THE EDITOR RESERVES THE LAST COLUMN
The Editor Reserves ... The Last Column I HOPE I'll be forgiven if I return just once more to the subject which has claimed my attention in this column for the past few weeks—the reasons why the...
...I say "vain and illusory" because Bullitt makes it clear that Wilson himself "was entirely conscious that the League as it stood could not revise the Treaty and was essentially a mechanism to guarantee the permanence of the Treaty...
...Stephen Bonsai, interpreter and aide to Woodrow Wilson, whose book, Unfinished Business, was discussed here last week and the week before...
...But he sought and obtained solace in the vain and illusory hope that his great ideal— the League of Nations—would right the wrongs in which he was asquiescing under pressure...
...One of the best of the recent "Now It Can Be Told" accounts came from Col...
...Thus, Clemenceau, we are told, had his heart "with his friends who lay dead along the Marne"—not in a brave new world...
...The late Robert M. La Follette, Sr., put it more bluntly when he described the League as the agency created by the victorious imperialists to "stand guard over the swag...
...This week I want to quote from a remarkable article in the Mar...
...He did not even ask to see them...
...He was cool toward the idea of a League until Col...
...The Wavering Wilson Mr...
...They no longer needed our men and munitions...
...Roosevelt to use America's bargaining power with our Allies before it is too late, will be interested in Bullitt's report that time after time, while Anglo-French forces were still vitally dependent on our aid, Wilson tragically failed to exact anti-imperialist concessions...
...Having thus lost his greatest weapon, Wilson found it necessary to compromise again and again on vital issues when the task of peacemaking began...
...For Mr...
...Bullitt makes it crystal-clear that the Treaty was shot through with injustices and inequalities, and that the League itself ivas essentially a mechanism to freeze those injustices and inequalities and not to open the xoay for reform and reconstruction...
...The Last Column I HOPE I'll be forgiven if I return just once more to the subject which has claimed my attention in this column for the past few weeks—the reasons why the Treaty of Versailles provided only a brooding, short-lived armistice, and not a peace...
...27 issue of Life by William C. Bullitt, who was Col...
...House he decided not to demand of Balfour the elimination of the secret treaties...
...We learn first-hand from Bullitt that the President began to weaken, waver, and compromise even before the war ended...
...House, Wilson's alter ego, told him that if the League were approved, it might result in bringing "the American Army and Navy immediately to the aid of France in case of future German attack...
...Bullitt notes that "many other such opportunities arose during the next 17 months . . . but he did not pin down the Allies, or attempt to do so, until after the German collapse...
...At that moment Wilson could have got rid of the secret treaties and begun the work of turning the war into the crusade for peace which he had proclaimed...
...Conversely, Britain's Lloyd George did not want too strong a League, for such an institution might interfere with what Bullitt describes as the two major objectives of the British at Versailles—the maintenance of the balance of power and the acquisition for the Empire of "as much of the spoils" as could be seized without creating too much of a stink...
...Guarding The Swag His "first great opportunity to get rid of the secret treaties between the Allies, and to pledge the Allies to a peace of reconciliation," Bullitt recalls, "came shortly after the U. S. entered the war" when Lord Balfour informed the President that "the position of the Allies was desperate...
...Bullitt shows us how the politicians who ruled Britain and France were not interested at Versailles, as were the idealistic internationalists from America, in mutual sacrifice for the preservation of peace...
...M.H.R...
...Then Clemenceau became the advocate of a stronger League than either Wilson or Lloyd George wanted...
...Bullitt tells in Life —amazing in the thoroughness with which it demolishes many a myth about Versailles and confirms the doubts and fears of cranks like myself who could never swallow the history-book maxim that America ruined a great treaty and wrecked a great principle in refusing to join the League of Nations...
...House's Chief of the Division of Current Intelligence at the Versailles Conference...
...So great were some of the concessions that Wilson was kept awake nights brooding over the course of events, Bullitt informs Us...
...It was policies and personalities like these that Wilson faced...
...The question seems to me one of paramount importance because it may help us to avoid the pitfalls which tripped the diplomats at Versailles...
...After consultation with Col...
...But Wilson wrecked his first great chance...
...Britain and France were "totally dependent for their lives on men, money, munitions, food, and supplies of all sorts from America...
...Readers of The Progressive who know how this magazine has urged Mr...
...And when the war ended, Bullitt writes, "the power over the Allies which he had possessed before the Armistice . . . had in large measure disappeared...
...It is an amazing story that Mr...
...They were interested solely in individual, not collective, security, and in the protection and enlargement of their own wealth and their own territory...
Vol. 8 • April 1944 • No. 17
