THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (70 page)

Lippmann was a member of The Inquiry, the secret project set up by House in the autumn of 1917 to collect the data that would provide the factual and analytical basis for an American-directed settlement. House chose his own brother-in-law Mezes, now president of the City College of New York, as the project's director. Although Judge Learned Hand, John Dewey, and Felix Frankfurter, among others, attempted to join the group once its existence became known—Hand asked whether he might leave the bench in order to work on the staff—appointments were tightly held, even as the group grew to 126 geographers, historians, economists, scientists, and lawyers. This group sought to determine what the map of Europe would look like based on American constitutional ideas of self-determination, and political objectives like a nonpunitive peace and an evenhanded system of free trade. No foreign ministry among the Allies— indeed, in the world—had prepared such briefs. In a letter to the secretary of war, Lippmann wrote that the American war effort was “the largest assembly of force for an entirely disinterested purpose ever known to history. The weapon is drawn by men who cannot worship it.”
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“We are fighting,” he wrote House, “not so much to beat an enemy as to make the world safe for democracy.”
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Secretary of State Robert Lansing and Secretary of War Newton Baker were entirely bypassed by Wilson, who made House his sole collaborator in the original drafting of the Fourteen Points.

“Saturday was a remarkable day,” House wrote in his diary.

House saw clearly that a great divide had opened up between the state-nations whose empires ruled the world before the war and the nation-states whose destinies were asserting themselves. He and Wilson also saw that parliamentary democracy was only one competing candidate for the constitutional order that the nation-state would come to embody. The Fourteen Points, which some historians have ranked with the Emancipation Proclamation in importance, proposed a world order of parliamentary nation-states that was significantly at variance with the order of state-nations but that also excluded fascist and communist nation-states.

Their vision was that of a universal constitution—the original draft of the Covenant of the League of Nations used the word
constitution
. This constitution rested on a universal common law and various explicit enforcement mechanisms. It simply replicated, at the supranational level, the processes of law making and law enforcement that Americans are accustomed to at the federal level. There was to be a body of legal rules that governed all states equally, regardless of their rank, and all nations, regardless of their power; there was to be a judicial institution of universal jurisdiction that applied these rules to controversies, and another institution of states that enforced these rules by sanctions, including violence if necessary. States were to be held, as Wilson ceaselessly put it, to the same processes as individual citizens had been.

Unless the uniquely
American
constitutional basis for this world constitution is appreciated, one cannot fully appreciate the intractable differences between the United States and her allies at the peace conference, and the difficulties faced by ratification of the Treaty that emerged from that conference once it went to the U.S. Senate. The customary criticisms of Wilson during this decisive period are that he failed to fight at Versailles for his ideals or was simply outwitted by Lloyd George and Clemenceau; and that he further ruined the chances for a stable peace by refusing to compromise with the Senate on various reservations to the treaty, thus keeping the United States out of the League of Nations and opening the door to the Second World War through a weakening of deterrence against Germany. These conclusions are partly based, however, on misunderstandings of Wilson's policy and the constitutional and strategic world within which it had to operate. Though widely held, these misunderstandings treat the political conflicts at Versailles and later in Washington as if they occurred in a constitutional vacuum, rather than in an environment structured by the Long War and a society of states with competing ideas of sovereignty.

The Fourteen Points were first presented to the Congress in an address by Wilson in January 1918. They can be reduced to the following six policies, each derived from some aspect of the U.S. Constitution: (1) open treaties, “openly arrived at”—a requirement that is absurdly quixotic unless one is committed by law to the American constitutional scheme of limited government and unalienable popular sovereignty, as a consequence of which no treaty that is secret from the People can be legally binding because treaty making requires the consent of the sovereign; (2) “absolute” freedom of the seas, such that in wartime neutral states could not be restricted in their commerce with belligerents beyond those customary rules of international law governing legitimate blockades, e.g., rules against contraband (weapons, munitions, and the like) and those rules protecting the civilians of neutral states against violence on the high seas; these rules have their parallel in the neglected original intent of the declaration of war clause in the U.S. Constitution;
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(3) the removal of economic barriers among states—parallel to the abolition of internal tariffs that is found in Article IV of the American constitution; (4) arms reductions to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety—a qualification on sovereignty that is entirely inconsistent with the European idea of inalienable state sovereignty; (5) the impartial adjustment of colonial claims, according a weight to the interests of the national peoples concerned equal to whatever claims of title were to be asserted by the states who governed those people—an application of the idea that runs through the remaining nine points of the declaration that legitimate states are based on the self-determination of the peoples for whose benefit the state is constituted (parallel to the tenth and fourteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution); thus the Fourteen Points specifically endorsed the creation of a Polish state, the independence of the Baltic states, and the readjustment of the frontiers of Italy “along clearly recognizable lines of nationality”; the people of Austria-Hungary were to be given “the freest opportunity of autonomous development.”
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And finally (6), in Point Fourteen, the creation of “a general association of nations [that] must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike”—the League of Nations, which in its structure replicates the federal and branch structures of the U.S. Constitution.

