These “peace progressives,” as Robert David Johnson and other historians have labeled them, held differing views of Russia’s new revolutionary government, but they all recoiled at the notion of a U.S. military intervention. California Republican Senator Hiram Johnson took the lead. He argued that the United States should deal with the issues that had given rise to Bolshevism—“oppression, and poverty, and hunger”—rather than intervening militarily to overthrow the new government, an undertaking he saw as part of Wilson’s “war against revolution in all countries.” He desired “no American militarism to impose by force our will upon weaker nations.” Mississippi Senator James Vardaman charged that the intervention had been conducted on behalf of international corporations that wanted to collect the $10 billion that the imperial Russian government had owed them. Robert La Follette deplored it as a “mockery” of the Fourteen Points—“the crime of all crimes against democracy, ‘self-determination,’ and the ‘consent of the governed.’”105 Idaho Senator William Borah reported that people who returned to the United States after spending months in Russia were telling a very different story about conditions there than the Wilson administration was presenting. Borah had been hearing “that the Russian people very largely support the Soviet Government.” And, he continued, “If the Soviet Government represents the Russian people, if it represents 90 percent of the Russian people, I take the position that the Russian people have the same right to establish a socialistic state as we have to establish a republic.”106 Johnson introduced a resolution to stop funding for the intervention, which gained strong support, deadlocking at 33–33.107
While growing numbers were beginning to question aspects of Wilson’s diplomacy at home, he still seemed to offer a beacon of hope for war-weary Europeans. Adoring crowds mobbed him when he arrived in Europe on December 18, 1918, for the Paris Peace Conference. H. G. Wells recalled, “For a brief interval Wilson stood alone for mankind. Or at least he seemed to stand for mankind. And in that brief interval there was a very extraordinary and significant wave of response to him throughout the earth…. He ceased to be a common statesman; he became a Messiah.”108
The Germans had surrendered on the basis of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, believing that they would be treated fairly. One German town greeted returning troops with a banner reading “Welcome, brave soldiers, your work has been done; God and Wilson will carry it on.”109 The Germans even deposed the kaiser and adopted a republican form of government as a sign of good faith. But the ill-defined Fourteen Points proved a weak foundation on which to base negotiations. And Wilson mistakenly failed to get his allies to concur during the war when he had more leverage. He had naively told Colonel Edward House, “When the war is over, we can force [England and France] to our way of thinking, because… they will be financially in our hands.”110
Despite their indebtedness, the Allies balked at Wilson’s terms. Having paid such a high price for victory, they had little interest in Wilson’s lofty rhetoric about making the world safe for democracy, freedom of the seas, and “peace without victory.” They wanted revenge, new colonies, and naval dominance. Wilson had already betrayed one of the central tenets by intervening in the Russian Civil War and maintaining forces in the country. More betrayals would follow. The British made it clear that they had no intention of abiding by Wilson’s call for freedom of the seas, which would have limited their navy’s ability to enforce British trade routes. The French made it equally clear they would not accept a nonpunitive treaty. France had lost well over a million soldiers and Great Britain just under a million. British Prime Minister David Lloyd George noted that in the United States “not a shack” had been destroyed.111 The French also remembered their defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, further fueling their desire to debilitate and dismember Germany.
Twenty-seven nations met in Paris on January 12, 1919. The task ahead of them was enormous. To varying degrees, the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian empires were collapsing. New countries were emerging. Revolutionary change was encroaching. Starvation was rampant. Disease was spreading. Displaced populations were seeking refuge. Visionary leadership was desperately needed. But Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and Italian Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando found Wilson, who considered himself the “personal instrument of God,” to be absolutely insufferable.112 Clemenceau supposedly commented, “Mr. Wilson bores me with his 14 Points; why, God Almighty has only ten!”113 Lloyd George took great pleasure in Clemenceau’s response to Wilson: “If the President took a flight beyond the azure main, as he was occasionally inclined to do without regard to relevance, Clemenceau would open his great eyes in twinkling wonder, and turn them on me as much as to say: ‘Here he is off again.’ I really think that at first the idealistic President regarded himself as a missionary whose function was to rescue the poor European heathen.” Lloyd George applauded his own performance under the difficult circumstances, “seated as I was between Jesus Christ and Napoleon Bonaparte.”114
Few of Wilson’s Fourteen Points remained in the final treaty. The victors, particularly Great Britain, France, and Japan, divided the former German colonies and holdings in Asia and Africa along the lines established by the secret 1915 Treaty of London. They also carved up the Ottoman Empire. They sanitized their actions by calling the colonies “mandates.” Wilson resisted but ultimately went along. He rationalized his acquiescence by arguing that the Germans had “ruthlessly exploited their colonies,” denying their citizens basic rights, while the Allies had treated their colonies humanely115—an assessment that was greeted with incredulity by the inhabitants of those Allied colonies, like French Indochina’s Ho Chi Minh. Ho rented a tuxedo and bowler hat and visited Wilson and the U.S. delegation to the conference, carrying a petition demanding Vietnamese independence. Like most of the other non-Western world leaders in attendance, Ho would learn that liberation would come through armed struggle, not colonialist largesse. Mao Zedong, then working as a library assistant, expressed similar frustration: “So much for national self-determination,” he vented. “I think it is really shameless!”116 Wilson went so far in compromising his principles that he even accepted a U.S. mandate over Armenia, leading Clemenceau to comment wryly, “When you cease to be President, we will make you Grand Turk.”117
Allied leaders did little to hide the racism that underlay their continued subjugation of dark-skinned peoples. This was most apparent when Japan’s representatives—Baron Nobuake Makino and Viscount Chinda—proposed that a clause on racial equality be included in the Covenant of the League of Nations. The clause read, “The equality of states being a basic principle of the League of Nations, the High Contracting Parties agree to accord, as soon as possible, to all alien nationals of States members of the League, equal and just treatment in every respect, making no distinction, either in law or fact, on account of their race or nationality.” The Japanese proposal was rejected outright by defenders of the British Empire, including British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour and Australian Prime Minister William Hughes. As one British cabinet member, Lord Robert Cecil, explained, the clause raised “extremely serious problems” for the British Empire.118