The United States and the Weimar Republic: America’s Response to the German Problem

  • Lloyd E. Ambrosius
Chapter

Abstract

America’s response to the German problem after World War I occurred within the intellectual framework that Woodrow Wilson articulated and epitomized. In the Fourteen Points and subsequent wartime addresses that became the basis for the Armistice with Germany, he promised a liberal peace of “impartial justice” to victor and vanquished alike.1 He wanted the United States to play the leading role in the League of Nations to preserve such a peace. Wilsons conception of the League emphasized both the functions of enforcing and revising the Versailles Treaty. Article 10 of the League Covenant provided for enforcement by promising the preservation of territorial integrity and political independence “against external aggression.” Article 19 outlined the procedure for revision of outmoded treaty provisions and for “consideration of international conditions whose continuance might endanger the peace of the world.”2 Wilson saw no contradiction between these two functions of enforcement and revision because he assumed that his peace program would reconcile the differences between Germany and the Allies. He viewed himself as the spokesman for the people of all countries.

Keywords

Open Door French Government Weimar Republic American Relation Peace Program 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in to check access.

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Notes

  1. 1.
    Ray Stannard Baker and William E. Dodd, eds., The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1925–7), 5: 257.Google Scholar
  2. 2.
    David Hunter Miller, The Drafting of the Covenant, 2 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1928), 2: 727, 735.Google Scholar
  3. Most historians have emphasized Article 10; see, for example, John Chalmers Vinson, Referendum for Isolation: Defeat of Article Ten of the League of Nations Covenant (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1961).Google Scholar
  4. Some also have noted Article 19; see especially Edward H. Buehrig, “Woodrow Wilson and Collective Security,” in Edward H. Buehrig, ed., Wilsons Foreign Policy in Perspective (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957), 34–60.Google Scholar
  5. 3.
    Paul Mantoux, Paris Peace Conference 1919: Proceedings of the Council of Four, March 24–April 18 (Genève: Institut universitaire de hautes études internationales, 1964), 45.Google Scholar
  6. For evidence of Wilsons misunderstanding of French public opinion, see George Bernard Noble, Policies and Opinions at Paris, 1919: Wilsonian Diplomacy, the Versailles Peace, and French Public Opinion (New York: Macmillan, 1935).Google Scholar
  7. 4.
    U.S. Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States: The Paris Peace Conference, 1919, 13 vols. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1942–7), 4: 543–7.Google Scholar
  8. 5.
    Lloyd E. Ambrosius, “Wilsons League of Nations,” Maryland Historical Magazine 65 (Winter 1970): 369–93.Google Scholar
  9. 6.
    W. R. Gherardi to American Commission to Negotiate Peace, Berlin, February 8, 1919, Department of State, Record Group 256, File No. 184.01202/18, National Archives, Washington, DC. See also D. K. Buse, “Ebert and the German Crisis, 1917–1920,” Central European History 5 (September 1972): 234–55;CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  10. Klaus Schwabe, “Woodrow Wilson and Germany’s Membership in the League of Nations, 1918–19,” Central European History 8 (March 1975): 3–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  11. 9.
    Alma Luckau, The German Delegation at the Paris Peace Conference (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941);Google Scholar
  12. Otto-Ernst Schüddekopf, “German Foreign Policy between Compiègne and Versailles,” Journal of Contemporary History 4 (April 1969): 481–97;CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  13. Peter Berg, “Deutschland und Amerika, 1918–1929: Uber das deutsche Amerikabild der zwanziger Jahre,” Historische Studien 385 (Lixbeck and Hamburg: Matthiesen Verlag, 1963): 9–47;Google Scholar
  14. Ernst Fraenkel, “Das deutsche Wilsonbild,” Jahrbuch fur Amerikastudien 5 (1960): 66–120;Google Scholar
  15. Klaus Schwabe, Deutsche Revolution und Wilson-Frieden: Die amerikanische und deutsche Friedensstrategie zwischen Ideologie und Machtpolitik, 1918/19 (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1971).Google Scholar
  16. 10.
    Lloyd E. Ambrosius, “The United States and the Weimar Republic, 1918–1923: From the Armistice to the Ruhr Occupation” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois, Urbana, 1967), 134–218;Google Scholar
