The Wilson-Smuts Synthesis: Racial Self-Determination and the Institutionalization of World

Order

A thesis submitted by

Scott L. Malcomson

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

in

International Relations

Tufts University

Fletcher School of International Law and Diplomacy

January 2020

Adviser: Jeffrey W. Taliaferro

©2019, Scott L. Malcomson

1 Table of Contents

I: Introduction 3

II: Two Paths to Paris.

Jan Smuts 8

Woodrow Wilson 26

The Paths Converge 37

III: Versailles.

Wilson Stays Out: Isolation and Neutrality 43

Lloyd George: Bringing the Empire on Board 50

Smuts Goes In: The Rise of the Dominions 54

The Wilson-Smuts Synthesis 65

Wilson Undone 72

The Racial Equality Bill 84

IV: Conclusion 103

Bibliography 116

2 I: Introduction

When President Woodrow Wilson left the United States for Europe at the end of 1918, he intended to create a new structure for international relations, based on a League of Nations, that would replace the pre-existing imperialist world structure with one based on national and racial

(as was said at the time) self-determination. The results Wilson achieved by late April 1919, after several months of near-daily negotiation in Paris, varied between partial success and complete failure.1 Wilson had had other important goals in Paris, including establishing a framework for international arbitration of disputes, advancing labor rights, and promoting free trade and disarmament, and progress was made on all of these. But in terms of his own biography and the distinctive mission of U.S. foreign policy as he and other Americans understood it, the anti- imperial and pro-self-determination goals were paramount. How he arrived at those goals, how he negotiated for them in Paris at the end of the First World War, and how he mostly failed to achieve them, is the core narrative of this thesis.

The main reasons for this failure have to do with imperialism, primarily British imperialism, as it presented itself to Wilson in 1919, and with the ideas about race, nationalism and sovereignty then prevalent in the British imperial Dominions and the United States, especially the idea that national sovereignty and white sovereignty might be the same thing. The

Paris negotiations were largely a British-American affair; their results were disproportionately shaped by British-imperial and American views and interests.

It was a curiosity of the negotiations that the main intellectual authors of the League of

Nations were not from the victorious Allied powers of France, Britain, Japan and Italy, which

1 This was before his unsuccessful effort, begun in July 1919, to convince the U.S. Senate to ratify the Paris Peace Treaty, of which the establishment of the League of Nations was a part. The factors that led to defeat in the Senate were only distantly related to the problems Wilson faced in the January-April period.

3 had done the bulk of the fighting, or indeed from Europe or Asia at all, but from the United

States and colonial South Africa: Wilson and Jan Smuts. General Smuts is not a well-known figure today, but at the time he was renowned as a thinker, a politician, and a man of action, and

Wilson and Smuts, both supporters of racial segregation as well as political liberals, were the dominant forces in envisioning the League as well as key players in the intense negotiations between December 1918 and May 1919 over the League covenant. In particular, they shaped, as no one else did, the notions of national and racial self-determination during those negotiations, and the postwar relationship between those notions, liberal internationalism, and imperial power.

I will argue that racial self-determination was a central concept for both Wilson and

Smuts, in part as a result of their personal experiences of state construction and national self- fashioning within what Belich calls “the Anglo-world”2 and Vucetic “the Anglosphere.”3 I will further argue that this was part of an internationalizing of aspects of British colonial (mainly

South African and Australian) and ex-colonial (U.S.) political economy, or the abstraction of those aspects into models for universal experience. Given that the 1919 negotiations provoked

“more debate and controversy over the origins, nature and limits of ‘international order’ than any other major post-war settlement in modern history,”4 it is to be hoped that this re-examination of

Wilson and Smuts will help us better understand why early 20th-century liberal internationalism took the forms it did.5

2 James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783-1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). See also Lorenzo Veracini, The Settler Colonial Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 3 Srdjan Vucetic, The Anglosphere: A Genealogy of a Racialized Identity in International Relations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011). 4 Alexander Anievas, “International relations between war and revolution: Wilsonian diplomacy and the making of the Treaty of Versailles,” International Politics 51 (2014), 619. 5 This thesis then can be seen as influenced by the “historiographical turn” (Duncan Bell’s phrase) in international relations. See Brian C. Schmidt, The Political Discourse of Anarchy: A Disciplinary History of International Relations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998); David Long and Brian C. Schmidt, eds., Imperialism

4 The argument below touches on multiple scholarly themes. Its main contribution is in shedding new light on how specific conditions in the early 20th-century U.S., Britain and the self- governing, “white”-dominated British Dominions decisively shaped the codification and articulation of a liberal international order in the covenant of the League of Nations. It therefore complements the work of Belich, Bell6, Mazower7 and others on reimagining the relationship between political liberalism and empire, in particular the British empire; recent work by

Morefield8, Manela9, Getachew10 and others on Wilsonian ideas as viewed from outside the community of the Great Powers; and works by Tooze11 and MacDonald12, for example, that are perhaps best described as global political economy.

and Internationalism in the Discipline of International Relations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. 6 Duncan Bell Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), esp. ch. 8, and The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860-1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). See also Michael Kenny and Nick Pearce, Shadows of Empire: The Anglosphere in British Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018). 7 Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea, from 1815 to the Present (New York: Penguin, 2012) and No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). See also Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan, The Making of Global International Relations: Origins and Evolution of IR at Its Centenary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan, eds., Non-Western International Relations Theory: Perspectives on and Beyond Asia (London: Routledge, 2009); Robbie Shilliam, ed., International Relations and Non-Western Thought. Imperialism, Colonialism and Investigations of Global Modernity (London: Routledge, 2011). 8 Jeanne Morefield, Empires Without Imperialism: Anglo-American Decline and the Politics of Deflection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 9 Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). See also Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia (London: Allen Lane, 2012). 10 Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). 11 Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order 1916-1931 (New York:Viking, 2014). 12 James MacDonald, When Globalization Fails: The Rise and Fall of Pax Americana (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015). I can only agree with Bell that “[p]olitical economists, in particular, are due greater attention,” as is political economy itself as a generator of powerful cultural-ideological norms. Bell, Reordering the World, 368-369.

5 In terms of International Relations as a field or discipline, the argument below is closer in spirit to those of Bell, Hobson13, Acharya, Buzan and Vitalis14. These authors have sought to recover the ways in which racial consciousnesses of various kinds, especially the white supremacist kind, shaped the purpose and methods of International Relations, at least in the anglophone academy. They have equally drawn attention to the roots of post-1919 International

Relations in an understanding of the state and politics that was profoundly shaped by imperialism, and not infrequently mobilized to advance it. These scholars, together with several already cited and some precursors like Olson and Groom15, form an identifiable revisionist school within International Relations that pivots on altering the disciplinary views of imperialism and race, including by reframing the discipline’s own historiography.

That is one aspect of the analysis below, although some of these authors tend to focus not so much on race as racism — or “‘Scientific’ Racism” in the case of Acharya and Buzan — and not so much on imperialism itself as on exposing the imperial will to power. By contrast, the goal here is to comprehend race and empire as they were understood by Wilson, Smuts, and the other major players in the League drama. Their own understandings are key to analyzing their successes and failures, in particular Wilson’s failure (it was also Smuts’s) to translate his genuine beliefs in post-imperialism and self-determination into a resilient international order. Racism is one portion of human thought and feeling that has to do with race, but if it is the worst part it is not also the largest one or even the most important in terms of extent and variety of effects. To restrict one’s view of race to the identification of racism is to miss much of how racial thinking

13 J.M Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics: Western International Theory, 1760-2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 14 Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015). 15 A.J.R. Groom, William C. Olson and Andre Barrinha, International Relations Then and Now: Origins and Trends in Interpretation (New York: Routledge, 2019 [1991]). This is the second edition. Olson and Groom alone published the first, in 1991.

6 has affected human society over the years. For example, identifying Woodrow Wilson as a racist, however defined, is not difficult to do, but to leave it at that means to miss the breadth of ways in which racial thinking affected his actions. The same is true of Smuts. As we will see, it was

Wilson himself who introduced the concept of racial equality into the League covenant debate, and Smuts who wrote the most florid hymns to self-determination; but it was also these same two men, with others, who then kept that same language out of the evolving text, to the point where self-determination disappeared from the covenant. We will be looking in some detail at how and why that intricate regression occurred.

Ultimately, reifying race into racism leaves one either conceiving of racism as a type of personal ailment acquired by individuals and eradicable (or not) on an individual basis, in which case social reality loses its relevance to race, or understanding racism as something inherent in a particular race, giving it an ontological rather than contingent social status, which quickly brings you into a type of racism, even if one meant to be anti-racist.16 Similarly, thinking of imperialism as a simple process of resource extraction and the creation of captive markets, or of deliberate underdevelopment aimed at perpetuating inequality, is to miss much of how imperialism actually worked, and therefore — as with race — much of how its effects continue today.

The first chapter, “Two Paths to Paris,” looks briefly at Smuts’s and Wilson’s personal lives and political careers with an eye to explaining why both men would become such prominent and imaginative political entrepreneurs in the immediate aftermath of the First World

War. Particular attention is paid to their respective experiences of self-determination (racial and national) and how these shaped their views of empire. The second chapter, “Versailles,” brings

16 There does seem to be a revival of racial ontology, not only on the right. See Nell Irvin Painter, “What Is White America? The Identity Politics of the Majority,” Foreign Affairs, Nov/Dec 2019. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/2019-10-15/what-white-america

7 the two men together — they first met in December 1918 — and examines how they worked with and against each other in shaping and negotiating the proposed League’s approach to the highly combustible issues of how to deal with colonies (especially defeated Germany’s) and the existing hierarchy, racial and otherwise, of nations. This chapter also places Wilson within an evolving American foreign-policy approach to these issues, and Smuts within a rapidly changing

British empire facing the sovereign power of its white-settler dominions. A conclusion looks at the postwar solidification of racial categories and conflict given the failure of the League negotiators to ratify and structure some other path toward self-determination.

Primary sources used are mainly the papers of Wilson and Smuts, supplemented by the letters, memoirs and diaries of their friends and colleagues, in particular those written during or about the League negotiations in 1918-1919, as well as periodical literature. An effort has been made to consult older as well as current secondary materials, popular as well as scholarly.

II: Two Paths to Paris

Jan Smuts and Woodrow Wilson were from opposite ends of the world but they nonetheless, as leaders, faced many similar challenges and opportunities. Both were political innovators in white-dominated settler communities with a complex and productive relationship to the imperial metropole in London. They had personal experience of bloody upheavals resulting from the political economy of slavery and empire. Their political careers would be shaped by the challenges of managing a transition away from empire and a global imperial political economy to the abstract model of an international state system as they constructed it at Versailles.

8

Jan Christian Smuts

Jan Smuts was born in 1870 into a Boer farming family of middling means in the British Cape

Colony. He was the second son, of uncertain health, and remained uneducated until the age of

12, when his elder brother, Michiel, died and the hopes and expectations of the family were transferred to Jan.17 He turned out to be an intellectual prodigy; according to his (somewhat worshipful) son, he mastered Greek in six days. At 17, he gave a speech on the theme of African unity at Victoria College to mark a visit by the British Cape Colony’s prime minister, Cecil

Rhodes. Their lives were to intertwine, as Smuts would leave aside his parents’ expectation of a clerical career in favor of a life in law and politics.18

The African unity of which young Smuts spoke was a notion that the European settler polities of the continent should form a single dominion of some sort, a political vision that

Rhodes would sometimes call the United States of Africa. The North American experience was seen as a precursor to the African: settler polities, dominantly but by no means exclusively

British, fighting their way outward from coastal and riverine strongholds in chronic warfare against pre-imperial populations, gradually extinguishing the social structures and land claims of these existing peoples, and gaining enough strength to demand self-government of some type from the imperial center while nonetheless having a claim on it for protection from other large

17 J.C. Smuts, Jan Christian Smuts (London: Cassell and Company, 1952), 11-14; Sarah Gertrude Millin, General Smuts (London: Faber and Faber, 1936), I, 3-5. The author of the first book is a son of Jan Smuts. Millin was a prominent South African novelist. See Milton Shain and Miriam Pimstone, “Sarah Gertrude Millin, 1889-1968,” Jewish Women’s Archive n.d. https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/millin-sarah-gertrude. See also W.K. Hancock, Smuts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962, in two volumes) 18 Smuts, Smuts, 19.

9 powers.19 In the U.S. case, this was achieved through the combination of the 13 colonies; in south Africa, a similar process would require collective action by the Boer and British settler populations, which were, for the most part, antagonistic and separate both culturally and politically. That was Rhodes’s dream: to unite those two populations into one, with the active assistance of Britain, and then to conquer the Africans between the south and Britain’s East

Africa colonies, resulting — so it was hoped — in an unbroken settler polity stretching from the

Cape to British Egypt (“Cape to Cairo”). The discovery of diamonds at Kimberley in 1870, the year of Smuts’s birth, was what had fueled Rhodes’s rise from an obscure English boy looking for a chance on a strange continent to one of the richest and most powerful men of his age.

Together with a related surge in British imperial ambition, diamonds, and then gold — discovered, mainly on Boer land, in 1886, just over a year before Smuts’s speech at Victoria

College — were what made Rhodes’s vision something other than fantasy.20

There were many obstacles to this projected United States of Africa, the principal ones being the disunity of the settler societies, the accelerating carve-up of Africa by ambitious

19 There is not space here to develop the security side of this argument in the U.S. case. The essence is that, while the 13 colonies and the subsequent United States had frequent and sharp conflicts with Britain, they also effectively used Britain as a security shield against other great powers. Britain of course had reasons of her own for providing this type of protection. See, e.g., Kori Schake, Safe Passage: The Transition from British to American Hegemony (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2017), passim, but especially 46-47. Such protection had a central economic aspect in a period when rival imperial rule meant not only a security loss but, on the prevailing model of empires as tariff-preference zones, an economic one. Britain’s policy was to prevent the loss of such protected zones to its European rivals, and that is what gave (partly) British settlers their leverage in negotiating with London. The very close and ongoing ties, even in contentious times, between American and British businessmen and bankers, stayed strong from the 1830s onward. See Belich, Replenishing the Earth; H.C. Allen, The Anglo-American Relationship Since 1783 (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1959); Mira Wilkins, The Emergence of Multinational Enterprise: American Business Abroad from the Colonial Era to 1914 (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1970) and The History of Foreign Investment in the United States to 1914 (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1989); Vincent P. Carosso, The Morgan: Private International Bankers 1854- 1913 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987). Similar dynamics repeated themselves after the mineral discoveries in South Africa. Belich, Replenishing the Earth, ch. 12; Carosso, The Morgans, 514. 20 There is no lack of scholarship on Rhodes, but for both some of the substance and much of the flavor of the Rhodes dream, see Ian D. Colvin, Cecil Rhodes (originally published 1912) and Cecil Rhodes and William Thomas Stead, The Last Will and Testament of Cecil John Rhodes (London: William Clowes, 1902). The latter refers (61) to “the restoration of the Anglo-Saxon unity destroyed by the schism of the eighteenth century,” that is, the revolt of the American settler colonies.

10 European imperial powers (notably including newcomer Germany, which Britain saw as its rising imperial competitor), and the continuing active resistance of the African majority. Back in

1852, Britain had decided to leave the Boers more or less alone. As the British historian and novelist James Anthony Froude put it in 1886:

Grown sick of enterprises which led neither to honour nor peace, we resolved, in 1852, to leave

Boers, Caffres, Basutos, and Zulus to themselves, and make the Orange River the boundary of

British responsibilities. We made formal treaties with the two Dutch states [the Orange Free

State and the Republic of South Africa, often referred to as the Transvaal], binding ourselves to interfere no more between them and the natives, and to leave them, either to establish themselves as a barrier between ourselves and the interior of Africa, or to sink, as was considered most likely, in an unequal struggle with warlike tribes by whom they were infinitely outnumbered.

They, on their side, undertook not to re-establish slavery; and so we left them.21

Froude notes that an additional factor in the British decision to leave the Boers to their presumed fate of decline and disappearance into the warlike African majority was that conquest was expensive and didn’t provide much of a return. That changed with the Kimberley diamonds discovery in 1870 and the gold discovery on the Boers’ Witwatersrand in 1886. Both were exploited by tens of thousands of fortune-seekers from across the continent and the globe, including the U.S., whose revenues and methods were soon organized and channeled by Boer and British businessmen with European and American backers. Anemic British attempts at

British-Boer consolidation (modeled on efforts in Canada) after 1867, followed by the Boers’

21 James Anthony Froude, Oceana; or, England and Her Colonies (London: Longmans, Green, 1886), 41. See Bell, Reordering the World, ch 12.

11 successful repulsion, in the first Boer War, of British annexation of the Republic of South Africa in 1880-81, established Britain’s continuing interest in incorporating the Boer states with Britain as senior partner — and the Boers’ continuing interest in resisting it.

The Boer position was complicated though. There could be no peace unless Britain wanted one, and indeed part of the peace settlement in 1881 had been acceptance of British control over external relations and what was called “native affairs.” This put Britain in the uncomfortably familiar (given the American precedent) position of guaranteeing the security of a rather hostile self-governing republic from interference by other European powers — notably

Germany (to the west, in what is now Namibia, and the north in today’s Rwanda, Burundi and

Tanzania) and Portugal (to the west in today’s Angola and the east in Mozambique) — as well as from African polities like that of the Zulus, with whom Britain had fought a war in 1879. The

Boers would not live with British rule but they could not quite live without it, either.

So Rhodes’s federal-colonial vision had precedent in British policy and, with the twin mineral booms, made fiscal sense. Smuts endorsed it wholeheartedly from college days. But if the reconciliation of Boer and Briton in pursuit of peace and riches in Africa possessed a long- term logic, the question of European-native African relations remained unsettled.

Race-based enslavement of the local population was not the dominant labor form in Boer

Africa.22 It certainly existed, but the slaves and indentures came mainly from East Africa and

Malaysia (which was controlled by the Dutch East India Company, the original settler of Dutch southern Africa), and were imported in part because the existing population could not be reduced to slavery — yet another parallel with the North American experience. Rather, the Dutch Boers

22 At age 19, Smuts had opposed slavery in an article published in Het Zuid-Afrikaansch Tydschrift in June 1889. See N. Levi, Jan Smuts (London: Longmans, Green, 1917), 7-8. Slavery was abolished by the British in South Africa in 1834 and effectively ended in that decade.

12 both had trading relations with indigenous Africans and were in a chronic state of conflict with them from the 1640s to the 1870s.23 The same was true for the British and other Europeans after their various arrivals.24 Nonetheless, an association did exist between native status, subservience, and slavery, as can be seen in a Smuts text from 1900:

Notwithstanding the wild surroundings and the innumerable savage tribes in the background, the young Africander nation had been welded into a white aristocracy, proudly conscious of having maintained its superiority notwithstanding its arduous struggles. It was this sentiment of just pride which the British Government well understood how to wound in its most sensitive part by favouring the natives as against the Africanders. So, for example, the Africander Boers were forced to look with pained eyes on the scenes of their farms and property devastated by the natives without being in a position to defend themselves, because the British Government had even deprived them of their ammunition. In the same way the liberty-loving Africander burgher was coerced by a police composed of Hottentots, the lowest and most despicable class of the aborigines, whom the Africanders justly placed on a far lower social level than that of their own

Malay slaves.25

23 Leaving major Europe-related wars aside, the chief occupation of the colonial and then U.S. military forces was likewise “Indian wars” over exactly the same time period. 24 The use of foreign labor continued. The Natal province imported Madras Indians in the 1860s to work sugar-cane fields, and in 1904 the British authorities implemented a plan to bring in indentured Chinese laborers. As these people were not actually slaves they tended to form families, like the “Cape Malays” before them, and this meant a relative shrinkage of the white share of the population. Labor shortages were chronic in southern Africa once it began to prosper, exacerbated of course by the strong and growing disenfranchisement of the native Africans. Smuts fils was reflecting a common white view, however, when he wrote that the root of the problem was in the poor character of the natives: “unless a native male is compelled to work by firm persuasion he is very likely to prefer a life of ease, lying happily in the sun.” Smuts, Smuts, 95-107. 25 Jan Smuts, A Century of Wrong, privately published, 1900. The text is described by Smuts fils: “It was written by my father in High Dutch, from facts he and Jimmie Roos had collected. … My mother translated it into English. As the manifesto appeared over no name and as it was published by State Secretary Reitz, he was at first thought to be the author.” Smuts, Smuts, 47. The text used here is the English one published by the Review of Reviews in London, with an introduction by the Review’s editor, the prominent English journalist W.T. Stead. It is available online at https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15175

13

Associations between nativeness and subservience to the “white aristocracy” — an aristocracy that, crucially, gathers the entire Africander26 nation into a racial caste — were hardening in the last decades of the 19th century. The South African couple Olive Schreiner and S.C. Cronwright-

Schreiner27 identified this in 1895 as key to “the steady and persistent Retrogressive Movement which has marked our political existence during the last years.”28 They noted agitation for “an

Act making legal the infliction of corporal punishment for the smallest offences towards master or mistress on the part of household or other servants, and which, if passed would be merely a recurrence to slavery under a new name,” an act supported by Cecil Rhodes; a separate act, also supported by Rhodes, “which compels even the self-supporting and industrious native to work for the white man for a certain time every year, whether he will or no”; another bill “intended to make it culpable for any aboriginal native, whether a domestic servant, householder, newspaper editor, or clergyman, to be found walking on pavements in our towns; and also to make it punishable for any aboriginal native to be found out of doors within a township after nine o’clock at night unless he or she had been given a pass”; and so on.29

Cronwright-Schreiner read the entire pamphlet from which these passages are taken at the town hall in Kimberley, the heart of the diamond fields and the source of Cecil Rhodes’s wealth,

26 “Africander/Afrikander” was a Dutch neologism for Europeans who considered themselves African. It was deliberately intended not to be restricted to Boers (themselves mainly of Dutch extraction but with a significant intermarried Huguenot heritage as well as some German). Nonetheless, the British in the region did not take up the term. The Africander Bond was a political organization founded in the 1880s and opposed to British imperial rule. The term Africander and its derivatives were intended to create a political space for a Euro-African identity that was not limited to the relatively vacant concept of whiteness. 27 She was at this time already celebrated as the author of The Story of an African Farm. Her husband added her name to his. Smuts and Olive Schreiner were friends over many years. Smuts had several long friendships with South African women of distinctly liberal views on issues like equal suffrage for non-whites and women. See Shula Marks’s Raleigh lecture on history, “White Masculinity: Jan Smuts, Race and the South African War,” read at the British Academy on Nov. 2, 2000, 206-211. https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/pubs/proc/files/111p199.pdf 28 Olive Schreiner and C.S. Cronwright-Schreiner, The Political Situation (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1896), 6. 29 Schreiner and Cronwright-Schreiner, Political Situation, 12-13, 20. Such legislation coincided with the refinement of similar laws and practices in the U.S. under Jim Crow.

14 on August 20, 1895. It was a public sensation because it was a broad, detailed, and unusually direct attack on Rhodes and his role in a process of monopolization, alienation of public lands, and legal rigidification of racial castes.

Jan Smuts, by then several years into a political career, was sent to give a response on behalf of the Africander Bond with which he was affiliated, his first address to a major political meeting. He gave it in October 1895 in the same Kimberley town hall where Cronwright-

Schreiner had spoken in August. Smuts later reflected in his diary:

When Mr. Cecil Rhodes appeared on the scene in 1889 as Premier of the Cape Colony under

Bond auspices, with a platform of racial30 conciliation, political consolidation of South Africa and northern expansion,31 my natural bias as well as the glamour of magnificence which distinguished this policy…made me a sort of natural convert to his views….I made a speech at

Kimberley which, while normally a defence of the Bond-Rhodes alliance in Cape politics, was really intended to set forth the general principles of a broader common political platform on a reconciled basis for both the white peoples of the Cape Colony.32

“Unless the white race closes its ranks,” Smuts said in the town hall, “its position will soon become untenable in the face of the overwhelming majority of prolific barbarism.”33

30 “Racial” here and in much writing of the period was used to refer to the different white groups, here the Boers and the British. “Race” as a term was promiscuously used in Europe and European colonial contexts in the 19th century and up to the mid-20th century: the French race, the Anglo-Saxon race, the Boer race, and so forth. 31 He means expansion into then-Matabeleland and Mashonaland, which would become (after wars in 1893 and 1896) southern Rhodesia and is today southern Zimbabwe. The area would eventually be British, a corridor of sorts between Portuguese Angola and Mozambique, and bordering the Belgian Congo to the northwest and German East Africa to the northeast, both of which blocked the British empire from connecting to its territories in Uganda and Kenya, Sudan, and Egypt. 32 Smuts, Smuts, 32. 33 Smuts, Smuts, 31.

15 The melding into a common political identity of the two often antagonistic British and

Boer “races” was the essence of the Rhodes program and Smuts’s fond dream. Yet Rhodes himself soon crushed that dream, barely three months after Smuts’s supportive speech at

Kimberley, with his sponsorship of the Jameson Raid: an attempt to provoke an uprising among the white miners in the Republic of South Africa that, it was hoped by the organizers, might have resulted in the Boer-dominated republic losing its independence and becoming part of the British empire. This was effectively a betrayal by one white group of another, propelled by cupidity.

Certainly that is how Smuts saw it. His son wrote decades later: “Rhodes had made a fool of him.

