Empire Without Tears: Chapter 3

Empire Without Tears: America's Foreign Relations 1921-1933

Temple University Press

1987

3. Toward the Preservation of Peace

In the era of Harding and Coolidge, the conventional diplomatic activity of the United States also intensified. Of particular importance were international efforts toward maintaining world peace. To American leaders, peace was not merely an intrinsic good; insofar as the United States was the leading beneficiary of the existing world order and best equipped to determine the shape of peaceful change, none doubted that peace was in the interest of the nation and its empire.

It would be wrong, however, to see American participation in conferences and agreements designed to strengthen the peace machinery" of the world merely as the coolly calculated moves of shrewd statesmen, as Realpolitik.The horrors of the world war had shown Americans as well as Europeans what modern warfare was like. Few talked of its glories; few could wax as eloquent as Theodore Roosevelt had about the joys of what John Hay called that "splendid little war" back in the summer of 1898. The postwar literature, stories by William Faulkner, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Erich Maria Remarque, Hermann Hesse, and scores of others in Europe, were not about heroes and heroic deeds, but about weeks, months, years in muddy trenches, surrounded with the stench of dying men and dead horses, about barbed wire and poison gas.

In this milieu the American peace movement flourished as organizations multiplied, mastered public relations techniques, and mobilized great masses of ordinary citizens. In the 1920s the peace movement was enormously important in defining the nation's role in world affairs, demanding that officials in Washington reconsider membership in or cooperation with the League of Nations, take the lead in disarmament, join the World Court, and outlaw war. Leaders of peace organizations also led efforts to restrain the more blatant forms of American imperialism. But critical as the work of the peace movement unquestionably was, it is equally clear that the nation's political leaders, certainly men like Hughes and Hoover, had also learned the lessons of the war. The need for American participation in efforts to preserve the peace was widely perceived.

Wilson had recognized that American interests in the world were protected best on two levels: international cooperation and a powerful navy. He understood, as did Hughes, the value of power for obtaining cooperation. The option of League membership appeared closed to Hughes, but there were other approaches available when necessary. One problem that troubled Hughes was pressure to limit naval building at a time when Great Britain and Japan seemed primed to launch new programs utilizing new technology and threatening to return the U.S. Navy to second-class status. The demand for naval disarmament struck administration officials as inopportune, given residual tensions with Japan and the pending renewal of the Anglo-Japanese alliance. Undisputed British primacy on the seas had facilitated previous British interference with American trade. As the American empire expanded, it made little sense to leave it at the mercy of the British Admiralty. Reining in the American navy unilaterally was manifestly not the answer; an international agreement to limit naval building might well be.

Demand that the Harding administration lead the world toward disarmament came from the peace movement and its allies in Congress, especially Senator Borah. In December 1920, Borah introduced a resolution calling for a 50 percent reduction in naval building and a conference with Britain and Japan to preclude an arms race. Initially the Harding administration, toward which the resolution was directed, resisted. Hughes was determined to regain for the executive branch the power over foreign policy which the Senate appeared to have seized in the fight over ratification of the Treaty of Versailles. In the months before the Senate considered the Borah resolution, before Hughes and Harding had to respond, the peace movement slowly mobilized. Disarmament was an issue of enormous appeal to the movement and the public generally. It was easily understood: Armaments were used for war; therefore, a reduction in armaments reduced the likelihood of war. On another level, theorists argued that war was caused by arms races. If nations could agree to avoid arms races, they could avoid war. Disarmament as a cause also had the virtue of circumventing the fissures within the peace movement. Individuals and groups that had found themselves opposed on the question of American membership in the League of Nations, or on the use of sanctions in world affairs, might unite to stave off an arms race. Even Borah and Senator Hiram Johnson (R-Calif.), leading "irreconcilables" in the fight over ratification of the Treaty of Versailles, were willing to work for an international conference on arms limitation. Hardheaded businessmen could be attracted to the cause by the promise of tax cuts made possible by reduced government spending on armaments. And to men like Hoover and Lamont, disarmament seemed a wonderful way to relieve pressure on government budgets, to free resources for more productive investment at home and abroad.

