PEACE ISN'T A GRAB-BAG
Peace Isn't A Grab-Bag * * * A Refresher Course In Some Vital History Of Peacemaking RECENT political developments in Eastern Europe, in the Mediterranean area, the Levant, and the Orient, have...
...From the Armenians came this note: "You are leaving America without having uttered the reassuring word as to the future of Armenia...
...But in all this collection of appeals, Baker continues, "I do not find a single one, either from strong nations or weak, that contains any offer to help him or help America unreservedly or disinterestedly in applying at Paris the principles which everyone had so acclaimed as the basis of the peace...
...It was published in 1922...
...These letters were made available to Baker's inspection...
...Here is a lesson worth pondering—a fragment of history, written by those who made it, which should help guide us away from the false path of those in all countries, who would beckon us to make the grab-bag the trademark of the peace we are about to write...
...The pages that you should read are pages 3 to 8. In them is a simple, poignant, and moving story of Wilson's great tragedy...
...With him on the trip was his close adviser and confidant, Ray Stannard Baker...
...The Ukranians, the Rumanians, the Hungarians, the Albanians all sought some special favor, all pleaded some special case...
...It's not a new book...
...There is apparently no injury too old, no grievance too trivial, but this coming millennial peace congress shall settle and cure it...
...Peace Isn't A Grab-Bag * * * A Refresher Course In Some Vital History Of Peacemaking RECENT political developments in Eastern Europe, in the Mediterranean area, the Levant, and the Orient, have emphasized the unhappy fact that while men of good will all over the world are dreaming and working for enduring peace, some of the "statesmen^' and many of the brass hats are thinking of peacemaking exclusively in terms of the grab-bag technique...
...Here are poured out, not only the suffering, the longing, the need of the world, but also the ambition, the fear, and the greed...
...Even wrongs done by Napoleon shall be righted...
...What I seem to see—with all my heart I hope that I am wrong—is a tragedy of disappointment...
...All of these expectations have in them the quality of terrible urgency...
...Yet you know, and I know, that these ancient wrongs, these present unhappinesses, are not to be remedied in a day or with a wave of the hand...
...Some of the mail was made up of official matters of state...
...The Swedes, for example . . . ask the President for the correction of the 'Crime of '64' and demand the Aaland Islands, and Belgium wants revision of the treaty of '39...
...IT'S the story of the beginning of the peace mission as it left New York harbor amid great fanfare, headed for Versailles...
...Aboard the ship George Washington was the man who symbolized the ideals for which America had gone to war and the hopes of men everywhere for a world in which they could live at peace—Woodrow Wilson...
...Thus it was that the President's ship, sailing for Europe with its cargo of hope for a world lying exhausted from its orgy of bloodletting, carried with it the premonition of what was to come—a premonition that the fitful gusts of selfishness and petty jealousy that ruffled the papers on the peace table would someday grow into a raging storm and threaten the destruction of civilization itself...
...There's a short refresher course available in 5 pages of easy and interesting reading in a book you can almost certainly find on the shelf of your local library...
...Why should we have anything further to do with Turks or others and not get unconditionally what is ours...
...The hungry expect us to feed them, the roofless look to us for shelter, the sick of heart and body depend upon us for cure...
...For the most part they all ask America to do something immediately for them, to relieve some dire need, to 'give them liberty, to enable them to realize some passionate interest or ambition...
...There must be no delay...
...Also aboard was a chest in which President Wilson had crammed much of the mail he had received from all over the world—mail directed to him as the man whose voice would be heard above all at the coming peace conference...
...It is Ray Stannard Baker's Woodrow Wilson And World Settlement...
...WILSON realized that this selfishness,, this placing of narrow, petty interests above the broad, collective vision of peace he saw was laden with danger for the future of the world, Baker relates...
...But," Baker writes, "dwarfing all these important documents is the fire-hot revelation, many appeals of what it was that the world expected or demanded of America and of this American President...
...There seemed to be an impression," Baker observes, "that America could heal all the old grievances of the world...
...If the nations of the world sincerely want peace, they will have to forego the swag-bag and recognize that there is a worldwide community of interest in a just peace settlement—not in a wild scramble for power and loot—or, at least, that's what history tries to teach those who want to avoid the mistakes of the past...
...Walking the deck one night with George Creel, Wilson said: "It is to America that the whole world turns today, not only with its wrongs, but with its hopes and grievances...
Vol. 9 • June 1945 • No. 25