The duplicity of the man left him furious.” Looking back in 1903, Smuts himself wrote, “When during the political storms that arose after the Jameson Raid I quietly asked myself whether I had really been wrong in striving so hard for the national fusion and concord of the white races, I came to the conclusion that I had not been wrong, that my ultimate political lodestar was not a will-o’-the-wisp and was worthy of being followed in the future even more seriously than I had done in the past.”34

The influential English journalist W.T. Stead, who would publish Smuts and was close to

Rhodes, had a more colorful but interestingly parallel explanation for the Jameson raid. Stead argued that the foreign gold miners of Johannesburg, known by the Dutch word Uitlanders, were a “godless crew” who believed the Boer government was getting in their way and therefore in need of overthrowing. However, problematically, many among the crew were not only un-British but anti-British: “German Jews, Frenchmen, Russians, Poles, Hollanders, and Americans — it was a motley crowd that the great golden magnet had attracted to Johannesburg — of which one thing at least could be stated without hesitation, viz., that it had as little enthusiasm for the Union

34 Smuts, Smuts, 36-37.

16 Jack or for anything more ideal than dollars and cents as any assemblage of human beings that could be collected on the planet.”35

The purpose of the Jameson raid, then, was to control a political force of empowered white (or close enough) immigrants, along with British citizens working the Transvaal mines, and pour them all into a British mold before they could construct their own, as British and other settlers in North America once had done. Stead quotes Rhodes as saying in justification, “it seemed to me quite certain that if I did not take a hand in the game the forces on the spot would soon make short work of [Republic of South Africa] President Kruger. Then I should be face to face with an American Republic — American in the sense of being intensely hostile to and jealous of Britain — an American Republic largely manned by Americans and Sydney Bulletin

Australians who cared nothing for the old flag. They would have all the wealth of the Rand at their disposal.”36 Rhodes wanted a United States of Africa, but not one quite independent of

Britain — indeed one of his deepest hopes was that the U.S. would return to Britain as part of a global Anglo-Saxon mega-state that included British Africa and the other white settler colonies37

— and under no circumstances did he want the Rand’s wealth to elude his grasp.

35 W.T. Stead, The Americanization of the World; or, The Trend of the Twentieth Century (New York: Horace Markley, 1902 [1901]), 55. 36 Stead, Americanization of the World, 56. The Sydney Bulletin was an Australian newspaper frequently critical of the British empire. 37 Affectively, this is the basis for the Rhodes scholarships. Colvin, Cecil Rhodes, 54-55; Rhodes and Stead, Last Will and Testament, 26-31. On the core geopolitical beliefs driving the mega-state, Stead cites Sidney Low, writing in the Nineteenth Century magazine, issue of May 1902: “First, that insular England was quite insufficient to maintain, or even to protect, itself without the assistance of the Anglo-Saxon peoples beyond the seas of Europe. Secondly, that the first and greatest aim of British statesmanship should be to find new areas of settlement, and new markets for the products that would, in due course, be penalized in the territories and dependencies of all our rivals by discriminating tariffs. Thirdly, that the largest tracts of unoccupied or undeveloped lands remaining on the globe were in Africa, and therefore that the most strenuous efforts should be made to keep open a great part of that continent to British commerce and colonization. Fourthly, that as the key to the African position lay in the various Anglo-Dutch States and provinces, it was imperative to convert the whole region into a united, self-governing federation, exempt from meddlesome interference by the home authorities, but loyal to the Empire, and welcoming British enterprise and progress. Fifthly, that the world was made for the service of man, and more particularly of civilised, white, European men, who were most capable of utilising the crude resources of Nature for the promotion of wealth and prosperity. And, finally, that the British Constitution was an absurd anachronism, and that it should be remodelled on the lines of the American Union, with federal self-governing Colonies as the constituent States.”

17 After the raid, Jan Smuts withdrew in disappointment from the public eye for two years of study and reflection before making his way back into politics. Meanwhile Rhodes continued his machinations to get at the Transvaal gold, working with the British to leverage the Uitlanders and induce the Boers to blend their two polities with Britain’s own. Smuts was convinced that

Rhodes and Britain’s high representative, Alfred Milner, wanted to provoke war in order to seize the Boer republics and the gold. And just before war came — five years after his betrayal by

Rhodes — Smuts wrote a desperate indictment of British imperialism in southern Africa called A

Century of Wrong. He suspected that the war might bring the extermination of the Boers. The root of the problem, he thought, was greed, “Capitalism,” materialism — he had been shocked by the “colossal materialism”38 of Johannesburg on his first visit — and yellow gold. Referring to the great British industrial city he wrote with exquisite bitterness, “The orchid of Birmingham is yellow.”39 Greed would lead white people astray; and whither the Boers, so all the West:

Even Xerxes, with his millions against little Greece, does not afford a stranger spectacle to the wonder and astonishment of mankind than this gentle and kind-hearted Mother of Nations, as, wrapped in all the panoply of her might, riches, and exalted traditions, she approaches the little child grovelling in the dust with a sharpened knife in her hand. This is no War—it is an attempt at Infanticide.

Rhodes and Stead, Last Will and Testament, 73. See also Aaron Friedberg, The Weary Titan: Britain and the Experience of Relative Decline, 1895-1905; Anne Orde, The Eclipse of Great Britain: The United States and British Imperial Decline, 1895-1956; Donald Cameron Watt, Succeeding John Bull: America in Britain’s Place 1900-1975. 38 Smuts, Smuts, 31. 39 Smuts had a very strong poetic side and as a student wrote a lengthy study of Walt Whitman. Millin, General Smuts, I, 37-51.

18 And as the brain of the onlooker reels, and as his thoughts fade away into uneasy slumbers, there arises before him in a dream the distant prospect of Bantu children playing amongst the gardens and ruins of the sunny south around thousands of graves in which the descendants of the

European heroes of Faith and Freedom lie sleeping.

For the marauding hordes of the Bantu are once more roving where European dwellings used to stand. And when the question is asked—why all this has happened? Why the heroic children of an heroic race, to which civilisation owes its most priceless blessings, should lie murdered there in that distant quarter of the globe? An invisible spirit of mockery answers, "Civilisation is a failure; the Caucasian is played out!" and the dreamer awakens … with the echo of the word

"Gold! gold! gold!" in his ears.40

And yet, Smuts concluded, there might perhaps be an American redemption:

As in 1880, we now submit our cause with perfect confidence to the whole world. Whether the result be Victory or Death, Liberty will assuredly rise in South Africa like the sun from out the mists of the morning, just as Freedom dawned over the United States of America a little more than a century ago. Then from the Zambesi to Simon's Bay it will be AFRICA FOR THE

AFRICANDER.41

40 Smuts, Century of Wrong, 195-197. 41 Smuts, Century of Wrong, 199-200.

19 Smuts acquitted himself well42 in the second and last Boer War; but the British won, and he had to recalculate.43 The conclusion he came to was that the spurned infant and the Mother of

Nations had to be reunited at whatever cost. To that end, he would have to remake the British empire from within.

He was assisted in this by Alfred Milner, who had begun his professional life as a journalist (working under W.T. Stead) before entering the British civil service. Milner was appointed high commissioner for southern Africa and governor of the Cape Colony in 1897. He remained Britain’s senior representative throughout the war (1899-1902), being appointed also as administrator of the two Boer states — the Republic of South Africa and the Orange Free State

— in 1901 when the war still had a year to run. Smuts had hated Milner. Milner had been in charge when the British decided to build wartime concentration camps for women, children and non-whites as part of a scorched-earth policy. (Boers, as a practice, did not arm non-whites, and

Smuts believed as a matter of global policy that “natives” should not have war weaponry or receive military training.44) Some 27,000 white women and children and perhaps 14,000 non- white Africans died in the concentration camps, fueling a bitterness that lasted generations.45 The

42 Marks (2001) stresses the emotional effects of Smuts’s battlefield experiences and in particular the effect of widespread arming of non-whites by the British, which stirred the core nightmare of white disappearance or absorption into the non-white majority. Marks, “White Masculinity,” 216-220. “During the war,” Marks writes, “Smuts felt his entire social world beginning to crack, and this catastrophic vision seems to have hunted him for most of the rest of his life.” 220. 43 Smuts played a major role in negotiating the peace agreement, including, according to Heyns and Gravett (among others), redrafting a clause that would have given one class of Africans the right to vote. The final clause deferred this extension of the franchise until after self-government. Christof Heyns and Willem Gravett, “’To Save Succeeding Generations from the Scourge of War’: Jan Smuts and the Ideological Foundations of the United Nations,” Human Rights Quarterly 39:3 (August 2017), 579. 44 Smuts, Smuts, 195; Marks, “White Masculinity,” 221-223. 45 There are various estimates of the concentration-camp dead. Heyns and Gravett have it as “an estimated 18,000 to 28,000 civilians and an unknown number of the 107,000 Africans in concentration camps.”) Heyns and Gravett, “’To Save Succeeding Generations,’” 579, citing Thomas Pakenham, The Boer War. Of course the Africans were also civilians.

20 fact that Milner was put in charge of reconstructing South Africa after 1902 only worsened

Smuts’s depression over defeat in the war.46

But Smuts and Milner had something important in common, which was a realization and acceptance that South Africa had become a political laboratory for the British empire and perhaps for the relationship between states and transnational power more generally. Milner had brought with him a sort of mobile think tank soon known as Milner’s Kindergarten. The core of it was the Three Musketeers — Lionel Hichens, Maxwell Balfour, and Lionel Curtis — New

College, Oxford, chums with a bent for idealism and adventure. When the second Boer War was going badly enough the War Office called for volunteers and the three young men joined the

Cyclists Section of the Inns of Court Volunteers.47 The Boys’ Own tone, the sense of creative freedom, is an important part of the story; Rudyard Kipling, appropriately, visited when the

Cyclists had arrived in Capetown. (Journalists Winston Churchill and Leo Amery were two other high-spirited young Englishmen whom Smuts came across during the war, the first as his prisoner. Their lives would all wind together across the first half of the new century.48) Not long after some initial cycling adventures Curtis successfully maneuvered his way near to Milner.

When the war ended, with Britain at last in control of Johannesburg’s gold as well as

Kimberley’s diamonds, Curtis headed up Milner’s Kindergarten to prepare the way for South

Africa’s absorption as a union into the British empire. “We are ruled,” Smuts said irritably, “by the finest flower of Varsity scholarship.”49

46 Smuts, Smuts, 89-96. 47 Deborah Lavin, From Empire to International Commonwealth: A Biography of Lionel Curtis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) 22; see also John Edward Kendle, The Round Table Movement and Imperial Union (Ontario: Univerity of Toronto Press, 1975). 48 Smuts, Smuts, 51. See also Richard Steyn, Churchill’s Confidant: Jan Smuts, Enemy to Lifelong Friend (London: Robinson, 2018). 49 Lavin, From Empire to International Commonwealth, 36.

21 The members of the Kindergarten took up both Anglo-Saxonism and the idea of imperial federation. British imperial federation was seen as a way for the empire to turn its white constituents’ demands for self-government, ever increasing since the rebellion of 1775, into a durable global polity that would reach a satisfying synthesis of self-determination and continuing central direction from London. Perhaps not quite Sidney Low’s U.S.-inspired conglomerate

“with federal self-governing Colonies as the constituent States,” but something like it.50

This was precisely the activity in which Smuts, Milner and the Kindergarten were engaged as they faced the challenges of creating an Anglo-Dutch self-determining (but white minority-ruled) country within a British empire. “Throughout his eight years in South Africa,”

Kendle writes, “Milner returned repeatedly to the theme of imperial union and the place of a

British South Africa within that union. He realized that Britain’s relative economic and military position in the world was declining and recognized the need for imperial unity if the civilizing mission of the British race was to be backed by adequate power. The ideal he had in mind was a united South Africa as one of a group of sister nations spread throughout the world, each independent in its own concerns, but allied for a common purpose.”51

Kindergarten members might be more or less attached to an Anglo-Saxon or white-racial vision, they might be more or less democratic (most were unfriendly to popular government), and they might be more or less impressed by the potential power of a protective tariff or Imperial

Preference as a strategy for economic development. But they all saw the British empire as a predecessor of, and vehicle for, something like global government.52 And they were “to be for

50 Rhodes and Stead, Last Will and Testament, 73. 51 Kendle, The Round Table Movement, 9. 52 “The group as a whole set itself one aim — the creation of an imperial superstate, in which all the races of the empire were to be penetrated by British traditions and British purposes, wedded with whatever individual contributions their original cultures could bring to enlarge this. This imperial super-state was to adopt what had been best in the Roman Empire, including its universal citizenship, and the imposition of the Pax Romana”: D.C. Watt, “America and the British Foreign Policy-Making Elite, from Joseph Chamberlain to Anthony Eden, 1895-1956,”

22 nearly forty years Toryism’s only effective doctrinal body. All were publicists of the first order.

Leo Amery, the only one to achieve really high office, was already on The Times. Lord Lothian

[Philip Kerr] founded and edited The Round Table. Lionel Curtis became the prophet of

Chatham House. Dawson edited The Times…John Buchan ended as Governor General of

Canada. F.S. Oliver, Grigg, Brand, and others acted as their influential seconds.”53 The U.S. was critically important as a rare example of successful federation (across races, languages and cultures) while still a presumed cultural ally — and an indispensable source of hard power. As

Watt writes, “the group realized that their aim could only be achieved by maintaining British predominance over Europe, especially against the European tyrannies in Germany and Russia, which, they believed, were challenging Britain’s position. This they felt America would help them to do. Again and again, one finds in their writings the idea of an Anglo-American world hegemony. Britain and America together could dominate the world, widening and strengthening the Pax Britannica, the world order on which they set so much store.”54

The period between the end of the second Boer War in 1902 and the Union of South

Africa in 1910 made up the formative years of the Kindergarten, its school for the more strenuous challenge, eight years later, of establishing a global-governance structure out of the ashes of World War 1. Smuts’s personal journey from anti-British guerrilla fighter to cooperant was not necessarily a swift or simple one, but he had his ex-enemy Milner and Milner’s

Kindergarten, funded principally by the Rhodes Trust,55 with him each step of the way. When

Britain allowed the two Boer states — the Transvaal and the Orange Free State — to govern

Review of Politics 25:1 (Jan. 1963), 14. See also the curious but important work by Carroll Quigley, The Anglo- American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden (New York: Books in Focus, 1981 [1949]). 53 Watt, “America and British Foreign Policy,” 14. 54 Watt, “America and British Foreign Policy,” 15. 55 Kendle, The Round Table Movement, 34. Rhodes died in 1902.

23 themselves, after a fashion, in late 1906, Smuts lifted himself into a profound enthusiasm: “They gave us back our country in everything but name. After four years. Has such a miracle of trust and magnanimity ever happened before? Only people like the English could do it. They may make mistakes, but they are a big people.”56

The Mother of Nations and its once-spurned infant were coming together. The Caucasian was not played out after all. The Kindergarten’s Robert Brand was Smuts’s close collaborator in designing the constitution of a united South Africa.57 Lionel Curtis had played the leading role with Smuts after Milner’s departure from South Africa in 190558; successful completion of the

Union in 1910 introduced a hiatus, but the group would reconvene, as it were, for the Great War, during which Smuts and Milner served together in Britain’s seven-member war cabinet

(supported by Kerr, Amery and Milner ally Maurice Hankey)59, and for the peace conference and the founding of the League of Nations in 1919.

In a celebrated speech to London’s League of Nations Society in 1917, anticipating the postwar world and emphasizing the removal through war of the German imperial threat, Smuts declared:

When peace comes to be made you have all of these cards in your hand, and you can go carefully into the question of what is necessary for your future security and the future safety of the Empire, and can say what you are going to keep and what you are going to give away. … I think that we

56 Smuts, Smuts, 98-99. 57 Kendle, The Round Table Movement, 16. 58 “Curtis made it clear that he was always willing to be guided by Smuts’s advice….He offered to see Smuts whenever possible and to tell him ‘without reserve all I have done or am thinking of doing.’ He would consider any appointment with Smuts ‘as prior to all other.’ During the next two years [1905-07] Smuts remained in constant touch with the kindergarten, particularly with Curtis, Brand, and Duncan.” Kendle, The Round Table Movement, 34. See also Smuts, Smuts, 111. 59 Quigley, Anglo-American Establishment, 153-155.

24 are inclined to make mistakes in thinking about this group of nations to which we belong, because too often we think about it as one State. We are not a State. The British Empire is much more than a State. I think the very expression ‘Empire’ is misleading, because it makes people think we are one community, to which the word ‘Empire’ can appropriately be applied. Germany is an Empire. Rome was an Empire. India is an Empire. But we are a system of nations. We are far greater than any Empire which has ever existed, and by using this ancient expression we really disguise the main fact that our whole position is different, and that we are not one State or nation or empire, but a whole world by ourselves, consisting of many nations, of many States, and all sorts of communities under one flag. We are a system of States, and not a stationary system, but a dynamic evolving system, always going forward to new destinies.60

Smuts further argued his hope that South Africa had “afforded the training school for a large- minded, broad-minded, magnanimous race, capable not only of welding together different racial elements into a new and richer national type, but capable of dealing as no other race in history has ever dealt with the question of the relation between black and white.”61 He admired Wilson’s proposal for a League of Nations, but suggested forming an Anglo-American committee to come up with a better one.62

60 Smuts, Smuts, 188-189. 61 Smuts, Smuts, 196. 62 George Curry, “Woodrow Wilson, Jan Smuts, and the Versailles Settlement,” American Historical Review 66:4 (July 1961), 969.

25 Woodrow Wilson

Woodrow Wilson’s own path to Paris was no more direct than that of Jan Smuts. He was born in

1856 into a slaveholding clerical family. “My earliest recollection,” he said in 1909, “is of standing at my father’s gateway in Augusta, Georgia, when I was four years old, and hearing some one pass and say that Mr. Lincoln was elected and there was to be war.” According to legend, his father, a Presbyterian minister who had brought his family to the South from

Steubenville, Ohio, in 1851, once dismissed his congregation early so they could use the Lord’s day to make cartridges for Southern soldiers. Pastor Wilson gave a sermon soon after Lincoln’s election looking forward to a time when racial slavery would be seen as “that scheme of politics and morals, which by saving a lower race from the destruction of heathenism, has under divine management, contributed to refine, exalt, and enrich its superior race!”63

Young Wilson lived near battlefields and saw the destruction of war;64 he also had a thrilling boyhood moment when he stood next to the South’s military leader, Robert E. Lee.65

Wilson’s approach to Lee, and to the South of his boyhood, had several distinctive features that were typical of his larger views and held serious implications for his eventual foreign policy as president.

63 John M. Mulder, “Joseph Ruggles Wilson: Southern Presbyterian Patriarch,” Journal of Presbyterian History 52:3 (Fall 1974), 251. 64 One of the strangest sentences in the records of debate during the peace negotiations in Paris, 1919, is Wilson saying to Prime Minister Lloyd George of Britain, “I was born in a conquered and devastated country and that has helped me, believe it, to understand the questions which are asked here.” Arthur S. Link, ed., The Papers of Woodrow Wilson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), hereafter PWW, vol. 57, 246. Wilson is referring, of course, to the Confederate States of America. 65 Harley Notter, The Origins of the Foreign Policy of Woodrow Wilson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1937), 5. Notter’s chief source for biographical details was Ray Stannard Baker’s authorized biography, published in eight volumes beginning in 1927.

26 One was his attachment to strong male leaders and his sense of them as models.66 Wilson was very close to his pastor father and presumably there was influence there: his father quickly became a prominent community leader as he helped steer the Southern church onto its own road, the denomination, like other Protestant denominations, having split along sectional lines. The major withdrawal of Southern Presbyterians from the national church was in 1857, Wilson’s first year of life and his father’s sixth year as a Southerner. The father’s sermons were intensely

Jesus-focused and concerned with the examples Jesus provided for love, rectitude and self- improvement; his first published address (1857) was titled The True Idea of Success in Life and declared that life “is not a season through which the soul is to dream. It is a day in which the soul must act.”67

Wilson’s own writing style resembles his father’s and the younger man adopted early on the tone of urgent exhortation and the constant reference to moral example.68 Wilson’s bent as a young reader was toward the biographies of great men, especially the British politicians William

Gladstone (born 1809) and Edmund Burke. In a 1909 speech on Robert E. Lee, Wilson argued characteristically that a man “is noble in our popular conception only when he goes outside the narrow circle of self-interest, and begins to spend himself for the interest of mankind. Then, however humble his gifts, however undistinguished his intellectual force, we give him this title of nobility, and admit him into the high peerage of men who will not be forgotten. Now that was

66 For example, in considering William Gladstone a young Wilson wrote, “Great statesmen seem to direct and rule by a sort of power to put themselves in the place of the nation over whom they are set.” The lives of great American and English statesmen were a favorite subject of his reading. Wilson typically felt that a good U.S. president should be someone “who has the personality and the initiative to enforce his views both upon the people and upon Congress.” Notter, Origins, 29-31, 143. 67 In this same address, the elder Wilson spoke against abolitionism, which he portrayed as seeking to quench “those bright domestic fires that are kept a-burning, as they were kindled, in the mutual good will of white and black!” Mulder, “Joseph Ruggles Wilson,” 249. Emphasis in the original. 68 Many of Joseph R. Wilson’s sermons are available in the Woodrow Wilson Papers, Library of Congress, series 11, reel 523.

27 the characteristic of General Lee’s life. It was not only moral force, but it was moral force conscientiously guided by interests which were not his own.”69 This seems to be the mold into which Wilson hoped to fit himself.

Wilson located Lee’s moral force partly in the general’s attachment to his native soil and community, a rootedness that Wilson believed was a necessary condition for high moral exertion. Lee “knew that a man’s nearest attachments are his best attachments, and his nearest duties his imperative duties. He had been born in Virginia, he was Virginia’s. Virginia could do with him as she pleased.”70 This attribution of moral and political force to local loyalties based in not much more than coincidence is a curious but persistent aspect of Wilson’s worldview, made curiouser, and perhaps more persistent, by the reality that his own family was not Southern at all

— his father was from Ohio, his mother from England. His mother as a child had been moved about the eastern U.S. and Canada, lost her own mother early, and was somewhat estranged from her father after his remarriage. Wilson’s father was himself the son of immigrants who had first settled in Philadelphia before relocating to Ohio, where Wilson’s paternal grandfather edited an anti-Jackson and anti-slavery newspaper.71

Woodrow Wilson’s father cannot be described as rooted. His embrace of slavery was itself an adopted creed at odds with his actual roots. He was the youngest of seven. Two of his

69 Woodrow Wilson, “Robert E. Lee: An Interpretation,” The Journal of Social Forces II:3 (March 1924), 324. The speech was given to the University of North Carolina (which later published it as a pamphlet) in 1909. The Journal itself was started at the same university in 1922 to feature new work in the social sciences. Wilson prefaced the talk by saying, “It is all very well to talk of detachment of view, and of the effort to be national in spirit and in purpose, but a boy never gets over his boyhood, and never can change those subtle influences which have become a part of him, that were bred in him when he was a child. So I am obliged to say, again and again, that the only place in the country, the only place in the world, where nothing has to be explained to me is the South. Sometimes, after long periods of absence, I forget how natural it is to be in the South, and then the moment I come, and see old friends again, and discover a country full of reminiscences which connect me with my parents, and with all the old memories, I know again the region to which I naturally belong.” Wilson, “Robert E. Lee,” 318. 70 Wilson, “Robert E. Lee,” 324. 71 There have been two psychological biographies of Wilson that focus on his paternal relationship though not on the father himself. One of these was co-written by Sigmund Freud. See Mulder, “Joseph Ruggles Wilson,” 245.

28 brothers fought on the Union side, while he chaired the Georgia relief association and served as a

Confederate Army chaplain. Joseph Wilson’s own churchyard had been used to contain Union prisoners. His relations with his siblings did not recover after the war.72 He preferred (war years aside) to spend his summers in Saratoga, New York, often alone and increasingly subject to depression. Woodrow Wilson himself spent most of his life outside the South. When he was speculating with friends in 1919 over where he might retire, he listed, in order of preference,

Baltimore, Boston and New York.73

Wilson’s attachment to the antebellum South of Lee then presents a puzzle. Wilson’s family was not really of the South and he was too young, by his own account, actually to remember anything of the South prior to Lincoln’s election and the war. His South was a largely imaginary homeland74; yet the intellectual and literary industry that grew up after the war to create retroactively a lost paradise of Southern gentility fixed that sentimental abstraction in a broad section of the American public, as it was apparently also fixed in the mind of the president who would make national self-determination a central principle of global politics.

Southern white self-determination was at the core of Wilson’s views, and if it was in fact more borrowed than owned that does not appear to have weakened its power: “in spite of the noble quality of the Southern struggle,” Wilson writes, “every man now sees that the forces of the world were sure to crush the self-assertion of the South.”75 For Wilson, the drama is a moral and psychological one: “Even a man who saw the end from the beginning should, in my conception as a Southerner, have voted for spending his people’s blood and his own, rather than

72 Mulder, “Joseph Ruggles Wilson,” 252-253. 73 Grayson, Cary T. (Cary Travers), 1878-1938, “Cary T. Grayson Diary,” 1919 March 12, in PWW, vol. 55, 482. Grayson was Wilson’s private physician. 74 See David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). 75 Wilson, “Robert E. Lee,” 324.

29 pursue the weak course of expediency.” That was Lee’s choice: “What has been the result? — ask yourself that. It has been that the South has retained her best asset, her self-respect.”76

Ideologically, the framework for that self-respect was what Wilson called “the old idea of the separate sovereignty of states.”77 This argument Wilson developed most fully in his popular78

1893 book Division and Reunion 1829-1889. “The doctrine that the States had individually become sovereign bodies when they emerged from their condition of subjection to Great Britain as colonies,” he wrote, “and that they had not lost their individual sovereignty by entering the

Union, was a doctrine accepted almost without question even by the courts, for quite thirty years after the formation of the government.”79 He noted that Pennsylvania had once thought to secede and that the addition of new territory through the Louisiana Purchase of 1815 had led many in the Northeast also to consider secession rather than see their relative political power be diminished in an expanded Union. Wilson was sympathetic to the core argument of John C.

