The United States had no obligations to the nations which emerged out of the Treaty of Versailles, only a human obligation to their people to keep faith with them. The people of Germany believed in all fervor that they had gained an armistice and sought peace on the basis of the fourteen points; the people of France and England believed that their own governments had accepted the same points. And the same people might have been stirred to insist on a peace of reconciliation—not with princes and ministers, but with peoples—if Wilson and the Americans had continued to communicate with them.
We withdrew into a stuffy silence. Just as we played a queer game of protocol and refused to "recognize" the USSR, so we sulked because the old bitch Europe wasn't being a gentleman—the only communication we made to Europe was when we dunned her for money. We have seen how the years of Harding and Coolidge affected our domestic life; they were not only a reaction against the fervor of the war months; they were a carefully calculated reaction against basic American policy at home and abroad; they betrayed American enterprise, delivered industry into the hands of finance, degraded government, laughed at corruption, and under the guise of "a return to normalcy" attempted to revive the dead conservatism of McKinley and Penrose in American politics.
In this period, it is no wonder that we failed to utter one kind word to help the first democratic government in Germany, that we trembled with fear of the Reds, sneered at British labor until it became respectable enough to send us a Prime Minister, and excluded more and more rigorously the people of Europe whose blood had created our own.
Slowly, as the depression of 1929-32 squeezed us, we began to see that our miseries connected us with Europe; it was a Republican president who first attempted to address Europe; but Mr. Hoover's temperament makes it difficult for him to speak freely to anyone; the talks with Ramsay MacDonald were pleasurable; the offer of a moratorium was the first kindness to Europe in a generation of studied American indifference. It failed (because France still preferred to avenge herself on Germany); and thereafter we had too many unpleasant things to do at home.
One Good Deed
We had, in the interval, spoken once to all the world. On the day the Japanese moved into Manchuria we had, in effect, notified the British that we chose not to accept the destruction or dismemberment of a friendly nation. The cynical indifference of Sir John Simon was the first intimation of the way Europe felt about American "idealism". It was also the first step toward "non-intervention" in Spain and the destruction of Europe at the hands of Adolf Hitler. When we were rebuffed by Downing Street, we sulked; we did not attempt to speak to the people of Asia, or try to win the British public to our side. We had lost the habit. We were not even candid in our talks with the Chinese whose cause we favored because we had Japan (and American dealers in oil and scrap iron) to appease.
In 1933 Adolf Hitler was elected leader of a Germany which had been out of communication with us for a generation. The United States which had been in the minds of generations of Germans, was forgotten by the people. In a few years Hitler had overthrown the power of France on the Continent, challenged Communism as an international force, and frightened the British Empire into an ignoble flutter of appeasement.
To that dreary end our failure of communication had tended. We were the one power which might have held Europe together—in a League, in a mere hope of friendship and peace between nations, in the matrix of the fourteen points if nothing more. The moment we withdrew from Europe, its nations fell apart, not merely into victors and vanquished, but into querulous, distrustful, and angry people, each whipped into hysteria by demagogues or soothed to complaisance by frightened ministers.
The obligation to address Europe is no longer a moral one. For our own security, for the cohesion of our own people, for victory over every element that works to break America into hostile parts—now we have the golden opportunity again, to speak to Europe, and to ask Europe to answer. As we look back on our ancient triumphs with the peoples of Europe and the sour end to which we let them come, this new chance is heaven-sent, undeserved, as if we could live our lives over again. And it is nearly so—for if we want to have a life to live in the future, if it is still to be the confident, secure life of a United America, we must speak now to Europe.