Peace without victory

On 22 January 1917 the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, unexpectedly appeared before the Senate and read an address on the terms of a future peace. At the same time he announced that its text had already been sent to the American ambassadors in all the belligerent states of Europe. The cables had gone out on 15 January, with instructions that on receiving a signal the ambassadors should hand the address to the foreign ministries and to the press. Wilson wanted to reach not only governments but above all peoples. The address went down in history under a name taken from a single sentence: the peace must be a “peace without victory”.

House’s idea

The President had failed to bring the belligerents to talks. To his note of 18 December the Central Powers replied with a proposal for a conference without any terms, while on 10 January the Entente announced its war aims, which the Germans regarded as a programme of conquest. On 27 December the President’s closest adviser, Colonel Edward House, suggested that he himself set out the main principles of a lasting peace, for whose maintenance the United States could take responsibility. According to House’s diary, on 3 January Wilson asked him what he thought of laying down general terms of peace in which the key would be the security of the world against future wars, with territorial questions of secondary importance. They agreed that the President would address the Senate, which, as it shared in the making of treaties, was the proper audience. They discussed Belgium, Serbia, Alsace-Lorraine, Turkey and Russian access to a warm-water sea. They also decided that, since Germany and Russia had agreed to a free Poland, it ought to be mentioned. In the end Wilson decided not to list territorial changes, so as not to obscure the main idea. He kept only Poland.

On 11 January the President read the finished text to House. At his adviser’s request he struck out a sentence saying that the war had been caused by mutual distrust, and the word “humiliate” in the sentence saying that neither side wished to destroy its opponent. House wanted to avoid anything touching on disputes over the causes of the war. Wilson showed the address to no one but him. Only later did he read it to the Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, and to the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, William J. Stone. According to the President, both received it favourably, though Stone was “a bit dazed”.

“Peace without victory”

Wilson began by summing up the exchange of notes. The Central Powers had replied only that they were ready to meet their opponents. The Entente had replied “much more definitely”, so the world was a step closer to a discussion of peace and of the settlement that was afterwards to protect that peace. It was inconceivable, he said, that the Americans should play no part in that great work. Before it began, however, the government ought to say frankly on what terms it would ask the nation’s approval for joining a league for peace. The United States would have no voice in determining the terms that ended the war, but it would have a voice in whether they were guaranteed. The peace must be secured by a force so great that no nation and no alliance could withstand it: by “the organized major force of mankind”. The President asked whether the present war was a struggle for a just and secure peace or only for a new balance of power. What Europe needed was not a balance of power but “a community of power”, not organised rivalries but an organised common peace.

The statesmen of both sides had given assurances that they did not intend to crush their opponents. From this, Wilson said, it followed first of all that it must be a peace without victory. “It is not pleasant to say this,” he admitted, and asked that his words be understood only as he himself interpreted them. Victory would mean a peace forced upon the loser, accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice. It would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory, and a peace built on such ground would rest as if upon quicksand. Only a peace between equals could last.

The President then listed the conditions. Nations must have equal rights, with no distinction between great and small. Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and no one has the right to hand peoples about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were property. Every great people should, as far as possible, have direct access to the sea, if not by the cession of territory then by neutralised routes of transit. The seas must be free in law and in fact. The freedom of the seas was bound up with the limitation of naval armaments, and that with the still more difficult question of limiting armies. The President said he was perhaps the only person in high authority who could speak freely, and that he believed he spoke for “the silent mass of mankind”. He proposed that all nations adopt the Monroe Doctrine as the doctrine of the world: no nation should seek to extend its polity over another, and every people should be left free to determine its own polity and its own development, “the little along with the great and powerful”. He also proposed avoiding “entangling alliances”. “These are American principles, American policies. […] They are also the principles of mankind and must prevail,” he concluded.

Poland in the address

The only concrete example in the address was Poland. Speaking of the consent of the governed, Wilson said: “I take it for granted, for instance, if I may venture upon a single example, that statesmen everywhere are agreed that there should be a united, independent, and autonomous Poland.” He added that all peoples who had hitherto lived under the power of governments hostile to their faith and purpose must be guaranteed security of life, of worship, and of economic and social development. The President was alluding to recent declarations by both sides: the Act of 5 November, in which Germany and Austria-Hungary had announced the creation of a Kingdom of Poland, and Tsar Nicholas II’s order of 25 December, which promised a free Poland formed from all three partitions. Wilson went further than either, for he spoke of a united and independent Poland.

