Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [66]
The covenant also reflected several other causes dear to internationalists and humanitarians. It contained an undertaking that the League would look into setting up a permanent international court of justice, provisions against arms trafficking and slavery and support for the spread of the international Red Cross. It also established the International Labour Organization to work for international standards on working conditions.
This was something middle-class reformers, left-wing parties and unions had long wanted. (The eight-hour day was their great rallying cry.) The most they had been able to achieve before the war, however, had been limits on women working at night and a ban on phosphorus in match-making. The Bolshevik revolution helped to work a miraculous change of attitude among the Western ruling classes. The workers, even in the victorious democracies, were restless. Who knew how far they would go down the path toward revolution? European labor representatives were threatening to hold a conference in Paris at the same time as the Peace Conference, with delegates from the defeated nations as well as the victors. While the Allies managed to deflect this to Berne in Switzerland, Lloyd George and Clemenceau both thought that a clause on labor in the covenant of the League would be very helpful in calming their workers down. In any case, their own political leanings, like Wilson’s, made them sympathetic to the labor movement, at least when it steered clear of revolution.29
The day the League of Nations commission was appointed, another was set up on international labor. Under the chairmanship first of the fierce little head of the American Federation of Labor, Samuel Gompers, and then of the British labor leader George Barnes, it worked away quietly. Barnes complained to Lloyd George that the peacemakers took only a “languid interest” in its work.30 This was probably a good thing: the International Labour Organization came into existence with a minimum of fuss and held its first conference before the end of 1919. Unlike the League of Nations, to which it was attached, it included German representatives from the very beginning. And unlike the League, it has survived to the present day.
On February 14, Wilson presented the draft of the League covenant to a plenary session of the Peace Conference. The members of the commission had produced a document, at once practical and inspirational, of which they were all proud. “Many terrible things have come out of this war,” he concluded, “but some very beautiful things have come out of it.” That night he left Paris for the United States, confident that he had accomplished his main purpose in attending the conference.31
The covenant was not quite finished, though. The French still hoped to get in something about military force; the Japanese had warned that they intended to introduce a controversial provision on racial equality; and the mandates over the former German colonies and the Ottoman empire still had to be awarded. There was also the tricky matter of the Monroe Doctrine, underpinning U.S. policy toward the Americas. Would the League have the power, as many of Wilson’s conservative opponents feared, to override the doctrine? If so, they would oppose the League, which might well lead to its rejection by Congress. Although Wilson hated to make concessions, especially to men he loathed, he agreed on his return to Paris to negotiate a special reservation saying that nothing in the League covenant invalidated the Monroe Doctrine.32
He found himself embroiled, this time with the British, in the sort of diplomatic game that he had always regarded with contempt. Although Cecil and Smuts sympathized with his predicament and were prepared to support him, Lloyd George had scented an opportunity.