The single most effective figure in the disarmament cause was Frederick J. Libby, an ordained Congregational minister whose speaking tour in the winter and spring of 1920-1921 helped focus attention on the Borah resolution and spawned petitions, postcards, and telegrams to Congress and the administration. The Federal Council of Churches of Christ, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and the newly formed National League of Women Voters committed their organizational skills to generating support for the resolution. With suffrage won, many women activists concentrated their energies on a variety of efforts to keep the peace.

In May 1921, despite administration objections, the Borah resolution passed the Senate by a vote of 74 to 0. A month later, the House endorsed it overwhelmingly, 332 to 4. Harding and Hughes capitulated and invited Britain and Japan to a conference to discuss arms limitation. The peace movement had demonstrated its power, and Libby moved quickly to increase its effectiveness. In September he organized the National Council for the Limitation of Armaments, a clearing-house for all organizations interested in the cause. Farm organizations and labor organizations, women's groups, representatives of Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant organizations, the Parent-Teachers Association and the National Education Association, as well as various peace societies, joined in the effort. Libby was chosen executive secretary to direct the day-to-day activities of the council. He set up his office in Washington, a few blocks from the site of the pending conference, and immediately created a stunningly impressive educational and lobbying apparatus. The outcome of the conference would not be left to chance — or to government bureaucrats less committed to disarmament than he believed the American people to be.

In London, the British government faced similar public pressure for disarmament, led by labor and women's organizations. The people of Great Britain had suffered infinitely more from the world war, and the cries for an enduring peace could not be ignored. But Prime Minister David Lloyd George had competing pressures to confront. The admirals constituted a far more potent force in British politics than in American, and they were not ready to yield supremacy to their upstart cousins across the Atlantic. Nonetheless, Lloyd George realized that the British economy could not easily sustain an arms race with the United States. Moreover, his cabinet deemed American goodwill an important foreign policy objective. The prime minister had another international political problem which appeared relevant: the question of whether to renew the Anglo-Japanese alliance, due to expire in July 1921 and much disliked by Americans and Canadians.

When the American initiative for an arms limitation conference arrived, the British Foreign Office suggested enlarging the conference to include all nations with interests in East Asia. The importance of navies was unquestionably related to Japanese-American tensions and questions of China. Without a political settlement of East Asian issues, it would be difficult to obtain agreement on arms limitation. Such a settlement might well preempt an arms race and produce a multilateral agreement to replace the Anglo-Japanese alliance. Carefully analyzing the domestic political situation, including grave complications like his need to avoid alienating potential supporters of his Irish policy, Lloyd George concluded his interests lay with naval arms limitation.

Hughes had no difficulty comprehending the value of a larger conference. The United States quickly agreed to issue invitations to Belgium, China, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Portugal—all nations with interests in the region except Soviet Russia. Here was an opportunity for Warren Harding's America to lead the effort to create an enduring peace, resolve its tensions with Japan, rid the world of the noxious Anglo-Japanese alliance, and obtain international endorsement of its policies in East Asia—an opportunity to preserve the peace, protect the empire, and win widespread domestic approval.

The Japanese government, on the other hand, was very uneasy about accepting the invitation, especially after the initial overture was modified to include issues other than arms limitation. Japanese leaders feared that the United States would use the conference as an international tribunal before which it would attack Japanese imperialism in China and challenge the Anglo-Japanese alliance. The foreign minister, Shidehara Kijuro, asked for and received assurances from Hughes that the matters would not be raised at the conference. But on these issues and the matter of naval arms limitation, Shidehara, Prime Minister Hara Kei, and a wide spectrum of Japanese intellectuals were in fact quite close to the mainstream of Anglo-American thought.