  17. Lloyd E. Ambrosius, “Wilson, Clemenceau, and the German Problem at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919,” Rocky Mountain Social Science Journal 12 (April 1975): 69–79.Google Scholar
  18. 11.
    U.S. Senate, Congressional Record, 66 Congress, 1 Session, 58: 2336–9 (July 10, 1919).Google Scholar
  19. 12.
    W. M. Jordan, Great Britain, France and the German Problem, 1918–1939: A Study of Anglo-French Relations in the Making and Maintenance of the Versailles Settlement (London: Oxford University Press, 1943);Google Scholar
  20. Arnold Wolfers, Britain and France between Two Wars: Conflicting Strategies of Peace from Versailles to World War II (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940);Google Scholar
  21. Martin Gilbert, The Roots of Appeasement (New York: New American Library, 1966).Google Scholar
  22. 13.
    Ambrosius, “The United States and the Weimar Republic,” 236–59. For accounts of the abortive French security treaties with Great Britain and the United States, see J. Paul Selsam, The Attempts to Form an Anglo-French Alliance, 1919–1924 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1936);Google Scholar
  23. Louis A. R. Yates, United States and French Security, 1917–1921 (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1957);Google Scholar
  24. Lloyd E. Ambrosius, “Wilson, the Republicans, and French Security after World War I,” Journal of American History 59 (September 1972): 341–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  25. 14.
    Kurt and Sarah Wimer, “The Harding Administration, the League of Nations, and the Separate Peace Treaty,” Review of Politics 29 (January 1967): 13–24;CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  26. Robert K. Murray, The Harding Era: Warren G. Harding and His Administration (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969), 135–40.Google Scholar
  27. 15.
    Wilson to Edward M. House, Washington, October 31, 1918, U.S. Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1918, Supplement 1, The World War (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1933), 1: 427–8.Google Scholar
  28. 16.
    Ronald W. Pruessen, “John Foster Dulles and Reparations at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919: Early Patterns of a Life,” Perspectives in American History 8 (1974): 381–410;Google Scholar
  29. Philip Mason Burnett, Reparation at the Paris Peace Conference: From the Standpoint of the American Delegation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), 1: 66–70, 142–57.Google Scholar
  30. 17.
    John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Howe, 1920);Google Scholar
  31. John Maynard Keynes, A Revision of the Treaty: Being a Sequel to the Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922);Google Scholar
  32. Sally Marks, “Reparations Reconsidered: A Reminder,” Central European History 2 (December 1969): 356—65;CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  33. David Felix, “Reparations Reconsidered with a Vengeance,” Central European History 4 (June 1971): 171–9;CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  34. Sally Marks, “Reparations Reconsidered: A Rejoinder,” Central European History 5 (December 1972): 358–61;CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  35. David Felix, Walther Rathenau and the Weimar Republic: The Politics of Reparations (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971).Google Scholar
  36. 19.
    Keith L. Nelson, Victors Divided: America and the Allies in Germany, 1918–1923 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); Ambrosius, “The United States and the Weimar Republic,” 329–77, 397–411;Google Scholar
  37. Jolyon P. Girard, “Congress and Presidential Military Policy: The Occupation of Germany,” Mid-America 56 (October 1974): 211–20;Google Scholar
  38. Royal J. Schmidt, Versailles and the Ruhr: Seedbed of World War II (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  39. 20.
    Joan Hoff Wilson, American Business and Foreign Policy, 1920–1933 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1971), x.Google Scholar
  40. On American isolationism, see Selig Adler, The Isolationist Impulse: Its Twentieth-Century Reaction (New York: Free Press, 1957);Google Scholar
  41. Alexander DeConde, “On Twentieth-Century Isolationism,” in Alexander DeConde, ed., Isolation and Security: Ideas and Interests in Twentieth-Century American Foreign Policy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1957), 3–32;Google Scholar
  42. Klaus Schwabe, “Der amerikanische Isolationismus im 20. Jahrhundert: Legende und Wirklichkeit,” Frankfurter Historische Vorträge 1 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1975).Google Scholar
  43. 21.
