Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (7 page)

The British military and diplomatic experts disliked the idea from the start. Colonel Maurice Hankey, the Cabinet Secretary and the most experienced military co-ordinator, minuted: ‘…any such scheme is dangerous to us, because it will create a sense of security which is wholly fictitious …. It will only result in failure and the longer that failure is postponed the more certain it is that this country will have been lulled to sleep. It will put a very strong lever into the hands of the well-meaning idealists who are to be found in almost every government who deprecate expenditure on armaments, and in the course of time it will almost certainly result in this country being caught at a disadvantage.’ Eyre Crowe noted tartly that a ‘solemn league and covenant’ would be like any other treaty: ‘What is there to ensure that it will not, like other treaties, be broken?’ The only answer, of course, was force. But Phillimore had not consulted the Armed Services, and when the Admiralty got to hear of the scheme they minuted that to be effective it would require more warships, not less.
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All these warnings, made at the very instant the League of Nations was conceived, were to be abundantly justified by its dismal history.

Unfortunately, once President Wilson, tiring of the Treaty negotiations themselves, with their necessary whiff of amoral Realpolitik, seized on the League, and made it the vessel of his own copious religious fervour, doubts were swept aside. His sponsorship of the scheme, indeed, served to strip it of such practical merits as it might have had. There is an historical myth that the European powers were desperately anxious to create the League as a means of involving the United States in a permanent commitment to help keep the peace;
that Wilson shared this view; and that it was frustrated by Republican isolationism. Not so. Clemenceau and Foch wanted a mutual security alliance, with its own planning staff, of the kind which had finally evolved at Allied HQ, after infinite pains and delays, in the last year of the war. In short, they wanted something on the lines which eventually appeared in 1948–9, in the shape of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. They recognized that a universal system, to which all powers (including Germany) belonged, irrespective of their record, and which guaranteed all frontiers, irrespective of their merits, was nonsense. They were better informed of Congressional opinion than Wilson, and knew there was small chance of it accepting any such monstrosity. Their aims were limited, and they sought to involve America by stages, as earlier France had involved Britain. What they wanted America to accept, in the first place, was a guarantee of the Treaty, rather than membership of any League.
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This was approximately the position of Senator Cabot Lodge, the Republican senate leader. He shared the scepticism of both the British experts and the French. Far from being isolationist, he was pro-European and a believer in mutual security. But he thought that major powers would not in practice accept the obligation to go to war to enforce the League’s decisions, since nations eschewed war except when their vital interests were at stake. How could frontiers be indefinitely guaranteed by anything or anybody? They reflected real and changing forces. Would the US go to war to protect Britain’s frontiers in India, or Japan’s in Shantung? Of course not. Any arrangement America made with Britain and France must be based on the mutual accommodation of vital interests. Then it would mean something. By September 1919, Lodge and his supporters, known as the ‘Strong Reservationists’, had made their position clear: they would ratify the Treaty except for the League; and they would even accept US membership of the League provided Congress had a right to evaluate each crisis involving the use of American forces.
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It was at this juncture that Wilson’s defects of character and judgement, and indeed of mental health, became paramount. In November 1918 he had lost the mid-term elections, and with them control of Congress, including the Senate. That was an additional good reason for not going to Paris in person but sending a bipartisan delegation; or, if he went, taking Lodge and other Republicans with him. Instead he chose to go it alone. In taking America into the war, he had said in his address to Congress of 2 April 1917: ‘The world must be made safe for democracy.’ His popular
History of the American People
presented democracy as a quasi-religious force,
vox populi vox dei.
The old world, he now told Congress, was suffering from a ‘wanton rejection’ of democracy, of its ‘purity and spiritual
power’. That was where America came in: ‘It is surely the manifest destiny of the United States to lead in the attempt to make this spirit prevail.’
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In that work, the League was the instrument, and he himself the agent, an embodiment of the General Will.

