Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [316]
The peacemakers in 1919 felt that they had done their best, but they had no illusions that they had solved the world’s problems. As he left Paris on June 28, Wilson said to his wife, “Well, little girl, it is finished, and, as no one is satisfied, it makes me hope we have made a just peace; but it is all in the lap of the gods.”6 It was also in the laps of those who came next to lead the world, some of whom had been in Paris—such as Prince Konoe of Japan and Franklin Delano Roosevelt—some of whom had been watching from afar. In Italy, Mussolini was rising fast in nationalist politics, as the old liberal order crumbled under assaults from men such as D’Annunzio. The young Adolf Hitler was in Munich that June, taking congenial courses on the glories of German history and the evils of international Jewish capital. Already he was discovering his own talents as an ideologue and an orator.
Lloyd George had three more years in power. After he was forced to resign in November 1922 he never again held office, although he remained a member of Parliament until his death in 1945. His memoirs of the Peace Conference, published in 1938, are entertaining, frequently inaccurate, and tend to blame the French or the Americans for everything that went wrong. Clemenceau unwisely ran for president of France at the end of 1919. Expecting to be acclaimed, he withdrew in a rage when it became clear that he would face opposition. He left France almost immediately and spent the next years traveling. He continued to write, a huge and almost unreadable two-volume work on philosophy and a short study of the ancient Athenian orator Demosthenes, who warned his civilized and comfort-loving fellow citizens that they were in danger from the barbarian Philip of Macedon. He refused to write his memoirs and destroyed most of his papers in 1928. He had made his contribution to history, he told a British journalist, but he disdained all discussion of the past. Stung by the posthumous publication of an attack by Foch, he finally took up his pen and drafted a defense of his work during the war and at the Peace Conference. He died in November 1929, before he could complete it. Whatever secrets he had about the inner workings of the Peace Conference, he took with him.7
Wilson’s end was the saddest. Exhausted by the Peace Conference, he plunged into a wrenching and debilitating fight with the Senate over ratification of the Treaty of Versailles and, more specifically, the League of Nations. His supporters and his opponents had both been busy while he was away. The League to Enforce the Peace was energetically lobbying for ratification. Wilson, unfortunately, did not much care for them, dismissing them as “butters-in” and “wool-gatherers.” The League for the Preservation of American Independence, inspired, so it frequently said, by George Washington’s and Thomas Jefferson’s repeated warnings against permanent or entangling alliances, did its best to thwart the president. As for the ninety-six members of the Senate, it became apparent that they were dividing into roughly four groups. At least six Republicans would not have the League in any form—they came to be known as the Irreconcilables. A few Democrat mavericks would probably vote with them. Some nine Republicans were Mild Reservationists who would have accepted the League so long as their reservations to protect American sovereignty were registered. (Reservations were the well-established diplomatic practice of accepting an international agreement with qualifications; so long as all parties to the treaty agreed, the reservations stood.) This left three dozen Republicans who were not yet fully committed. Most Democrats still followed their president, although many privately hoped he would come to terms with the Mild Reservationists. If Wilson did compromise, there was a good chance that there would be enough votes to get the treaty passed. Would the European powers accept reservations? Lloyd George claimed in his memoirs that they had always expected