    Wilson, American Business and Foreign Policy, 65–100, 123–56; Harold G. Moulton and Leo Pasvolsky, War Debts and World Prosperity (New York: Brookings Institution, 1932);Google Scholar
  44. Dieter Bruno Gescher, Die Vereinigten Staaten von Nordamerika und die Reparationen, 1920–1924 (Bonn: Ludwig Rohrscheid Verlag, 1956).Google Scholar
  45. 22.
    Howard H. Quint and Robert H. Ferrell, eds., The Talkative President: The Off-the-Record Press Conferences of Calvin Coolidge (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1964), 181, 184–5.Google Scholar
  46. 23.
    Kellogg to Norman Armour, Washington, October 31, 1928, U.S. Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1928 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1943), 2: 874.Google Scholar
  47. 24.
    Hughes to Coolidge, November 8, 1923, in David J. Danelski and Joseph S. Tulchin, eds., The Autobiographical Notes of Charles Evans Hughes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 256.Google Scholar
  48. 25.
    Carl P. Parrini, Heir to Empire: United States Economic Diplomacy (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1969), 212–47;Google Scholar
  49. Melvyn P. Leffler, “The Struggle for Stability: American Policy toward France, 1921–1933” (Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State University, 1972), 278–355.Google Scholar
  50. 26.
    William Appleman Williams, “The Legend of Isolationism in the 1920s,” Science and Society (Winter 1954), reprinted in William Appleman Williams, History as a Way of Learning (New York: New Viewpoints, 1973), 115–34; William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: Dell Pub. Co., 1962), 104–59,Google Scholar
  51. William Appleman Williams, “A Note on American Foreign Policy in Europe in the Nineteen Twenties,” Science and Society 22 (Winter 1958): 1–20.Google Scholar
  52. 27.
    Werner Link, Die amerikanische Stabilisierungspolitik in Deutschland, 1921–32 (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1970).Google Scholar
  53. 28.
    Lionel Kochan, Russia and the Weimar Republic (Cambridge, UK: Bowes and Bowes, 1954);Google Scholar
  54. Josef Korbel, Poland between East and West: Soviet and German Diplomacy toward Poland, 1919–1933 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963);Google Scholar
  55. Piotr S. Wandycz, France and Her Eastern Allies, 1919–1925: French-Czechoslovak-Polish Relations from the Paris Peace Conference to Locarno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962);Google Scholar
  56. Jon Jacobson, Locarno Diplomacy: Germany and the West, 1925–1929 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972);Google Scholar
  57. Gaines Post, Jr., The Civil-Military Fabric of Weimar Foreign Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 3–262;Google Scholar
  58. F. L. Carsten, The Reichswehr and Politics, 1918–1933 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 3–308;Google Scholar
  59. Henry L. Bretton, Stresemann and the Revision of Versailles: A Fight for Reason (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1953);Google Scholar
  60. Hans W. Gatzke, Stresemann and the Rearmament of Germany (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1954);Google Scholar
  61. Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., Stresemann and the Politics of the Weimar Republic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963);Google Scholar
  62. Robert Gottwald, Die deutsch-amerikanischen Beziehungen in der Ära Stresemann (Berlin: Colloquium Verlag, 1965).Google Scholar
  63. 29.
    Robert H. Ferrell, Peace in Their Time: The Origins of the Kellogg-Briand Pact (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1952).Google Scholar
  64. For contrary arguments that Republican policy was realistic, see L. Ethan Ellis, Republican Foreign Policy, 1921–1933 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1968),Google Scholar
  65. and Melvyn P. Leffler, “Political Isolationism, Economic Expansionism, or Diplomatic Realism: American Policy toward Western Europe, 1921–1933,” Perspectives in American History 8 (1974): 411–61.Google Scholar
  66. 30.
    Hoover to Wilson, April 11, 1919, Herbert Hoover, The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson (London: Museum Press Ltd., 1958), 202.Google Scholar
  67. 33.
    Stimson Diary, March 30, 1931, quoted in Jefferson Davis Futch, “The United States and the Fall of the Weimar Republic: German-American Relations, 1930–1933” (Ph.D. dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 1962), 77–8.Google Scholar
  68. 34.
    Futch, “The United States and the Fall of the Weimar Republic,” 1–213; Edward W. Bennett, Germany and the Diplomacy of the Financial Crisis, 1931 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962);Google Scholar
