The Inside Story of the Peace Conference

by Emile Joseph Dillon

The notion that the enemy would thus make good all losses was manifestly preposterous. In a century the debt could not be wiped out, even though the Teutonic people could be got to work steadily and selflessly for the purpose. For their productivity would be unavailing if their victorious adversaries were indisposed to admit the products to their markets. And not only were the governments unwilling, but some of the peoples announced their determination to boycott German wares on their own initiative. None the less the nations were for months buoyed up with the baleful delusion that all their war expenses would be refunded by the enemy.[70]

It was not the governments only, however, who, after having for over four years colored and refracted the truth, now continued to twist and invent "facts." The newspapers, with some honorable exceptions, buttressed them up and even outstripped them. Plausible unveracity thus became a patriotic accomplishment and a recognized element of politics. Parties and states employed it freely. Fiction received the hall-mark of truth and fancies were current as facts. Public men who had solemnly hazarded statements belied by subsequent events denied having ever uttered them. Never before was the baleful theory that error is helpful so systematically applied as during the war and the armistice. If the falsehoods circulated and the true facts suppressed were to be collected and published in a volume, one would realize the depth to which the standard of intellectual and moral integrity was lowered.[71]

The censorship was retained by the Great Powers during the Conference as a sort of soft cushion on which the self-constituted dispensers of Fate comfortably reposed. In Paris, where it was particularly severe and unreasoning, it protected the secret conclave from the harsh strictures of the outside world, concealing from the public, not only the incongruities of the Conference, but also many of the warnings of contemporary history. In the opinion of unbiased Frenchmen no such rigorous, systematic, and short-sighted repression of press liberty had been known since the Third Empire as was kept up under the rule of the great tribune whose public career had been one continuous campaign against every form of coercion. This twofold policy of secrecy on the part of the delegates and censorship on the part of the authorities proved incongruous as well as dangerous, for, upheld by the eminent statesmen who had laid down as part of the new gospel the principle of "open covenants openly arrived at," it furnished the world with a fairly correct standard by which to interpret the entire phraseology of the latter-day reformers. Events showed that only by applying that criterion could the worth of their statements of fact and their promises of amelioration be gaged. And it soon became clear that most of their utterances like that about open covenants were to be construed according to the maxim of lucus a non lucendo.

It was characteristic of the system that two American citizens were employed to read the cablegrams arriving from the United States to French newspapers. The object was the suppression of such messages as tended to throw doubt on the useful belief that the people of the great American Republic were solid behind their President, ready to approve his decisions and acts, and that his cherished Covenant, sure of ratification, would serve as a safe guarantee to all the states which the application of his various principles might leave strategically exposed. In this way many interesting items of intelligence from the United States were kept out of the newspapers, while others were mutilated and almost all were delayed. Protests were unavailing. Nor was it until several months were gone by that the French public became aware of the existence of a strong current of American opinion which favored a critical attitude toward Mr. Wilson's policy and justified misgivings as to the finality of his decisions. It was a sorry expedient and an unsuccessful one.

On another occasion strenuous efforts are reported to have been made through the intermediary of President Wilson to delay the publication in the United States of a cablegram to a journal there until the Prime Minister of Britain should deliver a speech in the House of Commons. An accident balked these exertions and the message appeared.

Publicity was none the less strongly advocated by the plenipotentiaries in their speeches and writings. These were as sign-posts pointing to roads along which they themselves were incapable of moving. By their own accounts they were inveterate enemies of secrecy and censorship. The President of the United States had publicly said that he "could not conceive of anything more hurtful than the creation of a system of censorship that would deprive the people of a free republic such as ours of their undeniable right to criticize public officials." M. Clemenceau, who suffered more than most publicists from systematic repression, had changed the name of his newspaper from the L'Homme Libre to L'Homme Enchaîné, and had passed a severe judgment on "those friends of liberty" (the government) who tempered freedom with preventive repression measured out according to the mood uppermost at the moment.[72] But as soon as he himself became head of the government he changed his tactics and called his journal L'Homme Libre again. In the Chamber he announced that "publicity for the 'debates' of the Conference was generally favored," but in practice he rendered the system of gagging the press a byword in Europe. Drawing his own line of demarcation between the permissible and the illicit, he informed the Chamber that so long as the Conference was engaged on its arduous work "it must not be said that the head of one government had put forward a proposal which was opposed by the head of another government."[73] As though the disagreements, the bickerings, and the serious quarrels of the heads of the governments could long be concealed from the peoples whose spokesmen they were!

That bargainings went on at the Conference which a plain-dealing world ought to be apprised of is the conclusion which every unbiased outsider will draw from the singular expedients resorted to for the purpose of concealing them. Before the Foreign Relations Committee in Washington, State-Secretary Lansing confessed that when, after the treaty had been signed, the French Senate called for the minutes of the proceedings on the Commission of the League of Nations, President Wilson telegraphed from Washington to the Peace Commission requesting it to withhold them. He further admitted that the only written report of the discussions in existence was left in Paris, outside the jurisdiction of the United States Senate. When questioned as to whether, in view of this system of concealment, the President's promise of "open covenants openly arrived at" could be said to have been honestly redeemed, Mr. Lansing answered, "I consider that was carried out."[74] It seems highly probable that in the same and only in the same sense will the Treaty and the Covenant be carried out in the spirit or the letter.

During the fateful days of the Conference preventive censorship was practised with a degree of rigor equaled only by its senselessness. As late as the month of June, the columns of the newspapers were checkered with blank spaces. "Scarcely a newspaper in Paris appears uncensored at present," one press organ wrote. "Some papers protest, but protests are in vain."[75]

"Practically not a word as to the nature of the Peace terms that France regards as most vital to her existence appears in the French papers this morning," complained a journal at the time when even the Germans were fully informed of what was being enacted. On one occasion Bonsoir was seized for expressing the view that the Treaty embodied an Anglo-Saxon peace;[76] on another for reproducing an interview with Marshal Foch that had already appeared in a widely circulated Paris newspaper.[77] By way of justifying another of these seizures the French censor alleged that an article in the paper was deemed uncomplimentary to Mr. Lloyd George. The editor replied in a letter to the British Premier affirming that there was nothing in the article but what Mr. Lloyd George could and should be proud of. In fact, it only commended him "for having served the interests of his country most admirably and having had precedence given to them over all others." The letter concluded: "We are apprehensive that in the whole business there is but one thing truly uncomplimentary, and that is that the French censorship, for the purpose of strangling the French press, should employ your name, the name of him who abolished censorship many weeks ago."[78]

Even when British journalists were dealing with matters as unlikely to cause trouble as a description of the historic proceedings at Versailles at which the Germans received the Peace Treaty, the censor held back their messages, from five o'clock in the afternoon till three the next morning.[79] Strange though it may seem, it was at first decided that no newspaper-men should be allowed to witness the formal handing of the Treaty to the enemy delegates! For it was deemed advisable in the interests of the world that even that ceremonial should be secret.[80] These singular methods were impressively illustrated and summarized in a cartoon representing Mr. Wilson as "The new wrestling champion," throwing down his adversary, the press, whose garb, composed of journals, was being scattered in scraps of paper to the floor, and under the picture was the legend: "It is forbidden to publish what Marshal Foch says. It is forbidden to publish what Mr. George thinks. It is forbidden to publish the Treaty of Peace with Germany. It is forbidden to publish what happened at ... and to make sure that nothing else will be published, the censor systematically delays the transmission of every telegram."[81]