Redividing the World
World War I was fought for the redivision of the world among the existing imperialist powers. Germany lost her colonies and the German Republic was reduced to the role of a vassal state serving the American-Anglo-French victors. This situation was duly reflected within the news cartel where Wolff lost territory and was permitted to serve only Germany itself.
A.P. scrambled clumsily for a share in the spoils. Cooper hurried to Versailles to ask the U.S. treaty delegation to fight for A.P. parity with Reuters and Havas. This was to be expressed in the form of a “free press” clause in the peace treaty. President Wilson’s right-hand man, Colonel House, very sympathetic to the American news monopoly’s desires, agreed to sound out the possibilities. He reported, in a few days, that the question had been “taken care of privately” and he could do nothing.
How it was “taken care of,” Cooper reports with great indignation. His account, coming as it does from a member of the gang—a disgruntled member but still one of the boys—is of great authority. It is necessary only to warn that, writing in 1942, he showed no great anti-Nazi fervor and discreetly dodged the ticklish problem of the Soviet Union. He does not mention the great cordon sanitaire—the strangling “safety belt”—set up around the new Socialist State after World War I, but is full of pity for Germany.
Cooper says he learned that a cartel meeting had been held in which the heads of Havas and Reuters had conferred alone while Dr. Heinrich Mantler, head of the Wolff Agency, was left to smoulder in an anteroom. When Reuters-Havas had decided the redivision of the globe, Mantler was called in and told the bad news.
Reuters and Havas, matching the political terms of the Versailles Treaty, built their own news agency cordon sanitaire around Germany. All the political states bordering on Germany were allowed to have only news agencies owned or controlled by either Reuters or Havas or both. In other words, the position of the news agencies in those border countries was harmonious with the determination of England and France to keep Germany hemmed in by little nations mostly pro-Ally, such as Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland.
A borderline area was the Saar Valley, the Palatinate and Rhenish Prussia. The French Government wanted that for Havas. Reuters was neither wholly unwilling nor enthusiastic, because Britain wanted a moderately strong Germany to act as a check on France. Finally, and subject to the Saar Plebiscite 15 years later, “they made a compromise by which Wolff Agency might serve there, but a copy of Wolff service should go to the Havas Agency, and if it was not satisfactory Wolff could be removed from there.”
The victors were not averse to tearing slices of territory from one another, either, so within the winning combination some changes were made. Havas retained the bulk of the Balkans, but Greece and Turkey passed “into Reuters’ [Britain’s] sphere of influence.”
Battle for Asia
A.P. remained a stepchild during all this time. It obtained a free hand in South America, as already related. But in general, just as Great Britain was slow to recognize and acknowledge the unmistakably superior position of the rival American imperialism, so Reuters took a haughty tone toward A.P. requests for adjustments in their relations. Outside the cartel, accordingly, A.P. built up positions and alliances for an ultimate showdown. Inside A.P., Kent Cooper gathered allies for his more aggressive program against the still dominant go-slow policy of Melville Stone.