Practicing History: Selected Essays by Barbara W. Tuchman

Author:Barbara W. Tuchman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3, pdf
Tags: History
ISBN: 0345303636
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 1981-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

We come now to the gaping hole in the argument. It is the assumption that in the conditions prevailing after the Armistice, in the passion of anti-German feeling, in the wounds of the victors, in the antagonisms and nationalisms released by the breaking up of three empires, an ideal peace was possible; that, in short, Wilson had the power to dictate a just peace and failed to exercise it.

All he need have done, the authors announce, was to have faced Clemenceau and Lloyd George with “masculine” weapons: threaten to leave the Conference, to publicly denounce the Allies as the “enemies of peace,” and to withdraw American financial and economic aid. In fact, as Wilson well knew, to have risked such an open rupture was impossible, if only for his own sake, for with it would have gone glimmering any hope of the League. Rather than being hailed as Savior, he would have been denounced as a destroyer, and pro-German besides. But, careless of history, the authors rush on. “One crack of Wilson’s financial whip,” they inform us with characteristic restraint, might have brought Lloyd George “to heel.” “One threat” to leave France to face Germany alone might have brought Clemenceau “to compromise” (which suggests a capacious ignorance of the Tiger). Wilson, they state, “still had more men ready to answer his call and follow him to battle than any man has had before or since. He was still the leader of all the idealists of the world.” Two sentences less translatable into reality or more empty of hard fact would be difficult to imagine. The idealists of the world, if the authors are referring to the crowds who cheered Wilson in ecstasy when he arrived in Europe, were now, if French, shouting for reparations and the Saar; if Italian, for Trentino and Fiume; if English, to “hang the Kaiser” and “squeeze the orange till the pips squeak.”

The authors’ version of a Peace Conference with Wilson cracking the whip that would have brought the Allied powers “to heel” is another never-never land. It ignores those who had done most of the fighting. It presents the Allies as scheming plotters against the noble “idealists of the world,” rather than, nearer to the truth, as the battered, exhausted survivors of terrible war who had lost the best part of a generation and, in the case of France, suffered the wreck, pillage, and ruin of a large part of its territory, and who were determined to make victory produce gains to pay for the long bleeding years. It supposes that Wilson, by the simple exertion of a little masculinity, would have had no problem in extracting a “just” peace out of the rival claims of a dozen nationalities, the redrawing of boundaries, the conflicting promises of secret treaties, the allocating of mandates, the dividing of the spoils of the German colonies and the Turkish dominions, the arranging of areas of sovereignty among Arab claimants, the adjudicating of claims to the coal of Silesia, the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.