The Illusion of Victory (62 page)

A frantic Tumulty begged Wilson not to let the “indiscretions” of the Irish-Americans stop him from doing something on Ireland’s behalf. It was not the fate of Ireland, but the political survival of Wilson and the peace treaty that worried the embattled secretary back in the White House. He warned that the Irish-Americans’ propaganda was deluging “every large
city and town.” with great reluctance, the president agreed to meet with the committee privately.

The meeting did not go well. Wilson told the Irish-Americans that the Big Four had agreed any one of them had the right to block a small nation that wanted to appear before them. The British were certain to exercise this veto on Ireland. Frank Walsh, his liberal ardor for Woodrow Wilson long since evaporated, bluntly asked the president why he did not go to Ireland and see for himself what was happening there. Wilson angrily reiterated his dubious contention that he had De Valera on his way to Paris when Walsh and his friends “kicked over the apple cart” with their speeches in Ireland. Walsh shot back that they were only trying to help a small nation realize one of Wilson’s ideals, self-determination. Had Wilson forgotten that article of the Fourteen Points?

Wilson was staggered. From the lips of this angry Irish-American, a former follower, he heard the ruin and mockery of the illusions he had brought to Paris.“You have touched on the great metaphysical tragedy of today,” the president said.“My words have raised hopes in the hearts of millions of people.” wilson admitted he was suffering “great anxieties” because he was unable to fulfill these hopes. Almost pitifully, he admitted he had come to Paris expecting to see his principles triumph. Now he had to admit,“There were a lot of things I hoped for but did not get.”
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Although Walsh may have been personally moved by this confession, the Irish in America showed Wilson no mercy. Judge Daniel Cohalan and his allies said the president’s refusal to act proved he did not give a damn about Ireland. Others scoffed at the president’s claim that he needed the unanimous consent of the Big Four, unable to believe how completely Lloyd George had Wilson at his mercy. One Irish-American talked wrathfully of making Wilson himself “the great metaphysical tragedy of the age.” this wisecrack would soon become fulfilled prophecy.
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On the other side of the world, another American ally, Japan, found itself confronted by a challenge to its regional imperialism. Since 1910, the Japanese had ruled Korea as a captive province. They had deposed the Korean emperor and installed a governor general with autocratic powers that made the kaiser look like a shrinking violet. They banned the Korean language and ordered schools, newspapers and book publishers to use Japanese. The 20 million Koreans were not happy about this destruction of their ancient country and culture, and many defiant souls fled abroad to seek help. One man, Syngman Rhee, headed for the United States.

There he listened to Woodrow Wilson enunciate his Fourteen Points and various supplementary principles. The one that hit Rhee the hardest was, not surprisingly, the right of self-determination. He and others soon got the news back to Korea, where massive street demonstrations erupted. Hundreds of thousands of Koreans chanted,“Long live Korean independence.”

The Japanese responded with six infantry battalions and 13,000 special policemen. They beat, shot, stabbed, hacked, tortured and occasionally burned alive these protesters with exemplary imperial zeal. The final toll, according to Tokyo, was 7,509 killed, 15,951 injured and 46,948 arrested. Koreans claimed the figures should be multiplied by three and possibly five. With effrontery that more than matched the British in India, the Japanese announced that the Koreans seemed to have confused self-determination with independence. They were not the same. Poor Japan was merely trying to keep order in Asia. It was like a clean, hardworking householder “disturbed by family brawls and incompetent sanitation of disorderly neighbors.”

There is no record of Woodrow Wilson’s saying a word on behalf of the massacred Koreans. The U.S. State Department said that their fate was, like the troubles in Ireland, an internal matter. The State Department incidentally had yet to comment on Amritsar, because the British had managed to make that human rights disaster an official secret.
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By this time the peace conference was lurching toward its finale. Clemenceau, Lloyd George and Wilson said they did not care whether the Italians returned or stayed home. The treaty had to be finished without further delay, or galloping Bolshevism would swallow Germany. The swarms of experts were told to finalize everything, and a message was sent to the Germans, telling them to send representatives to Versailles on April 25 “for the purpose of receiving the text of the preliminaries of the treaty, as drawn up by the Allies and Associated Powers.”
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The Big Four turned their attention to a treaty with Austria-Hungary, a job that could best be compared to putting together pieces of a dropped puzzle. Here Wilson confronted another dismaying problem. The French, still obsessed by their fear of Germany, were unilaterally turning the states born of the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires into military satellites on Germany’s borders. French officers and weaponry poured into Poland, Czechoslovakia and Rumania. Poland had raised an army of 600,000, and the Czechs 250,000; the Rumanians were industriously imitating them. All these armies soon began shooting at each other over disputed slices of territory. Ray Stannard Baker, Wilson’s press secretary, glumly informed the president that there were no less than fourteen small wars in progress in supposedly pacified Europe.

“Yes,” wilson said wearily.“They all prefer to fight.”

Around the same time, Baker overheard Lloyd George denouncing Europe’s small states as troublemakers and expensive in the bargain. The prime minister assailed the “monstrous demands of Czechoslovakia” as typical of the “miserable ambitions of the small states. ”

So much for the war to end all wars on behalf of small countries such as poor little Belgium.
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Meanwhile, the draft of the final peace treaty was in frantic progress. Staffers toiled on technicalities and wording. Other bureaucrats scurried around Paris to find out what had been decided about Poland’s claims to Upper Silesia and similar matters. When it came to the section on reparations, they discovered that no one, including Woodrow Wilson, had paid serious attention to a decision to preface it with a statement asserting that Germany was responsible for starting the war. To the British and the French, this was an article of faith, of course. Their propaganda had reiterated it almost every day for four years. But Wilson was on record as saying no one—or everyone—was responsible.

