It was never true that the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles without reservation by the United States would have brought peace to Europe. It was never true that “the heart of the world” was yearning for the kind of a League of Nations that was established by the Treaty of Versailles. Our associates in the World War were eager to have a real ally in the United States, whose continued military and financial support would have enabled them to put into execution the Treaty of Versailles. For our moral leadership they cared nothing. They were not thinking about being “morally led” by any one.
General Sir Ian Hamilton, in the Manchester “Guardian” and the historian, Signor G. Ferrero, in the Rome “Secolo,” have pointed out the fallacy of considering the League of Nations of the Versailles Treaty a bona fide effort toward international organization and coöperation. General Hamilton believes that “the abstention of the United States is less damaging to the decisions of the so-called League of Nations than the exclusion of Germany; what Europe should have quickly is a true League of European nations, where a German can state his case and then cast his vote.” Signor Ferrero is of the opinion that the present League of Nations is doomed because of its partizan character, which its connection with the Treaty of Versailles makes it impossible to shake off. Signor Ferrero writes:
The Treaty of Versailles subjects Germany to the collective protectorate of Italy, France, and England. To imagine that the nation which, up to November, 1918, was the most powerful in the world may be thrust over night under the guardianship of three powers, each weaker than itself, is to imagine not along the lines of political realism, but of political futurism. The truth of this statement is apparent in the fact that four years after the armistice France and Belgium are caught in the snarl of this impossible protectorate and involved in coercive measures that will ruin Germany without saving her enemies.
It was a sad and startling fact that the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles and the merits of the proposed League of Nations became a party question immediately after the return of Mr. Wilson. Administration and anti-administration forces were pitted against each other in the Senate. Most senators voted on party lines. The Republican opponents of unreserved ratification and advocates of rejection charged that the obligations imposed upon us by the treaty were incompatible with the Constitution. President Wilson answered that the Republicans were Bolshevists, narrow-minded, out of tune with the world of to-day, contemptible quitters, German sympathizers, betrayers of the trust put in them by our soldiers, provokers of new wars to draw our boys across seas, and unconscious but none the less responsible agents of Armenian massacres, who should be “hanged high as Haman.” Denouncing the Senate for performing its duty under the Constitution; imputing unworthy motives to every senator who did not show an inclination to accept the treaty without examination, discussion, or investigation; ridiculing the members of our upper house; threatening or attempting to influence them by an appeal to their constituents; insinuating that opponents of immediate and unqualified ratification were pro-German—all this campaign of passion detracted singularly from the solemnity and spirit of earnestness that should have surrounded the choice of the people of the United States to abandon or to preserve unbroken the traditions that had been maintained since the birth of the republic.
Of course treaty ratification became the issue in the Presidential Campaign a year later. President Wilson announced that the election of 1920 should be a solemn referendum. The result was an overwhelming victory for the Republican party, despite the efforts of some eminent Republicans to defend the League of Nations. The new Congress terminated war with Germany and Austria by resolution, which was signed by President Harding on July 2, 1921. Six weeks later a brief peace treaty was signed in Berlin, in which Germany agreed to give the United States all the rights and advantages stipulated in the Treaty of Versailles, with the exception of certain portions specifically mentioned as excluded at the volition of the United States. The repudiated portions were: the Covenant of the League of Nations; the boundaries of Germany; the political clauses for Europe; the sections concerning German rights outside Germany, with the exception of the cession of the German colonies “in favor of the Principal Allied and Associated Powers”; and the provisions concerning the organization of labor. By these omissions the United States dissociated itself from the other signatories of the treaty in regard to the responsibility of the war, the trial of war criminals, and the guarantees for the fulfilment of the treaty. The right was reserved to be represented on the Reparations Commission or any other commission established under the Treaty of Versailles. But “the United States is not bound to participate in any such commission unless it shall elect to do so.”
The defection of the United States was an accepted fact in Paris when the Senate failed to ratify the treaty in November, 1919, a year before the presidential election put the stamp of popular approval upon this action. So when the Peace Conference broke up the United States was already counted out of European affairs. We did not enter at all into the other treaties.
There were three serious consequences of the failure of the United States to ratify the Treaty of Versailles: destroying the authority of the treaty as the basis of a new political and economic order; reducing the League of Nations to impotence as a tool of the Entente Powers; and making the French people realize that the Anglo-American guarantee of security, proposed as the alternative to the Rhine frontier, was worthless. Of the Rhine frontier we shall speak in a later chapter; for the problem of the security of France has dominated all other considerations in post-bellum Europe. At this point we have only to consider the effect upon public opinion throughout the world of the abstention of the United States from any part in enforcing the Treaty of Versailles.
The war could not have been won without the aid of the United States. The treaty could not have been imposed upon Germany without the aid of the United States. Could the treaty be enforced without the aid of the United States? Thinking men everywhere realized that the logical result of the failure of the American Senate to ratify the Treaty of Versailles would be the scrapping of the treaty. British public opinion, which had begun to turn against the treaty because of its heavy responsibilities and its supposed connection with British unemployment, clamored for revision of the treaty and the League, drastically if need be, in order to get the United States back into European affairs. French public opinion demanded that the French Government be prepared to use its army to collect reparations and destroy the unity of Germany, a policy which should end in a new treaty, directly between France and Germany, in which France was to dictate the terms mistakenly abandoned or modified during the Paris Conference.
CHAPTER VI
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