Calhoun for Southern secession — “in his mind the Union meant state sovereignty no less than it meant national expansion and united power. His devotion was reserved for the original ideal, as he conceived it; for a Union of free States, not a national government set over subject States” — and wrote that as late as 1820 the federal government was still regarded as “an experiment.”80

Wilson made his academic and publishing careers writing about the United States as an ongoing experiment in state formation and self-determination.

In terms of geopolitical affections, Wilson leaned toward Anglophilia. In college he wrote a paper on John Richard Green’s History of the English People, seeing it as “a history of

76 Wilson, “Robert E. Lee,” 326. 77 Wilson, “Robert E. Lee,” 326. 78 It went through 35 printings between 1893 and 1926. Woodrow Wilson, Division and Reunion 1829-1889 (New York: Longmans Green, 1929 [1893]), vii. 79 Wilson, Division and Reunion, 47. 80 Wilson, Division and Reunion, 58-59, 48.

30 the American people as well,” a positive judgment to the degree that “we, as a lusty branch of a noble race, are by our national history adding lustre or stain to so bright an escutcheon.”81

Throughout his major works as well as various essays and speeches, Wilson preserved this position that the core U.S. population was English by descent and American institutions were grounded in the historical experience of the English.82 He felt that the Anglo-American model of popular government was superior to all others; yet this was interwoven with the thought that an

English “character” was the inheritable guarantor of democratic institutional soundness, and not inheritable by just anyone. Wilson believed strongly in national characters, and that they could all be measured by their distance from the English or Anglo-American ideal. The French, for example, he saw as unsuited to democracy. The “heady miscarriages of attempted democracy in

Spanish countries” similarly indicated a lack of natural, unforced democratic character or temperament.83

Whether Wilson believed non-English European immigrants to the United States might be assimilated to the higher Anglo-American norm may be doubted, although he frequently regretted, as a politician, some of the unkind remarks he had made as an author.84 But Wilson did eventually embrace “Americanism,” which configured the process of immigrants becoming

American as a renunciation of old tribal, national or racial ties, a process of rebirth into non- national Americanism. Like many politicians of the period, he denounced the idea of

81 Notter, Origins, 15. 82 Notter, Origins, 15-16. Allowance was made for the Scots, and Wilson often drew attention to his own Scottish heritage. 83 Notter, Origins, 19-20, 101. 84 E.g., “they came in numbers which increased from year to year, as if the countries of the South of Europe were disburdening themselves of the more sordid and hapless elements of their population.” Hans Vought, “Division and Reunion: Woodrow Wilson, Immigration, and the Myth of American Unity,” Journal of American Ethnic History 13:3 (spring 1994), 29. The passage is in Wilson’s popular A History of the American People, which incorporated a good deal from his earlier Division and Reunion. When seeking elective office, Wilson made prolific amends for this and similar remarks at many meetings with European immigrant groups.

31 “hyphenated” Americans (as in “Italian-American”). Americanism had one of the important qualities of broad-brush racial identities like white in that it dissolved ethnic and national commitments, exchanging them for a much wider and shallower solidarity and a much less individual identity. In Wilson’s eyes, the transformations of Americanism were not without cost, including a kind of asynchronous loneliness: the American was stuck in the state of becoming, an unfinished work. There’s something very American about the hope and sadness in Wilson’s words to a group of immigrants become U.S. citizens: “if some of us have forgotten what

America believed in, you, at any rate, imported in your own hearts a renewal of the belief…If I have in any degree forgotten what America was intended for, I will thank God if you will remind me.”85

This anti-nationalist strain within American nationalism, and its incomplete resolution into a certain political topography of race, echoes the trajectory of Smuts from Boer to

Africander to self-governing white Briton, for Wilson, like many of his contemporaries, did not view Americanization as quite a universal process. He opposed Asian migration, endorsing the

Chinese Exclusion Act and reassuring his Californian ally James Duval Phelan, “The whole question is one of assimilation of diverse races. We cannot make a homogeneous population out of people who do not blend with the Caucasian race….Oriental coolieism will give us another race problem to solve and surely we have had our lesson.”86

85 The speech is in Winthrop Talbot, ed., Americanization: Principles of Americanism, Essentials of Americanization, Technic of Race-Assimilation, Annotated Bibliography (New York: H.W. Wilson, 1920), 78-81. Wilson’s line to Lloyd George (note 63, above) about being from “a conquered and devastated country” is revealing: even when representing America he was of an indeterminate and unfinished identity. What was Wilson’s nation, for which he would wish self determination? And almost regardless of the answer, on what basis could it claim it? Nearly the whole point of Americanism was NOT to be nationally self-determined, or to have yourself not be determined by your nation. 86 Vought, “Division and Reunion,” 29.

32 That lesson had to do with African slaves and their American descendants. Wilson saw racial slavery as something that had unfortunately occurred and kept the white South from parity with the North. As a political-economic system, it had kept the South dependent on plantation agriculture and prevented it from developing manufactures and an industrialized economy. He therefore emphasized the prewar difference in attitudes between North and South on tariffs

(usually designed to favor Northern infant industries) and the political-economic difference in interests between the slave South, on one hand, and the newer Northwestern and Western states on the other. The signal trait of lifelong race-based chattel slavery, in Wilson’s presentation, was that it kept the South from modernizing, holding the region back from its rightful place. Wilson did not speak or write at any length on the arguments of abolitionists or the injustices of slavery for the slaves themselves, even when he was considering the antebellum South or the Civil War.

He had been in secondary school and college during the postwar period of

Reconstruction. White Southerners had formed the Ku Klux Klan in 1866 as part of a wide effort to prevent former slaves from gaining any political power, including through the right to vote.

The Klan was extremely violent and succeeded in restoring white Southern rule (even if it was minority rule) in several states by 1870. The federal government opposed this and the numerous legislative attempts to prevent freedmen from gaining any power. In Division and Reunion

Wilson describes this period: “Unscrupulous adventurers appeared, to act as the leaders of the inexperienced blacks in taking possession, first of the [political] conventions, and afterwards of the state governments; and in the States where the negroes were most numerous, or their leaders most shrewd and unprincipled, an extraordinary carnival of public crime set in under the forms of law. Negro majorities gained complete control of the state governments, or, rather, negroes constituted the legislative majorities and submitted to the unrestrained authority of small and

33 masterful groups of white men whom the instinct of plunder had drawn from the North.” The freedman vote, in other words, was a skirmish-point in the regrettable division between northern and southern whites. By 1872, Wilson writes, Washington was backing down in its insistence on bringing black voters into democratic government and enjoying the rights of American citizens.

“There was unquestionably,” he writes, “a deliberate and more or less concerted effort made by the whites of the South to shut the negro out by some means from an effectual use of his vote, and sometimes this effort took the most flagrant forms of violence. Presently, however, its more overt and violent features disappeared.”87

The next chapter of Division and Reunion is meaningfully entitled “Return to Normal

Conditions.” In it Wilson writes, “The supremacy of the white people was henceforth assured in the administration of the southern States.” With this established, North and South could reconcile with each other, much as Boer and Briton would in South Africa following the vision of Smuts and Rhodes. By 1889, Wilson writes, “The South had been changed, as if by a marvel, into likeness to the rest of the country. Freed from the incubus of slavery, she had sprung into a new life; already she promised to become one of the chief industrial regions of the

Union….Manufactures sprung up on every hand….Northern capital poured into the South; northern interests became identified with southern interests, and the days of inevitable strife and permanent difference came to seem strangely remote.”88

This was, of course, the period when racial-segregation laws were being put into force across the South and becoming either law or established practice in parts of the North. The identification and separation of black from white, and thereby the removal of the former to as great a degree as possible from the national political and economic life, was a central project of

87 Wilson, Division and Reunion, 282, 289. 88 Wilson, Division and Reunion, 302, 316. This was more hopeful vision than a description of reality.

34 the United States from the 1880s into the 1920s. So was American expansion overseas, toward which Wilson was generally hostile. Given his position in political life, his silence on the

Spanish-American War required an effort of will. When he did speak about it, a full year after the peace was signed in 1898, he regretted the acquisition of the Philippines but accepted that, the acquisition being a fait accompli, young American men should go to the islands and try to implant democratic institutions, since simply introducing democratic principles to the Filipinos and hoping for the best would leave democracy to “suffer the same fate which befell a dress suit once captured by savages.”89

Within two years, Wilson had reconciled himself to an expansionist United States, which he now saw as naturally flowing from the reconciliation of North and South after the Civil War

— the beginning of a truly national spirit. While the Philippines conquest was “almost accidental,” it was nonetheless also the result of a strengthening nation’s “natural and wholesome impulse” to extend its power: “We dare not stand neutral. All mankind deem us the representatives of … moderate and sensible discipline … and a temperate justice, of the best experience in the reasonable methods and principles of self-government.”90 For the Filipinos

(and Puerto Ricans) this meant that the U.S. should develop in them the “character” necessary for self-government “as soon as they can be made fit.”91 As Notter writes, Wilson was

“especially stirred by the world implications of the colonial task and the new position of the

United States.” He brought to his writing a new intensity, seeing that the U.S. was becoming a world actor and a sort of global tutor, following in the path pioneered by England: “It is our

89 Notter, Origins, 103. 90 Notter, Origins, 106-110. 91 Notter, Origins, 112-113.

35 peculiar duty, as it is also England’s, to moderate the process [of opening the markets of Asia] in the interests of liberty.”92

Wilson had been moving toward this idea of an American-led global order, understood as an inheritance from and improvement upon its British imperial predecessor, since at least June

1887, in his thirtieth year, when he considered the problem of “interlacing local self-government with federal self-government,” as Notter puts it. What the U.S. had achieved in creating a federated democracy of semi-sovereign states — a process interrupted by the Civil War but restored by the disenfranchisement of the non-white population, re-establishment of “the supremacy of the white people” as a ruling class in the former slave states, and the ensuing reconciliation of North and South — would put it in a position to “pilot the world” along a similar path. Wilson saw a tendency “clearly destined to prevail, towards, first the confederation of parts of empires like the British, and finally of great states themselves. Instead of centralization of power, there is to be wide union with tolerated divisions of prerogative. This is a tendency towards the American type — of governments joined with governments for the pursuit of common purposes, in honorary equality and honorable subordination.”93

The “honorary” suggested that, realistically, larger powers would retain their dominant relative position. The “honorable” suggested that the weaker states would, like Robert E. Lee’s

South, retain their self-respect.

92 Notter, Origins, 113-114. 93 Notter, Origins, 43.

36

The Paths Converge

Woodrow Wilson and Jan Smuts both had a particularly intense experience, practical and political, of what it meant to share sovereignty in order to achieve peace. They had rather romantic, even mystical views of human community and connectedness, based in a desire to be part of a group with roots deep in the past. It may be more than coincidence that both had led uprooted lives: Wilson nourished himself on a somewhat imaginary and depthless

Southernness,94 while Boer life per se — even under the imaginary sign of “Africander” — was one of being pushed and jostled (at best) by the British on one side and Africans on the other, in a condition of fairly constant conflict, movement and insecurity. Both men were raised in an identitarian environment that involved being surrounded by, and even outnumbered by, a frequently hostile people whose continued subservience and labor were necessary to their own core group’s survival, as they saw it. Moreover, this inherent precariousness itself constituted a type of political tool in the hands of what might otherwise have been seen as allies: the white

British, in the case of southern Africa, and white Northerners, in the case of the American South.

The British and the Northerners used this tool to force the groups to which Wilson and Smuts were attached into a political settlement that compromised their own sovereignty or self- determination. This was not quite submission: Boers and white Southerners had the means for bargaining. As Wilson saw it, the North, pushed onward by capitalism, crushed the white South’s desire for self-determination. For Smuts, the British, driven forward by capitalism, chasing the

94 Wilson’s most recent biographer, A. Scott Berg, writes: “Wilson was not, in truth, a dyed-in-the-wool Southerner, what with immigrant parents and an Ohio-born father.” A. Scott Berg, Wilson, (New York: G.P. Putnam’s, 2013), 38.

37 “yellow tulip” of Birmingham, crushed the Boers’ desire for self-determination. But both beleaguered white populations were still in a position to negotiate, as they still had the means to disrupt or cripple the far power, if never to defeat it. And the far power could still protect them from itself and others.

The principal price which the Boers and the white South exacted in exchange for peace and inclusion was acceptance by London or by the North, respectively, of a racial hierarchy that made maximal social agency an inheritable right of white men. This was the core synthesis of

American Reconciliation and of South African Union. From ferocious beginnings, it would be codified into racial segregation laws and, in the international realm, the theory and practice of racial hierarchy and “dependent peoples” guided by “the self-governing races of the world.”95

The domestic and the international were inseparable for Wilson and Smuts.

Both men were committed to the idea that some peoples were not ready for self- government, the chief examples being black Americans in Reconstruction, Filipinos, and Puerto

Ricans (Wilson) and non-white Africans (Smuts). Wilson believed the Anglo-Saxons had a unique talent for self-government and at different points questioned the democratic capacities of most other peoples, including most other white peoples; Smuts had a more racialized view, seeing all white people as essentially equal.96 Wilson’s views on this could be modified, particularly when he needed votes at home or peace abroad. As president, in dealing with

95 The phrase, common at the time, is here from Lionel Curtis. Lavin, Empire to Commonwealth, 109. 96 Smuts said to an English audience in 1917: “The view we have taken is this, that the different elements in our white populations ought really to be used to build up a stronger and more powerful nation than would have been possible if we had consisted of purely one particular strain. All great Imperial peoples really are a mixture of various stocks. Your own history is one of the completest proofs of that doctrine, and it is only in recent years that this remarkable doctrine of the pure race has come into vogue, and largely in Germany….The doctrine is to the effect that the governing races of the world are pure races, and that they simply debase themselves and become degenerate if mixed with alien blood. They must remain pure, and in so far as they do so they will play a great part in the world. It is more than hinted at that the German race must guide the world because it is one of those pure races. What arrant nonsense!” Smuts, Smuts, 193.

38 revolution in Mexico, Wilson emphasized that “when properly directed, there is no people not fitted for self-government.”97 As a first-time presidential candidate in 1912, Wilson had written,

“The colored people of the United States have made extraordinary progress towards self-support and usefulness and ought to be encouraged in every possible and proper way. My sympathy with them is of long standing, and I want to assure them through you [Bishop Alexander Walters, a black religious leader and activist and a former slave] that should I become president of the

United States they may count upon me for absolute fair dealing and for everything by which I can assist in advancing the interests of their race.”98 He received the largest black vote of any

Democratic presidential candidate to that time. But whites were voters too, and many of them assumed having a Democrat Southerner in the White House meant an opportunity for further racial segregation. As W.E.B. Du Bois, who had campaigned for Wilson, later wrote:

[T]hey poured into Washington and regarded the election of a Democrat as a signal for a host of anti-Negro measures….They touched marriage between the races, housing, education, jim- crow street cars in the District of Columbia and the Federal Civil Service….All the anti- intermarriage bills except one were eventually killed and most of the other measures except the matter of the Federal Civil Service. There by executive action, sanctioned by Wilson, and as it was said, actually suggested by his first wife, a large proportion of the Negro clerks in government employ were segregated in separate rooms and portions of rooms, in toilets and restaurants and especially discriminated against in appointment, by the requirement of

97 Notter, Origins, 291. 98 This letter was handwritten and later reproduced in type script by W.E.B. Du Bois as part of his remembrance of Wilson, which was itself sent to Paul Hall of the University of Virginia, who had been soliciting remembrances off the president. Du Bois’s “My Impressions of Woodrow Wilson” is reproduced in several collections, including at the University of Massachusetts. http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/pageturn/mums312-b088- i264/#page/1/mode/1up

39 photographs to be submitted with applications and examinations. The colored people all over the country were greatly aroused.99

They were aroused because Wilson had crossed a line: the federal government had been the protector, as against individual states, of the idea of equal rights regardless of skin color.

Domestically as well as internationally — perhaps more so domestically — the tension between racial hierarchy and self-determination was worsening. You could go toward one, or the other, but you could not really go toward both, since the longue durée racial-tutelage concept that was used to square this circle — the idea that ultimately, if quite distantly, everyone was capable of self-determination, even African Americans — was vitiated by these neurotically detailed racial laws and practices, such as the segregation of the federal workforce, that made such an eventual advancement impossible. The same had been true for decades in southern Africa and many other places. It was a worldview that ate its own tail. If you were going to open the doors of whiteness wide, as Wilson emphatically did with Americanism in his 1912 campaign,100 you had to patrol the borders of non-whiteness for the system to retain any identitarian meaning at all. This was the logic beneath the coincidence of racial exclusion and internationalism, as domestic hierarchies and international ones came to coincide with and reinforce each other.

The British empire, interestingly, offered for some a way to defer or dilute this logic’s implications across a greater expanse of space and time. For both Smuts and Wilson, the British empire was a geopolitical chrysalis. The wealth of a united South Africa and, much more so, a

United States was becoming the necessary condition for the continuation and transformation of

99 Du Bois, “My Impressions,” 4. 100 Scott L. Malcomson, One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2000), 367-373.

40 the empire and the culture that had, alone among imperial cultures, managed to grow so consistently from the 18th century to the 20th.101 Australia, New Zealand, and Canada — the other major white-settler colonies — were also of great importance.102 All of these polities, as less- developed colonies, had benefitted for decades from protective tariffs and regulations, the British security umbrella, patient (and even patriotic) capital provided from the imperial center, and subsidized labor migration: in short, government-funded nation building. As underpopulated (in

Western economic terms) developing countries with ample under-exploited resources, they paid a high relative wage to the European workers who were able to migrate to them.103 This very peculiar set of circumstances, in the aggregate, was unique to the British empire, and it was, by half-conscious design, limited in terms of full national (and transnational) empowerment to white people. Nonetheless, one could imagine it as Wilson and Smuts did: a prototype of a global order

101 Adam Tooze concisely explains, for example, the centrality of the U.S. and South Africa to British and Entente war finance in The Deluge, 206-217. India was almost entirely excluded from this process of coalescing “self- governing dominions” that gained momentum with South African unification and continued through World War 1 into the 1930s, first under the sign of imperial federation and then under that of the Commonwealth — an intellectual and political process that was the central project of Milner’s Kindergarten. India contributed about half the three million imperial troops made available to Britain in fighting World War 1 and a very great deal of the finance as well. But it was outside what Joseph Chamberlain — a prominent politician who began as a screw manufacturer in Birmingham — called “our own kinsfolk,” the “white population that constitutes the majority in all the great self-governing Colonies of the Empire.” Kenny and Pearce, Shadows of Empire, 27-34; Tooze, Deluge, 210. Of course, the white population was not the majority in South Africa. None of this was lost upon the non- Westerners looking at the issue from a certain distance. Kakuza Okakaura wrote in 1906, for example, “European imperialism, which does not disdain to raise the absurd cry of the Yellow Peril, fails to realize that Asia may also awaken to the cruel sense of the White Disaster.” Quoted in Mishra, Ruins of Empire, 212-213. 102 When David Lloyd-George, as prime minister in 1916, created an Imperial War Cabinet, it was, MacMillan writes, “a wonderful gesture. It was also necessary. The dominions and India were keeping the British war effort going with their raw materials, their munitions, their loans, above all with their manpower — some 1,250,000 soldiers from India and another million from the dominions.” Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2002 [2001]), 44-45. As Bell notes, “This was the nearest the dream of a politically unified Greater Britain came to fruition.” Bell, Reordering the World, 196. See also Philip Kerr, “From Empire to Commonwealth,” Foreign Affairs, 1:1-2 (1922), 83-98. 103 This argument is developed at length in Belich, Replenishing the Earth. The transformation of diverse European identities into an ex-European whiteness occurred consistently, if in different ways, across the Anglo world, mainly in the 19th century. For the U.S. see, for example, Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995); David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1999); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998); Malcomson, One Drop of Blood; Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010).

41 that preserved the honorable sovereignty of its individual states while also, through the necessary fiction of state equality, solidifying a hard-power status quo and thereby, it was hoped, removing what was thought to be the main source of great-power conflict and its close cousin, imperialism: the prospect of gain through violence, or what was often called “militarism.” This prototype is what Wilson and Smuts, with their keen sense of the importance and the limits of sovereignty, brought to Versailles.

42

III: Versailles

Wilson Stays Out: Isolation and Neutrality

Given how central Wilson and American power would be to establishing an international order in 1919, Wilsonian neutrality between August 1914 and April 1917 might seem out of the ordinary or exceptional. But the idea that European inter-state warfare was a primitive Old

World affliction had been a feature of American thinking since colonial times.104 Much of

American foreign policy had been devoted to keeping out of such conflicts, recurrent as they seemed to be, and in particular out of the imperial competition that was the overseas extension of the Old World’s rivalries and the European proclivity most likely to affect the United States.

U.S. leaders from George Washington onward also saw the material advantages of neutrality: as long as trade continued freely in wartime, a neutral U.S. would benefit both from escaping the military costs of engagement and picking up whatever production was being lost by belligerents as they focused on war — that is, selling to both sides. The U.S.’s chief concern was to keep

North and South America as free as possible from European quarrels and European imperial expansion. That was the essence of President Monroe’s famous doctrine of 1832. It made particular sense when the main continental powers, after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, were conservative and even reactionary monarchies, united in the Holy Alliance and eager to grow

104 Thomas Paine had thought that a measured neutrality should be the policy of England itself; in the absence of that, the American colonies were well advised to avoid both Britain and European alliances, given that American dependence on Britain “tends directly to involve this Continent in European wars and quarrels, and set us at variance with nations who would otherwise seek our friendship.” Paine also advocated a league of “unarmed” neutral nations that would, by withholding their markets from belligerents, be able to ensure world peace. Quoted in Arnold Wolfers and Laurence W. Martin, eds., The Anglo-American Tradition in Foreign Affairs: Readings from Thomas More to Woodrow Wilson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956), 130-131, 138.

43 their respective empires, if necessary at U.S. expense. They were avowedly hostile to democracy; and the U.S. was already the dangerous example of democracy in an undemocratic world.105

A century later, the world had changed but the tradition of neutrality was mostly intact.

The Monroe Doctrine was arguably of increased importance as the “new imperialism” saw

Germany, Japan and Italy rushing to claim whatever had been left unclaimed by, or could be wrested from, the established imperialist powers, chief among them Britain. U.S. imperialist exertions might have seemed to violate U.S. tradition but were portrayed almost as a kindness to the colonized peoples (such as the Filipinos and Puerto Ricans) who had been abandoned by their colonial parent, Spain. U.S. expansion of this type was not seen as violating neutrality, as

Spain was in decline and the U.S. had, in any event, been expanding at imperial Spain’s expense for most of its existence.106 The latest European war fit neatly into the American view of

European powers as pointlessly belligerent. A surging Germany, united as a state only since

1871, wanted to extend its power over Europe and, as a late but enthusiastic convert to the imperial aspect of European state competition, also grow its imperial reach. Wilson certainly did not support this, and German activities in South America and North Africa (the Morocco crisis of

1906) were more than an annoyance.107 But Germany’s rise did not decisively threaten the tradition of neutrality or the Monroe Doctrine.108

105 Notter, Origins, 320-325. Notter (321) quotes Washington writing to Jefferson in 1788 that when Europe goes to war, “if we wisely and properly improve the advantages…we may be benefited by their folly.” 106 Florida had been returned to Spain by Britain as part of the treaty of Paris in 1783. The U.S. finally acquired it in the Adams-Onís treaty of 1819. Much of the U.S. westward expansion was, of course, into former Spanish imperial territory. 107 Warren Zimmerman, First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2002), 476. 108 At the same time, “President Wilson suggested an enlargement of the Monroe Doctrine to take in the whole world.” Letter of Elihu Root to Colonel House, August 16, 1918, in Edward M. House, The Intimate Papers of Colonel House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928), IV, 44.

44 What did change was the global strength and reach of the U.S. economy over the long course of 19th-century globalization. In the days of Washington and Jefferson, neutrality had mainly to do with freedom to trade on the high seas. That remained true a century later, but the

U.S. in 1914 was far more involved with foreign markets than it had been and the ties among national economies had expanded enormously. To stay neutral Wilson now had, for example, to prohibit wireless stations on U.S. soil from sending any communications which might not be neutral. He also prohibited J.P Morgan from making a loan to a belligerent state.109

The other great change was popular democracy itself, no longer the quirk of 13 prideful ex-colonies. From the second great American revolution against France in Haiti (1791) onward, democracy had become a revolutionary force in many of the European imperial holdings and more gradually in the home countries as well. The Holy Alliance was continually beset by popular movements (liberal, socialist, anarchist, nationalist, sometimes all at once) that aimed at increasing the political power of the individual or the oppressed class. The United States gained geopolitical soft power over this period simply by being itself and welcoming migrants from the

Old World to the improved social arrangements of the New. This process had long been one of

Wilson’s favorite themes. But it was acquiring implications. To stay out of battles among despotisms and imperialists — the core scenario of Washington’s farewell address and the

Monroe Doctrine — was one thing. To stay neutral as between democracy and tyranny (or imperialism, despotism, militarism, reaction) was another.

At first, though, Wilson did not see too great a difference between new-imperialist

Germany and the other belligerent powers, and neutrality meant that the U.S. could offer itself as a mediator — which Wilson did within a few days (August 4, 1914) of the beginning of the war.

109 The loan would have been to France. Notter, Origins, 320-324.

45 Such external balancing held a great appeal for the U.S., where public opinion was generally for neutrality. But the U.S. was not an overgrown Switzerland; its credibility as a mediator extended from its democratic openness but also from its economic power and military potential, that is, its capacity for enforcing the results of a mediation. There was in addition an international-law aspect: international peace movements, in which many Americans played active parts across the

19th century, had long advocated arbitration of disputes as an alternative to war. Arbitration, of course, required neutral arbiters and, more complicatedly, arbitration enforcement.110

Wilson’s insistence on neutrality was less a retreat from power than the assertion of a particular type of it: the power to shape the aftermath of war. The U.S. could, apparently, stand at some remove from the “international system” of competing states engaged in an ever-shifting balance of power; the U.S. would be protected and legitimated by its own latent power.

