Versailles 35 Years After

...In this process, professional historians took the lead...

...In all his thought and action during the war, it was apparent that he was seeking to avoid Wilson's mistakes—to learn from the disasters that had befallen his predecessor's policy...

...And he had drawn attention to a serious flaw in the revisionist attitude...

...It was neither a thorough-going victor's peace nor a peace of accommodation...

...into the Treaty as he did...

...Basically, one question alone remains alive—the rejection of the treaty by the United States Senate...

...The rights and wrongs of the treaty were secondary: Whatever its defects, these could in time have been corrected...

...It is significant that Fay's work rested primarily on the Grosse Politik...

...Not only was he more harsh and realistic in his plans for the postwar treatment of Germany—we now know that at one time he contemplated partition...

...But in the 1930s, with democracy succumbing in nearly all of the small succession states, and with the absence of a strong barrier to Nazi expansion in Central Europe painfully apparent, a reconsideration of the European role of Austria-Hungary was only logical...

...In the 1920s, the latter type of criticism had been muted...

...The marvel is that he got as much of his program written H. Stuart Hughes, Associate Professor of History at Stanford University, recently published a critical estimate of Oswald Spengler for the Twentieth Century Library...

...Up to 1948 the settlement with Germany had in effect been a victor's peace...

...The revisionists were sure that the treaty was bad...

...One is tempted to inquire which one suffered from more illusions, the "idealist" Wilson or the "realist" Roosevelt...

...The two elements that most assiduously fed into it were the growing conviction that the reparations clauses of the treaty were unrealistic and impossible of fulfilment (Germany's default and the French occupation of the Ruhr seemed proof positive that Keynes had been right all along), and the parallel belief that the war-guilt clause on which these punitive provisions rested was patently unjust...

...In the United States, as in Britain, revisionism can be described as nothing short of a crisis of bad conscience...

...It took twenty years for the internationalist element among the American public to complete this essential task of clarifying its own mind...

...The strength of this opposition to "Wilsonianism" was suggested by the fact that in the previous year the President had lost his majority in Congress—an obvious sign of weakness, but one which Europeans frequently failed to notice, since the possibility of such a cleavage between the Executive and the Legislature was foreign to British or French experience...

...The treaty was not Wilsonian enough: It had violated the President's own ideals by imposing impossible terms on Germany...

...Obviously the lesson applied to the new war then in progress...

...In a sense, then, the entire question of the Versailles settlement has, as the French would put it, been depasse par les evenements...

...The grounds on which the nationality principle was attacked were essentially practical...

...And the contention that Germany was not solely responsible for the outbreak of the war—that indeed both Austria and Russia were rather more responsible—received scholarly confirmation with the publication in 1928 of Sidney B. Fay's The Origins of the World War...

...The publication of the "Kautsky Documents," followed by the more systematic Grosse Politik der europadischen Kabinette, had opened the eyes of a generation of historians...

...Doubtless a great number of such international compromises have in the past served the cause of peace...

...One could even go so far as to say that the most surprising thing about the Treaty is not that it was unsatisfactory but that any kind of treaty came out of the madhouse at Paris...

...But this consigning of Senator Lodge and his colleagues to outer darkness did not really settle the major difficulty...

...They tried to keep their heads and to maintain a distinction between "good" and "bad" Germans...

...Under these circumstances, it was not surprising that his friends and supporters early began to describe him as a crusader, a saint, a martyr—with a rising note of irony, to be sure, as the discrepancy between the abstraction and the reality began to manifest itself—in any case, a champion too lightly armed for the mission he had set himself...

...In retreating from the facile optimism of the late 1920s, American professors and the public that followed them were in danger of falling into the opposite error...

...They did not suggest that they had been all wrong about Germany, the treaty and the origins of the war...

...Moreover, Fay's work and the more journalistic efforts that accompanied it reflected the optimism and good will toward Germany engendered in America by the achievements of the "Stresemann era...

...And when—a full three decades after the Peace Conference of 1919—the "Versailles question" in effect ceased to be a subject of controversy, it was owing to a change in international relationships that had consigned to obsolescence the original issues of the debate...

...What was truly disastrous was the decision on the part of a majority of Senators—backed up, so far as one could tell, by a massive segment of public opinion—to withdraw from Europe and to leave its peoples, allied and enemy alike, to settle their difficulties themselves...

...Rather than in general principles or a new League of Nations, Roosevelt rested his hopes in the unity of the "grand alliance" that was in the course of winning the war: He would compromise his ideals in private and while the conflict was still in progress rather than at the end of hostilities and in the full glare of peacetime publicity...

...And apparently it has been well learned...

...what was more, the Weimar Republic was pursuing a policy of international concord and, it appeared, reconciliation with France...