Hara was determined to assert civilian control over the Japanese military. He and Shidehara and many Japanese opinion leaders had been embarrassed by the excesses of Japanese imperialism in China and were eager to demonstrate that Japan was prepared to accept Woodrow Wilson's new world order. Opposition to defense spending had suddenly become politically significant in Japan. The Japanese army, long the dominant force in Japanese politics, was opposed to arms limitation, civilian control, and Wilsonian conceptions of how to deal with China. Naval leaders, however, despite an ambitious and funded building program, recognized that an international agreement to limit naval building might work to Japan's advantage. They also saw acquiescence as a way to work through Hara to undermine the power of the army. Ultimately a civilian-navy alliance prevailed, and the Japanese delegation left for Washington prepared to reach agreement with the United States and Great Britain.

The enlargement of the conference agenda was a source of great excitement in another nation, whose navy was not deemed much of a threat to anybody. In China, extravagant hopes were raised of using the conference to reverse the failure of Chinese diplomacy at Versailles. The Chinese, despite internal dissension tantamount to civil war, imagined an opportunity to drive Japan out of Shantung and to get all the powers to surrender their special privileges in China—nearly a century of infringements on Chinese sovereignty. They dreamed of tariff autonomy, of an end to extraterritoriality, the elimination of spheres of influence, the removal of foreign troops from Chinese soil and of foreign gunboats from Chinese waters. They had few illusions about their ability to win in any diplomatic confrontation with Japan, but they had many illusions about what they might accomplish with the help of the United States.

The conference opened on 12 November 1921, and Hughes almost immediately shattered the complacency of jaded diplomats and journalists from around the world. Instead of restricting himself to the usual platitudes of welcome, he quickly presented a detailed plan to limit the battle fleet of each of the major naval powers, naming specific ships to be scrapped. He sank more British battleships, remarked one commentator, than all the world's admirals had succeeded in sinking in the history of the British navy. Hughes's approach was magnificent political theater: He gained the attention of the world, and he delighted the peace movement, at home and abroad. The United States had struck a great blow for world peace. But Hughes was not merely performing for the public. His proposals were brilliantly conceived, and he and his staff were ready and able for the extraordinarily complex diplomacy that would be necessary for success.

Before the United States or its rivals for naval leadership would agree to limit naval building, let alone decommission existing battleships, each required assurance that its security and the security of its empire would not be compromised. The greatest tensions were between the United States and Japan in the western Pacific. As a precondition for limiting its navy, the United States wanted the abrogation of the Anglo-Japanese alliance. In addition, the American government wanted guarantees of its rights, principally for commercial cable, on the island of Yap, mandated to Japan at Versailles despite Wilson's protest. While the conference sessions and public attention focused on navies and efforts to internationalize American policy toward China, Hughes secretly negotiated an agreement with Japan over Yap and with Great Britain and Japan to eliminate the alliance.

Neither the British government nor the Japanese wanted to give up the alliance. Arthur J. Balfour, leader of the British delegation, quickly concluded that retention of the alliance would prevent naval disarmament—and that Great Britain needed arms limitation and American goodwill more than it needed the alliance. His alternative, approximating a trilateral alliance of the three leading naval powers, was never seriously considered. Shidehara, negotiating for Japan, drafted a treaty which Hughes modified to a nonaggression pact, into which France was invited.

The resulting Four-Power Treaty specifically replaced the Anglo-Japanese alliance and committed the signatories to respect each other's island possessions in the Pacific and to consult in the event of disagreement or outside threat. The treaty was a tribute to Hughes, who had won elimination of the alliance at no cost to the United States. It was also evidence of the value both Great Britain and Japan placed on American goodwill—and of their awareness that they had to offer concessions to prevent an arms race in which they could not long compete with American wealth.