However, given that the U.S. was seen by Britain and Germany alike as the rising power and potential global hegemon, neutrality could look like deferred opportunism or even cynicism. All sides knew that the U.S. could be the only clear winner in the conflict, and it would simply increase its margins by staying out as long as possible. It would take considerable effort to convince the U.S. that Germany was the aggressor, and a despotism, and therefore that the war was one of liberty against tyranny, the only sort of external war for which Americans, as British imperial renegades, had much ideological preparation.111

Wilson, at least, had leisure to think about the end of the war right from its beginning. In

August 1914 he was already in discussions with Charles Eliot and Stockton Axson about

110 The U.S. relationship to arbitration is discussed in Schake, Safe Passage, chapter 7. For a vivid sense of American involvement in the Europe-based peace movement, see J.A. Hobson, Richard Cobden: The International Man (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1919), much of which consists of the free-trade-advocate, peace activist and anti- imperialist Cobden in correspondence with movement allies in the U.S. 111 See, e.g., Watt, “America and British Foreign Policy,” 15-21.

46 establishing a postwar world in which nations should never again be able to acquire land by conquest, small nations should enjoy rights equal to those of large nations, armaments would be restricted, and nations would join in an association that would jointly punish any acts of aggression by a state.112 By January 1915, even Wilson’s rival Theodore Roosevelt was publicly advocating that “the efficient civilized nations” unite in “a world league for the peace of righteousness.”113

Wilson’s policy on not lending to belligerents started cracking in March 1915, after less than a year of conflict. The war was affecting demand for U.S. goods; there had to be enough currency abroad to pay for them. Wilson also began to warm somewhat to the belief that

Germany was not just a party to the war but its cause, or more accurately the vehicle for the workings of militarism: “in case Europe falls under the domination of a single militarist group,” he wrote in August 1915, “peace and democracy for our country are going to be in grave danger.

In case that seems obvious, I shall have to urge American intervention. We shall have to try to save democracy.”

That same month, Britain’s foreign minister, Sir Edward Grey, who had built a strong relationship with Wilson, held out the possibility of a League of Nations as a feature of

American peace mediation.114 Grey drew Wilson in over the course of the fall and winter, tying the U.S. postwar role in world peace to a U.S. willingness to engage first in “warring against war.” Wilson’s closest advisor, Edward House, was talking of the war as “a fight between democracy and autocracy” and of the need, from an “economic viewpoint,” to ensure good

112 Notter, Origins, 326-333. The specific idea of a League of Nations had been proposed in the first weeks of the war by G. Lowes Dickinson in Britain; the Bryce Group he formed would influence Wilson. As Notter writes, “Wilson’s own thinking on world order fitted the thought of the times.” Origins, 336. 113 Notter, Origins, 379. Roosevelt later changed his mind. 114 Notter, Origins, 432-433. Grey reiterated the League of Nations idea to Wilson in October. Notter, Origins, 446.

47 postwar relations with the U.S.’s not-quite-yet allies.115 By March 1916, House and Grey had agreed on a draft memorandum that would propose a peace conference; if the results were

“unfavourable” to Britain and its allies, then the U.S. would enter as a belligerent. Wilson himself added the qualifier “probably.” This particular proposal then went nowhere, but it was part of a pattern whereby the British were bringing the U.S. into the battle with a certain type of peace and a peacemaking role, one satisfactory and even attractive to Wilson, as an incentive.116

Wilson declared his own view of peace most forcefully that May of 1916 in a speech to the first national assembly of the League to Enforce Peace. Wilson undertook, in the spirit of strong leadership, to express “the thought and purpose of the people of the United States.” He said he would not speculate on the various goals of the belligerents. Rather he would insist that

“every people has a right to choose the sovereignty under which they shall live,” that small states deserved respect for their sovereignty just as large states did, and that “the world has a right to be free from every disturbance of its peace that has its origin in aggression and disregard of the rights of people and nations.” The U.S. was “willing to become a partner in any feasible association of nations formed in order to realize these objects.”117 This speech, given as Wilson’s re-election campaign quickened, was the clearest expression to date of Wilsonian internationalism and, in that it offered a way out of the cycle of victory and defeat, the basis for his promise to keep the U.S. out of the war.

In the autumn of 1916, Britain’s Foreign Office prepared a lengthy memo outlining a postwar settlement. The document was strikingly Wilsonian though without Wilson. It argued that for a peace to be durable “it should give full scope to national aspirations as far as is

115 Notter, Origins, 449. 116 Notter, Origins, 493-495. 117 Notter, Origins, 521-523.

48 practicable. The principle of nationality should therefore be one of the governing factors… We have been guided by the consideration that peace remains the greatest British interest. The most direct way to this end is, of course, to arrest the race in armaments, which has gone on increasing for the last forty years. This object can be best achieved by means of general arbitration treaties…Another element, of course…will be the creation of a League of Nations, that will be prepared to use force against any nation that breaks away from the observance of international law.”118

Wilson did not deliver his 14 Points for postwar peace until January 8, 1918, but the ideas in them were already entrenched in sections of the British foreign office by late 1916.119 (Soon even many Germans were quite willing to consider a Völkerbund.120) This is not to say that

Wilson’s own ideas and inclinations were uninfluential. On the contrary, they decisively shaped the diplomatic effort to bring the U.S. into the war as the only possible enforcer of a Wilsonian peace, and they shaped perceptions on both sides of the war, and indeed around the world, of what an end to the war could and ought to be.121

118 David Lloyd George, Memoirs of the Paris Peace Conference (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939), I, 11- 12, 20-21. 119 For a fair-minded summary, see George W. Egerton, “The Lloyd George Government and the Creation of the League of Nations,” The American Historical Review 79:2 (April 1974), 419-444. 120 Tooze, The Deluge, 221-224. Acceptance of Wilson’s 14 Points, the last of which featured the League of Nations, was stated in Germany’s first Peace Note of October 7, 1918. The prospect of a Wilsonian, League peace was crucial to Germany’s otherwise unexpected decision to quit fighting. See e.g. A.C. Umbreit, “The Peace Notes — The Armistice — The Surrender,” Marquette Law Review 3:1 (1918), 3-8. 121 Eyre Crowe’s October 1916 memo critiqued the League from a balance-of-power perspective. “These arguments,” Egerton writes, “appealed especially to those in imperialist and military circles and the right wing of the Conservative party, who saw security after the war resulting from a continuing Anglo-French alliance and a consolidated British Empire. The Morning Post repeatedly made the point that the only feasible leagues of nations were the Allies presently fighting the war and the nations that made up the British Empire.” Egerton, “The Lloyd George Government,” 425.

49

Lloyd George: Bringing the Empire on Board

This broad drift toward a League of Nations coincided with a more specific but, as it turned out, related drift within British governance toward more power for the executive and greater sovereignty for the colonies. Soon after August 1914, many in Britain developed doubts about the fitness of its government for managing the war. British government had long been considered

“government by amateurs,” which now looked like a liability in the face of a rising Germany’s government by experts. British Cabinets had reached an unwieldy size. Meanwhile, the self- governing “white” dominions of South Africa, Canada, New Zealand and Australia had become steadily more vigorous in economic and military terms, as had non-self-governing India; their desires for autonomous power correspondingly grew, yet they had no constitutional (in the unwritten British sense) position beyond attendance at a few Imperial Conferences. Both the

Liberal government in 1915 and the Coalition government in 1916 had not wrestled with these issues very successfully, which was a principle reason why David Lloyd George challenged the

Coalition government and, in December 1916, replaced it. He immediately created a five- member War Cabinet, which featured men (such as Lord Alfred Milner) with expertise but no political support in the popular or democratic sense — and, for the first time in British cabinet history, two cabinet members (Milner and Arthur Henderson) held no office at all, requiring special legislation in order to be paid.122 A prime ministerial secretariat was created to enable the

122 Robert Livingston Schuyler, “The British War Cabinet,” Political Science Quarterly 33:3 (Sept. 1918), 384. Lloyd George was known to be skeptical of the Foreign Office: “The fact was that Lloyd George remained unimpressed by the Foreign Office and when he needed advice he much preferred that of Philip Kerr and Maurice Hankey.” M. L. Dockrill and Zara Steiner, “The Foreign Office at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919,” The International History Review 2:1 (Jan. 1980), 57, 65.

50 War Cabinet to coordinate the work of government departments. Maurice Hankey, an extremely able bureaucrat, was the secretary (and would manage to keep the position for 22 years). One of his two assistant secretaries was Leo Amery, who boasted to the Australian prime minister that the new Cabinet had “swept away altogether the old system which you saw working at the very height of its inefficiency when you were over here of twenty-three gentlemen assembling without any purpose and without any idea of what they were going to be talking about, and eventually dispersing for lunch.”123 Lloyd George found the War Cabinet such an agreeable political instrument that he would continue it even after the war.

This new government with its new methods also represented the return of Milner’s

Kindergarten,124 which had been so effective as the empowered think tank behind South African union. The Kindergarten had been in the political wilderness, although Lionel Curtis, Philip

Kerr,125 and other of the Africa comrades had made the best of the situation by founding in 1908 the Round Table as an extension, on a global scale, of the study-group methods (“Moots”) they had pioneered in South Africa. The Round Table had corresponding societies across the Empire and in the United States. (The person later responsible for Africa and colonial matters in

Wilson’s own think tank, known as The Inquiry, was George Louis Beer; he was the author of

The English-Speaking Peoples: Their Future Relations and Joint International Obligations as

123 John F. Naylor, A Man and an Institution: Sir Maurice Hankey, the Cabinet Secretariat and the Custody of Cabinet Secrecy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 29. Naylor writes (32) that “the Prime Minister’s Secretariat represented another attempt by the radical innovator, David Lloyd George, to create a means around the departmentalism and traditions of the old order.” Not all traditions were abandoned. Boyish nicknames, for example: Hankey was known, inevitably, as Hanky Panky. 124 Naylor describes them as “a band of young, able and aggressive men who for more than a decade had looked to the lead of Lord Milner, now a member of the War Cabinet.” Naylor, A Man and an Institution, 30. 125 Kerr’s position as Lloyd George’s gatekeeper at the Paris Peace Conference was deeply resented by the Foreign Office. Dockrill and Steiner, “The Foreign Office,” 65-68. There was some justification to the charge that Kerr (assisted by Lionel Curtis) had, in effect, moved the Foreign Office to his own wartime redoubt, a wooden structure built in the prime minister’s garden at 10 Downing Street. Lloyd George, Memoirs, I, 172-173. Also MacMillan, Paris 1919, 42; Naylor, A Man and an Institution, 31-33; Michael Hughes, British Foreign Secretaries in an Uncertain World, 1919-1939 (New York: Routledge, 2006), 24-26. Kerr would eventually serve (1939-1940) as UK ambassador to the U.S.

51 well as the chief American representative of the Round Table.126) In 1910 the group founded its journal, The Round Table: A Quarterly Review of the Politics of the British Empire.127 The

Round Table was a small but global group of men — no longer just Englishmen — with a shared technocratic vision of building a next-generation British Empire, at the very least, and perhaps a broader world order based on the Empire’s lessons learned. Lloyd George wrote in 1919 that the

Round Tablers were “a very powerful combination — in its ways perhaps the most powerful in the country. Each member of the Group brings to its deliberations certain definite and important qualities, and behind the scenes they have much power and influence.”128 He was, more than most, in a position to know.

Lloyd George’s innovations were just beginning, for there remained the challenge of somehow integrating the self-governing dominions (all, except South Africa, with white majorities) and India. Britain’s enthusiasm for growing its Empire, or even maintaining it, had waned well before the war, but its desire to remain a global power at the head of a planet- straddling polity of friendly, and even lucrative, semi-sovereigns remained strong.129 And from a

126 George Louis Beer, African Questions at the Paris Peace Conference (New York: MacMillan, 1923), xvii-xviii. The Inquiry was created in 1917 but was clearly envisioned by Edward House as early as 1915 in discussion with Britain’s foreign minister. Lawrence F. Gelfand, The Inquiry: American Preparations for Peace, 1917-1919 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 8. For a revealing contemporary review of The English-Speaking Peoples see David Saville Muzzey, “America and the British Commonwealth,” The Standard (New York), IV:1 (Oct. 1917), 139-40. 127 It is now published as The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs. 128 Erik Gildstein, “The Round Table and The New Europe,” The Round Table 346 (April 1998), 181. Ties between the Inquiry team and the British delegation led to a proposal to establish an Anglo-American institute on world affairs, with branches in London and New York. To a significant degree this updated and extended the Round Table network; the initiative came from Lionel Curtis. At the founding meeting Lord Robert Cecil opened, followed by the American General Tasker Bliss. In addition to Round Table figures like Curtis, Kerr, Cecil, John Latham (head of Australian Naval intelligence) and George Louis Beer, the initial talks gathered Eyre Crowe, James Brown Scott, Whitney Shepardson, Archibald Coolidge, James Shotwell, and Lord Eustace Perry, among others. These meetings eventually led to the formation of the Royal Institute for International Affairs (RIIA, often known as Chatham House) and, in the U.S., the Council on Foreign Relations. James Shotwell, At the Paris Peace Conference (New York: Macmillan, 1937), 346-347, 367-368; Gildstein, “The Round Table and The New Europe,” 177-189; Morefield, Empires Without Imperialism, 132. See also Lloyd George, Memoirs, I, 171. 129 Lloyd George: “Personally I was not anxious to add any more millions to the number of square miles we already found much difficulty in garrisoning and a still greater difficulty in developing.” Lloyd George, Memoirs, I, 32. According to Isaiah Bowman, Wilson said, while sailing to Paris in December 1918, “England herself was against

52 practical war-fighting point of view, Lloyd George recognized that he needed the wealth and manpower of India and the self-governing colonies if Britain was to prevail. As the winter of

1916-17 began, a desperate Britain had little choice but to expand its geopolitical franchise in order to survive. Thus in December 1916, just after taking office, with pacifist sentiment rising at home and defeat following defeat in the field,130 Lloyd George created the first Imperial War

Cabinet — with the British War Cabinet at its center — increasing the utility to Britain of the

“Dominions and India, who had been such loyal and valuable partners throughout the conflict,” in exchange for enhancing their sovereignty.131 On the afternoon of March 12, 1917, Jan Smuts, standing in for South Africa’s Prime Minister Louis Botha, arrived in London from South Africa to join the Imperial War Cabinet and help direct the war.132 Eight days later, at the Imperial War

Cabinet’s first meeting, Lloyd George said of the British Empire, “This war is already making it a great democratic commonwealth which will exercise a real, a beneficent, and I think a permanent influence upon the course of human affairs. It is becoming more and more consolidated without in the least impinging on the freedom of the constituent parts.”133

further extension of the British Empire.” Quoted in David Hunter Miller, The Drafting of the Covenant (New York: G.P. Putnam’s, 1928) I, 42. 130 This was how Lloyd George later described his situation. Lloyd George, Memoirs, I, 26-27. 131 Lloyd George, Memoirs, I, 24; MacMillan, Paris 1919, 44-45. Lloyd George laid it on thick at the Imperial War Cabinet’s first meeting: “The Allies are depending more and more upon the British Empire. … The sense that we are getting more and more behind them is giving them most of their courage, and that sense is increasing. … I say at once we could not have done it without the help the Empire has given us. It is impossible in words to describe our sense of gratitude…” Confidential Papers, National Archive of Great Britain, Procès-Verbal of the First Meeting of the Imperial War Cabinet, held at 10, Downing Street, S.W., on Tuesday, March 20, 1917. 6 [12 of the online file] http://filestore.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pdfs/large/cab-23-43.pdf 132 Keith Arthur Berriedale, War Government of the British Dominions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921), 28. 133 Confidential Papers, National Archive of Great Britain, Procès-Verbal of the First Meeting of the Imperial War Cabinet, 4 [10 of the online file]. http://filestore.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pdfs/large/cab-23-43.pdf

53

Smuts Goes In: The Rise of the Dominions

Smuts had come to London fresh from victory directing imperial troops against German forces in

German Southwest Africa and then German East Africa.134 Since his conversion from armed enemy of Britain to ally following defeat in the second Boer War, Smuts had applied gentle but constant political pressure toward a greater role for the self-governing colonies of the empire, as did his old Kindergarten friends at the Round Table.135 He continued to press the conversion of the empire into a commonwealth and a model for all the world. As C.P. Scott, editor of the influential Manchester Guardian, recorded in his diary after first meeting Smuts, “He identified himself completely and naturally with Britain and British interests, always speaking in terms of the larger unity to which he applies the term Commonwealth rather than Empire.”136

Smuts was the only dominion subject with a regular and direct role in the conduct of the war. When the Imperial War Cabinet broke after a month of deliberation at the beginning of May

1917, Smuts remained behind in London as a new member of the British War Cabinet, so recognized in War Cabinet minutes beginning in September.137 This was even odder than having

Milner and Henderson in the prime minister’s Cabinet “without portfolio,” since Smuts was not quite representing South Africa (though he was, rather nominally at this juncture, its minister of

134 The land mass of the latter was alone greater than that of Germany itself. 135 Jeanne Morefield traces the intellectual relationship between Smuts and the Round Table in Empires Without Imperialism, 184-192. 136 David R. Woodward, “The Imperial Strategist: Jan Christiaan Smuts and British Military Policy, 1917-1919,” South African Military History Journal 5:4 (Dec. 1981). http://samilitaryhistory.org/vol054dw.html 137 By early October he had advanced to head the War Priorities Committee, which adjudicated among the different armed forces’ munitions needs. Among the other four members of the committee was Winston Churchill, who had first met Smuts in South Africa. Confidential Papers, National Archive of Great Britain, Minutes of a Meeting of the War Cabinet held at 10 Downing Street, S.W., on Monday, October 8, 1917, at 11:30 a.m. 6 [174 of the online file] http://filestore.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pdfs/large/cab-23-4.pdf Smuts would also be a member of the Inter-Ally (later Inter-Allied) Council, which was set up at American request.

54 defense), much less all the self-governing colonies, nor was he a minister or representative of the

United Kingdom. He was simply Smuts. But Lloyd George prized him, as he did Milner, in part because they, like he, did not hesitate to think of and express new ideas and policies. So Smuts served very actively on the core War Cabinet until the peace, even though he was not described as an official member.138 His main contributions, apart from numberless specific taskings, committee assignments and studies, were two in number: acting as an emollient shaper of consensus on the main war-aims dispute within the cabinet; and synthesizing American and

British views on a League of Nations such that the Americans, mainly meaning Wilson, would be fully engaged in forming and guaranteeing the peace.

These two were tightly related. When Lloyd George became prime minister in December

1916, there appeared to be a switch in British policy away from seeking a negotiated peace and toward securing total victory over Germany and the Central Powers, with a view toward eventually dictating terms of capitulation rather than negotiating terms of peace.139 Wilson, as we have seen, had been committed from the beginning of the war to mediating its end, and despite some commonplace reflections on Prussian absolutism140 was not drawn to attributing unique blame for the conflict to Germany or any other party. This fit with his deeper understanding of the conflict as not due, in its essence, to one or another flawed state but to a broader system of needless and destructive state competition: “Nothing in particular started it,” he said in late 1916,

138 Berriedale, War Government, 30. Smuts’s son writes: “There was only provision for six members; my father was the seventh, a sort of minister without portfolio, but with powers equal to the others. In truth, it was impossible to legalize or define his position, because he was still Minister of Defence of South Africa and not a British Minister. …. In the fine informality of the British system he was just a member of the War Cabinet, supreme military tribunal of Britain. He was also the only colonial sitting on that body.” Smuts, Smuts, 186. See also “To D. Lloyd George, Vol. 20, no. 207,” Smuts Papers, IV, 25. 139 Seth Tillman, Anglo-American Relations at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 3-5. 140 Notter, Origins, 42, 45-46.

55 “but everything in general.”141 When the war began, Wilson had even hoped that it would deadlock, as that might show all nations “the futility of employing force in the attempt to resolve their differences.”142 There must be, he would tell the U.S. Senate on January 22, 1917, “not a balance of power, but a community of power.”143

Even when he did warm to the idea of German war responsibility, Wilson stuck to the conviction that it was almost beside the point: for him, neither total responsibility nor total victory was quite possible. To the Senate he advocated “peace without victory.”144 The war problem was systemic and needed a systemic solution. Therefore he was concerned that the new government under Lloyd George seemed committed to a “knock-out blow” and complete

German surrender.145

When, following the change of British government, Smuts had joined Lloyd George’s new Imperial War Cabinet and the British War Cabinet, he made it clear that he, like Wilson, but unlike many British leaders, did not believe in total victory. Neither Smuts nor Lloyd George was a prisoner of consistency in the years that followed, but Smuts stuck to this belief just as

Lloyd George tended his own truculence, and it is striking that they worked so well together.146

One reason is that Smuts, wholly free of political commitments beyond South Africa and the

Empire taken as a whole, functioned well as a roaming general and diplomat in the ongoing factional struggle between “Westerners,” who wanted to focus on crushing Germany on the

Western front, and “Easterners,” who wanted to split off Germany’s allies and weaken the main

141 Woodrow Wilson, Oct. 27, 1916, quoted in Wolfers and Martin, The Anglo-American Tradition, 278. 142 Notter, Origins, 373. 143 Quoted in Tillman, Anglo-American Relations, 6. 144 Notter, Origins, 603. 145 Tillman, Anglo-American Relations, 4; Notter, Origins, 582-583; Kenneth O. Morgan, “Lloyd George and Germany,” The Historical Journal 39:3 (Sept. 1996), 759. 146 Lloyd George did, however, have a strong positive feeling toward German culture. Morgan, “Lloyd George and Germany,” passim.

56 power enough to force it to a brokered peace rather than a surrender. Typically, Smuts made a smooth transition from supporting one position (the Westerners’) to supporting the other.147 His enthusiasm for a settlement rather than total victory was consistent though and comported with his own experience: there were no total victories in South Africa.

Smuts applied his extraordinary energy and work ethic to winning the war but he was also playing a longer game of designing a world order of pacific relations between states large and small. Smuts drafted a note for the new Imperial War Cabinet on the League of Nations idea in spring 1917, soon after arriving in London. He drafted a memorandum on the League and other war aims for the prime minister on January 1, 1918. On October 21, 1918, Smuts was charged by the War Cabinet with preparing “a British brief for the Peace Conference consisting of a general statement of the British position in summary form.”148

On Nov. 14, 1918, three days after the German Armistice was signed, Smuts wrote to his wife, “The peace has come very suddenly, more suddenly than anyone expected. And the revolution in Germany has followed it and no one really knows what is happening….thank God the war at least is over. Now we are preparing for the Peace Conference. I am very busy putting our whole case in order for the Conference.”149

That evening, Smuts gave a speech to American newspaper editors gathered in London.

He began by stressing “the greatest, most fruitful fact of this great world crisis: the coming together of Europe and America. The old Europe, the old world is dead; what was left of it by the

French Revolution has been or will be swept away in this greatest of all revolutions through

147 An early and persistent Dutch nickname for Smuts among Boers was “slim Jannie,” connoting a slippery trickiness. Lloyd George had also earned a reputation for checking the political weather — not cynical, but supple. Wilson had called him a “slippery customer.” MacMillan, Paris 1919, 41. 148 Dockrill and Steiner, “The Foreign Office,” 58. 149 “Letter to S.M. Smuts,” Smuts Papers, IV,7.

57 which we have been.”150 Smuts thus neatly turned the four years of industrial-scale slaughter into an almost necessary phase of transformation from old world to new, the belated completion of the French revolution. The U.S. was the handmaiden of this final revolution, militarily and economically but also because of the “moral reinforcement which came from the splendid vision and moral enthusiasm of President Wilson speaking on behalf of the people of the United States.

His was the great vision of a League of Nations and of world organization against reaction and militarism in future.”151 Smuts did not know what would happen to Germany. (“[I]t is possible that the great racial homogeneity and the education and political discipline of Germany will in the end keep her from disintegration.”152) He also worried that post-imperial Europe “will be covered with small nations, mostly untrained in habits of self-government…and divided from each other by profound national or racial prejudices and antipathies, and all in a state of destitution. In most there is a resolute minority of alien race making for internal weakness.”153

He saw the proposed League idea as no longer in “cloudland” but as “an international organization which will to some extent take the place of the Great Powers which have disappeared and keep the peace among these smaller states,” though it might also make the U.S. or another developed nation a “mandatory” for territories, such as colonies, also in need of tutelage and protection on their way to self-determination. Smuts did emphasize, however, that

150 “Speech (1918) Box H, no. 27,” Smuts Papers, IV, 8. 151 “Speech (1918) Box H, no. 27,” Smuts Papers, IV, 10. 152 “Speech (1918) Box H, no. 27,” Smuts Papers, IV, 13. 153 “Speech (1918) Box H, no. 27,” Smuts Papers, IV, 14. This last line might or might not be a reference to Jews. Certainly European Jews had been the focus of a great deal of interstate negotiations on minority rights over the years and would continue to be in the Versailles talks on new states and minorities. The blaming of “internal weakness” on the existence of an “alien race” was a well-established trope, implying the desirability of removing that race as a step toward greater strength. Smuts (and, to a lesser degree, Wilson) were both sympathetic toward Zionism. On Smuts, see Gideon Shimoni, “Jan Christiaan Smuts and Zionism,” Jewish Social Studies 39:4 (Autumn 1977), 269-298. On Wilson, see Richard Ned Lebow, “Woodrow Wilson and the Balfour Declaration,” The Journal of Modern History 40:4 (Dec. 1968), 501-523. Attributing a racial problem to the simple presence of an unwanted minority race was, of course, a feature of Wilson’s thinking about black Americans, as it had been for many U.S. leaders, including Lincoln. Malcomson, One Drop of Blood, 201-202. Racial segregation and apartheid were both solutions to this “problem” as so construed.