  69. Bernard V. Burke, “American Economic Diplomacy and the Weimar Republic,” Mid-America 54 (October 1972): 211–33;Google Scholar
  70. F. G. Stambrook, “The German-Austrian Customs Union Project of 1931: A Study of German Methods and Motives,” Journal of Central European Affairs 21 (April 1961): 15–44;Google Scholar
  71. Stanley Suval, The Anschluss Question in the Weimar Era: A Study of Nationalism in Germany and Austria, 1919–1932 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 75–165;Google Scholar
  72. Charles P. Kindleberger, The World in Depression, 1929–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 128–98;Google Scholar
  73. Robert H. Ferrell, American Diplomacy in the Great Depression: Hoover-Stimson Foreign Policy, 1929–1933 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957), 106–19;Google Scholar
  74. Louis P. Lochner, Herbert Hoover and Germany (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 68–131; Leffler, “The Struggle for Stability,” 356–92.Google Scholar
  75. 35.
    F. P. Walters, A History of the League of Nations (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), 500–516; Ferrell, American Diplomacy in the Great Depression, 194–214; Post, The Civil-Military Fabric of Weimar Foreign Policy, 265—358; Carsten, The Reichswehr and Politics, 309–405; Leffler, “The Struggle for Stability,” 614–31.Google Scholar
  76. 36.
    Hugh R. Wilson, Diplomat Between Wars (New York: Longmans, Green, 1941);Google Scholar
  77. Hugh R. Wilson, Jr., A Career Diplomat, The Third Chapter: The Third Reich (New York: Vantage Press, 1960).Google Scholar
  78. 37.
    William Edward Dodd, Woodrow Wilson, 1918–1920 and the World Situation, 1938 [Address before the Democratic Women’s Luncheon Club of Philadelphia, December 28, 1938] (Philadelphia, 1938);Google Scholar
  79. Arnold Offner, American Appeasement: United States Foreign Policy and Germany, 1933–1938 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969);CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  80. Robert Dallek, Democrat and Diplomat: The Life of William E. Dodd (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 171–317.Google Scholar
  81. 38.
    Robert A. Divine, Second Chance: The Triumph of Internationalism in America during World War II (New York: Atheneum, 1967);Google Scholar
  82. Bruce Kuklick, “History as a Way of Learning,” American Quarterly 22 (Fall 1970): 609–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  83. 39.
    William E. Dodd, Woodrow Wilson and His Work (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1920);Google Scholar
  84. Ray Stannard Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, 3 vols. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1922);Google Scholar
  85. Paul Birdsall, Versailles Twenty Years After (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1941);Google Scholar
  86. Arthur S. Link, Wilson the Diplomatist: A Look at His Major Foreign Policies (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1957);Google Scholar
  87. Seth P. Tillman, Anglo-American Relations at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961).Google Scholar
  88. 40.
    Warren I. Cohen, The American Revisionists: The Lessons of Intervention in World War I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 65–6;Google Scholar
  89. Harry Elmer Barnes, “Woodrow Wilson,” American Mercury 1 (April 1924): 479–90;Google Scholar
  90. Selig Adler, “The War-Guilt Question and American Disillusionment, 1918–1928,” Journal of Modern History 23 (March 1951): 1–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  91. 41.
    Arno J. Mayer, Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, 1917–1918 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959);Google Scholar
  92. Arno J. Mayer, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles, 1918–1919 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967);Google Scholar
  93. N. Gordon Levin, Jr., Woodrow Wilson and World Politics: America’s Response to War and Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968).Google Scholar
  94. 42.
    Schwabe, Deutsche Revolution und Wilson-Frieden. Map of Germany (1919–1923) that appears between Part II and Part III: U.S. Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States: Paris Peace Conference, 1919 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1947), Volume XIII (after page 1018). The map was compiled and drawn in the Department of State, Division of Geography and Cartography in February 1945.Google Scholar

Copyright information

© Lloyd E. Ambrosius 2002

Authors and Affiliations

  • Lloyd E. Ambrosius

There are no affiliations available

Personalised recommendations