It is not clear how Wilson, the ultra-democrat, came to consider himself the beneficiary of Rousseau’s
volonté générale
, a concept soon to be voraciously exploited by Europe’s new generation of dictators. Perhaps it was his physical condition. In April 1919 he suffered his first stroke, in Paris. The fact was concealed. Indeed, failing health seems to have strengthened Wilson’s belief in the righteousness of his course and his determination not to compromise with his Republican critics. In September 1919 he took the issue of the League from Congress to the country, travelling 8,000 miles by rail in three weeks. The effort culminated in a second stroke in the train on 25 September.
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Again, there was a cover-up. On 10 October came a third, and massive, attack, which left his entire left side paralysed. His physician, Admiral Gary Grayson, admitted some months later, ‘He is permanently ill physically, is gradually weakening mentally, and can’t recover.’
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But Grayson refused to declare the President incompetent. The Vice-President, Thomas Marshall, a hopelessly insecure man known to history chiefly for his remark ‘What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar’, declined to press the point. The private secretary, Joseph Tumulty, conspired with Wilson himself and his wife Edith to make her the president, which she remained for seventeen months.

During this bizarre episode in American history, while rumours circulated that Wilson was stricken with tertiary syphilis, a raving prisoner in a barred room, Mrs Wilson, who had spent only two years at school, wrote orders to cabinet ministers in her huge, childish hand (’The President says …’), sacked and appointed them, and forged Wilson’s signature on Bills. She, as much as Wilson himself, was responsible for the sacking of the Secretary of State, Lansing (’I hate Lansing’, she declared) and the appointment of a totally inexperienced and bewildered lawyer, Bainbridge Colby, in his place. Wilson could concentrate for five or ten minutes at a time, and even foxily contrived to deceive his chief Congressional critic, Senator Albert Fall, who had complained, ‘We have petticoat government! Mrs Wilson is president!’ Summoned to the White House, Fall found Wilson with a long, white beard but seemingly alert (Fall was only with him two minutes). When Fall said, ‘We, Mr President, we have all been praying for you,’ Wilson snapped, ‘Which way, Senator?’, interpreted as evidence of his continuing sharp wit.
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Thus America in a crucial hour was governed, as Germany was to be in 1932–3, by an ailing and mentally impaired titan on the threshold of eternity. Had Wilson been declared incapable, there is little doubt that
an amended treaty would have gone through the Senate. As it was, with sick or senile pertinacity he insisted that it should accept all he demanded, or nothing: ‘Either we should enter the League fearlessly,’ his last message on the subject read, ‘accepting the responsibility and not fearing the role of leadership which we now enjoy … or we should retire as gracefully as possible from the great concert of powers by which the world was saved.’
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Into this delicately poised domestic struggle, in which the odds were already moving against Wilson, Keynes’s book arrived with devastating timing. It confirmed all the prejudices of the irreconcilables and reinforced the doubts of the reservationists; indeed it filled some of Wilson’s own supporters with foreboding. The Treaty, which came before the Senate in March, required a two-thirds majority for ratification. Wilson’s own proposal went down to outright defeat, 38–53. There was still a chance that Lodge’s own amended text would be carried, and thus become a solid foreign policy foundation for the three Republican administrations which followed. But with a destructive zest Wilson from his sick-bed wrote to his supporters, in letters signed with a quavering, almost illegible hand, begging them to vote against. Lodge’s text was carried 49–35, seven votes short of the two-thirds needed. Of the thirty-five against, twenty-three were Democrats acting on Wilson’s Orders. Thus Wilson killed his own first-born, and in doing so loosened the ties between Europe and even the well-disposed Republicans. In disgust, Lodge pronounced the League ‘as dead as Marley’s ghost’. ‘As dead as Hector’, said Senator James Reed. Warren Harding, the Republican presidential candidate, with a sneer at the Democrats’ past, added: ‘As dead as slavery.’ When the Democrats went down to overwhelming defeat in the autumn of 1920, the verdict was seen as a repudiation of Wilson’s European policy in its entirety. Eugene Debs wrote from Atlanta Penitentiary, where Wilson had put him: ‘No man in public life in American history ever retired so thoroughly discredited, so scathingly rebuked, so overwhelmingly impeached and repudiated as Woodrow Wilson.’
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Thus Britain and France were left with a League in a shape they did not want, and the man who had thus shaped it was disavowed by his own country. They got the worst of all possible worlds. American membership of a League on the lines Lodge had proposed would have transformed it into a far more realistic organization in general. But in the particular case of Germany, it would have had a critical advantage. Lodge and the Republican internationalists believed the treaty was unfair, especially to Germany, and would have to be revised sooner or later. In fact the Covenant of the League specifically provided for this contingency. Article 19, often over-looked
and in the end wholly disregarded, allowed the League ‘from time to time’ to advise the reconsideration of ‘treaties which have become inapplicable’ and whose ‘continuance might endanger the peace of the world’.
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An American presence in the League would have made it far more likely that during the 1920s Germany would have secured by due process of international law those adjustments which, in the 1930s, she sought by force and was granted by cowardice.