58 ex-German colonies conquered by nearby British Dominions should be given to them to govern as they saw fit. He particularly had in mind South African annexation of formerly German South

West Africa and East Africa. As he wrote on Nov. 28 to Walter Long, the British secretary of state for the colonies, regarding a memo he had put together on the subject, “You will see there is nothing left about joint control, and a small concession is made about the League of Nations which might have the effect of securing the support of the United States to our holding on to these Colonies if our other lines of argument fail. Our Delegates will, of course, not make this concession until it becomes necessary to carry President Wilson with them.”154

Smuts had been given responsibility for coordinating government studies on the League and the anticipated peacemaking process, and he submitted a memorandum in December 1918.

In this memorandum, Smuts raised the fundamental question of whether the Empire should align itself principally with France (and the balance-of-power approach it tended to favor) or the U.S.

Smuts spoke firmly in favor of Anglo-American ties, emphasizing that Wilson’s clear attachment to a League of Nations provided a means with which to enhance Anglo-American solidarity post- war, as Britain might “give form and substance to his rather nebulous ideas.”155 In introducing the memorandum to the Imperial War Cabinet, Smuts argued, “We must from the very start of the conference co-operate with America, and encourage and support President Wilson as far as is consistent with our own interests.... I suggest we could best signalize that co-operation by supporting President Wilson's policy of a League of Nations.”156

154 Smuts letter to Long quoted in William Roger Louis, “Australia and the German Colonies in the Pacific, 1914- 1919,” Journal of Modern History, 38:4 (Dec. 1966), 416. 155 Egerton, “The Lloyd George Government,” 426-427, 431. 156 George Curry, “Woodrow Wilson, Jan Smuts, and the Versailles Settlement,” The American Historical Review 66:4 (July 1961), 971.

59 One way to signalize cooperation with Wilson was to go ahead and write up a plan for him to follow. In the memorandum, later published as The League of Nations: A Practical

Suggestion, Smuts began by sketching a view of universal history: people gathered into nations, some of which succeeded in exceeding their bounds, gathering in other nations, and creating empires; all empires were in a sense leagues of nations. However, “Nationality over-grown became Imperialism, and the Empire led a troubled existence on the ruin of the freedom of its constituent nations.” The exception was the British empire, which once having transformed itself into “the British Commonwealth of Nations remains the only embryo league of nations because it is based on the true principles of national freedom and political decentralisation.”157

This was the goal toward which Smuts, the Milnerites, the Round Table, and many others had been working. The empire would be transformed, taken into the future and reunited with the

13 old colonies, now grown to adulthood. “The League,” Smuts argued, should be understood

“as the successor of the Empires” and “will succeed, if it takes itself seriously and looks upon itself, not as a merely nominal, but as a real live active heir to, the former Empires.” In doing so, the League should emulate the British Empire “as the nearest approach to the League of

Nations”: “In the British Empire the common policy is laid down at conferences of the Imperial

Cabinet, representing the United Kingdom, the Dominions and India, while executive action is taken by the individual Governments of the Empire. Where the British Empire has been so eminently successful as a political system, the League, working on somewhat similar lines, could not fail to achieve a reasonable measure of success.”158

Although they were coming at the problems from rather opposite ends, and did not know each other, Smuts and Wilson were in many ways reaching the same synthesis. What Smuts was

157 Jan Smuts, The League of Nations: A Practical Suggestion (London : Hodder and Stoughton, 1918), 9. 158 Smuts, The League of Nations, 26-30.

60 doing was taking the core (but unelaborated) idea of the new American hegemon, or at least of its president, and blending it with the current, indeed rather new, form of the British empire —

Smuts and the Boers had only laid down their arms in 1902, and the Imperial War Cabinet was itself short of two years old. The goal was not simply to preserve the Imperial Cabinet or the empire per se, but to, in a sense, bring the United States into it, or to transform it, necessarily together with the United States, into the League of Nations and the beginnings of a new and better world order.

“The future position of America in the world,” Lionel Curtis wrote that same December in an influential159 Round Table article called “Windows of Freedom,” “is the great issue which now hangs on the Peace Conference.”160 Curtis argued that balance-of-power politics had persisted throughout the 19th century and into World War One precisely because the U.S. had stayed outside of the game, determinedly aloof: “the balance of power outlived its time by a century…due to the unnatural alienation of the British and American Commonwealths” resulting from “the schism of 1775.”161 Echoing Cecil Rhodes’s own vision of decades before, Curtis saw the renewal of this expanded Anglosphere as the underlying geopolitical structure that would make the League of Nations work. It was a natural process of sorts, underpinning an ideal one.

Meanwhile, as Smuts and Curtis were publishing their reflections, Woodrow Wilson was sailing eastward across the Atlantic with a large retinue, including George Louis Beer, who found the president expounding on the League in ways that “demonstrated he had not gone into details — frankly said so — and that he had not thought out everything.” (Beer later noted that

159 William Roger Louis, Ends of British Imperialism: The Scramble for Empire, Suez, and Decolonisation (London: J.B. Tauris, 2006), 228. 160 Lionel Curtis, “Windows of Freedom,” The Round Table 9:33 (December 1918), 1. 161 Curtis, “Windows,” 12, 30; see also Smuts’s speech to American newspaper editors of Nov. 14, 1918, Smuts Papers, IV, 8-16.

61 “Wilson is strong on principles a sophomore might enunciate, but is absurdly weak on their application.”162) On board the George Washington, Wilson emphasized his preoccupation with the fate of the German colonies in Africa and the Pacific.163 There was no question of Germany retaining them, as the plan of German imperialism, in the American view, was to expand in

Africa and elsewhere at the expense of other European imperial powers, raising aggressive armies from among the colonial subjects, and otherwise fulfilling its self-assigned “world historic task of pitilessly destroying decaying culture.” The German empire was not only indignant about being late to imperialism and Great Power status, it wanted 18th-century imperialism. The British themselves were not altogether hostile to German imperialism in

Africa; they thought they could manage it.164 This was one more reason for Wilson to fear that even his closest allies would, in the end, keep European imperialism going under some other name. The difficulty was that Wilson himself could not imagine ex-colonies being immediately self-governing. After all, as everyone knew, the colonial borders were arbitrary and the colonial economies dependent, devoted to providing raw materials for use and refinement in the imperial center. This argued against immediate self-government. At the same time, it was important that these colonies not be simply divvied up among the victorious powers in a re-run of the African

162 Both quotes are in Louis, Ends of British Imperialism, 228-229. It is hard to know who was better at, or more dedicated to, mocking Wilson: his own team or the Europeans. Secretary of State Robert Lansing thought Wilson’s traveling to Paris itself was “one of the greatest mistakes of his career.” Robert Lansing, The Peace Negotiations: A Personal Narrative (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921), 23. Lansing’s memoir is a long and bitter threnody, culminating in ch. 8, where he relates that Wilson said “he did not intend to have lawyers drafting the treaty of peace….Being the only lawyer on the delegation I naturally took this remark to myself.” 107. 163 Louis, The Ends of British Imperialism, 229. Louis’s account is based on Beer’s diaries. As Curtis wrote, “There are no problems more calculated to provoke jealousies in peace between allies who have held together in war than those presented by German East Africa and by all the territories of the Middle East.” Curtis, “Windows,” 33. 164 The quote is from Professor Otto von Gierke, in Beer, African Questions, 49. Beer’s analysis in chapters six and seven of African Questions can be taken as representative of the U.S. view. He emphasized the degree of Anglo- German rapprochement on imperialism in Africa (47-48). But see also Lloyd George, Memoirs, I, 71-77.

62 carve-up at the Conference of Berlin (1884-85) or, indeed, the Great Power spoils system of the

1815 Congress of Vienna, which was much on people’s minds as the Paris conference neared.165

Wilson did not want to perpetuate imperialism. He wanted to bury it. The goal was to replace the empires, not preserve them. His insistence on freedom of the seas and an open door for investment were part of that. What these precisely meant, and what they were actually worth, would be much debated. The British saw freedom of the seas as meaning Britain’s freedom to sail where it willed and, if necessary, impair others’ freedom to do the same.166 The qualification that freedom of the seas should not necessarily extend to wartime did not help much: according to a British note, France’s President Georges Clemenceau said he “could not understand the meaning of the doctrine. War would not be war if there was freedom of the seas.”167 Similarly, an open door for investment meant little in the absence of investors. As Beer himself wrote, most colonial trade was with the imperial home; there were barriers of language and custom; the colonizers were usually entrenched; and in any case, “the question is not primarily economic.

Financiers were not competing to invest in Africa. Capital needed considerable coaxing before it could be induced to venture into such a speculative field as tropical Africa.”168 The deeper

165 Secretary Lansing, for example: “I examined Lord Robert’s plan for a League. … [H]e proposed the formation of a Quintuple Alliance which would constitute itself primate over all nations and the arbiter in world affairs, a scheme very similar to the one proposed by General Smuts. Lord Robert made no attempt to disguise the purpose of his plan. It was intended to place in the hands of the Five Powers the control of international relations and the direction in large measure of the foreign policies of all nations. It was based on the power to compel obedience, on the right of the powerful to rule. … It seemed to provide for a rebirth of the Congress of Vienna which should be clothed in the modern garb of democracy. It could only be interpreted as a rejection of the principle of the equality of nations. Its adoption would mean that the destiny of the world would be in the hands of a powerful international oligarchy possessed of dictatorial powers.” Lansing, The Peace Negotiations, 88-89. 166 This was sometimes called the “right of blockade.” House claims to have let a British visitor know (Paris, Oct. 27, 1918) that the U.S. and other nations were not more disposed to have Britain dominate the seas than Germany the land, and the U.S. was ready to build a preponderant navy if needed. “We had more money, we had more men, and our natural resources were greater. Such a programme [of naval buildup] would be popular in America and, should England give the incentive, the people would demand the rest.” Edward M. House, The Intimate Papers of Colonel House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928), IV, 160. This threat was renewed the next spring. 167 Lloyd George, Memoirs, I, 43. 168 Beer, African Questions, 219.

63 purpose of the open door was to prevent security competition among larger powers for the resources and labor of less-developed countries and territories; if all had legal guarantees of access, then a major cause of Great Power war might be removed. In spirit, it was part of universalizing the Monroe Doctrine, which would itself be written into the final League covenant.169

In practical terms, the key question really was: Who would govern Germany’s former colonies in Africa and the Pacific? According to Charles Seymour, taking notes aboard the

George Washington, Wilson “explained his hope that territories conquered from the enemy, especially in backward portions of the world, should become the property of the League.

‘Nothing stabilizes an institution so much,’ he said, ‘as the possession of property.’ He argued at that time that these territories should be administered not by the Great Powers but by the smaller states, mentioning the Scandinavians in particular.”170 It would not prove to be so simple. The question of who would govern Germany’s former colonies was among the most difficult at the

Versailles conference, precisely because it involved the interests of the proto-League, the British

Dominions — the anticipated building blocks of the new world order. And beneath this issue was a still more profound question: What would be the role, if any, of “race” in the construction of the new League order? This was a question that Wilson and Smuts were uniquely positioned to answer.

169 Smuts and Botha were both committed to a Monroe Doctrine for Africa, “to protect it against European militarism.” Beer, African Questions, 61. There was also much talk of a Monroe Doctrine for the Pacific, where Germany’s other colonies were and where Japan was expanding its empire. See W.J. Hudson, Billy Hughes in Paris: The Birth of Australian Diplomacy (Melbourne: Thomas Nelson, 1978), 57; Peter Spartalis, The Diplomatic Battles of Billy Hughes (Sydney: Hale and Ironmonger, 1983), 55-65; Shizuka Imamoto, “Racial Equality Bill; Japanese Proposal at Paris Peace Conference; Diplomatic Manoeuvres, and Reasons for Rejection” (Macquarie University, 2006), 50-51. 170 House, Intimate Papers, IV, 54, fn. 1. Seymour was a member of the American delegation and later edited House’s memoirs.

64

The Wilson-Smuts Synthesis

Wilson was the first to speak of equality of races and racial self-determination in reference to the

League of Nations and a Wilsonian peace. The idea’s proximate roots seem to have been in the

“Magnolia draft” of the League covenant, written in July 1918 by Edward House at Wilson’s request and based on an official British text submitted to the UK government on March 20, 1918, by a Committee on the League of Nations chaired by Sir Walter Phillimore (and known as the

Phillimore Plan).171 House significantly altered this plan in preparing the Magnolia draft, among other things adding (Article 20) the idea that boundaries were after all not immutable and were subject to “such territorial modifications, if any, as may become necessary in the future by reason of changes in racial conditions and aspirations, pursuant to the principle of self- determination.”172 In his cover letter to Wilson, House said this was to ensure that the League’s giving of territorial guarantees would not be “inflexible.” Canada, he wrote, “might sometime wish to become a part of the United States. It is also a possibility that Chihuahua, Coahuila or

Lower California might desire to become a part of this country.”173

Race had made its first, quiet appearance. It is not recorded what race House thought the aspiring Canadians or Mexicans might belong to. He was using the term in the way common at the time, the way Smuts would use it in his Nov. 14 speech to the American editors when he referred to the power of German racial homogeneity, the “national or racial prejudices” that hampered self-government in some parts of Europe, or the “alien race” that had caused internal

171 Miller, Drafting of the Covenant, I, 3. 172 Miller, Drafting of the Covenant, II, 10. 173 Miller, Drafting of the Covenant, I, 14.

65 weakness here and there on the Continent.174 House, like Smuts and Wilson, envisioned the

League as an impartial sorter of racial antagonisms. (Smuts hardly exempted himself, as he concluded his speech with exemplary reference to the reconciliation of Boer and English races in the imperially brokered Union of South Africa.) Race was a term applied to ethnicities, religious communities, tribes, “nations” and transnational groupings (the European race, Arabs) as well as to the still less precise groupings of black, yellow, and white and their quasi-synonyms

(Caucasian, Asiatic, Negro).This was the common meaning of race at the time, and the debates on racial issues at Versailles don’t make much sense without it, nor, finally, does the League itself. In this very specific sense, the League was about racial segregation. That was part of the meaning of self-determination; and it was the meaning of racial self-determination with which

Wilson and Smuts had been familiar throughout their lives.

Smuts’s preservation, in his celebrated Practical Suggestion of December 1918 and subsequently, of the right of some Dominions to annex their neighboring, newly ex-German colonies required some careful balancing among the various meanings of race. At the outbreak of war, the Germans in their colony of South West Africa had exploited racial ties to help stir

Boers, with their German inheritance, against the British. Smuts and Louis Botha put down an internal rebellion and then conquered the German force in South West Africa before moving on to German East Africa. Smuts and Botha often reminded the British that they had got the Boers to set aside racial ties in favor of the greater imperial and global good.175 But that type of racial reconciliation operated alongside other racial dynamics, as may be seen in a Nov. 18, 1918, letter from O.C. Olivier, a wealthy ostrich farmer and Cape politician, to Smuts, urging him to “use your great talents especially in the discussions relating to the former German territories in South

174 As cited supra: “Speech (1918) Box H, no. 27,” Smuts Papers, IV, 10, 13-14. 175 This was a calculated political risk for both men, who were seen as excessively pro-British by many Boers.

66 West and East Africa.” Would it not, Olivier wondered, be possible to “make provision for the different Native [South African] races in such portions of the former German territories as are not so suitable for a white population? Provision would also, of course, have to be made in the conquered territories for the existing coloured peoples, so that each race can inhabit a different portion separately….[I]s it possible to cherish a more beautiful image than a South Africa populated up to the Zambesi with a strong white nation, unhindered by friction with the coloured races and the bitter feelings that spring from it?”176

Wilson was greatly influenced by Smuts’s Practical Suggestion. It had vision and moral grandeur, as well as coherent proposals. It was a post-imperial, in parts even anti-imperial,177 manifesto from a highly respected imperial statesman of great influence. That was very welcome, given that the hunger of the imperial Dominions for postwar territorial self- aggrandizement was already legendary. As Edwin Montagu put it, with some irritation, after a series of special pleadings back in November from various members of the Imperial War Cabinet seeking new lands, “it would be very satisfactory if we could find some convincing argument for not annexing all the territories in the world.”178

“I have just returned from the King’s dinner,” Smuts wrote in a private letter on Dec. 27,

1918, “where I had a good talk with Wilson. He is reading my paper…My paper has made an enormous impression in high circles….It would have been adopted as our official programme for the [peace] conference but for the objection of W.M. Hughes [Australia’s prime minister]. But it was officially voted that it be given to Wilson to read to see our point of view!”179 Smuts’s view

176 “From G.C. Olivier, Vol. 20, No. 101,” Smuts Papers, IV, 19-20. 177 Morefield, Empires Without Imperialism, 172. 178 Lloyd George, Memoirs, I, 70. 179 “To M.C. Gillett, Vol. 20, no. 258,” Smuts Papers, IV, 34. Smuts was not alone in claiming parentage of the League. House is notorious for giving the impression, in his edited Intimate Papers and diaries, that all of Wilson’s good ideas were his own. In just one entry (Jan. 8), House refers to “the League of Nations Covenant as the President and I had written it,” going on to refer to the then current draft as being in substance the “covenant which I

67 of the League as “the heir to the Empires” had captured Wilson’s imagination: “This clever and attractive phrase,” Secretary of State Lansing later wrote, “caught the fancy of the President, as was evident from his frequent repetition and approval of it in discussing mandates under the

League.” Indeed Lansing believed that it was due to Smuts’s influence that the first draft of

Wilson’s League covenant had been amended to read, “As successor to the Empires, the League of Nations is empowered, directly and without right of delegation, to watch over the relations inter se of all new independent states arising or created out of the Empires.”180

Parts of Smuts’s Practical Suggestion were copied onto the Wilson-House Magnolia draft. While there were many hands on the various drafts of the League of Nations Covenant, it was all but entirely an Anglo-American product, with some input from France and Italy.181 The

Anglo side of the negotiation was handled chiefly by Lord Robert Cecil and Smuts, but with

wrote at Magnolia” and then “much improved over the Magnolia document.” These three contradictory statements could only coexist happily in the mind of House. Lloyd George’s massive two-volume Memoirs of the Peace Conference is another parental claim, although Lord Robert Cecil in his diary entry of Jan. 20, 1919, records that Lloyd George “did not want to talk about the League of Nations at all, in which he takes no real interest.” Cecil himself gives the impression that most of the hard work was done by him, in constant correction of a wayward Wilson and a distracted Lloyd George. Cecil even remarks (Jan. 31) that Smuts “apparently wishes to leave the great bulk of the negotiations on the League in my hands,” which was emphatically not the case. House Diaries, entry for Jan. 8, 1919, PWW, vol. 53, 693-694; Lord Robert Cecil, Notes on the Formation of the League of Nations (British Library, Ref. 73372-H02) 25, 45. Cecil’s Notes are online at the British Online Archives as part of the collection The Papers of Lord Robert Cecil, 1917-1924. 180 Lansing, The Peace Negotiations, 82-83; Millin, General Smuts, II, 180 181 The Phillimore report had been made available to Wilson and House in 1918. Wilson had House write an American version, although House seems to have exceeded Wilson’s instructions. House wrote to Wilson on July 14, 1918, that he had “spent yesterday and to-day in formulating a draft of a Convention for a League of Nations.” He claimed both that he had set the pre-existing British version aside “to keep from getting entangled with their plan,” and that once he had finished his own and compared, “several of the Articles of the British were incorporated as a whole.” House told Wilson that it would be best to launch this U.S. version to the public “without consultation with any foreign government and so state in your announcement,” so as to associate the League closely with Wilson himself, “to let thought crystallize around your plan instead of some other,” and to minimize non-American influence. This was the first “Magnolia draft,” named for the Massachusetts town where House wrote it. The draft was not publicized, neither was it shared with allies. Wilson discussed alterations to it with House on a visit to Magnolia on August 15, 1918. During that visit, according to House, Wilson “concluded that if a governmental report was made by any of the Allied nations at this time it would inevitably cause more or less friction and would increase the difficulties of getting a proper measure through at the Peace Conference.” The U.S. also prevailed on Britain to keep its own plan secret. House, Intimate Papers, IV, 27, 38, 49-52. See also Curry, “Wilson, Smuts,” 972-973. Wilson did not trust the British and kept his plans to himself into January 1919. Lloyd George, Memoirs, I, 114-115.

68 significant input from the Dominion premiers, Massey of New Zealand, Borden of Canada, and

Hughes of Australia, as well as Botha from South Africa: in short, the Imperial War Cabinet.182

The goal was to have a draft ready before the official League commission met.183 Despite

Wilson’s famous advocacy of “open agreements openly arrived at,” all of these discussions were secret, and the meetings (beginning Feb. 5, 1919) of the broader League commission were closed.

The Wilson-Smuts synthesis was very considerable, but not complete. A part of Smuts’s

Practical Suggestion that was not copied over to Wilson’s first Paris draft was the contradiction at its heart: that everyone should be self-determining except those people whose lands South

Africa, Australia and New Zealand wished to annex. Unlike Smuts, Wilson included these former German colonies within the general League mandate scheme.184 But he also went much farther. Because Wilson believed 13 was a lucky number, his first Paris draft, presented to the

American Commission in Paris on January 10, 1919, stopped at article 13,185 but it had an additional six supplementary agreements, much of which was drawn directly from Smuts’s original Practical Suggestion.186 The first read: “In respect of the peoples and territories which

182 Maurice Hankey emphasized bringing the white-settler Dominions into world government, writing excitedly to his wife on Jan. 14, 1919, of “a great scheme of Imperial development which I have actually carried out,” namely that the Imperial War Cabinet would effectively be transferred to the Versailles peace negotiations, with the Dominions both working with the British Empire and working for themselves, as effectively sovereign states. “I have actually started a great Imperial Office,” Hankey continued. “It is at this moment in existence. I have tried to do this for six years but circumstances have always blocked it. But I know that Milner favors it. I got the P.M. to agree.” Maurice Hankey, The Supreme Control of the Paris Peace Conference 1919 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1963), 26. 183 Cecil: “We did not make very much progress beyond an agreement that it was desirable that the English and Americans should settle between them their policy on the League of Nations before they met with their Allies.” “Entry for Jan. 8,” Cecil, Notes, 4. 184 Wilson had a typescript made of Smuts’s proposals (as distinct from the rhetoric and analysis of the larger Practical Suggestion) for reference. Unlike the full pamphlet, this typescript did not have the German-colonies carveout; it did not mention them at all. “A Memorandum,” PWW, vol. 53, 515-519. 185 House Diaries, entry for Jan. 8, 1919, PWW, vol. 53, 694. 186 The text is in many places, including as an annex (281-294) to Lansing, The Peace Negotiations, and with David Hunter Miller’s suggestions in Miller, Drafting of the Covenant, II, 65-93. It can be seen in typescript with Wilson’s edits in PWW, vol. 53, 655-676.

69 formerly belonged to Austria-Hungary, and to Turkey, and in respect of the colonies formerly under the dominion of the German Empire, the League of Nations shall be regarded as the residuary trustee with sovereign right of ultimate disposal of or continued administration in accordance with certain fundamentals hereinafter set forth; and this reversion and control shall exclude all rights or privileges of annexation on the part of any Power.”

The exclusive power of the League to govern these territories was expressed again and again –“reserve to the League complete power of supervision and of intimate control” — along with the absolute right of their peoples to self-determination: “in the future government of these peoples and territories the rule of self-determination, or the consent of the governed to their form of government, shall be fairly and reasonably applied.” Any governance of these territories other than “their own self-determined and self-organized autonomy shall be the exclusive function of and shall be vested in the League of Nations.” If the League appointed a mandatory agent, whenever possible it “shall be nominated or approved by the autonomous people,” who would also have “the right to appeal to the League for the redress or correction of any breach of the mandate.” Mandatories would also be required to ensure “fair hours and humane conditions of labour,” a new addition. Finally, in the event of the creation of new states, the League would require them, as a condition of recognition of their independence, “to accord to all racial or national minorities within their several jurisdictions exactly the same treatment and security, both in law and in fact, that is accorded the racial or national majority of their people.”187 This was Wilson’s own addition.188 The distinctive border-adjustment language on “changes in present racial conditions and aspirations” was also retained (Article 3) from the Magnolia draft

187 In a Jan. 13 letter to the Italian prime minister, Wilson called this “one of the fundamental covenants of the Peace.” “To Vittorio Emanuele Orlando,” PWW, vol. 54, 50. 188 Bonsal, Unfinished Business, 20; House Diaries, entry for Jan. 8, 1919, PWW, vol. 53, 694.

70 of Wilson and House. Wilson did still want the League to be the “successor to the Empires”

(supplementary agreement 4) — but not their perpetuator. This first, secret draft of the League of

Nations covenant was the full Smuts-Wilson synthesis and the logical expression of that

Wilsonianism that had stirred the world.

