The story of the Versailles Peace Conference actually began on October 5, 1918, when Prince Max of Baden, communicated his desire to negotiate a peace settlement with President Wilson based on the Fourteen Points. Three days later the President requested from the German Government a definite statement to the effect that it would agree with his points as the basis for an armistice. After receiving this statement on October 12, Wilson replied with a list of additional conditions two days later. He would not be prepared to sign any armistice which did not guarantee 'absolutely satisfactory safeguards for the maintenance of the present military supremacy of the Allied and Associated armies.' The Kaiser would also be required to abdicate and permit the establishment of a democratic and representative government in Berlin. The German Government accepted these conditions. Whereupon the President told Prince Max on October 23 that he would approach the Associated governments with the proposed conditions for an armistice. Its terms would still be contingent on their general approval of his Fourteen Points. The Associated governments were agreeable to Wilson's proposals with the understanding that the 'freedom of the seas' means 'complete freedom' and that the reparation payments would be made 'by Germany for all damage done to the civilian population of the Allies, and their property, by the aggression of Germany by land, by sea, and from the air.' On November 5 the German Government agreed to these terms. Six days later, on November 11, an armistice was signed in the Forest of Compiègne.

In the ensuing negotiations the German Government counted on the integrity of Wilson to comply with his promise in making the Fourteen Points the basis of a peace settlement, a promise which had been formally, though reluctantly, extended to its representatives by all heads of state of the Allied Powers. That the British and French governments never intended to keep this promise, marred the proceedings at the Peace Conference in Paris from its very beginnings. At the London Conference, on December 1-3, 1918, Lloyd George openly declared his intention to make the Pre-Armistice Agreement a mere scrap of paper. He proposed a resolution, which was later adopted, to form an inter-Allied Commission endowed with powers to 'examine and report on the amount enemy countries are able to pay for reparation and indemnity.' The word 'indemnity' could easily be interpreted as an obligation of Germany to reimburse the Allied Governments for all 'costs of the war'. Although such an interpretation did not conform with the intent of the Pre-Armistice Agreement, Lloyd George showed an 'apparent nonchalance about principle and contract'.

During the December election the British Prime Minister assured his national constituency that he did not intend to honour his pledge to Colonel House in accepting the principles set forth in the Fourteen Points. In a speech at Bristol on December 11, 1918 he told his jubilant audience that 'we propose to demand the whole cost of the war [from Germany]', and thereby he effectively discarded the Pre-Armistice contract. Speaking to a large crowd in the Cambridge Guildhall, Eric Geddes captured the spirit of the election campaign by expressing his approval of Lloyd George's intentions: 'We shall squeeze the orange until the pips squeak.'

At the Paris Peace Conference, Lloyd George (January 22, 1919) suggested the appointment of a commission to study 'reparation and indemnity'. In an attempt to follow the guidelines of the Pre-Armistice Agreement, President Wilson managed to have the word 'indemnity' removed from the commission's purpose statement. On February 24, then returning to the United States on the S.S. George Washington, President Wilson unequivocally stated that America was 'bound in honor to decline to agree to the inclusion of war costs in the reparation demanded ... It is clearly inconsistent with what we deliberately led the enemy to expect ... We should dissent and dissent publicly if necessary.' This gesture of good faith by the American President, however, proved to be ineffectual against the joint efforts of the British and French governments to follow through with their schemes for the economic dismemberment of Germany. Lloyd George and Clemenceau demanded that Germany must accept the obligation for all 'war costs'.

This concerted attempt to circumvent the Pre-Armistice Agreement was primarily challenged on legal and moral grounds by John Foster Dulles, the American member on the Reparation Commission. Dulles emphasised the fact that the Pre-Armistice Agreement on reparations was essentially a legal contract: 'We have not before us a blank page ... but one which is already filled with writing, and at the bottom are the signatures of Mr. Wilson, of Mr. Orlando, of Mr. Clemenceau and of Mr. Lloyd George. It is the agreed basis of peace with Germany.' Only by this expedient had the Associated governments succeeded in persuading the Germans to sign the armistice. The American lawyer simply reminded the Allies that they had given their word to the Kaiser that they would live up to this arrangement.

