PARIS 1919 Read Online Free PDF Page B

such occasions. The experts left the meeting heartened and impressed. Wilson was informal and friendly. He spoke about the heavy task ahead and how he was going to rely on them to provide him with the best information. They must feel free to come to him at any time. “You tell me what’s right and I’ll fight for it.” He apologized for talking about his own ideas: “they weren’t very good but he thought them better than anything else he had heard.” 15
    When it came to making peace, Wilson said, their country would rightly hold the position of arbiter. They must live up to the great American traditions of justice and generosity. They would be, after all, “the only disinterested people at the Peace Conference.” What was more, he warned, “the men whom we were about to deal with did not represent their own people.” This was one of Wilson’s deep convictions, curious in a man whose own Congress was now dominated by his political opponents. Throughout the Peace Conference he clung to the belief that he spoke for the masses and that, if only he could reach them—whether French, Italian or even Russian—they would rally to his views. 16
    He touched on another favorite theme: the United States, he assured his audience, had not entered the war for selfish reasons. In this, as in so much else, it was unlike other nations, for it did not want territory, tribute or even revenge. (As a sign that American participation in the war was different from that of the Europeans, Wilson had always insisted on the United States being an Associate and not an Ally.) The United States generally acted unselfishly, in its occupation of Cuba, for example. “We had gone to war with Spain,” he insisted, “not for annexation but to provide the helpless colony with the opportunity of freedom.” 17
    Wilson tended to draw on Latin American examples, since most of his formative experiences in foreign relations had been there. He had recast, at least to his own satisfaction, the Monroe Doctrine, that famous defiance hurled at the Europeans in 1823 to warn them off attempting to colonize the New World again. The doctrine had become a fundamental precept in American foreign policy, a cloak, many said, for U.S. dominance of its neighbors. Wilson saw it rather as the framework within which all the nations of the Americas worked peacefully together, and a model for the warring European nations. Lansing was dubious, as he often was of Wilson’s ideas: “the doctrine is exclusively a
national
policy of the United States and relates to its national safety and vital interests.” 18
    Wilson paid little attention to what he regarded as niggling objections from Lansing. He was clear in his own mind that he meant well. When the American troops went to Haiti or Nicaragua or the Dominican Republic, it was to further order and democracy. “I am going to teach,” he had said in his first term as president, “the South American Republics to elect good men!” He rarely mentioned that he was also protecting the Panama Canal and American investments. During Wilson’s presidency, the United States intervened repeatedly in Mexico to try to get the sort of government it wanted. “The purpose of the United States,” Wilson said, “is solely and singly to secure peace and order in Central America by seeing to it that the processes of self-government there are not interrupted or set aside.” He was taken aback when the Mexicans failed to see the landing of American troops, and American threats, in the same light. 19
    The Mexican adventure also showed Wilson’s propensity, perhaps unconscious, to ignore the truth. When he sent troops to Mexico for the first time, he told Congress that it was in response to repeated provocations and insults to the United States and its citizens from General Victoriano Huerta, the man who started the Mexican Revolution. Huerta in