This was a major problem for Smuts. His “clever and attractive phrase” (Lansing) was maybe too clever. Smuts had made it very clear in the Practical Suggestion that “the German colonies in the Pacific and Africa are inhabited by barbarians, who not only cannot possibly govern themselves, but to whom it would be impracticable to apply any ideas of political self- determination.”189 Wilson apparently disagreed. Smuts did not see Wilson’s first Paris draft immediately, and wrote in a Jan. 15 letter that “Wilson has read my pamphlet carefully, and the

Prime Minister says he is now beginning to talk enthusiastically of this scheme and will probably end by giving it to the world as his own!”190 On the 18th, he writes that Wilson “seems to accept my programme whole-heartedly.”191

That evening, however, Wilson sent him the new draft.192 The next day, Smuts wrote with some anxiety that Wilson had put together “a scheme which is practically my twenty-one paragraphs with some alterations, which are most unfortunately not improvements but the reverse.”193

189 Smuts, Practical Suggestion, 15. 190 “To A. Clark, Vol. 98, no. 55,” Smuts Papers, IV, 43. 191 “To M.C. Gillett, Vol. 22, no. 194,” Smuts Papers, IV, 47. 192 Edith Benham Diary, Jan. 18, 1919, PWW, vol. 54, 149. 193 “To M.C. Gillett, Vol. 22, no. 195,” Smuts Papers, IV, 48.

71

Wilson Undone

Smuts’s own soaring anti-imperial language, represented as having the backing of Great Britain and all her Dominions, was now being applied by Wilson to the wrong target: the people of

South West Africa and East Africa and formerly German Middle Africa, the people of formerly

German New Guinea and Samoa, and inhabitants of the Central Pacific island states of the

Marianas, Carolines, Palau and the Marshalls. When Wilson presented this draft on Jan. 19, Lord

Cecil, whose team had been busily preparing its own version, thought he could find a way out of the tangle:

[Wilson] received us very cordially, and immediately produced his scheme for the League of

Nations, which we went through clause by clause. It is almost entirely Smuts and Phillimore combined, with practically no new ideas in it. … I began by treating him with the utmost deference, and got very little out of him. Then I began to press rather more strongly, and found that answered much better. He is, if one may say so, a trifle of a bully, and must be dealt with firmly, though with the utmost courtesy and respect — not a very easy combination to hit off. He is also evidently a vain man, and still with an eye all the time on the American elections. He was very anxious therefore that the scheme which we should work on should be, nominally at any rate, his scheme, and did not mind that in actual fact it was very largely the production of others.194

194 Cecil, Notes, 24.

72 Smuts spent that evening of the 19th with Cecil and Wilson until 11:30 going over the draft.

According to Smuts, Wilson made it clear he “is entirely opposed to our annexing a little

German colony here or there, which pains me deeply and will move Billy Hughes to great explosions of righteous wrath.”195 Smuts was right. Wilson’s second Paris draft (printed Jan. 21) incorporated comments from a number of Americans but kept intact the passages on the empowerment of ex-colonials, including those in former German colonies.196 The “successor to the Empires” phrase was deleted. Wilson apparently sent the new draft to Smuts with a note saying he would “look forward to cooperating with you in perfecting it.”197

On January 21, David Hunter Miller, an American attorney and Wilson backer who had worked with House on League-related questions since the previous summer, was sent to hammer out a draft with Cecil.198 Miller had not thought much of the stubborn insistence on “no annexations,” since, as he pointed out, the mandatory powers for the former German territories would almost certainly be France, Japan, the U.S. and Great Britain, all of whom as League

Great Powers would have “an absolute veto over criticism of their actions.” Miller didn’t see why this was “spoken of as not annexation.”199 But the Dominions would not have that same veto power, and Britain wanted its self-governing Dominions to be in the League as independent members — this, along with keeping the Great Powers as the exclusive ruling Council, was really Britain’s main priority in the negotiations, as it was the key to taking the Imperial or

Commonwealth model and transforming it into the League, while also (at least in theory)

195 “To M.C. Gillett, Vol. 22, no. 197” (Jan. 20, 1919), Smuts Papers, IV, 46-49. Margaret Clark Gillett was a botanist and social reformer. 196 The second Paris draft is in PWW, vol. 53, 138-148. None of the American commenters objected to the uses of the word “racial.” 197 PWW, vol. 54, 147-148. 198 Cecil called Wilson’s draft “a very bad document, badly expressed, badly arranged and very incomplete.” Cecil, Notes, 28. 199 Miller, Drafting of the Covenant, I, 46-47.

73 fattening Britain’s vote bank in League debates. The British also insisted that the Dominions be consulted during the open peace-treaty debates on matters of concern to them. This gave the

Dominions a very strong hand. Cecil wrote little in his diary about the Miller meeting, except to note “I pressed him [Miller] on one or two points on which the President’s draft differs from ours, and found him very amenable.”200

Meanwhile, Wilson spent the evening with a British writer, A.G. Gardiner, and when they came to discussing the mandates issues Wilson said that was “the principal objection from

America. Ingrained in us was our national dislike to acquiring new territory that is outlying and he [Wilson] instanced the Philippines as a case of which the American national thought that we were impatient of the time when we could give them autonomy.”201

Smuts was in a most difficult position. The following day, Cecil charged him and the delegation’s League of Nations Section, in particular Eustace Percy, to come up with their own version of Wilson’s text, taking out whatever they didn’t like. “I also had some talk with Smuts about the position of Mandatory States,” Cecil wrote in his diary. “He is very nervous as to the effect of any language which will tie the hands of the Dominion authorities. He evidently thinks that they are out for annexation pure and simple” – Smuts was just the person to know – “and that the least they will accept is some decent veil for that process.”202 Smuts and Cecil spoke again on the 23rd and the 24th, by which time Smuts suggested telling the Americans that agreement was being reached. Cecil didn’t like that idea: “It is no use concealing the fact that though on broad principle we agree with the Americans most of their details seem to us now wrong, though a large proportion of them have been taken from our previous suggestions.”203

200 Cecil, Notes, 28. 201 Edith Benham Diary, Jan. 21, 1919, PWW, vol. 54, 197. 202 Cecil, Notes, 30. 203 Cecil, Notes, 34.

74 Cecil, Percy and Smuts were in the strange position of trying to get Smuts’s own language scrubbed from the League of Nations Covenant.

According to Cecil, Prime Minister Lloyd George found it very amusing that “the

Colonials have been making for annexation” and “even Smuts” had had to oppose the

Americans. Cecil himself told his League group that he “was very afraid of the imperialism of the Dominions”204 and sent Lionel Curtis off to calm the not-quite-subjects. Over several days, the British worked up their draft, bringing Miller on board and trying to keep the Colonies, and

Australia’s Billy Hughes in particular, from getting militant. In a meeting with the Dominion premiers on Jan. 24, Lloyd George said he thought the peace conference should “treat the territories enumerated as part of the Dominions which had captured them,” an idea with which the Dominion premiers heartily agreed. None of the Dominions had ever had their own colonies.

Canada’s prime minister, Borden, spoke up for the Dominions as “autonomous nations within an

Empire which might more properly be called a League of Nations. He realized that the British

Empire occupied a large portion of the world, but the prejudice raised by the word ‘empire’ might be dispelled by considering the matter from the angle he had just suggested.” This idea,

Hankey writes in his set-piece on the meeting, “brought down the curtain on the first appearance of the Prime Ministers of the Dominions on the international stage.”205

It was not the last; the pressure on “the imperialism of the Dominions” just kept growing, because on the 22nd the Council of Ten (heads of state and foreign ministers of the five victorious powers: US, Britain, France, Italy and Japan) had voted to put the League Covenant in the peace

204 Cecil, Notes, 35. 205 Hankey, Supreme Control, 55-58; PWW, vol. 54, 254.

75 treaty itself, a decision insisted on by Wilson.206 This decision was ratified in a wider plenary on

January 25th.207 The question of Dominion territorial claims therefore could not be put off.

Miller and Cecil spent two hours alone together on the 25th trying to harmonize the

Wilsonian and British positions, notably on mandates. Miller spent much of the next day, a

Sunday, putting together a compromise covenant, keeping at it until one in the morning on the

27th.208 Cecil meanwhile sent yet another emissary to “bring [Billy] Hughes to reason, which he

[the emissary] thought could only be done by hitting him, as he put it, between the eyes.”209

Cecil and Miller met late on the morning of Monday the 27th, and spent over three hours trying to reconcile the various versions. They went to visit House at 4:15, with House “believing that even my [Cecil’s] proposals…did not go far enough; whereas I understand the Dominion Ministers think they go a great deal too far.”210

That afternoon of the 27th, meeting with the Great Powers and the Dominion premiers,

Wilson argued that a League mandatory system was necessary because of “the feeling which had sprung up all over the world against annexation.” Hughes countered that “there was nothing to be gained by the mandatory system that could not be got by direct government, except that the world was said to dread annexation.”211

Cecil didn’t see how they could have the Dominions annexing colonies without the talks bringing them all “practically again to the atmosphere of the Congress of Vienna.” Yet the

206 His main reason was political: his opponents back home wanted to have a peace treaty to accept and a League to reject. The difficulty was that the countries with an interest in the peace would negotiate it very differently with the League established than they would without it. Miller believed the difference was between a peace based on a global assumption of a U.S. return to isolation, or one based on an assumption that U.S. isolationism was at an end. The latter, under the right conditions, was Wilson’s chief goal. See Miller, Drafting, I, 100. 207 Efforts to do the peace treaty first and the League covenant later, advocated by Secretary Lansing among others, were rejected. Miller, Drafting I, 77-79. 208 Miller, Diaries, I, 91-93. 209 Cecil, Notes, 37. The entry is for Jan. 26. 210 Cecil, Notes, 38. 211 PWW, vol. 54, 291-301; Hankey, Supreme Control, 58-59.

76 Australians and South Africans (as well as New Zealand) were “kicking very much against the application of the mandatory principle to the territories in which they are interested.” Hughes and

New Zealand’s Massey were for rejecting the mandate system altogether.212 By the 28th, Hankey noted, “the temperature. … had risen considerably.”213 Wilson explained that the challenge was to prevent “the assignment of mandatories, if they were to be the Great Powers, from appearing to the world as a mere distribution of the spoils”214 — the Congress of Vienna problem. The empowerment of the Dominions made the problem very considerably worse.

Characteristically, Smuts then offered a solution, known as the Smuts Resolution. Miller later noted “a considerable variance between the Smuts Plan [the earlier Practical Suggestion language] and the Smuts Resolution. In [originally] proposing the idea of Mandates, General

Smuts had expressly excluded its application to ‘the barbarians’ of Africa. Now, however” — thanks to Wilson — “they were to be within the principle,” so the new Smuts Resolution

“introduced for some of these ‘barbarians’ the Mandates in their mildest and most milk and water form, that nearest to the annexation which Smuts desired, what we now call ‘C’ mandates.”215 The Smuts Resolution was, in essence, a way to classify the various ex-colonies in order to have a League mandates program and still get the Dominions and Japan the annexations they wanted. It was heatedly discussed and irritably (on the part of the Dominions concerned) accepted by the British delegation when they met on Jan 29. Wilson also saw it that morning, with a note attached from House: “L.G. [Lloyd George] and the colonials are meeting at 11:30 and this is a draft of a Resolution that Smuts hopes to get passed. He wants to know whether it is

212 Cecil, Notes, 39. The entry is for Jan. 28. The League of Nations Commission was established during this second plenary session. 213 Hankey, Supreme. Control, 60. 214 PWW, vol. 54, 330; U.S. Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States: The Paris Peace Conference, 1919, Volume III, 771. 215 Miller, Drafting, I, 104-105; for a carefully detailed account of the formation of C-class mandates, see Spartalis, Diplomatic Battles, 132-134.

77 satisfactory to you. It seems to me a fair compromise.” Wilson seemed to find the Smuts

Resolution acceptable, “if the interpretation were to come from General Smuts….My difficulty is with the demands of men like Hughes.”216

The Council of Ten heard from Smuts on the morning of the 30th. He presented the resolution with elaborate humility — it “is far from admirable, it is not grammatical, and it is anything but coherent” — while insisting, rather extraordinarily, that it aimed at “the ultimate self-government of all peoples, without distinction as to race, religion, or color, or previous condition of servitude.”217 Smuts may have been extemporizing; color and previous condition of servitude had not previously been part of the debate.

Lloyd George had spent two days working on the Dominion premiers, urging them “not to take the responsibility of wrecking the conference.”218 But Hughes was lying in wait. What followed was, in Lloyd George’s recollection, “the only unpleasant episode of the whole

Congress.”219 Wilson was “ruffled and irritable”:

His demeanor toward the Dominion Premiers was hectoring and occasionally in addressing Mr.

Hughes he was inclined to be dictatorial and somewhat arrogant. Mr. Hughes was the last man I would have chosen to handle in that way. … [Wilson] dwelt on the seriousness of defying world opinion on this subject. Mr. Hughes, who listened intently, with his hand cupped around his ear so as not to miss a word, indicated at the end that he was still of the same opinion. Whereupon the President asked him slowly and solemnly: “Mr. Hughes, am I to understand that if the whole

216 PWW, vol. 54, 347; Tillman, Anglo-American Relations, 94. 217 Tillman, Anglo-American Relations, 92-95; Bonsal, Unfinished Business, 35. Cecil thought little of the Smuts Resolution, writing in his diary that it “will make the Dominions, and particularly the Australians, very ridiculous, if no worse.” Cecil, Notes, 41. 218 Lloyd George, Memoirs, I, 357. 219 Lloyd George, Memoirs, I, 359.

78 civilised world asks Australia to agree to a mandate in respect of these islands, Australia is prepared still to defy the appeal of the whole civilised world?” Mr. Hughes answered: “That’s about the size of it, President Wilson.” Mr. Massey grunted his assent...220

It then fell to Louis Botha to find some common ground among these white polities (plus Japan) as they quarreled over which non-white polities they might allow themselves to rule. Botha looked back to the aftermath of the second Boer war, when there had been four different polities

— two Boer, two British — each with a type of self-government. Each was jealous of its powers; but Botha saw that they would all best survive by uniting and putting aside the small things for the higher ideal. “On that occasion,” the British note records Botha saying, he “had asked his colleagues to stick to one thing, to aspire to the higher ideal, and that was the Union of South

Africa. They must give way on the smaller things. He would like to say the same on this occasion.”221

The fever broke; Smuts’s resolution seemed to be on its way, although Wilson described it to Miller after the vote “as not going as far as he had hoped.”222 Despite Smuts’s mention of self-government, all of that powerful language — his own earlier words — was now gone. The

Imperial War Cabinet had, in a sense, proved its point, its worth and its power, advancing its own interests against the leaders of the two greatest powers in the world, Britain and the United

220 Lloyd George, Memoirs, I, 359-360. Hankey’s extensive notes on the morning and afternoon sessions are in PWW, vol. 54, 350-378. 221 Lloyd George, Memoirs, I, 359-360. 222 Miller, Drafting, I, 114; PWW, vol. 54, 379.

79 States.223 South Africa, Australia and New Zealand (and Japan) got their small things, their very own more-or-less-colonies.224

Clemenceau had one quibble with the reference in the Smuts resolution to not arming people in mandated territories except for police purposes and defense. He wanted to preserve

France’s ability to levy colonial armies in the event of a future attack from Germany. Colonial troops had been as important to France as they had been to Britain.225 Lloyd George explained that the proposal aimed to prevent “the kind of thing the Germans were likely to do, namely, organize great black armies in Africa.” He said that “so long as M. Clemenceau did not train big

Negro armies for purposes of aggression…he was free to raise troops. M. CLEMENCEAU said that he did not want to do that. …PRESIDENT WILSON said that Mr. Lloyd George’s interpretation was consistent with the phraseology.” Lloyd George was disappointed that the

U.S. did not itself take on mandates in Africa: “They probably apprehended that, if they undertook the government of millions of Negroes in tropical Africa, it might create some complications with their own coloured population.” But then he had been disappointed that he

223 See Hankey, The Supreme Control, 63: “At the six meetings described above the representatives of the Dominions had made their first appearance to defend their rights at a great international conference. …They gave the assembled statesmen of the five Great Powers a magnificent example of how the British Empire does its business, by holding to its ideals and subordinating them to the smaller things, as Botha had done. That is a lesson for all nations to this very day. In no manner could the Dominions have demonstrated more strikingly that they had reached full nationhood.” 224 Lloyd George later wrote, “It will be noted that this is the first occasion on which the Dominions accepted responsibility for the government of territories outside their own frontiers. Three out of four thereby established little empires of their own within the greater Empire of which they are an integral part. Their readiness to do so was a great relief to all those who, like myself, felt that the British Empire, with its vast distances, its immense territories, its endless problems and its infinite variety of races and languages, was becoming too great a burden for a small island like ours ever to govern efficiently and develop adequately without more definite assistance from the Dominions.” Lloyd George, Memoirs, I, 367. 225 Clemenceau had been forced to give some political rights to Senegalese colonial subjects in exchange for troops. Tooze, The Deluge, 227.

80 could not convince Canada to take over the British West Indies. The empire was just getting to be too much. It was time for the offspring, perhaps including India, to take up the burden.226

Miller joined with a British lawyer, Cecil Hurst, to put together a draft which the new

League of Nations Commission could debate and vote on. Hurst had already prepared language for various sections and Miller took most of it on. Wilson’s two references to racial equality — in the case of border adjustments and new states — disappeared. The anti-imperial language was gone too. There was no mention of empires at all. Wilson, Cecil, House and Miller met on the evening of Jan. 31, and Wilson spoke “very freely” (per Miller) about the Covenant drafting, while Cecil recorded that Wilson “had read nothing, but he did know something about the subject, though not perhaps very much.”227 Miller records that he spent seven hours the next day,

Feb. 1, trying to incorporate Wilson’s latest responses and agreeing on the changes with Hurst.228

Yet none of the older language was restored. All reference to self-determination, autonomy, or equality of races — to self-government, empire or race in any sense, much less “color and previous condition of servitude” — was gone. They printed their draft and Miller delivered it to the president on the evening of Feb. 2.229

He didn’t think it was very good, as Miller discovered later that evening: “The President said that he did not like the paper very much; that the British seem to have taken a good many things out, some of which he thought were important. He then took the original draft as a basis of

226 Lloyd George, Memoirs, I, 363, 367-368, 32; PWW, vol. 54, 367-368. Miller: “‘The British Empire is big enough’ is the way that this sentiment [of popular British dislike for acquisitions] was reflected among some of the most responsible British representatives at Paris.” Miller, Drafting, I, 104-105. There was a serious proposal to have former German East Africa be governed by India. Shotwell, At the Paris Peace Conference, 159; Gelfand, The Inquiry, 237; Beer, Africa Questions, 61-64, 439-442. 227 Miller, Diaries, I, 102; Cecil, Notes, 48; PWW, vol. 54, 407-408. 228 “I conferred with Mr. Hurst at his office concerning the revised draft Covenant in accordance with President Wilson's instructions of the previous evening.” Miller, Diaries, I, 103. 229 Miller, Diaries, I, 104. This is known as the Hurst-Miller Draft and is reproduced as Document 274 in Miller, Diaries, IV, 354-357. It is also in PWW, vol. 54, 433-439.

81 discussion and went over it, making certain changes and approving some of the changes which the British had made. He then asked me if it could be recast with these changes and printed. I told him that this could be done in time for the meeting the next day.”230 By “original draft”

Miller meant Wilson’s own second Paris draft, which they, together with House, refashioned into a third Paris draft. The call for equality of majority and minority races was back; the idea that a new state might be created to accommodate racial aspirations was not.231 References to self- government, self-determination, and autonomy remained deleted, as did any reference to the end of empires. But while this third Paris draft of Wilson’s did not re-import all of Smuts’s old language, it did assert the authority of the League in what might have mattered most to Wilson:

“The degree of authority, control, or administration to be exercised by the mandatory State or agency shall in each case be explicitly defined by the [League] Executive Council in a special

Act or Charter which shall reserve to the League complete power of supervision, and which shall also reserve to the people of any such territory or governmental unit the right to appeal to the

League for the redress or correction of any breach of the mandate by the mandatory State or agency or for the substitution of some other State or agency, as mandatory. The object of all such tutelary oversight and administration on the part of the League of Nations shall be to build up in as short a time as possible out of the people or territory under its guardianship a political unit which can take charge of its own affairs, determine its own connections, and choose its own policies. The League may at any time release such people or territory from tutelage and consent to its being set up as an independent unit.”232 Wilson’s third Paris draft also introduced language for representing non-Great Powers directly on the Council. In Wilson’s mind, judging both from

230 Miller, Diaries, I, 105. 231 Miller had always disliked that clause, “as the drawing of boundaries according to racial or social conditions is in many cases an impossibility.” Miller, Diaries, II, 71. 232 The text of Wilson’s third Paris draft is Document 284 in Miller, Diaries, IV, 380-386.

82 context and from Miller’s letter233 to him of Feb. 3, this draft was fundamentally an attempt at compromise on the mandates question; Wilson essentially accepted the deletion of two of

Smuts’s old paragraphs, the ones with ringing endorsements of self-determination, but insisted on restoring most of a third, which is the text quoted above.234

On Wilson’s order this draft was printed up overnight. Wilson thanked Miller for the rapid work, adding “I hope with all my heart that it will serve as the basis of the work of the

Drafting Commission”: the inaugural meeting of the League of Nations Commission was that same day, Monday, Feb. 3.

But this new draft never quite made it to the Commission. Sir William Wiseman had learned of the new draft, as had Cecil. Wiseman called House and told him that Cecil was

“greatly perturbed.”235 House proposed that he and Wilson meet with Cecil prior to the inauguration of the Commission. Cecil records that after “one or two agitated interviews with

Wiseman, Smuts and others, I went down at 2:15 to the [Hotel] Crillon to meet House and the

President. I did not conceal my severe disappointment.”236 Cecil writes that the president, “who was a little apologetic in manner,” backed down and agreed to revert to the old Hurst-Miller draft. House writes that the president “showed considerable nervousness both during the conversation with Lord Robert Cecil and afterward in the general meeting over which he presided.”237 Wiseman recorded in his diary that the president, chairing the opening of the

233 Document 286 in Miller, Diaries, IV, 387. 234 Miller had also substituted the Smuts Resolution language on mandates for some of the old language of the supplementary agreements, “in accordance with my understanding of your [Wilson’s] directions.” There does not appear to be any other record of this or other understandings between Wilson and Miller. Wilson had written in by hand an application of the principle of self-determination to apply to all not-yet-autonomous states. That too did not survive. This is the point at which self-determination, as a phrase, disappears from the League Covenant. PWW, vol. 54, 441-458. 235 House Diary, entry for Feb. 3, PWW, vol. 54, 459-460; House, Intimate Papers, III, 302. 236 Cecil, Notes, 51; PWW, vol. 54, 460-461. 237 House Diary, entry for Feb. 3, PWW, vol. 54, 459-460.

83 Commission at 2:30, “had then to keep the meeting going with a speech while Miller went round to his office and got enough copies of the old draft to be handed round.”238

That was the end of it. None of the old language, including “self-determination,” ever returned to the covenant. Wilson had been out-maneuvered and intimidated into backing down.

He was finally able to end his speech when the old draft arrived.239

The Racial Equality Clause

Racial equality, and in a sense self-government, did make one more appearance in the League of

Nations debate. Japan had been thinking about racial equality for some time.240 When the

Japanese diplomat Viscount Ishii visited Edward House in Massachusetts in July 1918, House had presented him with a choice: he felt Japan had not yet decided between following the

German path of imperial militarism or the American path. “I pointed out,” House wrote to

238 “From the Peace Conference Diary of Sir William Wiseman,” entry for Feb. 3, 1919, PWW, vol. 54, 461; Miller, Memorandum, 347-349. The reversion to the Hurst-Miller draft took Miller by surprise. 239 “I could not help thinking,” House wrote, “that perhaps this room would be the scene of the making of the most important human document that has ever been written. It certainly will be the greatest if we do our work well.” House Diary, entry for Feb. 3, PWW, vol. 54, 460; House, Intimate Papers, III, 303. The language of the three Wilson Paris drafts on representation of smaller powers in League governance was revived in succeeding days and provided the basis for an eventual settlement of that contentious issue. The mandates language was not revived. 240 The main English-language treatments of Japan’s racial-equality proposals are a master’s thesis — Shizuka Imamoto, “Racial Equality Bill; Japanese Proposal at Paris Peace Conference; Diplomatic Manoeuvres, and Reasons for Rejection,” Macquarie University, 2006 (republished as Rejection of Racial Equality Bill by Notion press in Chennai, 2018) — and an earlier doctoral dissertation by Naoko Shimazu, “The Racial Equality Proposal at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference: Japanese Motivations and Anglo-American Responses” (Magdalen College, University of Oxford, 1995). Shimazu’s thesis was later republished as a book, Japan, Race and Equality: The Racial Equality Proposal of 1919 (London: Routledge, 1998). Both scholarly papers make extensive use of Japanese sources. See also Sean Brawley, The White Peril: Foreign Relations and Asian Immigration to Australasia and North America, 1919-1978 (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1995); Paul Gordon Lauren, “Human Rights in History: Diplomacy and Racial Equality at the Paris Peace Conference,” Diplomatic History 2:3 (1978), 257-278; Paul Gordon Lauren, Power and Prejudice: The Politics and Diplomacy of Racial Discrimination (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1996 [1988]), second edition, 82-107; Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 284-309; Tillmann, Anglo-American Relations, 300-304; MacMillan, Paris 1919, 306-321.

