AMERICA MUST RAISE A STANDARD!
Follette, Sen. Robert M. La Jr.
America Must Raise A Standard! By SEN. ROBERT M. LA FOLLETTE, Jr. THE world stands today at one of the great crossroads of history. The United States must determine the course it is to follow. As...
...For the second time in 27 years we have thrown the power of the United States into a world war...
...Unless we change our direction soon, we shall find that our fantastic expenditure of men, money, and materials has bought us only a short and uneasy truce—not the enduring peace we seek...
...Sumner Welles, former Under Secretary of State and long in the diplomatic service of this country, vividly describes in his recent book, A Time for Decision, how it gradually "became apparent that those gathered at Paris who had the power to shape the future world were departing more and more from the clearcut principles of the 14 Points...
...It has been the fashion in certain circles to blame practically every international disaster that has occurred from 1920 to 1939 upon the refusal of the United States Senate to ratify the Treaty of Versailles in precisely the form submitted by President Wilson...
...But the record shows that for political reasons they tolerated and even helped to build up Nazism in Germany and Fascism in Italy...
...These same powers starved and humiliated the German Republic, which, had it been maintained and strengthened, might have been a stabilizing force in Europe...
...The groups then in power in Britain and France actually aided in the growth and development of this brutalitarianism which was to plunge the world into the bloodiest war of all time...
...No one who reads the record of that period and searches honestly through the memoirs of the principal participants can avoid the melancholy conclusion that when the Allied diplomats abandoned principle in favor of short-sighted expediency, relied upon force instead of justice, and betrayed the promises to conquered, neutral, and subject peoples, they sowed the seeds of war...
...For weeks a sustained misleading propaganda has been carried on to put over the fantastic idea that the future peace and security of the world depended solely on the outcome of this Conference...
...But later, because our bargaining power had not been used wisely and courageously, the victories won on the battlefields under the banner of our publicly declared war aims were secretly betrayed at the peace table in Versailles...
...In the first place, we failed when we entered this war to exercise our enormous bargaining power...
...Had discussion been open, the American people and the democratic-minded peoples of Europe who had acclaimed President Wilson upon his arrival there would have supported him...
...But to ignore the forces in Britain and France which helped to build up nazism and fascism in Germany and Italy would be a tragic mistake if we are to prevent now a betrayal of the aspirations of the people of our own country and the democratic minded peoples of all countries...
...Such secret bargains betray the freedom-loving peoples of all lands...
...Verbal idealism does not cost anyone anything...
...In the present war we have repeated this tragic mistake...
...It is harder to achieve this practical idealism in peace than in war...
...Nothing could be further from the truth...
...The Forgotten Charter The Versailles Treaty failed because it was an unrealistic treaty, founded upon injustice and dismemberment, and above all because it did not solve the basic social and economic causes which history shows are the root of most wars...
...In common with men and women everywhere who long for enduring peace after this global holocaust ends, I have followed the developments at San Francisco closely during these past weeks...
...Even more important than any decisions at San Francisco on the mechanics of enforcement are the decisions which must be made later as to the actual peace settlements...
...At that time I believe the Allies could have been publicly committed to specific terms of a democratic peace...
...I should be as shocked as I know most Americans would be at any suggestion that we should have used or should now use our bargaining power to wrest concessions from our Allies for the aggrandizement of our own Nation or the satisfaction of any selfish desires which may be in the minds of special interests in the United States...
...The events of the past few years justify this conclusion...
...One of the chief reasons for the compromises which President Wilson felt himself obliged to accept at Paris was the fact that the United States had made no effort to reach a prior understanding with its Allies concerning political and territorial problems...
...For a time this aroused high hopes...
...But at least 3 of the President's appointees to the American Peace Commission were aware that this hope was built on quicksand...
...We must constantly remember that no permanent peace can be based on wrong, and that no world organization can be formed strong enough to r maintain a bad peace...
...A Hope Built On Quicksand The first great error made by the United States was its failure to use America's enormous bargaining power in our relations with our Allies...
...Apparently all we have achieved is the famous and now almost forgotten Atlantic Charter...
...There is overwhelming evidence that up to the present we have not mastered these lessons of the past...
...It is a painful experience to review this grim record of the past...
...The events of 1919 to 1929 have a powerful lesson for us which should be studied and mastered by those who have the awful responsibility of charting the course for the world's tomorrow...
...We have much to learn from the tragic drama of Versailles in 1918-19 when the leaders of the victorious nations, tlien led by a Big 4, wrote the peace settlement which exploded scarcely 20 years later in the present war...