There is scarcely one of these war aims that was not as threatening to the Allies as to the Germans. If “open covenants” were to be an objective of Allied governments, what of the secret agreements they themselves had made among one another for a postwar division of the spoils? At least one state, Italy, had actually been induced to join the war on the basis of such undertakings. Great Britain had violated the well-recognized rules of international law governing free passage of neutral shipping in order to
starve Germany, and indeed would do so with such success once the armistice agreement finally stilled German submarine warfare, that famine became widespread across Central Europe. Trade barriers and national protection were the policies that defined “empire”—how could they be declared unlawful without disintegrating the system of imperial preferences? Self-determination presumably applied to the Irish as well as to the Indians, Algerians, and Indochinese. And, of course, a League of Nations whose security decisions would pre-empt those of its member states had yet to be willingly achieved between Britain and France even in the European Union of the late twentieth century. What made these aims so objectionable was not simply their astonishing scope, it was that at their very basis they presumed a relationship between the State and its people that was inconsistent with European ideas of sovereignty dating back to the origin of the modern State in the fifteenth century.

When informed of the president's address, Clemenceau reacted with derision. The Fourteen Points, he said, “bore me.” “The Good Lord,” he remarked mordantly, “only had ten.” Lloyd George was in the midst of an election campaign in which he promised to make the Germans pay “the whole cost of the war.” How could he possibly accept a statement of principles that confined a postwar settlement to an evenhanded treatment of victors and vanquished alike? The German reaction was also hostile. The German chancellor, Hertling, declared that “our military situation was never so favorable as it is now,” and led the Reichstag in a rejection of the Fourteen Points.
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Nevertheless, a month later the American president declared:

There the matter lay for the early months of 1918, which the leaderships of all the European belligerents saw as absolutely decisive for the war as a whole.
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After the slaughter of British forces at Passchendaele, the disintegration of the Russian army in the East, and the Italian debacle at Capo-retto, the Allies braced for a fresh German offensive. By March 1918, the German army had a superiority of almost thirty divisions over the Anglo-French forces. If the German attack succeeded, Allied lines would be pierced and either the British forces surrounded by a sudden German move to the channel or Paris menaced by a drive on the French capital. The German high command mobilized all the resources of the state for this great gamble: if the offensive failed, German resources would be exhausted just
at the time when the U.S. strength was growing from 300,000 troops at the front in April, when the attack began, to 1, 200, 000 in July.

By early June German forces had advanced to within thirty-seven miles of Paris and had inflicted enormous casualties on the Allies; their own losses, however, were just as staggering. By July, the Germans had lost about 973,000 men, and over a million more were listed as sick. On July 18, the Allies attacked at Soissons and Château-Thierry, with the Americans distinguishing themselves on the latter battleground. On August 8 an Allied offensive at Amiens achieved a breakthrough. In September, as if all at once, the German coalition collapsed. Austria-Hungary asked for a separate peace. The German High Command began pressing its government for an armistice. On October 3, a new German chancellor, von Baden, directly addressed the Americans, asking President Wilson for immediate negotiations on the basis of the Fourteen Points. Throughout the Central Powers, states were imploding, producing revolution and economic chaos.

In reply to the German plea, Wilson asked for a categorical acceptance of all the conditions laid down in the Fourteen Points. Colonel House was able to persuade Wilson to add an insistence on such military restraints as would “make the renewal of hostilities on the part of Germany impossible.” The German government gave its assent on October 12, adding that “its object in entering into discussions would be only to agree upon practical details of the application of these terms.”
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Wilson then turned to the Allies and found them far from receptive. After four years of awful slaughter, the American president who had once announced that he was “too proud to fight” now had arrived on the European scene with a peace plan, which he proposed to unilaterally negotiate with the enemy.
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On October 29, House met with the Allies. Point Seven had specified that Belgium should be evacuated and “restored”; Point Eight, that all “French territory should be freed and invaded portions restored.” The Allies insisted, not unreasonably, that they understood the term
restoration
to mean that “compensation would be paid by Germany for all damage done to the civilian population of the Allies, and their property by the aggression of Germany…” Further, the British government announced a reservation to the requirement of freedom of the seas. On November 4, House cabled Wilson, who consented to an interpretation arrived at by House and the Allied leaders. Lansing informed Germany that the United States and the Allies were willing, subject to the reservations on reparations and freedom of the seas, to make peace on the basis of the Fourteen Points. “There can be little doubt that… by specifying ‘damage done to the civilian population' [the Agreement] clearly excluded the costs of waging the war [however].”
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An armistice was agreed to on the 11th of November.

While House was in Europe, Wilson made what House thought was the most disastrous speech of Wilson's career. It was an appeal to the public to elect Democratic congressmen and senators in the election of 1918 so as to help Wilson “win the peace.” This speech shattered the wartime coalition between the parties, and effectively eliminated almost all existing Republican support for the treaty that would emerge from the Versailles conference. This insistence not only that he be right, but that others must play their role as “wrong” proved to be a fatal handicap to Wilson once he was no longer guided by House in his relations with Congress.