84 Wilson, “the advantage to his country of following the international ideals set forth by you. If

Japan would do this, I thought she would find America ready to help her extend her sphere of influence.” According to House, Ishii thought this was good advice, expressing interest in how

“the foundation of your [Wilson’s] policy was justice to all nations.” Ishii went on to note that

Japanese, whose numbers at home were becoming unmanageable, were being prevented from emigrating to Siberia. House said the US would support a “more liberal policy” and expressed his view to Wilson that “unless Japan was treated with more consideration regarding the right of her citizens to expand in nearby Asiatic, undeveloped countries, she would have to be reckoned with—and rightly so.”241

House’s and Ishii’s mild language obscured some truly combustible themes. The demographic expansion of non-white peoples — the “rising tide of color” — had been a theme of popular literature in Europe, the U.S. and the white-settler colonies since the 1890s.242 Like the Boers in the 1850s, white populations in various parts of the world were developing a fear of being submerged, in this case by unwanted non-white migrants. At the same time, the clock did seem to be running out on that European dominance, by force of arms, of the rest of the world that had been such a feature of geopolitics since the 1870s. Those who had been overwhelmed by this 19th-century expansion, this rising tide of whiteness, understandably saw little of “justice” in it, perhaps none less so than the Japanese and Chinese. Japan’s defeat of Russia’s imperial forces in 1904-05, the second major defeat of a European imperial army following Ethiopia’s defeat of

Italy at Adwa in 1902, put Japan at the head of this apparently emergent global class of the

“colored.”

241 “Two Letters from Edward Mandell House,” July 6, 1918, PWW, vol. 48, 540-541. 242 See, for example, Lauren’s able summary, Power and Prejudice, 50-81.

85 Such leadership was not wholly divorced from the will to power. Japan came to

Versailles with a racial-equality proposal as a priority, along with securing certain rights on the

Shantung peninsula (at the expense of China) and possession of the German ex-colonies strung across the central Pacific. It promoted these claims as a proven ally of the British empire. Japan’s industrialization in the 19th century, and especially the construction of its fleet, had been undertaken with British capital and the strong cooperation of the British military. Japan had been a formal ally of Britain since the signing of their treaty of Anglo-Japanese Alliance in 1902.

Japan’s joining the Entente powers was shaped by this alliance, and Japanese forces fought both independently and alongside the British in evicting German forces from the Pacific theater and defending Australia, New Zealand and other British imperial entities from German aggression.

Japan’s initial proposal (October 1918), prepared for the anticipated postwar peace conference, read: “The equality of the nations being a basic principle of the League of Nations, the High

Contracting Parties agree that concerning the treatment and rights to be accorded to aliens in their territories, they will not discriminate, either in law or in fact, against any person or persons on account of his or their race or nationality.” The language was rooted in requests dating to at least 1914 that Japanese be treated equally in British colonies.243

Migration by Chinese and Japanese to the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand had become an important political issue in the last decades of the 19th century. It was not on a large scale, but it touched on the perennial conundrum of these settler societies: keeping the cost of labor high enough to protect the culture of political and social equality and opportunity that made these fissiparous societies at least somewhat governable, as well as attractive to emigrants from the old country; but also keeping the cost of labor low enough, and the supply of it high enough,

243 Imamoto, “Racial Equality Bill,” 2, 4.

86 to develop the territories at a rate of return that attracted foreign, chiefly British, investment, and over time deepen the domestic capital market and bring more autonomous development. The solution to this dilemma of having both cheap and expensive labor at once was often to delimit one social group as “free labor” and another as unfree or less free; to empower or enfranchise the first group, and disempower or suppress the second; and to establish some sort of marker that would make the two groups distinguishable one from the other. This marker was very often

“race.” The most important distinction to be marked and defended was, of course, the most desired one: freedom, or individual self-determination. This status of free self-determination had, in the British settler colonies and elsewhere, become closely associated with the concept of being white; indeed, social freedom and autonomy was much of the content of whiteness. Free and white became very nearly synonyms. There were always exceptions: in North America, there had been free Africans from very early on, and free Africans with African slaves, and free indigenous peoples with African and native slaves; there had been indentured Englishmen; Australia had been conquered and settled with the labor of unfree British convicts. But the existence of exceptions might only have strengthened the rule over time. It did not undermine it. The association of whiteness and freedom was the key. Whiteness did not really need to mean more than that.244

Non-whiteness had just as little content to it. It was a condition. Someone from northeast

Asia or the Cape of Good Hope could be equally non-white or “colored.” The main characteristic of non-whiteness was a lower wage, whether accepted voluntarily (given that the wage back home was even lower) or involuntarily. The fear among the free white citizenry was of having its social bargaining power undermined by the presence of cheaper, non-white labor or

244 See Bell, Reordering the World, 370-371.

87 entrepreneurs. So the state of California, which tolerated low-wage Chinese labor when it needed infrastructure built, put up restrictions on Chinese immigration when its only result seemed to be downward pressure on white wages. (When California became a state it had opted to exclude slavery and, to a degree, free non-white labor.245) Californian pressure led Congress to pass the

Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. Three years later Canada passed a Chinese Immigration

Restriction Act. The Australian colonies, not yet united, had been experimenting with different kinds of Chinese exclusion laws since 1855. Policies were harmonized in 1888 and extended to other “Asiatic” people at an inter-colonial conference in 1896.246 “The colonial legislation of

1896,” Lake and Reynolds write, “encoded for the first time the division of the world into white and non-white.”247 This became the cornerstone of the policy known as White Australia.

Australia’s legislation was directed mainly at Chinese and was effective. The Chinese population in Australia and New Zealand decreased from 1881 to 1891.248 But such legislation, as it became common throughout the white-settler colonies, was a problem for the empire. As

Joseph Chamberlain, then secretary of state for the colonies, explained at a meeting in June 1897 of all the empire’s colonial premiers, gathered in London to mark the Queen’s Jubilee: “We quite sympathize with the determination of the white inhabitants of these Colonies who are in comparatively close proximity to millions and hundreds of millions of Asiatics that there shall not be an influx of people alien in civilization, alien in religion, alien in customs, whose influx, moreover, would most seriously interfere with the legitimate rights of the existing labour population…[B]ut we ask you also to bear in mind the traditions of the Empire, which makes no

245 Malcomson, One Drop of Blood, 292-303. 246 Imamoto, “Racial Equality Bill,”42-43. 247 Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, 145. 248 Arthur Reginald Butterworth, “The Immigration of Coloured Races into British Colonies,” Journal of the Society of Comparative Legislation 2 (1897), 344.

88 distinction in favour of, or against race or colour; and to exclude, by reason of their colour, or by reason of their race, all Her Majesty’s Indian subjects, or even all Asiatics, would be an act so offensive to those peoples that it would be most painful, I am quite certain, to Her Majesty to have to sanction it.” Chamberlain stressed that India was Britain’s “brightest and greatest dependency” and included men “who are every whit as civilized as are we ourselves, who are, if that is anything, better born in the sense that they have older traditions and older families.”249

This somewhat self-interested imperial call to anti-racism was met with yet more

Dominion legislation against a still broader range of “coloured races.” Some of the new laws received royal assent but all were problematic in terms of Chamberlain’s concerns. The artful solution, which Chamberlain had himself alluded to, was in legislation by the South African colony of Natal, which had required immigrants to pass a “dictation test” of 50 words in a

European language to be selected by the interviewer. Since the interviewer was empowered to select any such language he liked, including Scottish Gaelic or Italian, the rule in effect allowed immigration to be controlled with complete arbitrariness. This was the path chosen for the 1901 bill that was the main legal sanction for the White Australia policy.250 White Australia was a leading policy of Australia’s first national government and adhered to by all political parties.251

From a British point of view, racial exclusion was now unfortunately turning into foreign policy. As we have seen, the war made it clear that Britain had become dependent on both India and the white Dominions for its own survival as an empire and perhaps even as a nation — the support of the American ex-colony being the other crucial factor. It had also become somewhat dependent on Japan for its own security in the Pacific, including the security of White Australia,

249 Butterworth, “The Immigration of Coloured Races,” 348. 250 Butterworth, “The Immigration of Coloured Races,” 351-353. 251 Imamoto, “Racial Equality Bill,” 49.

89 New Zealand, Tasmania and other regional dependencies, all of whom themselves feared that the

Mother of Nations might see their interests as secondary to those of Japan. They had good reason: in 1894, Britain proposed to its colonies an Anglo-Japanese treaty whereby Japanese would have had a right to reside in, and enjoy free commerce and navigation among, the British territories.252 As the Straits Times editorialized, the worry was not so much race in itself — if indeed that is a meaningful category — as that the Japanese would “settle on the soil and compete with Australian producers at such cheap rates that [successful] rivalry becomes almost impossible….Trade advantages cannot countervail the accompanying disadvantages of cheap

Japanese labour competition against the colonial working classes.” The colonies all rejected the proposed treaty.253

From the Japanese point of view, British dependence on Japan could be leveraged for its own imperial, territorial gain, but Japanese leaders, and the Japanese public, also thought it might be used to somehow vitiate, or at least meaningfully weaken, this solidifying geopolitics of race.

The day after Wilson’s humiliating abandonment of his own draft for the League, two Japanese diplomats visited House.

Baron Makino and Viscount Chinda came for advice concerning what Japan had best do regarding the race question. There is a demand in Japan that the Peace Conference through the League of Nations should express some broad principle of racial equality. Chinda and

Makino do not desire to bring it up themselves if they can avoid doing so. I advised them to

252 Imamoto, “Racial Equality Bill,” 44. 253 One Australian MP both racialized and de-racialized the competition point, saying of Japanese migrants: “‘We are not afraid of them on account of their vices, but on account of their virtues….More energetic men you cannot find. These men are the Scotchmen of the East, and some action should be taken to regulate them.” Imamoto, “Racial Equality Bill,” 45,48. Billy Hughes, in 1901, had said in Parliament that “no white man can compete with our cheap, industrious and virtuous, but undesirable Japanese and Chinese friends.” Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, 149.

90 prepare two resolutions, one which they desired, and another which they would be willing to accept in lieu of the one they prefer. I promised I would then see what could be done.

I was interested to hear Chinda and Makino say: “On July 8th at Magnolia you expressed to Viscount Ishii sentiments which pleased the Japanese Government, therefore we look upon you as a friend, and we have come for your advice.”

I took occasion to tell them how much I deprecated race, religious or other kinds of prejudice. I insisted, however, that it was not confined to any one country or against any particular class of people. I found prejudice existing among the Western peoples against one another as well as against Eastern peoples. I cited the contempt which so many Anglo Saxons have for the Latins, and vice versa. I thought this was one of the serious causes of international trouble, and should in some way be met.254

It certainly was a serious cause of international trouble and Wilson’s covenant was a work in progress aimed at addressing it. From Dec. 27, 1918, to Feb. 3, 1919, Wilson had continually tried to insert language on the equality of races and the legitimacy of their desire for self- determination and autonomy, and he had offered the League as the supervisor and guarantor of that process. His chief means for this, apart from his own introduction of language on equality of racial treatment, had been adopting the phrasings of Smuts, rhapsodic phrasings about freedom and self-government whose emotion must have sprung from Smuts’s uneven experience as a colonial but which Wilson sought to apply to non-white colonized peoples, including the non- white neighbors whose land South Africa coveted.255 Wilson had been defeated, but now the

254 House Diary, Feb. 4, 1919, PWW, vol. 54, 484-485. The Magnolia meeting was actually on July 6. 255 Smuts seems to have recognized how questionable South Africa’s claim to German South West Africa really was. He wrote on Jan. 25, “Yesterday we discussed the Dominion claims to the German colonies. I hope I made a good case to South West Africa, but I don’t know. My argument was principally that it was a desert, a part of the

91 subject was back, one day later, though in a form that seemed closer to the broader sense of race and its accompanying idea of “prejudice.”

It is true that the Japanese proposal was chiefly in the context of Japanese exclusion from the U.S. and the British colonies, which (in the U.S. case) Japan’s premier had identified in 1915 as not merely a quarrel between nations but something “of far deeper meaning and wider scope,” namely “racial discrimination.”256 Japan had also tried in secret to get Britain to change its putatively self-governing colonies’ racial exclusion policies.257 A Japanese newspaper made clear that Japan’s equality proposal was about “the wrong suffered by races other than the white” while a second urged Japan’s delegation to ensure that “[f]airness and equality … be secured for the colored races who form 62 per cent of the whole of mankind.”258

At the same time, the Japanese proposals were all couched in the idea that “the equality of nations” was a basic principle of the League, and therefore a nation should not discriminate in its own territory against alien nationals on the basis of “race or nationality.” House and the

Japanese worked on several options, one of which Wilson approved. It retained the language on

“of race or nationality,” but the Japanese believed the action language (“agree to accord as soon as possible…equal and just treatment in every respect”) was too weak. House was trying, as his assistant Bonsal described it, to “satisfy the Japanese without making little Hughes of Australia put on his war paint.” House, Bonsal and Miller met with British Foreign Minister Balfour on the

9th, and House tried out some language based on the principles that had led to the American break with Britain almost a century before — the part about all men being created equal. Balfour

Kalahari no good to anybody, least of all so magnificent a body as the League of Nations! It was like the sinning girl’s plea that her baby was only a very little one! Not that I consider our claim to South West Africa sinful or wrong.” “To M.C. Gillett, Vol. 22, no. 20,” Jan. 25, 1919, Smuts, Papers, 55-56. 256 Lauren, “Human Rights,” 259-262. 257 Shimazu, “The Racial Equality Bill,” 202. 258 Imamoto, “Racial Equality Bill,” 77-78.

92 replied that “all men of one particular nation are born free and equal, but I am far from convinced that a man from Central Africa could be regarded as the equal of a European or an

American.”259 House stressed that the Japanese needed more territory for their people; Balfour sympathized, but said that “Hughes will not admit them to Australia and if I am not mistaken your people in California are opposed to even limited immigration.” They thought of Brazil, but when contacted Brazil’s president said, “We have all the race questions we can manage now.” 260

House had Miller draft something beginning “all men are created equal” that, unlike the draft earlier approved by Wilson (and rejected by the Japanese), did not mention race at all. It was Miller’s opinion that “any draft which had a real effect would, of course, be impossible”; even his new text that had no mention of race seemed too much to Miller, because “it makes the general subject a matter of international cognizance, and I doubt very much if that result is or should be acceptable.”261

Hughes’s interest was emphatically in controlling non-white immigration to Australia, and he offered to the Japanese to accept a racial-equality clause if it were also made clear that this would imply no obligations regarding immigration. The Japanese did not agree to this.262 For

Hughes and other white colonial leaders, and for their voting publics, control over immigration was particularly sensitive as they were themselves descendants of immigrants (if not actually immigrants) but had very little control over their own national security. Foreign affairs were in

London’s hands. Control over membership in the nation was not just one aspect of their

259 Imamoto,”Racial Equality Bill,”81-83; Bonsal, Unfinished Business, 32-33; Miller Diary, I, 116; Tillman, Anglo- American Relations, 301. 260 Both quotes are in Bonsal, Unfinished Business, 33. 261 The race-less draft and Miller’s cover letter to House are documents 362 and 363 in Miller, Diary, V, 214-215. 262 This was following Hughes’s meeting with Japanese diplomats in Paris on March 14. Hudson, Billy Hughes in Paris, 56; Fitzhardinghe, William Morris Hughes, II, 403.

93 sovereignty as self-governing colonials. It was, in their relations with neighbors, almost all the sovereignty they had.

This is why Hughes, when he traveled to the U.S. in 1918 at the urging of his publicist

Keith Murdoch,263 could present White Australia and a “Monroe Doctrine of the Pacific” as really the same thing. As Australia’s governor-general described it, Hughes hoped to secure “the support of America to the ‘White Australia’ policy and to a restriction of Japanese activity south of the Equator.”264 White Australia, like the U.S. in 1832, wanted to keep imperial powers from extending their sway over sovereign, or would-be sovereign, states. The Australians and other colonials wanted, in a way, an end to imperialism. The imperialisms of immediate interest to

Hughes were Japanese and British. Hughes did not get far with Wilson in the summer of 1918 — perhaps because he was also insisting on annexing German colonies and becoming a mini- imperialist himself — and as we have seen made an even worse impression in early 1919.

However, Hughes, with New Zealand’s Massey in tow and with the quiet cooperation of

Canada’s Borden — who had his own Asian exclusion agreements to protect — and of Smuts and Botha, was able to make opposition to the Japanese proposal into British policy. It was not easy to divine the actual British (non-imperial) view on Japan’s racial-equality question, if such a view even existed. In general, Cecil didn’t think the prime minister listened to him, and the prime minister himself made a point of not listening to his foreign minister.265 If anyone had a controlling hand on the League negotiations it was Lloyd George and his team, but they did not have a very thorough control over themselves. The British were at once bullied by the

Dominions, especially Australia, and used them as a shield.266 At the conclusion of this first

263 Father of the publisher Rupert Murdoch. Spartalis, Diplomatic Battles, 55-63. 264 Spartalis, Diplomatic Battles, 58. 265 Cecil, Notes, 53 (Feb. 4, 1919); Dockrill and Steiner, “The Foreign Office,” 57, 62. 266 Shimazu, “The Racial Equality Bill,” 204.

94 round, the Japanese ended up submitting the wording Wilson had endorsed (per House), and it was put into a draft alongside a similar clause on religion, concerning which an absent Wilson was said to be passionate. The whole draft was sent for Wilson’s final approval. Wilson, in scuttle mode, decided to excise that clause for the time being and had the covenant printed without it, to the dismay of the Japanese. They promised to bring the subject up again.267

Wilson returned to the U.S. to sell the League. The Japanese followed him there. Giving a speech in New York, Viscount Ishii, Japan’s ambassador to the U.S., asked, “Why should this question of race prejudice, of race discrimination, of race humiliation be left unremedied?”268

This and other speeches made a good impression but had little effect. Elihu Root, the influential

Republican politician and conditional supporter of the League, said to Wilson on the Japanese proposal, “Don’t let it in, it will breed trouble. In any event you’re going to have hard sledding, but with the racial provision, you will get nowhere in the Senate….On the Pacific coast, at least, they would think there lurked behind it a plan for unlimited yellow immigration.”269 Wilson was already having a hard time selling the League and, after a month’s effort, sailed for Paris and the resumption of negotiations. Ambassador Ishii had seen him off with a warning that if the equality proposal failed, “the Japanese Government do not see how a perpetual friction and discontent among nations and races could possibly be eliminated.”270

Mid-passage, Wilson was fretting about Bolsheviks and African-Americans with foreboding:

267 Imamoto, “Racial Equality Bill,” 83-85; House, Intimate Papers, III, 314-315. Miller records that at some point before 9 p.m. “Colonel House told me that Article XXI was to be omitted by direction of the President.” Miller, Diary, I, 133. 268 Imamoto, “Racial Equality Bill,” 86. 269 This is Bonsal’s paraphrase. Bonsal, Unfinished Business, 154. 270 Imamoto, “Racial Equality Clause,” 87; Ray Stannard Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1922) II, 236.

95 He said the American negro returning from abroad would be our greatest medium in conveying bolshevism to America. For example, a friend recently related the experience of a lady friend wanting to employ a negro laundress offering to pay the usual wage in that community. The negress demands that she be given more money than was offered for the reason that “money is as much mine as it is yours.” Furthermore, he called attention to the fact that the French people have placed the negro soldier in France on an equality with the white man, and “it has gone to their heads.”271

Nonetheless, Wilson did not seem to view the Japanese proposal as necessarily related to other racial dangers and premonitions. Just before reaching Paris, for instance, Wilson said of the

League covenant, “There were a great many things that I wanted to put in there that I had to leave out. For instance, the Japanese wanted free immigration, and this was something to which others could not agree.”272

The Japanese believed the sticking point was immigration and said publicly again and again that they were not talking about the free international movement of labor but about a more abstract question of justice. In reality, Japanese opinion was not a single bloc and the country’s motives were mixed. Japanese did want to be able to emigrate. Japan did want to expand into new territories, such as Siberia, that belonged to other states and were not necessarily considered empty by the people already there. Japan was expanding its power at the expense of Chinese and

Koreans, and developing its own Rassenkampf ideas along the way.273 All this ambition had been

271 Grayson Diary, PWW, vol. 55, 471. 272 Grayson Diary, PWW, vol. 55, 489. 273 Frederic Eggleston, a member of the Australian delegation, wrote from Paris, “Racial discrimination is practiced by all great nations today, including Japan.” Spartalis, Diplomatic Battles, 177. Eggleston was the Victoria correspondent of the Round Table and a leading figure in the establishment of international relations as an academic field in Australia. James Cotton, The Australian School of International Relations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), ch. 3. Already in the 1890s, some Japanese objected to being labeled “Asiatic” because it put them “on the

96 hugely stimulated by the war, which not only saw Japanese forces going far from home

(including the Mediterranean) as part of an alliance of great powers, but also growing economically: Japan, like the U.S., had an excellent war. Its military-industrial capacity expanded to serve Allied needs. It was able to take market share in areas from which European businesses had withdrawn as a result of war. Japan’s GDP jumped by 40 percent in 1914-18. Its exports to the U.S. and Britain doubled, exports to Russia grew six-fold. Japan went from having balance-of-payments problems to being an international creditor. In a handful of years, after very little fighting, Japan had become the number-three Great Power in the world.274 Japanese feelings about race humiliation were about the future as well as the past, ambition as well as grievance.275 Japan, too, spoke of a Japanese or “Asiatic” Monroe Doctrine that would limit outside interference in Japan’s own sphere, whatever that sphere might be.276 The ferocious suppression by imperial Japan of a Korean revolt — one directly inspired by Wilson’s public statements on self-determination277 — coincided (March-April 1919) with Japan’s final push for a racial-equality clause. There were solid reasons for the Australasian colonies to fear Japan, particularly given that the British imperial parent had shown signs of divided affections.278

As it happened, the British were willing to put Hughes and the Dominions in the driver’s seat, just as they had been on the question of mandatories, and in this case Wilson was not going

same level of morality and civilization as other less advanced populations of Asia.” Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, 145. 274 Imamoto, “Racial Equality Proposal,” 28. 275 See Mark Peattie’s introduction to Ramon H. Myers and Mark R. Peattie, eds., The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), and his chapter, “Japanese Attitudes Toward Colonialism, 1895-1945.” 276 Miller, Diary, I, 205, 239; Bonsal, Unfinished Business, 178-179. 277 Manela, The Wilsonian Moment, ch. 6, “Seizing the Moment in Seoul.” 278 Alfred Deakin, Australia’s second (1903-1910) prime minister, hoped for a Pacific Monroe Doctrine, jointly enforced by Britain and the U.S., to keep imperial powers such as Japan from threatening sovereignty. Imamoto, “Racial Equality Bill,” 51.

97 to object.279 The Japanese approached Smuts on March 26 and he became the intermediary between the Japanese and everyone else. He dutifully wore them down, using Hughes as a shield.

Bonsal recalls:

Smuts and Makino came into my room and had a long talk about the racial-equality proposal which is hanging fire and is so filled with explosives. They asked me to remain and I was glad to do so, as it gave me an excellent idea of the style and technique of the South African when negotiating on delicate ground. He was exceedingly friendly to the formal Japanese delegate, but he made quite plain what course he would pursue if Makino insisted upon bringing the matter

(the race question) before the whole Conference in a plenary session as it is rumored he proposes doing.

“Your position is incontestable and so is the status of Japan — so why raise the question? You know what my personal feelings are, but you see I am here officially, and so I must warn you that if you persist in your motion, for which I have much sympathy, and if Hughes of Australia opposes it, as he undoubtedly will, I shall have to fall in line and vote with the

Dominions, like a ‘good Indian.’”

Kind words may butter no parsnips but they certainly softened Makino’s attitude toward the white world.280

On March 31, Smuts suggested that Hughes might be movable if Japan agreed to adding immigration and naturalization to the covenant as examples of its principle of non-interference in

279 Imamoto, “Racial Equality Bill,” 87-91. 280 Bonsal, Unfinished Business, 170.

98 domestic affairs.281 This Japan did not want to do, although language on the primacy of

“domestic jurisdiction,” which was believed to cover immigration, was already on the table, and would eventually became part of the final covenant (article XV).

The intransigent Hughes282 seemed most useful at a distance. Even Keith Murdoch, after an interview with Makino, felt put out that Australia was “being used to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for the greater Powers.”283 Grayson, Wilson’s private physician, saw a similar dynamic:

“Concealed in the Japanese apparently simple request was the nucleus for serious trouble in the

United States should it be adopted, inasmuch as it would allow the Asiatics to demand the repeal of the Asiatic Exclusion Law of the United States. However, it was not necessary for the United

States openly to oppose the suggested amendment because Australia and New Zealand through the British representatives had taken the position of positive opposition.”284

By April 11, the Japanese had agreed to have their amendment whittled down to language on “the endorsement of the principle of the equality of Nations and the just treatment of their nationals.” Baron Makino introduced it:

281 That principle had been established on March 24 and 26. Imamoto; “Racial Equality Proposal,” 93; Spartalis, Diplomatic Battles, 179. Some in the U.S. Senate had been interested in such a guarantee. Wilson understood it to be, in part, an attempt to preserve the power of California to control immigration, that is, as part of the “Japanese question.” Miller, Diary, I, 185-186 (entry for March 18, 1919); Bonsal, Unfinished Business, 149. The key language, per Bonsal, was finally inserted, after a “bitter if also quite clandestine battle,” on April 16. “And this leaves the United States, as well as other powers of course, in complete control of its immigration laws and its school regulations,” Bonsal writes, referring to California’s famous school-segregation regulations aimed at separating the Japanese. “The Japanese are bitterly disappointed.” Bonsal, Unfinished Business, 207-208. 282 One of his nicknames was “The Strong Man of Australia.” H. Campbell-Jones, praising Hughes during wartime, said, “He possesses a turn of sarcasm, a mordant raillery, a command of barbed words that bite like corrosive sublimate.” Stanhope W. Sprigg, W.M. Hughes: The Strong Man of Australia (London: C. Arthur Pearson, 1916), 54-55. 283 Murdoch was writing as special correspondent for the Melbourne Herald: “Racial Bar Angers; Japan Blames Australia,” Melbourne Herald (April 10, 1919), 1. 284 Grayson Diary, PWW, vol. 57, 239-240.