In a letter to Arnold J. Toynbee on 10 August 1919, and again years later in his book, Spiritual Values and World Affairs, Alfred E. Zimmern, the Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford, reflected on the intricacies of the controversy at Versailles and cast his vote squarely in favour of Dulles' position concerning the binding force of the Pre-Armistice Agreement:

One such issue -- a very plain issue -- arose within a few weeks of the signing of the Armistice. The Prime Minister had embarked on an election campaign with a programme, one of the main planks of which was in violation of an international engagement on which the ink was hardly dry -- the reparations clause of the pre-Armistice agreement ... But that did not alter the fact that it was a binding agreement -- as binding as the Belgian Treaty of 1839 with the violation of which our action in August 1914 had so much to do. In other words, the Prime Minster was committing the British people, within a few weeks of the Armistice, to a policy which involved an offence against international morality (to use the language of the Versailles treaty) of the same kind as that which we later imputed to the Kaiser. Here surely was a moral issue of the plainest and most unmistakable kind -- and an issue which, as was evident to any student of international affairs, was pregnant with momentous consequences for the future of Europe and of the world.

Dulles further noted that Germany's capacity to pay reparations was limited and that the Allies would sow the bitter seeds of a new war if they pressed their claims beyond those limits. This brought him into direct confrontation with W. M. Hughes, the Prime Minister of Australia. Hughes had persistently argued for an open-ended solution to the reparation question allowing Britain and France to make the most exacting demands from Germany. Since these two countries were obligated by treaty to defend the integrity of Belgium's territory, Hughes contended, they were, like policemen, fulfilling their duty to uphold the law. The other countries engaged in war with Germany were comparable to private citizens on a city street, who could not remain by-standers while the 'policemen' rushed to Belgium's defence and, having participated in the struggle, should also receive full payment to recover their expenses. In his rebuttal, Dulles challenged the Australian Prime Minister's logic by asking: 'Does the policeman receive his hire from the wrongdoer whom he arrests? No; in making the arrest the policeman has performed his duty nobly, gallantly, at great sacrifice, if you will; but still his duty. And the reparation paid by the wrongdoer is made to the victim not to the guardian of the law.' By applying this principle Dulles established the case that only Belgium (because her territory alone had been attacked) had the right to press its claim for full recompense of war damages. The other countries should be content with payments covering any damages sustained by the destruction of property and by physical injury to civilians. Yet Dulles soon realised that, in the matter of reparations, it was useless to remind his principal disputants that their integrity and honour as statesmen were at stake. His moral appeals quickly evaporated in the hot atmosphere of the Peace Conference. In a private memorandum, he later wrote that 'there was not one of them who recognized the binding force of this provision [the Pre-Armistice Agreement].'

Dulles was not prepared, however, to lower his flag so soon. Fearing the grave consequences which might follow such flagrant breach of contract by the Allies, he tried tenaciously to hold his position and embarked on a more casuistic course of action. By pretending to accommodate the demands of his disputants, he tried to persuade them to fix the reparations payments to a mutually agreeable amount. On February 21, 1919 he declared in a draft statement that 'the German Government shall ... make reparation for the entire cost of the war', but added that 'the ability of the German Government ... to make reparation is limited'. The Associated Governments could now prudently 'renounce' their right to payment beyond a specified level. Colonel House supported him in this tactical manoeuvre.

Lloyd George remained unconvinced and, on Lord Sumner's recommendation, demanded that both war pensions and separation allowances should be included in the reparations. Clemenceau scrupulously agreed with him, although both of them knew that by stipulating these items as 'war cost' they violated the expressed terms of the Pre-Armistice Agreement. In response Dulles maintained that the United States and the Allies had committed themselves to a legal agreement with Germany on November 5, 1918, which explicitly excluded pensions and separation allowances from claims of compensation. 'If the Allies expected Germany to understand that she was to repay the costs of these items,' he wrote, 'I, personally, do not see how the Allies could have chosen words less apt to convey that meaning.'