Nonetheless, the Four-Power Treaty was not popular in the United States. In the Senate and in the streets there was considerable suspicion of the secrecy surrounding the negotiation. Unable or unwilling to comprehend that the treaty was an integral part of the larger arms and Pacific settlements reached at the conference, some senators feared it was a gratuitous entanglement in international politics which, like League membership, would draw the United States involuntarily into war. Careful preparation by Hughes, assisted by the president and key senators, won a narrow 67 to 27 victory for ratification, only 5 votes more than the required two-thirds majority.

The naval arms limitation, or Five-Power Treaty, was enormously pleasing to Libby and the peace movements around the world—and rightly so. For the first time in recorded history, the Great Powers voluntarily surrendered their freedom to arm as they pleased. In Great Britain, Japan, and the United States, internal political considerations facilitated agreement. The leading student of the treaty, Roger Dingman, explains that in the United States, "the politics of domestic leadership demanded American initiatives for arms control and profoundly influenced the character of American proposals for disarmament." ₁ In short, the efforts of the peace movement and Harding's unwillingness to lead the United States into the League of Nations forced the administration to turn to naval limitations, an assertion of American leadership for peace of which even Senators Borah and Johnson were supportive.

The Five-Power Treaty negotiators focused on and restricted tonnage in capital ships—battleships and battlecruisers. The treaty contained the name of every ship retained or sacrificed and a schedule of replacements through 1942. Great Britain agreed to rough equality with the United States. Japan, with but one ocean in which to defend its empire, accepted inferiority to both. The ratio of tonnage allowed to the three major naval powers was 5:5:3. The other two powers, France and Italy, accepted ratios of 1:67. Aircraft carriers, whose potential importance was suspected, were also restricted, but the numbers of cruisers, destroyers, and submarines were not. Only the size and offensive power of cruisers were limited. France was primarily responsible for the failure to reach agreement on the smaller ships.

In addition, a clause without which arms control efforts might not have succeeded provided that Great Britain, Japan, and the United States would not build new bases or further fortify existing bases on most of the islands they controlled in the Pacific. For the United States, the agreement covered the Aleutians, Midway, Wake, Tutuila, Guam, and the Philippines. For Japan, it included the Kuriles, Bonins, Ryukyus, Formosa, and the Pescadores. For Great Britain, it included all island possessions except Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, and Canadian offshore islands. In effect, the nonfortification agreement and the limits on naval building left Japan dominant in the western Pacific and the United States secure in the eastern Pacific and western Atlantic. The British reigned supreme from their home waters to the Straits of Malacca.

Gaps in the agreement relating to small ships and the absence of once major naval powers Germany and Russia were among the flaws of the Five-Power Treaty, but its signing constituted a most important historic moment, filled with promise for all who wished to be spared future war. Japanese-American tensions over Yap, naval bases, and naval threats eased markedly, and the two countries had new evidence that they could negotiate their differences. It established the basis for further cooperation, and an era of good feeling between the two nations. All Hughes surrendered were ships and bases for which Congress was unlikely to appropriate essential funds. Again, the Harding administration was rightfully proud of its diplomacy and deserving of its public relations success.

The third major agreement to come out of the conference was the Nine-Power Treaty relating to China. The primary purpose of the treaty was to stabilize the competition among the powers to preclude rivalry in China from erupting in war. To this end, the powers agreed not to meddle in China's internal affairs and not to seek new privileges at Chinese expense. In words Americans had urged so many times before, all agreed to respect the "sovereignty, the independence, territorial and administrative integrity of China" and to attempt to establish the principle of equal opportunity for the commerce and industry of all in China.

