaration of racial equality, and then faced an attempt by the other powers to divide German interests in China between all of them, although Japan had taken those interests over and browbeaten China into a quasi-acquiescence in that.
Wilson finally acceded to Japan’s demands, since, as a practical matter, there wasn’t much to be done about them, on the condition that Japan acknowledged that Shantung would revert to China apart from economic rights. The Open Door and China’s territorial integrity were sanctimoniously reiterated, but were, in fact, being steadily whittled away. The United States was the only country that made even the slightest pretense of concern for the Chinese interest in these matters. (If Japan had rallied to the Allies for any other than completely self-serving purposes, such as by sending two divisions to fight in France, or even against Turkey, she could have established a claim to all of Germany’s Pacific islands and a much-enhanced status in the councils of the world. Portugal, though hardly a heavyweight country militarily, bravely volunteered modest forces for the Western Front, though her own interests were not in play and the Portuguese were only responding under their centuries-old treaty with Britain.)
The Allies had deployed 195,000 soldiers to Russia from 1918 to 1920, led by 70,000 Japanese, ostensibly to protect their interests, but really to seize an eastern chunk of Russia. The second largest contribution was from the Czech Republic—Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war whom the Bolshevik leaders released to return to the Western Front via Vladivostok, to join the Western Allies against the Central Powers. Most of them did not embark and instead engaged in the Russian Civil War against the Bolsheviks. The British landed 40,000 men at Archangel and Murmansk to secure vast supplies that had been deposited there and to assist the White Russians in their struggle with the Bolsheviks. The United States sent 24,000 men, and there were French and Canadians as well as, in the Caucasus Greek contingents, but it was a shambles and was never coordinated nor united by any mission statement. The Western powers left in 1920, and the combination of Soviet military success and American diplomatic pressure forced Japan back to its prewar frontiers in 1924.
Wilson tried to conciliate the reasonable Republicans such as Taft, by agreeing that the U.S. would refrain from participation in the mandate system, which was to provide for administration over seized German colonies; would oppose League interference in tariffs and immigration; would assure that there would be no interference with “regional understandings,” such as the Monroe Doctrine; and would assure that any country could withdraw from the League on two years’ notice.
7. THE TREATY OF VERSAILLES
 
The Treaty of Versailles was presented to the Germans on May 7 as a fait accompli; there would be none of the negotiating for which its emissaries had prepared. The treaty fixed responsibility for the Great War on Germany; took away from Germany Alsace-Lorraine, the western provinces of what became Poland, all colonies, and, until its future should be determined by plebiscite in 1935, the Saar; assessed reparations that later aggregated $56 billion; and imposed unilateral disarmament on Germany. The Covenant of the League of Nations was attached to the treaty. This established the secretariat at Geneva; set up an assembly and a council, on which the permanent members would be the U.S., Britain, France, Italy, and Japan; and pledged member states to avoid war, disarm, submit disagreements to the League, impose sanctions on aggressor states, and set up a Permanent Court of International Justice. Germany, under great protest, signed it on June 28, a week after its navy had scuttled itself at Scapa Flow, where it had been concentrated after the armistice. Over 70 ships, including 16 battleships and battle cruisers, were sunk, a pitiful end to a great fleet that antagonized Britain and was never, except for two inconclusive days, put to any practical use. It was the capstone of Wilhelmine strategy. Wilson departed France as soon as the treaty was signed, and returned to the United States on July 8, and submitted the Treaty of Versailles to the Senate on July 10, 1919.
This had been the first attempt at so comprehensive a reorganization of the world since the Congress of Vienna in 1815, and was the first attempt the United States had ever made to participate in deliberations that affected the whole world, or any part of it outside the Americas. Wilson had bet on the epochal peace-making and imposing possibilities of a world organization, and in order to achieve European and Japanese adherence to it, had sacrificed any pretense of a peace without victory or without vindictiveness. In the great struggle between France and Germany, France had made an astonishing comeback from the debacle of the Franco-Prussian War, but a united Germany, the bequest of Bismarck, was a larger population and France could be secure only if the alliance with the British and Americans was solid. Wilson assumed that Germany could be suitably rehabilitated as a democracy. Although the principal Allies were milling about with expeditionary forces in Russia, where a civil war was in progress, Wilson considered recapturing Russia for the family of civilized nations to be a project for the future, after the disposition of more urgent business.
Woodrow Wilson was a pioneer in international organization, and if the League could be set up and the United States drawn into the world to support the maintenance of peace in the principal regions of the world, democracy might be safe after all, as he had promised. The battle now turned to the United States Senate, where Wilson was just starting to realize that there could be a substantial problem. The Democrats were pretty solidly with the president, and the moderate Republicans, led by Lodge, would participate in the League, under conditions, though it has always been difficult to determine if Lodge was sincere or just masquerading as seeking to support the president on the fulfillment of unacceptable conditions. Unfortunately, Wilson’s inflexibility made Lodge’s opposition relatively easy to dress in comparative moderation. And the western isolationists, the “Irreconcilables,” were led by Hiram Johnson, William E. Borah, and Robert M. La Follette. Wilson agreed to interpretative reservations that would not require the consent of other signatory countries, but these were insufficient for the hard-line isolationists, who held up consideration of the treaty until September 10.
Wilson set out on a speaking tour in the interior and west of the country to promote the treaty, on September 4, and Borah and other Irreconcilables conducted their own tour, paid for by wealthy Republican stalwarts Andrew Mellon and Henry Clay Frick. Wilson, a formidable, if overly erudite, public speaker, was well-received wherever he went, but on September 25, at Pueblo, Colorado, his health broke down, and he returned to Washington, where he suffered a massive stroke on October 2. He was no longer physically capable to act as president, and his judgment had been damaged also. On November 6, 1919, Lodge reported out a bill that included 14 reservations, but at least the United States would have joined the League and turned its back on isolationism. On November 18, in a letter to supporters, Wilson dismissed Lodge’s bill as the “nullification” rather than ratification of the treaty. It was voted down the next day, as was unconditional acceptance (53–38). If Wilson had endorsed Lodge’s version, it would have passed easily. The British and French, desperate for any American involvement as guarantors of Western European democracy, would have leapt like gazelles at almost any American ratification, no matter how hemmed about with escape hatches. But Wilson, barely compos mentis, resisted flexibility even when his wife suggested it. He even vetoed a declaration that the war with Germany was concluded.

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