To disperse any lingering doubts about his determination to exact all 'war costs' from Germany, the British Prime Minister instructed his private secretary, Philip Kerr, to draft the position of the Associated Powers on reparations. Kerr later admitted that his note, especially the phrase, 'the aggression of Germany', was used in formulating the famous 'war guilt clause' (Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles). Reflecting on the consequences of this particular clause, Dulles stated in 1938, at a time when the worst features of Hitler's tyranny had become general knowledge, that 'it was the revulsion of the German people from this article of the Treaty which, above all else, laid the foundation for the Germany which we see today.' On May 29, 1919, Lloyd George introduced a revised version of Kerr's draft to the Council of Four. Describing in vivid pictures the immense destruction of war caused 'by the aggression of the enemy states', he continued to emphasise 'the indisputable claim of the Allies and Associated Governments to full compensation.' Dulles expected that President Wilson would resolutely oppose this obvious attempt to break the Pre-Armistice Agreement and constrain the Allies to abide by the assurances they had extended to the Kaiser. But when the President's financial advisers pointed out to him that Lloyd George's proposals were devoid of any logical foundation, Wilson deeply shocked the American delegation by bursting out in petulant tones: 'Logic! Logic! I don't give a damn for logic. I am going to include pensions.' Due to the President's surprising volte-face in regard to the reparations issue, Dulles, again, failed to reach a reasonable agreement with the Associated governments. In a last, desperate attempt, Dulles proposed on June 3, 1919, that, whatever the formula used for determining 'war costs', at least a clearly defined limit of reparations payments should be established. The financial experts at Versailles, however, postponed the decision to settle for any particular amount of reparation payments. In 1921 the Reparation Commission remedied this omission by demanding from Germany to pay the astronomical sum of approximately $33,000,000,000. One third of this sum represented damages to Allied property, 'and one-half to two thirds, pensions and similar allowances. In short, Wilson's decision doubled and perhaps tripled the bill.' Germany might have been able to pay a bill of not more than ten billion dollars, but when Wilson consented to the British and French position, he pointed the way to the financial chaos that eventually overwhelmed Germany and Europe. In the dark soil of this breach of contract the seeds of another world war were sown.

John Foster was present when the punitive terms of the Peace Treaty were finally set down, signed by the victors and presented to the Germans. His vivid impression of the Peace Conference was that, beyond injustice, its outcome would lead to a course of self-destruction. The realisation that Wilson's plan to erect an international order of peace at Versailles foundered on the rock of senatorial opposition at home left an indelible impression on his mind. From the collapse of Wilson's idealism he concluded that statesmen should not prematurely attempt to alter political realities before they are assured of a strong political base as a platform on which lasting diplomatic victories can be achieved. In the final analysis it was not that Wilson had failed in reaching his goal of establishing a world government (although the President could be faulted for his poor handling of the negotiations in Paris and his deplorable inconsistency); it was more the lack of public support behind his efforts that had contributed to the downfall of an international system of collective security. Subsequently, Dulles would always use the historical lessons he had learnt at Versailles as the touchstone against which he measured his own performance as an expert of foreign affairs. He became convinced that the use of propaganda was essential in shifting public opinion in America from its traditional isolationist stance to a new policy of interdependence. In a published response to Keynes' criticism of President Wilson's diplomatic blunders at the Peace Conference, Dulles concurred with the British scholar's own conclusion in The Economic Consequences of the Peace (chapter 'Remedies'): 'A great change is necessary in public opinion before the proposals of this chapter can enter the region of practical politics.' In the same article Dulles also asserted that, while the 'balance of power structure' was subject to limitations imposed by political realities, the restraints forced upon the politicians by public temperament and conceptions, as expressed in congressional resolutions, could be overcome in time. As it turned out, only a month later, on March 19, 1920, the first part of Dulles' prescient remarks came true. On that day the U.S. Senate rejected America's participation in a League of Nations. The tragedy of the First World War was destined to be repeated in a much more devastating world conflict twenty years later. John F. Dulles noted that, at Paris, democratic Europe had proved unworthy of a world order which was based on the principle of a community of nations. It still seemed unable to rise above petty nationalistic ambitions. The day would come, however, when the second part of his response to Keynes would also find its fulfilment. In 1949, at a Church conference, Dulles announced that internationalism had finally triumphed over isolationism. He took great pride in the churches' accomplishment of convincing the American public to accept membership in the United Nations Organisation.

If our nation has abandoned political isolation, it is largely because our Christian people took the lead in developing the public opinion that not only permitted but that compelled our Government to work to establish a world organization and to work with it.

Years later, Richard M. Fagley, the executive secretary of the Commission of the Churches on International Affairs, essentially confirmed Dulles' assessment. Fagley maintained that the failure of the League of Nations served a pedagogical purpose ('the major teacher') in revealing the fragile nature of a collective security system which did not rest on a broad base of public support. Fortunately, Dulles' chairmanship of the Commission on a Just and Durable Peace during the war years 'had a part in helping to awaken the American people to their need for a more responsible role in the post-war world.'

To understand Dulles' purpose in using the churches to proclaim his message of peaceful change in the international community, we need to examine first the events which led to the founding of the Institute of International Affairs at the Peace Conference. Later we will consider the Institute's connection to the British Round Table Group.

< ToC  ^ top 

© 2005 Martin Erdmann