The Chinese quest for tangible concessions toward the elimination of existing imperialist privileges was considered outside the conference and generally brushed aside. Of greatest importance were Japanese-Chinese negotiations in which Balfour advised the Japanese and Hughes and members of his staff advised the Chinese, sitting in on a total of thirty-six sessions. Japan finally agreed to return the leasehold it had seized in Shantung, while retaining important railway privileges for another fifteen years. The Chinese struggle for tariff autonomy and an end to extraterritoriality failed, however. A customs convention was signed which threw the Chinese a few crumbs, in the form of a 5 percent increase in duties, but French obstruction turned even that into less than it appeared. All China could get was a promise to investigate tariff and judicial questions—and that came to naught in the years that followed. The response in China and among Chinese students in the United States was angry. Among Americans, however, the signing of the Nine-Power Treaty satisfied the desire to do something for the heathen Chinese and there was great satisfaction at international acceptance of the American formula.

The Washington Conference of 1921-1922 was an extraordinary event, symbolic of America's new role in world affairs. An international conference of tremendous importance was held in the United States, largely at American initiative, organized by the United States, and dominated by its secretary of state. As great powers are wont to do, the United States broke Japan's diplomatic code, intercepted messages between Tokyo and the Japanese delegation, and knew just how far to push. Every important American objective was achieved: arms control, abrogation of the Anglo-Japanese alliance, a limit on imperialism in China, protection of American rights in China and on Yap. Peace and the empire would be preserved without putting the lives of American boys at risk. None of the agreements reached at the conference required the United States to use force or committed the United States to any action other than to consult with the others in any crisis.

The Washington Conference was also a triumph for Wilson's vision of a new world order. Great Britain, Japan, and the United States would cooperate in peaceful rivalry without further harm to weaker countries like China. The Pacific treaty system, designed primarily by Hughes and his staff but understood and accepted by Balfour and Shidehara, envisaged a cooperative system for East Asia—a system in which none of the powers would attempt to maximize its advantage. Once assured that the Americans were not threatening their "special interests" in Manchuria and Inner Mongolia, the Japanese were quite willing, even eager, to adopt the system Japanese-American friendship bloomed—only to be undermined by the racist legislative action of 1924 excluding Japanese immigrants. Nonetheless, the Pacific system endured until it was shattered by an unexpected force: the Chinese revolution (see Chapter 4).

After the exhilaration of the Washington Conference's successes faded, public interest in the peace movement and world affairs naturally declined. Some Americans doubtless believed that the conference had solved all the world's problems certainly those pertinent to the United States—and secure in that belief, returned to the usual preoccupations with making money. For distractions there were opportunities to swallow goldfish, sit on flagpoles, or ogle flappers – or whatever the new morals and manners of postwar society might permit. Within the peace movement, however, there was general awareness that the foundation of an enduring peace was not yet complete. Further disarmament was necessary. There remained strong interest in world organizations, both the League and the World Court, and there was growing support for the idea of outlawing war. At the core of the American peace movement were fewer than a hundred full-time workers determined to maintain a high level of public interest and to keep official Washington actively involved in strengthening the world's peace machinery.

The Harding administration had kept the League of Nations at arms length throughout 1921, sometimes quite rudely. The president had decided that the issue was settled: The United States would neither join with nor cooperate with the League. The League was dead and, for a while, correspondence from League officials was placed unanswered in the Department of State's dead letter file. When the League survived American rejection, Harding and others were willing to credit it with being useful for Europe, but unnecessary for the United States. Even the Democratic party came to see the League issue as a liability by 1924, and Wilsonian loyalists failed to get the platform committee to promise to seek membership for the United States.

Within the peace movement, however, efforts to gain membership or at least align the United States with the League persisted for some time with considerable success. Especially after the favorable outcome of the Washington Conference, Hughes seemed more responsive to the League. It was clear to administration leaders that Congress and the American public welcomed international cooperation that did not threaten to embroil the United States in foreign wars. Much of the credit for creating a climate of opinion conducive to working with the League must go to the peace movement. Organizations like Libby's, in 1922 renamed the National Council for the Prevention of War, maintained a constant campaign to generate grassroots support and to lobby Congress. Libby was a master of all of the necessary activities. He continued his very successful speaking tours, stimulating petition drives, letters, and telegrams to public officials everywhere he went. He and his staff prepared and planted releases in small-town newspapers all over the country. They wrote speeches for congressmen. They were exceptionally good at mustering farm and labor support. In good years, Libby was able to raise a budget of well over $100,000, most of it in very small contributions. In the 1920s, a frugal lobbyist could work miracles with a budget of that size.