...As I see it there are two alternatives...
...If we are to be committed to deep-going international cooperation, we must be on the alert in behalf of true democracy and justice...
...It depends, too, upon how the urgent problems of imperialism, competitive armaments, world trade, natural resources, and slave labor are determined...
...During the First World War, at the time President Wilson announced these war aims in his famous 14 Points speech, they were publicly endorsed in principle by Allied leaders...
...THE decisions as to the vital elements of the peace settlements will be infinitely more important for your children and mine than any decision at San Francisco regarding the mechanics of enforcing peace...
...I do not discuss those developments for the moment, but shall come to them presently...
...This is an admonition that we Americans should constantly keep in mind in thinking about the Dumbarton Oaks-Yalta proposals which have been under discussion at San Francisco...
...At the peace table they betrayed the democratic-minded, liberty-loving peoples of all countries, defeated the war aims declared by President Wilson, and wrote a treaty largely in accord with provisions of the secret treaties which the Allied governments had made among themselves before the United States entered the war...
...These proposals are not in themselves a peace plan...
...I am convinced that no one who studies objectively the causes of the-present holocaust can escape the judgment that this war is a malignant outgrowth from the seeds planted, however unwittingly, by the Allied leaders who thought they were peacemakers...
...We have been the decisive factor once more in determining the outcome of a world war...
...But it is vital to make clear that the San Francisco Conference is dealing only with an effort to devise machinery to enforce the peace...
...years of the life of the League to prevent conditions making for war...
...Any enduring peace must ultimately depend upon the decisions as to what finally happens in Poland, Italy, Greece, Burma, Malay, the Philippines, and with other areas liberated from the yoke of Axis tyranny...
...Wilson claimed that he was uninformed of the nature of the secret treaties, distributing vast territories and their inhabitants in a manner wholly inconsistent with the 14 Points...
...But this does not mean that we must give indis-criminating support to every proposal submitted to us by our allies or by some of our spokesmen simply because it is advanced in the name of nebulous internationalism...
...The power of France and Britain on the continent of Europe was absolute and unchallenged...
...There, day by day, in secret conferences, the selfish, imperialistic purposes of the men then in power in the governments of our allies steadily undermined both an enduring peace and an effective League of Nations...
...Five of the principal American experts were so alarmed at what was happening that they wrote letters protesting against the peace terms and stating that they considered them an abandonment of the principles for which the Americans had fought...
...If we are to engage in international cooperation for enduring peace, America should use all her power to uphold a standard which expresses the aspirations of the peoples of all creeds and colors for political freedom and economic opportunity—a standard which would proclaim to the entire world America's aspirations in that peacemaking and in continued international cooperation...
...No international organization, with or without the aid of the United States, would have been strong enough to have enforced the utterly inadequate, unwise, and unworkable Treaty of Versailles, framed in secrecy, based upon intrigues of secret diplomacy...
...They are an incomplete and imperfect arrangement resulting from comproThis Is The First Of Several Articles Charting A Foreign Policy For America—Based On Bob LaFol-lette's Historic Speech In The Senate May 31 mise designed to enforce the peace settlements which are now being made or will be made in the future...
...Those secret treaties contained the seeds of future wars...
...One is to wash our hands of the whole business and refuse to take on the responsibilities our participation in the war has thrust upon us...
...I do not believe we should do this...
...The commitments we should secure are those in behalf of freedom and democracy for small nations and subject peoples...
...Thus far we have been traveling a road which, almost step by step, parallels the tragic road we took after the First World War...
...But later we were informed that this agreement, so widely publicized as a solemn, signed, covenant, was only a news release scribbled on pieces of paper...
...Welles writes: "The arbiters of human destiny seemed less and less like prophets and more and more like harassed, tired, and irritable old men...
...Evidence of the disastrous results of these two great strategic errors are to be found in the published memoirs and in the biographies of nearly all the principal men who negotiated at Paris and Versailles...
...Our bargaining power should have been used before we entered the war in 1917 and continuously thereafter—not to secure selfish ends for the United States, but to advance democratic principles in all countries and to formulate a just peace settlement in accord with the war aims publicly declared in the 14 Points...
...The time to have secured their public repudiation by the Allies was when victory Was uncertain and our help was most desperately heeded...
...At that moment President Wilson's power to write his 14 Points into the treaty was further weakened, if not destroyed...
...I do not minimize the importance of the San Francisco Conference...