...And Bailey continued: "It has been fashionable in recent years to condemn the Treaty of Versailles as thoroughly bad...

...This time the peace would rest not on the shifting sand of general principle and a merely theoretical equality among nations but on the unshakable personal friendship among the leaders of the three super-powers that had survived every test of wartime discord...

...But the public was not far behind...

...They were at liberty to welcome Germany back as a friend and an equal in the community of Western nations...

...Such was the final lesson of the twentv-year debate over the Versailles Treaty...

...The first phase of this semi-popular, semi-scholarly evolution of opinion was the attitude known as revisionism...

...In the long run, at least, the Rooseveltian effort to avoid a second Treaty of Versailles proved well-advised...

...The initial reaction of the more reflective and high-minded element among the American public, thirty-five years ago and even today, was to extend their support and sympathy to the hard-pressed leader...

...It also betokened a shift in the ethical basis of the whole discussion...

...They began to see more clearly that the problems the peacemakers had confronted at Paris were not merely moral but technical—that in all the difficulties of the post-armistice world, amid economic ruin and psychological exhaustion, to have arrived at any settlement at all was in itself an achievement...

...As Professor Bailey put it, "The Treaty fell between two stools...

...The advent of Hitler changed all that—yet not to the extent that one might have supposed...

...Rather than repudiating, then, their former revisionism, the American historians and public simply sought to correct what was incoherent and superficial in the earlier view...

...But in the West the powers were able to make a clear-cut shift to a settlement of reconciliation: Little but a lingering psychological resistance on both sides stood in the way...

...And thereby they threatened to undermine the "idealism" that had been the strength of both the Wilsonian and the revisionist position...

...Almost immediately, however, this generous impulse was brought up short by the chilling realization that what Wilson had in fact brought home from Paris was not a Holy Grail but an earth-bound treaty whose defects were only too obvious...

...Such at least was the direction in which President Roosevelt leaned...

...In effect, the compromise proved less satisfactory than what might have resulted from a frank acceptance of either of the contending principles...

...Such discussion as has gone on in the past few years has frequently been of a revisionist sort far more radical than what was published in the 1920s...

...At last the American professors and publicists were beginning to define the issues more clearly...

...It is no longer a live issue before the American public...

...The disillusioned liberal," Professor Birdsall warned, "has been the unwitting ally of the cynical advocate of physical force as the only conceivable basis for world politics...

...The President, then, had set out for Paris inadequately supported at home and with an even more inadequate notion of the difficulties that faced him abroad...

...The truth is that it contained much that was good and much that was bad...

...Necessarily, it had been a peace of compromise among the victors...

...35 Years After VERSAILLES By H. Stuart Hughes For years the subject of violent controversy in America, the Treaty is no longer a relevant issue and its significance can be calmly assessed by historians The Treaty of Versailles had not even been drafted before it became a passionately debated issue before the American public...

...Indeed, in the twenty-year polemic over the Treaty of Versailles it is hard to draw the line between scholarship and journalism...

...In the newspapers, in the classroom, in all but the back-eddies of American public life, it now goes unquestioned...

...Hughes, 38, is the grandson of the late Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, who was Secretary of State after the First World War...

...Parenthetically one might recall that today, nine years after the end of the Second World War, Germany and Austria are still without peace treaties...

...And even after that date the partition of the country and the continued Soviet occupation of the Eastern zone had prolonged this "Carthaginian" solution...

...For the conclusions of the scholars grew logically out of the changed political atmosphere—and these conclusions in turn served to strengthen the popular convictions from which they had arisen...

...He is the author of An Essay for Our Times and has contributed to numerous scholarly periodicals...

...Professor Hughes enlisted in the U.S...

...And it may be even more significant that the most thorough and up-to-date study of interwar diplomacy—The Diplomats 1919-1939, edited by Gordon A. Craig and Felix Gilbert—discusses the Versailles issue only in passing and in other contexts...

...During the Second World War, such historians as Bailey and Birdsall had early observed that this was the crucial issue...

...As the situation changed—and changed radically—in the years following 1945, the British, French and Americans were free to shift their policy accordingly...

...It took a second war to drive this lesson home—to convince the most thoughtful part of the American public that the United States had also borne its share of responsibility in permitting a situation to develop from which war alone offered an escape...

...It was easy to suggest that the opponents of ratification in the American Senate were inspired by petty spite and a primitive nationalism (although, even here, the importance of the middle group of realistic Republicans, who sought to save the major principle of postwar American participation in international organization by ratifying the treaty in an amended form, was never adequately appreciated by the doctrinaire Wilson-ians either at the time or in the later hagiography of the struggle...

...The result was a posthumous rehabilitation of the Hapsburg Empire, accompanied by the suggestion that Wilsonian principles had gratuitously flouted Europe's deepest historical traditions...