Working toward a similar end, men like Nicholas Murray Butler, James T. Shotwell, and Clark Eichelberger lobbied at the highest levels of government. Persuaded that public and congressional pressures on the executive were more often than not counterproductive, Butler, a Republican presidential hopeful as well as president of Columbia University and the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, talked and wrote to his good friend, Charles Evans Hughes. Shotwell, a Columbia professor and director of the Carnegie Endowment, had ready access to the senior members of Hughes's staff. Eichelberger, who headed the Chicago office of the League of Nations NonPartisan Association (later League of Nations Association), could assure the secretary of state of the support of opinion leaders outside New York. Though they differed on tactics and in their respective conceptions of the League as well men like Libby and Butler complemented each other well as they neutralized public, congressional, and bureaucratic opposition to working with the League.

After the Washington Conference, League officials and American diplomats corresponded formally and met informally to discuss all the major issues of world politics. The United States posted a series of its ablest diplomats—Joseph C. Grew, Hugh Gibson, and Hugh Wilson—to Switzerland, where they looked after American interests at League headquarters in Geneva as well as the modest demands at the Swiss capital in Berne. Unofficial observers represented the United States at League meetings, and by 1925 Grew attended as the official representative of his government. From 1925 onward there was an American official present at every League conference dealing with arms control and at most conferences dealing with economic and social issues. Moreover, the American government signed several treaties and conventions that derived from these meetings.

League officials were heartened by the American presence and encouraged by conversations with the pro-League American leaders with whom they were most likely to have contact. The dream of American membership died hard on both sides of the Atlantic. The United States never sought membership, and no administration was willing to commit itself to support the League to the extent that League officials and supporters thought essential if the League was to function effectively. Nonetheless, sustained American participation in League affairs far surpassed the prewar level of involvement in international affairs and the expectations of those who had witnessed the apparent rejection of the League by the Senate in 1919 and 1920 and by the Harding administration in 1921.

A substantial minority of Americans appears to have had serious objections to the League in the 1920s, some viewing it as an instrument of British and French imperialism, and others fearing League Covenant provisions for collective security would enmesh the United States in wars of someone else's choosing. On the other hand, there was widespread, nearly unanimous support for membership in the World Court. Hughes and Harding, Calvin Coolidge and his secretary of state, Frank B. Kellogg, Hoover and his secretary, Henry L. Stimson, all favored joining the Court—as did the majority of congressmen and senators. Poor diplomacy and dilatory handling at critical moments prevented consummation of the necessary arrangements.

Harding submitted a proposal for the United States to adhere to the Protocol and Statute of the World Court early in 1923, but he died before the Senate acted. In the Senate, Lodge and Borah, consecutive chairmen of the Committee on Foreign Relations, kept the proposal from reaching the floor. Both men were hostile to the World Court as a subsidiary of the League, despite Borah's interest in international law as an instrument for maintaining peace. After several efforts by Coolidge and endorsement of membership by both parties in 1924, the House of Representatives approved the idea by a wide margin in March 1925. Finally, in January 1926 the Senate gave its overwhelming approval.

Unfortunately for those who hoped to see the United States join the World Court, Senate approval had been subject to five conditions. The fifth of these, permitting the United States to prevent the Court from giving advisory opinions on matters in which it claimed an interest, met objections from other Court members. Twice the League Council suggested negotiations and twice Coolidge and Kellogg refused. Unable to bluff the council into dropping its objections and unwilling to negotiate, Coolidge dropped the idea. In retrospect, the United States had nothing to lose by negotiating, and the behavior of the American government, demanding privileges other Court members did not share, was reprehensible. On the other hand, if drawing the United States closer to the League was a paramount concern of League members and officials, then perhaps yielding a bit more to appease the Americans was in order.