Wilson’s decision to go for an international jurist’s solution to Europe’s post-war problems, rather than an economic one, and then the total collapse of his policies, left the Continent with a fearful legacy of inflation, indebtedness and conflicting financial claims. The nineteenth century had been on the whole a period of great price stability, despite the enormous industrial expansion in all the advanced countries. Retail prices had actually fallen in many years, as increased productivity more than kept pace with rising demand. But by 1908 inflation was gathering pace again and the war enormously accelerated it. By the time the peace was signed, wholesale prices, on a 1913 index of 100, were 212 in the USA, 242 in Britain, 357 in France and 364 in Italy. By the next year, 1920, they were two and a half times the pre-war average in the USA, three times in Britain, five times in France and six times in Italy; in Germany the figure was 1965, nearly twenty times.
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The civilized world had not coped with hyper-inflation since the sixteenth century or on this daunting scale since the third century
ad.
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Everyone, except the United States, was in debt. Therein lay the problem. By 1923, including interest, the USA was owed $11.8 billion. Of this, Britain alone owed the USA $4.66 billion. But Britain, in turn, was owed $6.5 billion, chiefly by France, Italy and Russia. Russia was now out of the game, and the only chance France and Italy had of paying either Britain or the United States was by collecting from Germany. Why did the United States insist on trying to collect these inter-state debts? President Coolidge later answered with a laconic ‘They hired the money, didn’t they?’ No more sophisticated explanation was ever provided. In an essay, ‘Inter-Allied Debts’, published in 1924, Bernard Baruch, the panjandrum of the War Industries Board and then Economic Adviser to the US Peace Delegation, argued, ‘The US has refused to consider the cancellation of any debts, feeling that if she should – other reasons outside – the major cost of this and all future wars would fall upon her and thus put her in a position of subsidizing all wars, having subsidized one.’
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Plainly Baruch did not believe this ludicrous defence. The truth is that insistence on war-debts made no economic sense but was part of the political price paid for the foundering of
Wilsonism, leaving nothing but a hole. At the 1923 Washington conference, Britain amid much acrimony agreed to pay the USA £24 million a year for ten years and £40 million a year thereafter. By the time the debts were effectively cancelled after the Great Slump, Britain had paid the USA slightly more than she received from the weaker financial Allies, and they in turn had received about £1,000 million from Germany.
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But of this sum, most had in fact been raised in loans in the USA which were lost in the recession. So the whole process was circular, and no state, let alone any individual, was a penny the better off.

But in the meantime, the strident chorus of claims and counterclaims had destroyed what little remained of the wartime Allied spirit. And the attempt to make Germany balance everyone else’s books simply pushed her currency to destruction. The indemnity levied by Germany on France in 1871 had been the equivalent of 4,000 million gold marks. This was the sum the Reparations Commission demanded from Germany for Belgian war damage alone, and in addition it computed Germany’s debt at 132,000 million
GMS
, of which France was to get 52 per cent. There were also deliveries in kind, including 2 million tons of coal a month. Germany had to pay on account 20,000 million
GMS
by 1 May 1921. What Germany actually did pay is in dispute, since most deliveries were in property, not cash. The Germans claimed they paid 45,000 million
GMS
. John Foster Dulles, the US member of the Reparations Commission, put it at 20–25,000 million
GMS
.
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At all events, after repeated reductions and suspensions, Germany was declared (26 December 1922) a defaulter under Paragraphs 17–18 of Annex II of the Treaty, which provided for unspecified reprisals. On 11 January 1923, against British protests, French and Belgian troops crossed the Rhine and occupied the Ruhr. The Germans then stopped work altogether. The French imposed martial law on the area and cut off its post, telegraph and phone communications. The German retail price-index (1913:100) rose to 16,170 million. The political consequences for the Germans, and ultimately for France too, were dolorous in the extreme.