...American historians and the public associated with them did not execute a complete about-face...

...Since there was neither treaty nor previous commitment respecting Germany, the Allied statesmen's hands were bound by no fixed provisions such as had bedeviled international relations in the 1920s...

...And the clarification eventually came about only through reflection on the events of European history that filled the two decades following the Paris Conference...

...The presence of American troops in Europe nine years after the end of hostilities is sufficient proof of the profound change in public sentiment that has taken place...

...In far less time than it had taken for the terms of Versailles to lapse-in a far shorter period than the 17 years from 1919 to 1936—the Western victors of 1945 had tried both solutions between which the assembled statesmen of 1919 had drawn an uneasy compromise, and had early settled for a peace of understanding...

...Interest had concentrated on Germany, and the fate of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had been brought into the discussion only secondarily to clinch the main point...

...But in the case of the Versailles Treaty the gap between the two opposing viewpoints was too great to be bridged...

...Army as a field-artillery private in 1941, and was ultimately discharged in 1946 as "lieutenant-colonel...

...Stripped of its high-flown language—and of the League of Nations, the storm-sail to which Wilson had pinned his final despairing hope—it was a vengeful, a punitive document...

...It did not explain satisfactorily what it was for which Wilson's supporters had battled so hard and whether the lost campaign had been worth fighting at all...

...In fact, as compared with American attitudes during the First World War, it is amazing to what an extent such a distinction continued to be made-that a crudely anti-German attitude was less widespread in the United States during the second war than during the first, despite the fact that the later struggle offered, in the Nazi terror and the systematic destruction of European Jewry, far more reason for moral indignation...

...it may be doubted whether Wilson has any clearer right to be called a Wilsonian than Marx in his later years had to being a Marxist...

...The simultaneous employment of these two arguments was not only illogical...

...It was with this latter argument that historical scholarship entered the debate in most influential fashion...

...Such, then, was the original dilemma with which internationalist and liberal-minded Americans were obliged to struggle—how to square their loyalty to Wilsonianism with their distaste for the specific terms of the Versailles Treaty...

...Meanwhile, the specific terms of the peace settlement could wait: A "gentleman's agreement" was enough...

...At the same time, the treaty—or rather treaties, for here the settlements of Saint-Germain and Trianon came into question —were too Wilsonian: By a doctrinaire application of the nationality principle, they had destroyed the economic and cultural unity of the Danubian basin...

...It is the image of a gallant President, defeated by circumstances and by the narrow nationalist passions of his enemies both domestic and foreign—a broken man, dying among the wreckage of his hopes...

...One might mention the series of lectures by Ambassador Kennan in which he in effect questions the whole basis of American intervention in the First World War...

...there is every evidence that the new American role in Europe has passed into the sphere of unconscious and habitual acceptance...

...And initially it looked as though the "Carthaginian" school of thought would predominate...

...Writing at the height of the second war, Thomas A. Bailey judiciously suggested that "it was impossible for Wilson to have his own way all—or perhaps most—of the time...

...Nearly a decade has gone by...

...They recalled the traditional considerations of balance-of-power politics...

...From 1924 to 1929, democracy in Germany seemed to be well established...

...The American people could not have it both ways: They could not drink their Wilsonianism straight and at the same time criticize the nationality principle...

...This was the first and clearest image of the Treaty of Versailles—an image that haunted the boyhood of my own generation and, in moments of wistfulness, lingers with us yet...

...But the grounds they gave for their criticism were frequently contradictory...

...Somewhat earlier in the war, Paul Birdsall had arrived at an essentially similar conclusion...

...In short, they were free to embrace in turn each horn of the Versailles dilemma...

...Indeed, it was already an issue when the Peace Conference opened: Large and vociferous blocs of citizens questioned the whole basis on which the President had undertaken to negotiate—and added that it was constitutionally improper for him to have gone to Paris at all...

...It had been neither the iron treaty for which Clemenceau and Foch had argued, nor the peace of reconciliation which was the presumed goal of the American President...

...As the work of clarification proceeded, it gradually became apparent that the central fault of the treaty was that it was both too Wilsonian and not Wilsonian enough—depending on how one chose to look at it...

...But in addition, and rather more consistently, he carefully refrained from making the sort of specific promises and commitments that had been enshrined in Wilson's Fourteen Points: In contrast, the Atlantic Charter was an extremely vague document...

...I say "presumed," since, in his pre-armistice attitude toward the Germany of Prince Max, Wilson had behaved in a far from conciliatory fashion...

...The return to isolationism ranked as the "great betrayal...

...But, all things considered, it is remarkable that the defects were not more numerous, more pervasive, and more glaring...

...The subsequent studies of the events of July 1914 that drew on the British and French documents handled the German role less charitably...