On the face of it, the accusation was bizarre. No one claimed that the Germans had shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo in 1914, nor that this murder of the crown prince of Germany’s chief ally did not have a great deal to do with precipitating the conflict. The war guilt clause pretended this central event never happened. Instead, the document curtly demanded that Germany acknowledge its responsibility “for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated governments have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed on them by the aggression of Germany and its allies.” Compounding the irony, this statement was written by a former Wilson pupil at Princeton (and future secretary of state), John Foster Dulles.
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The source of the assertion was a memoir by Henry Morgenthau, Sr., Wilson’s ambassador to Turkey from 1913 to 1916.
Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story
told of a secret meeting of the kaiser with Germany’s top generals, admirals, industrialists and bankers plus numerous prominent members of the diplomatic corps on July 5, 1914, seven days after the Sarajevo assassinations.“ Are you ready for war?” the kaiser had purportedly asked. Everyone except the bankers supposedly said yes. The bankers wanted time to unload securities they held on Wall Street and other financial markets. The kaiser gave the money men two weeks to take care of these matters.

Morgenthau cited the “astonishing slump in prices” on Wall Street from July 5 to July 22 by way of proof that the Germans dumped their stocks. But the pièce de résistance in the evidence department was the ambassador’s revelation that he had been told the entire story of the Potsdam conclave by Baron Hans Von Wagenheim, Germany’s ambassador to Turkey, who had supposedly attended the meeting. One can easily see why a harried young staffer such as John Foster Dulles might buy this story. In a report filed on March 29, 1919, it had been cited as perhaps the primary piece of evidence by the Commission on the Responsibility for the Authors of the War and on Enforcement of Penalties.

Historians examining the evidence in the next decade concluded that Morgenthau was lying. In the early months of the war, Germany was trying to convince the United States that hostilities had been forced on it. Wagenheim would never have boasted to an American official that the precise opposite was the truth. Nor was there an “astonishing slump” in stocks in July 1914. State Department files show no report from Morgenthau of his conversation with Wagenheim, who had conveniently died in 1915. If such an exchange had taken place, Morgenthau should have (and would have) instantly informed his government.
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The Germans, in the midst of fighting Bolsheviks and imminent starvation, had managed to stay in close touch with the peace process in Paris. They
had even set up a Bureau for Peace Negotiations, soon shortened by slangy Berliners to
Paxkonferenz
. The bureau’s existence testified to the widespread German conviction that Germany had signed a contract with Woodrow Wilson to negotiate peace on the basis of the Fourteen Points. The country put forty bureaucrats to work on Wilson’s various statements on peace, backed up by more than one hundred experts on agriculture, industry, education and almost every other conceivable topic that might come up when negotiations with the Allies began.

When the Allied note asking Berlin to send representatives to hear the preliminary terms arrived in Berlin, the German foreign minister, Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, assumed that the document could be picked up by a messenger. He would dispatch an ambassador, an aide and four clerks to do the job. Back came a stiff reply from the Allies. They wanted a delegation of “plenipotentiaries” ready to discuss all aspects of the proposed peace. The count, a veteran diplomat, was not in the least nonplussed. He quickly assembled politicians, soldiers and top-level bureaucrats, and soon, 180 Germans were on their way to Versailles.

When they arrived on April 29, 1919, the French escorted them to the Hôtel des Réservoirs, one of the better hostelries in Versailles. The French dumped their bags in the courtyard and announced there were no porters willing to carry a German suitcase upstairs. Around the hotel was a barbed-wire fence, patrolled by French sentries. For the next week, the Germans waited—and waited—and waited. In Paris the drafting committee was still writing the treaty. Meanwhile, groups of French patriots showed up at the hotel’s barbed-wire fence to scream insults at the Germans.

In Paris, the completed treaty, 440 articles in 75,000 words, went to the printer on May 5. It ran to more than 200 printed pages. Before dawn on May 7, messengers rushed copies to Allied delegations and collaborating officials such as Herbert Hoover, who had finally managed to get some food into Germany, though not nearly enough. Hoover received his copy at 4 A.M. Recently the food administrator had written a letter to Wilson, advising him that if they could not get a peace treaty on the basis of the Fourteen Points,“we should retire from Europe, lock stock and barrel.”

Hoover finished reading the treaty as dawn brightened the Paris sky. He could not believe his own disappointment. The thing was an abomination, a parody of the Fourteen Points. The economic clauses, aimed at crippling Germany, would “pull down the whole continent.” Unquestionably, the
terms “contained the seeds of another war.” dressing, the Iowan wandered disconsolately into the streets, where he met the British economist John Maynard Keynes and the South African leader Jan Christian Smuts, both of whom had obviously just finished reading their copies. They stared at each other, disillusion and dismay on their faces.
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No one, including Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau or Orlando (who returned from his sulky retreat to Rome on May 5), had read the entire treaty from beginning to end until the day it was presented to the Germans. The cumulative effect of its cynical deals and cruel demands struck almost every American at the conference with the impact of a high-explosive shell, annihilating whatever illusions the participant may have still nourished about their mission in Paris.

Secretary of State Lansing made one of the more powerful statements in a memorandum he put in his files. He called the terms “immeasurably harsh and humiliating.” He dismissed Wilson’s ploy of putting the league into the treaty, because the treaty made a mockery of the league. The secretary deplored the way the document delivered “peoples . . . against their will into the hands of those they hate.” Lansing called the league “an instrument of the mighty to check the normal growth of national power and national aspirations” among the defeated. Instead of a Triple Alliance, he believed the world now had a Quintuple Alliance,“which is to rule the world.” the members could surround this alliance with a halo and call it the League of Nations, but it was still an alliance of “the five great military powers.” what did it all add up to? “Disappointment, regret, depression.”
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