...Such commitments are important to the United States in the sense that they are important to all nations and all peoples genuinely determined to create conditions for an enduring peace by getting at the causes of war...
...Because the United States had failed to exact a commitment to specific, democratic peace terms from the European Allies when our bargaining power was prodigious, President Wilson was driven into surrendering principle after principle during the actual process of formulating the peace treaty at Versailles...
...Overselling The Conference It is easy to get individuals and nations to agree upon vague, general statements of idealistic purposes...
...When these diabolical movements were in their infancy, Britain and France needed no assistance to crush them...
...Americans should constantly remember that nebulous internationalism was used during the First World War as a cloak to cover the secret bargains of war-breeding imperialism which were finally disclosed at Versailles...
...Had this been done, the peoples of the Allied countries and the people of our own country who thought they were fighting a war for democracy and enduring peace would have held their governments to the kind of peace that had been publicly pledged...
...I recall an anecdote told of the late Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes...
...That was the time to have insisted upon their making specific public commitments to join the United States in writing the peace with the 14 Points as its basis...
...But from now on we must remember the past and not again make the mistake of putting too much faith in the machinery to enforce peace or in fine phrases about internationalism...
...Asked to give the prime requirement for a Justice of the United States Supreme Court, he replied, "Always to remember that one is not God...
...The task of the final peace settlements and the task of attempting to build a more secure tomorrow for the world will remain to be done after the San Francisco Conference adjourns...
...And yet when our bargaining power was at its peak we did little toward publicly pledging them and ourselves to a democratic peace through open covenants openly arrived at...
...Practical idealism comes high, for it demands mutual sacrifices and constant cooperation in the achievement of a common purpose...
...We were led to believe that it was a genuine covenant, even though it had been secretly arrived at...
...The President mistakenly believed that a league of nations could subsequently rigfit the injustices of the Versailles Treaty...
...Personally it would be easier to ignore it...
...Therefore, in discussing the international problems of the present I wish to set them against the backdrop of the past...
...Many of the war-breeding decisions at the peace table could have been avoided if President Wilson had insisted on his publicly declared principle that open covenants should be openly arrived at...
...The conflicts arise when the terms of a bargain begin to be specific...
...Past experience teaches us that to achieve this purpose both the peace settlement and the world organization must be rooted in principles of justice...
...Instead I believe that we should face the new responsibilities that our decisive role in the war has brought upon us...
...The Failure Of Versailles The United States has played a leading, decisive role in this war...
...I am profoundly convinced that the United States should throw her moral strength into the international balance to tip the scales on the side of justice and liberty, just as America threw her military strength into the balance that tipped the scales against Nazism, fascism, and militarism...
...And we shall be less than alert if we do not keep the record of the past vividly before us in charting our course for the future...
...Up to the time that Adolf Hitler sent his brown-shirted gangsters to reoccupy the Rhineland in 1936, Britain and France alone could have kept Germany disarmed and Mussolini impotent without levying a single additional dollar for armaments...
...For I should like to say first that I feel a deepening apprehension that the purpose, program, and possibilities of the conference have been oversold to the American people, and doubtless to other peoples of the world...
...Another great error was made when it was agreed to hold the conferences in secret...
...It also depends upon what is done with conquered Germany and Japan...
...No less than in 1917-18 the Allied Powers have been desperately dependent upon the United States for men, money, munitions, food, and supplies...
...Thus they helped to provide Hitler with the ammunition he needed to wreck the Republic and substitute his own brutal regime...
...The people of this country have been bombarded from all sides with the dangerous delusion that the San Francisco Conference is the beginning and the end of the peacemaking process...
...Recent history within the memory of living men should protect us from repeating past mistakes...
...Any plans for international cooperation which ignore the lessons of the past are unrealistic...
...The flood of emotional optimism quickly vanished in a wave of cold and cynical pessimism...
...Nor, until the final months before the armistice, had this Government tried to come to an agreement with the Allies regarding the Covenant of the League of Nations...
...Unless we learn greater wisdom from this disastrous past experience we shall repeat in our own time some of their most perilous mistakes...
...I believe we should strive to create a realistic international organization which will actually work and to create a peace settlement which will endure...
...A study of the history of the world between the World Wars must make it clear even to the most casual student that the powers dominating the League of Nations had it within their grasp for the first 15...
...The past should teach us that the most beautifully worded and cleverly contrived instrument of enforcement that the United Nations can possibly devise will fail if the final peace settlements are not firmly grounded in principles of justice and freedom...
Vol. 9 • June 1945 • No. 24