In the United States, peace movement leaders were outraged and continued their efforts to gain membership in the Court. They were able to enlist Hughes and the venerable Republican statesman and father of the foreign policy establishment, Elihu Root, to assist in their efforts. Root eventually went to Geneva, where he was largely responsible for the redesigning of the Court Protocol to meet the conditions posed by the U.S. Senate. In December 1929 the United States signed. Again backers were frustrated, as Hoover gave priority to arms control and the Great Depression overtook Senate consideration until after Franklin Roosevelt was in the White House. The United States never became a member of the World Court.

III

One other cause in which the peace movement united was the quest for the outlawing of war. Ultimately, the efforts of peace activists and the aims of French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand overlapped and led to the Kellogg-Briand or Paris Peace Pact of 1928.

The single most important figure in the outlawry movement was a wealthy Chicago lawyer, Salmon 0. Levinson. Levinson was a pacifist, convinced that international law could contain the impulse to war. He argued that if war were made illegal, there would be no more wars. It was necessary to get all nations to agree to such a law, as through a multilateral treaty. Levinson was publicizing the phrase "outlawry of war" even before the battle over ratification of the Treaty of Versailles and American membership in the League. He opposed the League because he objected to the provisions in the Covenant for sanctions and collective security—a potential for the use of force he would not countenance. In 1919 and 1920, however, the League issue engaged the attention of his potential audience. In 1921 and 1922, the peace movement concentrated its energies on arms control. Finally, in 1923, Levinson persuaded Borah to introduce a resolution in the Senate incorporating his program: a call for a universal treaty outlawing war, with each nation responsible for punishing its own warmongers. All disputes would have to be resolved peacefully, by negotiation or arbitration. Despite considerable interest within the peace movement—not least from the great American philosopher John Dewey—no American or foreign political leader took the idea seriously. Levinson wrote hundreds of letters drumming up support and was seconded by the influential Christian Century, but several years passed without progress.

The principal catalyst for bringing Levinson's dream to reality was James T. Shotwell, whose goals were quite different. Shotwell was a strong supporter of the League of Nations, eager to draw the United States closer to the League. Shotwell often contended that American cooperation with Great Britain and France was crucial to world peace. United, the democracies could provide international peace and justice. In the spring of 1927, Shotwell met with Briand in Paris in the hope of bringing their two countries closer.

French leaders of the 1920s were intensely fearful for the security of their nation, specifically from attack by Germany. France had been victorious in 1918 only because it had been allied with Russia, Great Britain, Italy, and the United States. French leaders knew that alone they could not prevail against Germany. France had suffered heavy losses during the war, and these were reflected in a very low postwar birth rate. Germany started with a larger population base and had a higher birth rate. French leaders believed that their only hope of surviving that inevitable day when the Germans came seeking revenge was to find allies, to sign pacts with as many nations as possible, alliances if they could be obtained, nonaggression pacts at minimum. It was this pattern of French thinking that Shotwell sought to exploit.

Briand sent an open letter to the American people, drafted by Shotwell, in which the French foreign minister proposed a bilateral treaty to outlaw war. In effect, the agreement was a negative alliance. If the United States signed and France went to war, the United States would not be able to take reprisals against France if the French violated America's neutral rights, as had Great Britain from 1914 to 1917. Briand liked the idea for the same reason Shotwell liked it: If successful, the scheme would involve the United States in the French security system. For Briand such involvement was an end in itself; for Shotwell it was a step toward further collective action by the United States.

