3.8 The Peace

Wilson’s Fourteen Points

With their army in retreat and civilian morale low, Germany’s leaders sought an armistice. They hoped to negotiate terms along the lines laid out by Woodrow Wilson during a speech to Congress in January 1918. Wilson’s vision of peace in this speech contained “Fourteen Points.” The key provisions called for open diplomacy, free seas and free trade, disarmament, democratic self-rule, and an “association of nations” to guarantee collective security. It was nothing less than a new world order to end selfish nationalism, imperialism, and war.

As the flu virus wracked the world, Europe and America rejoiced at the end of hostilities. On December 4, 1918, President Wilson became the first American president to travel overseas during his term. He intended to shape the peace. The war brought an abrupt end to four great European imperial powers. The German, Russian, Austrian-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires evaporated, and the map of Europe was redrawn to accommodate new independent nations. As part of the armistice, Allied forces followed the retreating Germans and occupied territories in the Rhineland to prevent Germany from reigniting war. As Germany disarmed, Wilson and the other Allied leaders gathered in France at Versailles for the Paris Peace Conference to dictate the terms of a settlement to the war. After months of deliberation, the Treaty of Versailles officially ended the war.

Treaty of Versailles

The Treaty of Versailles was one of five treaties negotiated at the Paris Peace Conference, but it is the one that is the cornerstone of the peace. Woodrow Wilson went to France for the peace conference to represent the United States. The French and Italians welcomed him as the “peacemaker from America.” Wilson believed what he heard, unaware of how determined the victors were to punish the vanquished.

David Lloyd George of England, Georges Clemenceau of France, Vittorio Orlando of Italy, and Woodrow Wilson constituted the “Big Four” at the conference that included 27 nations. War had united them; now peacemaking threatened to divide them.

Wilson’s sweeping reform proposals had taken Allied leaders by surprise. Hungry for new colonies, eager to see Germany crushed and disarmed, their secret treaties had already divided up the territories of the Central Powers. Germany had offered to surrender on the basis of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, but the Allies refused to accept them. When Wilson threatened to negotiate peace on his own, Allied leaders finally agreed, but only for the moment.

Noticeably absent when the peace conference convened in January 1919 were the Russians. None of the Western democracies had recognized the Bolshevik regime in Moscow out of fear that the communist revolution might spread. As a result the Bolsheviks had negotiated an end to the war with Russia through the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March of 1918 nearly a year before. At the time of the Paris Peace Conference, France and Great Britain were helping to finance a civil war in Russia to overthrow the Bolsheviks. Even Wilson had been persuaded to send some American troops to join the Allied occupation of some northern Russian ports. The Soviets would neither forgive nor forget this intrusion.

Grueling negotiations forced Wilson to yield on several of his Fourteen Points.

• Great Britain, with its powerful navy, refused to discuss the issues of free trade and freedom of the seas.
• Wilson’s “open diplomacy” was conducted behind closed doors by the Big Four. Determinations were made for all other participant nations without any voice from those affected.
• The only mention of disarmament involved Germany, which was permanently banned from rearming.
• Wilson’s call for “peace without victory” gave way to a “war guilt clause” where Germany was forced to accept responsibility for a war that they arguably had not even begun.
• The vanquished were forced to accept a debt of $33 billion in war reparations payable to the victors.

Wilson did achieve some of his points. His pleas for national self-determination led to the creation of new states in Europe, including Yugoslavia, Hungary and Austria. Poland, and the newly created Czechoslovakia, however, contained millions of ethnic Germans. Basically, the Big Four drew lines on a map to create new states in an effort toward fairness with little regard for historical animosities and conflicts or geography. Former colonies also gained new statuses as mandates of victors, who were obligated to prepare them for independence. This was a move toward self-determination as well.