In January 1917 Ignacy Jan Paderewski, who had been campaigning for the Polish cause in America since 1915, prepared a memorandum on Poland for the President at House’s request. In it he argued that the restoration of Poland’s independence was necessary and demanded access to the sea for her. Some historians believe that the memorandum influenced the President’s position on the Polish question. In the Polish lands Wilson’s words were received with enthusiasm. According to contemporary accounts, demonstrations in the President’s honour were held in Warsaw, Kraków and Lviv. This was the origin of his enormous popularity in Poland, which was strengthened by his address of 8 January 1918 and its thirteenth point.

An insult to the Allies

In Europe the address was received coolly. In the Entente countries attention focused on a single phrase. The British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, wrote in his memoirs that the President never deigned to explain how, without victory, and an Allied victory at that, Poland could be liberated and self-determination given to the peoples subject to Turkey, Austria and Germany. “To the Allies the phrase was an insult, to the Germans a joke,” he judged. On 24 January the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Andrew Bonar Law, said in Bristol that Britain could not look at the address from the same point of view as the President. “America is neutral; we are not neutral,” he explained. For the British this war was a matter of the difference between right and wrong, and a peace without the breaking of German military power would secure nothing. According to the American monthly Current History, the British press was “respectful but hostile”, and the slogan of the freedom of the seas, aimed at the British blockade, was as unwelcome in London as peace without victory. French newspapers praised the President’s ideals but considered them utopian. The Italian Foreign Minister, Sidney Sonnino, told the American ambassador that the address was idealistic and difficult to apply in practice, while the Italian Minister of Education, Francesco Ruffini, replied that Italy’s aims could be achieved only through victory. The Russian Foreign Ministry issued a courteous statement in which it recalled that the Tsar had already announced his intention to create a free Poland.

British Liberals were delighted. The Manchester Guardian sharply warned the British government, and the writer Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson later called the address perhaps the most important international document in history. A friend of America and former ambassador in Washington, Lord James Bryce, wrote to House on 24 January that the British valued the spirit of the address but did not see how its terms could be met with the present German government. House also received reports that the Allied diplomats in Washington had officially received the address politely but resented it inwardly. In their view the President was proposing compulsory arbitration for the future while refusing to punish Germany for breaking those same principles now.

In Berlin satisfaction with the words about peace without victory and the freedom of the seas was shown cautiously, and officials avoided public statements. Less welcome in Germany and Austria-Hungary was the announcement of autonomy for nations, especially for the Poles. The Hungarian Prime Minister, Count István Tisza, replied in parliament in Budapest on 24 January that the Entente’s terms meant the dismemberment of Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, so it was the opponents who were the obstacle to peace. The demand for security of life, worship and development for all peoples was, in his view, nowhere fulfilled as well as in the Habsburg monarchy.

Dispute in America

In the United States the address divided opinion along party lines. Democratic papers called it an epoch-making message to mankind; most Republican ones considered it unwise or a “millennium speech”. The Republican Elihu Root, a former Secretary of State and senator, agreed with the President’s ideals but pointed out that taking part in a league for peace without ships and soldiers would be worth nothing. Former President Theodore Roosevelt wrote that Wilson was proclaiming peace without victory between the tortured Belgians and their cruel oppressors and had brought upon America the biblical curse of Meroz, which fell on those who came not to help against the mighty. Senator William Borah of Idaho introduced a resolution on 25 January that was to reaffirm the Monroe Doctrine and the principle of non-involvement in European affairs, and the next day he warned that once drawn into the maelstrom of European politics America would never get out of it. A resolution by the Republican Albert Cummins calling for a debate on the President’s proposals was tabled by the Senate on 30 January by 38 votes to 30, strictly along party lines.

Nine days

House wrote to the President that the echoes of the address were sounding better and better. Wilson replied that what interested him most was what the German government thought, and confessed that, in spite of himself, he sometimes felt very lonely and depressed. A few days after the address House, on the President’s behalf, offered the German ambassador, Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff, confidential mediation on the basis of the Senate address and asked him to disclose Germany’s terms. Bernstorff passed this on to Berlin on 27 January and begged for the submarine war to be postponed. It was already too late. On 31 January Germany announced unrestricted submarine warfare from 1 February, and on 3 February the United States broke off diplomatic relations with her. Many of the ideas in the Senate address, from a league of nations to an independent Poland with access to the sea, Wilson developed a year later in the Fourteen Points.