Kellogg and Coolidge were irritated by Briand's public diplomacy and by no means interested in becoming involved in the French security system. They had every intention of ignoring the overture, but Shotwell was not without further resources. At his initiative, Nicholas Murray Butler wrote to the New York Times calling attention to Briand's letter. The Times published Butler's letter and endorsed the Briand proposal. A massive campaign by the peace movement followed. Levinson and Libby mobilized all their resources, but the campaign transcended the efforts of a few individuals. All the peace organizations and their compatriots in church groups, women's organizations, and educational associations joined in. They organized petition drives, letter-writing campaigns, and lobbying visits to Congress and to the secretary of state. Kellogg began receiving more than 300 letters a day and at one point noted that more than 50,000 people had registered their support for Briand's proposal. When an attempt to extend the arms control agreements of 1921-1922 to cruisers failed at Geneva in August 1927, the peace movement redoubled its effort to outlaw war. One petition gathered by the Federal Council of Churches contained 180,000 signatures. Clearly Kellogg and Coolidge had little choice.

The secretary of state and his president wanted no part of Briand's treaty, but they could not ignore the pressures generated by the peace movement. A solution to their dilemma emerged in December 1927. The United States proposed substituting a multilateral treaty to be signed by all nations. In this way the United States could evade Briand's snare and still endorse peace, the outlawing of war. Levinson, Libby, and others enrolled in the campaign were delighted. Every nation would promise not to go to war with every other nation—and the heavenly city would be upon us.

Briand was not pleased by Kellogg's ploy, but there was no escape. The peace movement in Europe was also determined to seize this opportunity and Briand, no more than Kellogg or Coolidge, could not appear to oppose peace. And so, in August 1928, in Paris, the Great Powers signed a pact to which all but a few insignificant countries adhered. Germany, Japan, and Italy, as well as the United States, France, and Great Britain, undertook a solemn obligation to renounce war as an instrument of national policy. Nations and U.S. senators with reservations about fighting in self-defense or under obligations of the League Covenant were heard—and their reservations swept under the rug by Kellogg. Ultimately, sixty-four nations signed the pact. In the U.S. Senate, consent for the treaty was obtained quickly by a vote of 85 to 1. For his efforts, the American secretary of state was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace.

Few peace movement leaders and perhaps no diplomats or senators believed that the Kellogg Pact had put an end to war. The American public was generally delighted because the United States had played a leading role in strengthening the "machinery" for world peace. If they could not be certain that war had been eliminated, they believed they had at least made the use of force more difficult to justify. They had improved the odds for peace. The Kellogg Pact and the fact that a Quaker, Herbert Hoover, had been elected to the presidency in 1928, heartened Libby, but he still thought it essential for the United States to join the World Court and the League and to obtain arms reductions around the world. Shotwell and Butler had always had additional collective security measures on their agenda. Similarly, in Europe and on the League Council, the enormous satisfaction with the American role in the pact was predicated on the assumption that the United States would now cooperate still more with the League and accept more and more responsibility for the maintenance of world peace.

The Kellogg Pact confirmed the power of the peace movement as a force in the shaping of American foreign policy. Those within the movement who were eager to have the United States join the League remained frustrated, as did the much larger number who wanted membership for their country on the World Court, but the record of the 1920s was impressive: the first major arms control agreement of modern times and a multilateral treaty to renounce the use of force. Moreover, the peace movement created a milieu in the United States in the 1920s which greatly restricted the freedom of the executive to use American power in "police actions" in the Caribbean and China or to coerce Mexico (see Chapter 4). The strength of the peace movement ensured that the American quest for wealth and power would be pursued peacefully.

Internationally, the United States had established itself as an important pillar of world peace. It was not as cooperative as League officials and French and British diplomats might have liked, but American secretaries of state, Hughes and Kellogg, were the architects of arms control, the Pacific treaty system, and the Kellogg Peace Pact. Rarely had the presence of the United States been so strongly felt in the foreign ministries of the world. The American people were in the forefront of the search for peace and prosperity.

Endnotes

Note 1: Roger Dingman, Power in the Pacific: The Origins of Naval Arms Limitation, 1914-1922 (1976), 140. Back.