The League of Nations

President Wilson labored to realize his vision of the postwar world. The United States had entered the fray, Wilson proclaimed, “to make the world safe for democracy.” At the center of the plan was a novel international organization—the League of Nations—charged with keeping a worldwide peace by preventing the kind of destruction that tore across Europe and “affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.” This promise of collective security, that an attack on one sovereign member would be viewed as an attack on all, was a key component of the Fourteen Points.¹

But the fight for peace was daunting. While President Wilson was celebrated in Europe and welcomed as the “God of Peace,” his fellow statesmen were less enthusiastic about his plans for postwar Europe. America’s closest allies had little interest in the League of Nations. Allied leaders sought to guarantee the future safety of their own nations. Unlike the United States, the Allies endured the horrors of the war firsthand. They refused to sacrifice further. The negotiations made clear that British prime minister David Lloyd George was more interested in preserving Britain’s imperial domain, while French prime minister Clemenceau sought a peace that recognized the Allies’ victory and the Central Powers’ culpability: he wanted reparations—severe financial penalties—and limits on Germany’s future ability to wage war. The fight for the League of Nations was therefore largely on the shoulders of President Wilson. By June 1919, the final version of the treaty was signed and President Wilson was able to return home. The treaty was a compromise that included demands for German reparations, provisions for the League of Nations, and the promise of collective security. For President Wilson, it was an imperfect peace, but an imperfect peace was better than none at all.

The real fight for the League of Nations was on the American home front. Republican senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts stood as the most prominent opponent of the League of Nations. As chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and an influential Republican Party leader, he could block ratification of the treaty. Lodge attacked the treaty for potentially robbing the United States of its sovereignty. Never an isolationist, Lodge demanded instead that the country deal with its own problems in its own way, free from the collective security—and oversight—offered by the League of Nations. Unable to match Lodge’s influence in the Senate, President Wilson took his case to the American people in the hopes that ordinary voters might be convinced that the only guarantee of future world peace was the League of Nations. During his grueling cross-country trip, however, President Wilson suffered an incapacitating stroke. His opponents had the upper hand.²

President Wilson’s dream for the League of Nations died on the floor of the Senate. Lodge’s opponents successfully blocked America’s entry into the League of Nations, an organization conceived and championed by the American president. The League of Nations operated with fifty-eight sovereign members, but the United States refused to join, refused to lend it American power, and refused to provide it with the power needed to fulfill its purpose.³

The Battle for Treaty Ratification

Wilson left Paris immediately for home to address growing opposition in Congress. While most of the country favored the League, Wilson’s archrival, Henry Cabot Lodge, senator from Massachusetts and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, did not. Wilson formally presented the treaty in July. Wilson’s only hope of winning the necessary 2/3rds majority lay in compromise. Despite his doctor’s warnings, Wilson took his case to the people in a month-long stump across the nation.

In Pueblo, Colorado, a crowd of 10,000 people heard perhaps the greatest speech of Wilson’s career. He spoke of American soldiers killed in France and American boys whom the League would one day spare from death. Listeners wept openly. That evening, utterly exhausted, he collapsed. On October 2, four days after being rushed back to the White House, he fell to the bathroom floor, unconscious from a stroke.

For six weeks Wilson could do no work at all and for months after worked little more than an hour a day. His second wife, Edith Bolling Wilson, handled the routine business of government along with the president’s secretary and his doctor. The country knew nothing of the seriousness of his condition. Wilson recovered slowly, but never fully. More and more the battle for the treaty’s ratification consumed his fading energies.

Late in 1919, Lodge finally reported the treaty out of committee with 14 amendments to match Wilson’s Fourteen Points. The most important asserted that the United States assumed no obligation under Article X to come to the aid of League members unless Congress assented. This was meant to protect Congressional power to declare war. Wilson and Lodge refused to compromise. When the amended treaty finally came before the Senate in March of 1920, the required 2/3rds to ratify was not met. The Treaty of Versailles was dead in the United States. Not until July 1921 did Congress enact a joint resolution to end the war. The United States, which had fought separately from the Allies, made a separate peace as well.

Notes

1. Thomas J. Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
2. John Milton Cooper, Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
3. Ibid.