Peacemakers—Blessed and Otherwise / Observations, Reflections and Irritations at an International Conference

by Ida M. Tarbell

Men and women who have been spectators of great human tussles are generally possessed by a desire to tell what they saw, thought and felt during its progress, and until they have relieved themselves of this obsession they are uneasy, as from a duty undone. Until one carries for a time such an obsession as this he cannot realize the patness of the vulgar expression getting a thing “off one’s chest.” It lies there, literally a load. He may have a notion—and his delay is probably due to that—that he will only be adding another folio to a more or less pestiferous collection; that, as a matter of fact, he will not, and cannot, communicate anything that others have not already communicated. All he can do is to say, “So I saw it; so it seemed to me.”

For three years I had carried around a few impressions of the Paris Conference of 1919. I had meant to keep them to myself—they were so ungracious. Summed up they amounted to a melancholy conclusion that in times of stress, public and press, unrestrained, make a bedlam in which steady constructive effort, if not frustrated utterly, is sure to be hindered and distorted. Taken as a whole the milieu in which the Paris Conference operated, furnished the most perfect example the world has ever seen of the arrogance of the one who calls himself liberal, of the irresponsibility of him who calls himself radical, of the unutterable stupidity of him who calls himself conservative, of the universal habit of saving your face by crying down what others are attempting to do, and of the limitations which the laws of human nature and human society put upon the collective efforts of human beings.

From the day that the Conference opened you had the impression of each man—I am talking here only of the man on the outside—being for himself in what was plainly and admittedly the world’s most gigantic effort to sink this each man in the whole. It was the insistence of the individual and his way of thinking, so long held in check by the terrific necessities of the war, that caused the first doubts of the undertaking to one who struggled to keep a disinterested outlook. Take the idealists who had accepted the great formula for world peace laid down; they regarded it as something accomplished because for the moment it stood out as the clear desire of the world, and were heedless and contemptuous of the wisest words that were uttered at the start, the words of Georges Clemenceau, who, at the first session, told the delegates of all the nations of the world that if this daring thing, which he doubted but to which he consented, went through it meant sacrifice for everybody. But your idealist had not come for sacrifice. He had come to put into operation his particular formula for a perfect world.

With every day the numbers in Paris grew who had come to help—to get a hearing—to help in the group at the top—to be heard by principals. They failed. Disappointment, wounded vanity, the sense that they were somebody, had something to contribute, stirred them to resentment. They would serve, and they were rejected. There was, to be sure, one thing that those who resented this apparent unconsciousness of their importance by those charged with the conduct of things might have done—one surely useful thing, and that was, casting an eye about and seeing the multitude of problems that shrieked for solution, master one, little as it might be:—the case of Teschen, of the Banat of Tamesvar, the history of a boundary, the need of a coal mine here or there—and working, really working, on this particular problem, produce some sound presentation, something that men could not get around. The whole bubbling pot of trouble called for such cooling drops of real, carefully considered work.

But this demanded self-direction, poise, a willingness to make a very small contribution, to have no pretense of being called into council, to trust to the gods and your own knowledge of what really counts in solving complications. It called for going aside, of not pretending to be on the inside. Minds were too troubled, vanity was too keen. You eased your mind and poulticed your vanity by talk—talk at dinner tables, over restaurant coffee, over tea—and talk in endless articles.

One of the banes of the Paris Peace Conference was that there were so many men and women on the field under contract to write, to produce so many words every day or every week. There was no contract that these words should add something to the knowledge of the many things about which it was so necessary for men and women to learn—no contract that they should contribute by ever so little to the great need of control on every side, that they should comfort, soften hates, stimulate common sense. Writers covered up their ignorance of things doing by prophecies, by shrieks of despair, by poses of intimacy with the great, by elaborately spun-out theories. And they built up superstitions. They created things—absolutely created superstitions that may never be dispelled from the minds of those who read them back home.

There was the superstition of the mysterious four who, without advice, without use of the vast machinery of expert knowledge that had been called into existence, without consideration of political prejudice, of ancient hates and struggles, carved up countries, made artificial boundaries, and did it with a nicely calculated sense of revenge, hate, self-advantage. This “Big-Four” came in popular minds to be a hydra-headed tyrant—more irresponsible, brutal, and cynical than any czar of Russia or Machiavelli of the Middle Ages.

And it was a creation that left out of consideration facts that were there for everybody to read if they were willing to work. It was a Putois they created. Who was Putois? Read your Anatole France, or if Crainquebille is not at hand, read Joseph Conrad’s review.

The malevolence of those not charged with the conduct of affairs against those so charged grew thicker and thicker as the days went on. Gossip became more and more unrestrained. It was the only refuge of the numbers who had no definite business in the scene but who had come to watch—often with the idea in their minds that they might be able to contribute some definite, salutary, stimulating something, often again with a very definite idea that they might be able to pull down this or that person having some actual inside hold.

There were those who set themselves with calculation to destroy the prestige of the President of the United States; not to destroy it by sound criticism of his point of view, by the presentation of a larger aspect of things than his, but to do it by a calculated meanness of mind. In the general and frightful disorder left by the war, everything begged that men should sink their littleness and show bigness, if there was any in them, or if not leave the scene, in order at least, by their absence, there might be so much less of littleness of mind around. But these men—and women—stayed on. They sat at the tables of the Ritz and smacked their lips over a nasty piece of scandal, born of mischief-making partisans in far distant places; the meanness of the “outs” against the leader of the “ins.” And there were always those to listen and to spread.