99 The sentiment of nationality, one of the strongest human feelings, has been aroused by the present world-wide moral renaissance, and is at present receiving just recognition in adjusting international affairs. In close connection with the grievances of the oppressed nationalities there exist the wrongs of racial discrimination which was, and is, the subject of deep resentment on the part of a large portion of the human race. The feeling of being slighted has long been a standing grievance with certain peoples. … I think it only reasonable that the principle of the equality of nations and the just treatment of their nationals should be laid down as a fundamental basis of future relations in this world organization. If this reasonable and just claim is now denied, it will, in the eyes of those peoples with reason to be keenly interested, have the significance of a reflection on their quality and status. Their faith in the justice and righteousness, which are to be the guiding spirit of the Covenant, may be shaken.285

Italy spoke for the Japanese amendment, as did France, Greece, Czechoslovakia and China.286

According to House, Wilson had wanted to vote in favor but House talked him out of it, emphasizing that Hughes would make a public fight.287 Cecil recorded in his diary that Makino’s presentation was “extremely effective,” adding, “Smuts, without giving me any adequate warning, had fled, and as I did not realise he was not going to be there I had got no one else to take his place, and had to grapple with the Japanese as best I could, which was not very well.”288

David Hunter Miller also thought the Japanese presentation was “admirably done, and it seemed

285 PWW, vol. 57, 260; Bonsal, Unfinished Business, 192-193. 286 Bonsal, Unfinished Business, 196-197. 287 Shimazu, “The Racial Equality Bill,” 237, citing House Papers, Binder 15, Series II, Collection Group 466, for April 12, 1919. 288 Cecil, Notes, 127 (April 11); PWW, vol. 57, 247.

100 that they had the support of the entire room. Cecil acted as though he was in a very difficult position, and after making his statement sat silent with eyes fixed on the table.”289

Wilson emphasized that he found Makino’s remarks “very impressive.”290 He mildly but vaguely said that the problem was “controversies which would be bound to take place outside the

Commission over the Japanese proposal, and that in order to avoid these discussions it would perhaps be wise not to insert such a provision in the preamble.”291 With good reason, he worried that the proposal could cause the “burning flames of prejudice” to “flare out in public view.”292

(U.S. Senator Phelan of California had written to Wilson a week before that “I have been waging a hot campaign against the Japanese demand at the Peace Conference for racial equality and addressed a joint session of the [California] legislature last Monday night.”293) Japan insisted on a vote, and the proposal won a majority, 11 of 17.294 Because two countries — Britain and

Poland — voted against, Wilson ruled that the proposal did not carry because it had not received unanimous support. The U.S. never voted. Wilson “did not show quite as much courage as I could have hoped in resisting the amendment” is how Cecil put it.295 Two previous U.S. proposals had carried over opposition, and Wilson’s insistence on unanimity in the Japanese case was transparently unfair, as the French pointed out. Later that month, Wilson introduced

“without fanfare and quietly put through”296 language which required (Article V) unanimity of

289 Miller, Diary, I, 245. 290 PWW, vol. 57, 269. 291 Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, 238. 292 PWW, vol. 57, 268. 293 PWW, vol. 57, 49. Phelan noted there was a bill then pending in the California senate to prohibit “Orientals” from buying or leasing land in California. 294 Japan, France and Italy had two votes each. They were joined with single votes by China, Brazil, Greece, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia. Lauren, Power and Prejudice, 347. 295 Cecil, Notes, 127. 296 Bonsal, Unfinished Business, 210-211.

101 voting, which meant that neither the votes on his own, approved proposals, nor on the rejected

Japanese proposal, could be overturned retroactively.297

“Certainly it is not surprising,” the prominent English journalist Vernon Bartlett wrote that June,

that the Japanese were hurt, for the Peace Conference cannot have done much to impress them with the superiority of the Western Civilisations. It was very difficult to sit between a Japanese and a Chinaman at lunch, in the middle of this exhibition of insensate greed and bickering, while your lords and masters told their lords and masters that they were not yet civilised enough to have equality of treatment with us, that they were only coloured men. The Japanese, especially, made so many valuable suggestions to the Peace Conference, that their treatment as inferior beings caused much comment.298

297 See Spartalis, Diplomatic Battles, 187-188. 298 Vernon Bartlett, Behind the Scenes at the Paris Peace Conference (London: George Allen and Unwin, n.d.), 106- 107. According to the book (viii) this text was completed “before the middle of June.” It is clear from a reference at the end of the text to four months having passed since the beginning of the Conference that this means June 1919.

102

IV: Conclusion

“I’m afraid self-government is hard to define,” admitted Cecil, and then President Wilson made a confession.

“For twenty years I have lectured on the subject, but I am reluctant to commit myself to a definition.” — Stephen Bonsal, Unfinished Business (156)

Wilson did not achieve his related goals of taking empire out of the international order and building a new order on the basis of national and racial self-determination, except in the limited sense that a white-nonwhite “racial” distinction solidified in international politics. I have argued that part of the reason can be found in the individual trajectories of these two intellectual men as they sought to reconcile self-determination with the advancement of their own not-so-organic

“communities” and the preservation of the gains of empire. These were two forceful personalities who had gained power and set out to use it at an extraordinary juncture in world history. They had not wanted the conflict but they were determined to define its meaning.

The League was Wilson’s price for bringing America into the war. He was not interested

— neither were most Americans — in engaging in European disputes, nor did he wish to get his country involved in that global extension of European (and now Japanese or East Asian) disputes known as the new imperialism. To do so would have violated the spirit of the Monroe Doctrine and settled principles of U.S. foreign policy, including the principle of letting other powers weaken themselves and waste their time and money on war. The United States had acquired, not

103 least through violence, its own continent, more or less, and for most Americans that was enough.

The Monroe Doctrine aimed at keeping empires out of America and for the most part it succeeded.

The U.S. had, however, developed global interests and the military and economic power to look after them. The U.S. had always depended on foreign capital and technology for its growth; now it was coming to depend on foreign markets for its manufactured as well as agricultural exports. After more than a century, the U.S. had developed a material interest in peace, or at least stability. In American terms, the only war that made sense was a war to end all wars. This was “peace without victory.” It had to claim as a genuine possibility that warfare could end. Wilson could go from neutrality to armed combat only if it led to something like the

League. So the English political leadership learned to love the League, and with ever more fervor as the chances of winning the war without the U.S. receded. Having made the League the price of war, Wilson could construct the League once peace was secured, or so he thought.

Like Wilson, Smuts brought energy, enthusiasm, charisma and intellectual command to bear on constructing a new world order. Both men had deep personal experience of states as malleable political units and of nations as communities of choice. Both were political entrepreneurs, especially Smuts, who had the advantage of long association with the

Kindergarten/Round Table group. Smuts became an architect of the League in large part because he was able, almost uniquely, to articulate how the British empire might naturally transition into a diffuse sort of global leadership that would entail losing the burdens of empire while keeping the benefits, particularly as concerned the white self-governing territories and whatever they might be able to gather under their control. But, arguably, the Round Table might have done that without him, and it was amply represented in Paris. What most distinguished Smuts was, as

104 Morefield brilliantly puts it, that his political vision “solved liberal imperialism’s temporal problem by recasting the linear movement of evolutionary progress as the growth of internally differentiated, overlapping wholes or concentric circles that spontaneously ordered and reordered the world into lower and higher spheres, where the difference between the governed and the governing appeared to be categorical byproducts of nature.”299

In other words, Wilson and Smuts both believed, or at least could convince themselves, that this highly constructed and unprecedented League idea was actually in accord with nature.

There seems to be a clear parallel with Wilson’s and Smuts’s experience with creating organic communities out of, as it were, inorganic material. The “American South,” after all, had gone to war on the basis of the sovereignty of its individual state units, not of the South as a whole, and against the will of much of its population. South Africa was a “community” formed out of two openly hostile blocs speaking different languages, but together a minority in “their” land, and dependent on the labor of an imported subject class of different ethnicity. The refinement of whiteness in both cases used pre-existing social materials to create a new principle of

“community” belonging because the old, possibly more “organic” principles (such as Boerness, or Virginian patriotism) had failed. These so-called white communities didn’t come together because they were white; they became white because that was all they held in common. This was true in fractious White Australia as well.

If the League was rooted in nature, then international stability didn’t require a hegemonic power to enforce it. Stability, if not quite peace, could be a natural condition if the principle of self-determination were allowed to operate: social intercourse as free trade. The League would be the means for that operation. Wilson and Smuts were really the only people who could see it

299 Morefield, Empire Without Imperialism, 198-199.

105 in quite this way and drive it forward, and they happened to collide with each other at the end of

December 1918. It was all there, in the first Paris draft.

And then, of course, it wasn’t. Why? The main reason was that Britain had revealed its dependence on the U.S. and, especially, the Dominions. To a degree, of course, that strengthened the hands of Wilson and Smuts. But Wilson was extremely reluctant, as his country was, to put

U.S. money, military assets or much else into the League. (There was an aspect of hopeful geopolitical economizing in the confidence that the League order, being fitted to nature, would, by definition, almost run itself.) American reticence left Britain, however diminished, in the driver’s seat. At the same time, the manifest weakening of Britain left its white-settler colonies both high-handed and fearful, and looking for the means of self-defense. This might not have mattered so much — not to the degree that Billy Hughes could repeatedly hold the League for ransom — had the League actually been conceived in a more global process, but in fact it was created in a rather airless Anglo-American compartment by chronically tetchy heads of state cosseted along by unelected mandarins, seconded lawyers, and academics outside their comfort zone. Besides, the white Dominions, following in the footsteps of their rebel American cousins, had long experience of extracting what they wanted from London. They were the most empowered colonies in the world. For them, imperialism was a two-way street. They wanted their own colonies, and they got them. And they wanted complete control over who could and couldn’t live in their colonies, regardless of what the Empire thought or believed it needed.

So between December 27, 1918, and January 20, 1919, Wilson and Smuts together wrote a League covenant that advanced a universal principle of racial and national self-determination, and even a type of racial equality, with an international structure to enforce it. Then, between

January 20 and February 14, 1919, Smuts and the British took out, with Wilson kicking and

106 screaming, most of the sometimes beautiful language they had themselves put in — because it would interfere with the budding Dominion imperialism. When racial equality immediately reappeared, just a day later, in the shape of the long-anticipated Japanese proposal, it again gained acceptance, in various forms and with varying degrees of comprehension and sincerity, from France, Italy, the U.S., Britain, and other “white” European nations, and of course Japan, among others. But it did not get the support of the Dominions, as it would interfere with White

Australia and similar policies elsewhere in the Anglo-American world.

What were the effects in all this of the belief held by Wilson and Smuts in racial separation and the superiority of the white race? The evidence on this point is hard to parse. Both men, especially Wilson, introduced the language of racial equality and non-discrimination into the debates as they unfolded and, in Wilson’s case, into the draft language for the League covenant. This seems to present a paradox. But we should remember that Wilson and Smuts had defended racial self-determination for much of their lives. It happened to be white racial self- determination, of a particular national-colonial kind characteristic of Britain’s white-settler- dominated colonies. If they were advocating racial self-determination for others that hardly meant they were abdicating it for themselves. When Balfour said to House that the phrase “all men are created equal” was probably applicable to the men within a nation but not so much to men as between nations, he was getting at the essence of the Wilson-Smuts view that a “nation” should be made up of equal people, and those who were not equal in that nation should be in some other nation.300 The racial segregation that both men advocated in their own countries was a variation of this principle, not a contradiction of it.

300 The idea that African Americans should be in a separate country is almost as old as the Republic, from the American Colonization Society (founded 1817) through the Back to Africa movement of Marcus Garvey.

107 More importantly, what happened in Paris was the racialization of race, so to speak — the falling away of the multiple meanings of the term, leaving these large categorizations of black, white and yellow in all their absurdity and power. Their absurdity and power are not simply for us to perceive with the advantage of a century’s hindsight; they were obvious enough at the time. It is inaccurate and misleading to argue that Wilson and Smuts were simply men borne along by the prejudices of their era and unable to perceive moral issues that would be obvious to later generations. That argument underestimates both the men and their times. Race was a subject constantly discussed, a regular topic of the quality press as it was of the Journal of

Race Development, a pioneering (founded at Clark University in 1910) International Relations journal that became (1919-1922) the Journal of International Relations and, finally, Foreign

Affairs. W.E. B. Du Bois was a contributing editor, publishing “Of the Culture of White Folk” in

1917 to argue that in this unprecedented war there was an atavism at work that existed in everyone but manifested a unique violence in whiteness: “As we see the dead dimly through rifts of battle smoke and hear faintly the cursing and accusations of blood brothers, we darker men say: This is not Europe gone mad; this is not aberration nor insanity; this is Europe; this seeming terrible is the real soul of white culture—back of all culture, stripped and visible today.”301

In Paris itself, Du Bois had organized a Pan-African Congress to coincide with the peace negotiations; his co-organizer was Ida Gibbs Hunt, the daughter of one American diplomat and wife of another, William Hunt, then posted in France. (Both U.S. diplomats were black.) Du Bois

301 W.E.B. Du Bois, “Of the Culture of White Folk,” Journal of Race Development 7 (1916-1917), 437. The journal, its successor, and early numbers of Foreign Affairs are all available at the Hathi Trust online. In 1918 the Journal published George W. Ellis on “The Negro and the War for Democracy,” in which Ellis noted the importance of “Negro” troops from the colonies and the role of Japan as “the representative of the darker races of Asia.” “Few things,” Ellis wrote, “indicate so much the vast significance which this war has for the darker races than the part…which they are actually taking for world democracy into which they have not hitherto been recognized and considered.” Journal of Race Development 8 (1917-1918), 450.

108 had asked for a meeting with Wilson in Paris but had to settle for lesser interlocutors.302 The U.S. had been hostile to the conference; it was Clemenceau who approved it.303 The Pan-African

Congress built on meetings dating at least to the Pan-African Conference in London in 1900, where DuBois apparently introduced his famous phrase, “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour-line.”304 That 1900 conference was chaired by Alexander Walters, the same former slave whom Wilson assured in 1912 of his commitment to “absolute fair dealing” with black Americans and to doing “everything by which I can assist in advancing the interests of their race.” Among the targets of the 1900 conference was the association of racial hierarchy with “science”; by 1911, at the Universal Races Congress, luminaries like H.G. Wells, Jane

Addams, Franz Boas, Mohandas Gandhi, John Dewey and, of course, Du Bois were passing resolutions on “relations between the so-called ‘white’ peoples and the so-called ‘coloured’ peoples.”305 W.T. Stead published for the occasion The Death Agony of the Science of Race, a condensed translation of a longer and influential anti-racist work by his good friend Jean

Finot.306 This is the same Stead who had helped Cecil Rhodes write his will and been close to

Milner’s Kindergarten. (Stead’s extraordinary career came to an early end after he booked passage on the Titanic.) There had been robust international discussion and a vigorous

302 Susan Pederson, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 30. The Congress endorsed much of the approach to League supervision of mandates and other relevant policies that had been articulated in Wilson’s Paris drafts but later withdrawn. Getachew, Worldmaking, 52. 303 Clarence G. Contee, “Du Bois, the NAACP, and the Pan-African Congress of 1919,” Journal of Negro History 57:1 (Jan. 1972),19, 23. 304 “Report of the Pan-African Conference held on the 23rd, 24th and 25th July, 1900, at the Westminster Town Hall, Westminster, S.W.” (London: Veale, Chifferiel, n.d. [1900?]). https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/pageturn/mums312-b004-i320/#page/1/mode/1up The phrase is in the final resolution, undersigned by four men, including Du Bois. 305 Ulysses G. Weatherly, “The First Universal Races Congress,” American Journal of Sociology 17:3 (Nov. 1911), 316. 306 Finot’s book was Le Préjugé des races (Paris: F. Alcan, 1906). Finot’s tribute to Stead is excerpted in “King of Journalists and the Best of Men — A French Tribute to William T. Stead,” The American Review of Reviews 46:1 (July 1912), 105-106. Elsewhere in that issue are a report on the status of White Australia and essays by Japanese and Indian female authors on the “awakening” of Asian women.

109 international civil society considering “the race question” for more than 20 years prior to the

League debate. The New York World in December 1918 publicized Du Bois’s intention to “ask the Peace Conference to turn back to native control the German colonies in Africa for national organization by those there now” and to commemorate the tercentenary of the first African arrivals in Virginia in 1619.307

Wilson and Smuts would not have been unaware of the contingency of their own views on race, much less have believed them to be the unquestioned norm. Ray Stannard Baker,

Wilson’s press secretary in Paris (and, eventually, his official biographer), had published an important investigation, Following the Color Line: An Account of Negro Citizenship in the

American Democracy, in 1908, which even had a profile of Du Bois.308 Smuts had long had friends, like Olive Schreiner, who differed with him on race (and much else). And Wilson had been so taken with the English writer A.G. Gardiner, who visited him in Paris in January 1919, that he would read some of his sketches at night to relax. One sketch published by Gardiner during the war, titled “On the American Soldier,” addresses the democratic spirit of the New

World:

It is illustrated by the tribute which Frederick Douglass, the negro preacher, paid to Lincoln.

"He treated me as a man," said Douglass after his visit to the President. "He did not let me feel for a moment that there was any difference in the colour of our skins." It is a fine testimony, but I do not suppose that Lincoln had to make any effort to achieve such a triumph of good manners.

He treated Douglass as a man and an equal because he was a man and an equal, and because

307 Contee, “Du Bois,” 17-18. 308 Ray Stannard Baker, Following the Color Line: An Account of Negro Citizenship in the American Democracy (New York, Doubleday, Page, 1908).

110 the difference in the colour of their skins had no more to do with their essential relationship than the difference in the colour of their ties or the shape of their boots. The directness and naturalness of the American is the most enviable of his traits. It gives the sense of a man who is born free.309

Born free of the Old World, perhaps, but not of the New. It was a freedom for some paid for with the unfreedom of others, as Douglass knew better than anyone.

The rigid separation of white from non-white that was such a noticeable aspect of politics in the U.S. and the white-settler colonies, later self-governing Dominions, from about 1870 onward was becoming, thanks not least to the way the League talks had unfolded, a model for global racial hierarchy. In this renovation of the British Empire into a League-leading self- governing white Commonwealth, race became dominantly white-yellow-black, or more accurately white-colored, or white-nonwhite. This was one political result of the League of

Nations negotiations. As the Japan Times editorialized: “A historic and august congress of the representative white peoples has now formally refused to admit and accept the principle of equality of the non-white people with themselves.”310

The main category here is white, in its association with freedom and self-determination.

Places like the U.S. and Australia had been able to create democratic, socially fluid societies in part because they had worked up and defended the idea of free white labor, the equation of whiteness and freedom. Hughes emphasized this once he realized Wilson had effectively heaped the blame on Australia for the victory of white supremacy. (“[I]f Wilson had had courage to vote

309 A.G. Gardiner, Leaves in the Wind (London: J.M. Dent, 1920), 94-95. These essays were written and first published during the war, thus prior to Wilson’s meeting with Gardiner in Paris. In 1920, Gardiner published The Anglo-American Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press). 310 Lauren, Power and Prejudice, 273.

111 for them, or to accept two to one majority vote, their amendment would have been inserted.”311)

Hughes gave a long interview to the Asahi, protesting at length his admiration of Japan and insisting that what he wanted was Australian autonomy in shaping its own “industrial development”: “After many years of agitation and struggling we have secured a high standard of living in Australia…Our workers insist upon high wages and good working conditions.”312 He pointed out that Japan and other Eastern countries had sought and got an exception to a clause in the peace treaty that would have required similar wages and working hours across borders. This was aimed at preserving a comparative advantage in lower wages and longer hours; Japan believed these were necessary for its own autonomy of industrial development in competition with more technically advanced states like Britain, the U.S. and the Dominions.313 In a sense, it was White Australia inverted. That’s how Billy Hughes saw it, and he told Parliament in

September 1919 that he thought “the greatest thing we have achieved” in the Paris negotiations

“is the policy of a white Australia.”314

What was new here was that free white labor was being erected into a principle of geopolitics along with an international division of labor rather than any strictly national (or even imperial) one. It was a principle that had been developing across the Anglo settler colonies for more than a century. It developed differently in Canada than in New Zealand or South Africa, and differently in some parts of the U.S. or Australia than in others. (At the time of the war, for example, Australia’s Northern Territories were majority Aboriginal.) But it was basically consistent across the U.S. and the Dominions. Whether these imperial, then ex-imperial, entities

311 Spartalis, Diplomatic Battles, 184. 312 Spartalis, Diplomatic Battles, 184; Fitzhardinghe, Hughes, 407-409. 313 See, for example, the exchange between Balfour and Makino in Maurice Hankey’s notes of a Council of Ten conversation held on Jan. 23, 1919, in PWW, vol. 54, 239. 314 Hudson, Billy Hughes in Paris, 66.

112 would have developed their distinctively demotic and robust, socially fluid and socially leveling democratic cultures in the absence of the concept of free white labor is not an easy question to answer. What we do know is that that is how it happened.

We also know that the principle of free white labor — a historically specific and, in its whiteness aspect, highly artificial development within the British empire — was not well designed to function as a universally applicable principle of state formation. And yet that is a significant part of what happened in Paris in early 1919. Wilson and Smuts, with a big assist from Billy Hughes, had ushered into the world the idea that these avowedly white-ruled quasi- democracies were an example for everyone. It was a highly provincial, at best, approach to the birth of liberal internationalism and global governance.

Predictably, race consciousness rose after the Paris conference and the establishment of the League, as did race-based imperialism. The Japanese embraced it, as did the Germans and the

Italians. Racial violence and the “second klan” surged in the U.S., while urban and residential segregation were legislated in South Africa. Marcus Garvey’s previously obscure Universal

Negro Improvement Association, with its Back to Africa program, became a mass movement in the U.S. after the war. The U.S in 1919 experienced a “Red Summer” of extraordinary racial violence.315 Color consciousness begat color consciousness. The imaginary community of whiteness as it manifested itself in Paris had come into being to serve the political-economic needs and desires of very specific groups within the Anglo-world, but since those groups happened to be the dominant players in the Paris peace talks their whiteness became, as it were, the world’s whiteness, and the nonwhite world — then as now, the global majority — re-

315 Cameron McWhirter, Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America (New York: Henry Holt, 2011).

113 examined its racial options.316 The problem of the 20th century might not have been the color line in 1900, when Du Bois proposed the idea, but it had become so by the summer of 1919, and this was due not least to the efforts of Woodrow Wilson and Jan Smuts.

This interpretation of how an evolving imperialism and patterns of racial thinking affected the Paris peace negotiations and the birth of the League of Nations order is at an angle to existing theories. The Dominions and the U.S. don’t fit easily into theories of imperialism: they were resource colonies that grew, industrialized, and reached the heights of the global economy, enjoying unprecedented prosperity. They don’t fit easily into theories of nationalism either. Even the great debunkers of “organic” nationalism — Eric Hobsbawm, Terence Ranger, and Benedict

Anderson — didn’t have much to say about these quintessential imagined communities. Perhaps the settler Anglosphere was just too obviously contrived.317

Likewise the U.S. and Dominions don’t fit easily into theories of International Relations as these apply to race and empire. As the revisionists have stressed, and any reader of IR or proto-IR scholarship from 1910 to 1940 would know, the field was preoccupied with race and, above all, empire until the Second World War — and it was preoccupied by the avoidance, rather than the management, of war. After 1945 (or 1939, if you count from the publication of Carr’s

The Twenty Years’ War), the first two were radically downplayed, appendices to the main narrative of major-power agency, while the third was reframed as idealism or utopianism. One of the numberless results of this maneuver is that the felt realities of race and empire in the non-

316 See, for example, Jonathan Derrick, Africa’s Agitators: Militant Anti-Colonialism in Africa and the West, 1918- 1939 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 317 Anglo settlers as nation-builders are mostly absent from Hobsbawm and Ranger’s classic 1983 essay collection The Invention of Tradition. Ranger sees white settlers in Africa as basically expatriates, while Hobsbawm figures “the invented traditions of the U.S.A.” as basically assimilationist, in contrast to the inventions of “countries defining nationality existentially,” which are his main concern. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992 [1983]), 279-280. Benedict Anderson, in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), corrals the Anglo settler polities into a capacious, Iberian-dominated category of creole/criollo/mestizo (chap. 4).

114 Western world were continually discounted in the calculation of international causes and effects.

A field that had talked constantly about empire and race, and therefore also, in its way, about uneven development, now spoke of other things. The “stages of racial development” were repurposed as stages of economic development — to the side of IR, even if economic power was recognized as a driver — without much notion of how people had got to where they were. And post-1945 phenomena that might have been more explicable with the help of a knowledge of empire, race, and the profound social drive toward the avoidance of conflict appeared as a series of unanticipated anomalies: a hegemon that saw the stabilization of other states as a public good

(U.S.); a strong challenger constantly tripping over its own ideology until it finally fell down

(Soviet Union); an economic great power intent on pacifism and demographic stagnation

(Germany); a once-great power chronically blindsided by its own imperial past (Britain); a rising power aching for prestige and retribution for crimes the criminals no longer remember (China); and a hegemon craving dominance and retreat simultaneously (U.S. again). Such phenomena might have been more comprehensible and foreseeable with a better knowledge of the dynamics actually faced by leaders like Wilson and Smuts at the close of the imperial era and the start of the first major attempt to replace it. Recent excavations of IR history have sometimes struck an accusatory note, as though past preoccupations with race and empire were a poisonous inheritance, tainting the field, and made only worse after 1945 by being denied. But as the old stories are recovered and re-told, is the point only to tell them again then bury them again with the proper rites? The denial is a fact — with, beyond a doubt, its own stories — but it’s not the main fact. As the effects of racial thinking and empire, and of the desire to avoid war, are clearly still with us, the chief utility of recovering this past must be in better understanding where we are and where we are going.

115

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