The Origins of NeZltrdh3-y Reuiion: The Americdn P h n $1924

Charles DeBenedetti”

ETWEEN 1920 and 1940 the doctrine of neutrality provided the diplomatic rationale for America’s attempt to maintain its international eminence while remaining free from Great Power rivalries. The “illusion of neutrality” and the debate

that it engendered in the 1930s have been ably documented by a number of scho1ars.l But the emphasis which has been placed upon the debate of the Depression years has tended to obscure the fact that the challenge to neutrality had long been building. As a position of legal impartiality among belligerents and as a defense of the rights of private American citizens to trade freely with all sides in non-contraband materiel, neutrality appeared officially doomed as early as 1917, when President Wilson told the Congress that the doctrine was “no longer feasible or desirable where the peace of the world is involved and the freedom of its peoples” jeopardized by “autocratic governments.” But the real irrelevance of the doctrine did not penetrate the public consciousness until the last half of the 192Os, when a growing number of thoughtful Americans came to conclude that the nation’s neutral posture constituted an intolerable impediment to the maintenance of organized peace. Then, with increasing influence, well-placed groups of articulate critics started insistently to charge that America’s political indifference and indiscriminate arms shipments served to support aggressor states and to thwart collective efforts at international security. Clearly, they argued, the United States must revise its neutrality and assume at least a negative commitment to the defense of world peace.

The initial impetus behind the challenge to neutrality arose

+The author is Assistant Professor of History in the University of Toledo. ‘Robert Divine, T h e Illusion of Neutrality (Chicago, 1962); Donald F. Drum-

mond, T h e Passing of American Neutrality, 1937-1941 (Ann Arbor, 1955); Wayne s. Cole, Senator Gerald P . Nye and American Foreign Relations (Minneapolis, 1962); Fred L. Israel, Nevada’s Key Pittman (Lincoln, 1963).

zRay Stannard Baker and William E. Dodd, The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson (6 vols.; New York, 1927), V, 1 I ; see also Nils Orvik, T h e Decline of Neutrality, 1914-1941: With Special Reference to the United States and the Northern Neutrals (2d edition; London, 1971), 117.

B

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The Historian in 1924, when a group of private American citizens met in New York in order to discuss alternative ways of strengthening Great Power co-operation at the League of Nations. The group first gathered at the Columbia University Club in January at the request of Dr. James T. Shotwell, a professor of history at Columbia and an officer of the Carnegie Endowment for Inter- national Peace. Most of those invited were - like Shotwell - prominent veterans of American military and diplomatic service during the Great War. The scholarly Major General Tasker H. Bliss had been the nation’s highest-ranking officer in war-time European strategy sessions, its representative to the inter-Allied Supreme War Council, and, in 1919, a member of the American Commission to Negotiate Peace. Major General James G. Harbord had headed the Army’s Service of Supply, led a post-war investigative mission through the Near East, and capped his rise from the rank of private when he was named, in May 1919, chief of staff of the American Expeditionary Force. Frederick Keppel had been assistant secretary of war in the Wilson Administration; and David Hunter Miller had worked in Paris as Wilson’s legal adviser and a draftsman of the League Covenant. Shotwell, Miller, Isaiah Bowman, Joseph Chamberlain, and Stephen Duggan had all served at one time or another with the Inquiry, an archetypical government “think-tank.” Altogether, the men made up an imposing roster of notables who were convinced that a need existed for their collective services. After two meetings, they began informally to refer to themselves as the American Committee on Disarmament and Security. a

* In 1924, Bliss was serving as commander of the Soldiers’ Home in Washington, D. C.; Bowman was director of the American Geographic Society; Chamberlain was professor of public law; Duggan was director of The Institute of International Education; Harhord was president of the Radio Corporation of America; Keppel was president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York; and Miller was a Wall Street lawyer.

In addition, the following were also Committcc members: Dr. John Bates Clark, professor of econoniics at Columbia and a former officer of the Carnegie Endowment; Austcn Fox, a New York attorney and triistee of thc Carnegie Endowment; and Dr. Henry Smith Pritchett, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia, John H. Finley, editor of the New York Times, Albert Shaw. editor of Review of Reviews, and former Under Secretary of State Frank Polk followed the group’s activities from a distance. James Shotwcll to Tasker H. Bliss, May 26, 1924, Box 267, Tasker H. Bliss Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Shotwell, “Disarmament Policy: Pre- liminary Memorandum of an American Committee of Research,” n. d., Box 268, ibid. James T. Shotwell, The Autobiography of James T . Shotwell (Indianapolis, 1961), 18.2; and Harold Josephson, “James Thomson Shotxvell: Historian as Activist” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1968). 150.

For the fascinating story of the Inquiry, see Lawrence E. Gelfand, T h e Inquiry: American Preparations for Peace, 1917-1919 (New Haven, 1963).

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Neutrality Revision The title was not an empty one. On the contrary, it perfectly

expressed the group’s underlying faith in the normative superiority of rationality, systematization, and calculability and its commit- ment to the political utility of managerial technique and social scientific expertise. Dominated by legal and academic activists, the American Committee operated upon the assumption that empirical research and objective analysis were vital to sound policymaking and orderly international co-operation. Each member believed that the conduct of international affairs was fundamentally a rational process that had been complicated by a wave of modern technology and the totality of modern war. Although their faith had been shaken by the Great War, the men still maintained that rational, progressive forces were at work in the world and that it was the task of an enlightened elite to facilitate the operation of these forces by institutional overhaul and re-adjusment. With the help of organized scientific experts skilled in experimentation and planning, realistic statesmen could begin to reduce the great complexity of international affairs to controlled management in the interests of world peace.

The focus of Committee interest was Europe’s continuing attempt to reconcile the competing needs of international dis- armament and national security. Indeed the precipitating cause of the Committee’s very convocation had been Shotwell’s apprehension that the League experiment might collapse in a failing effort to ease world tensions and bring about arms limitation. Since 1920 negotiations at Geneva had deadlocked between France and the security-conscious states, who wanted automatic guarantees of mutual assistance, and Britain and the security-satisfied states, who demanded immediate arms reduction. The disarmament dilemma posed a formidable diplomatic problem. But it was only symptomatic of deeper Anglo-French differences over the durability of the Versailles order. British leaders were repelled by the violent uncertainty of East European politics and anxious to develop closer relations with the Commonwealth and with Germany. French leaders, on the other hand, resented Britain’s refusal to treat the European peace as an integral arrangement that rested upon clear-cut commitments to resist forcible change. Frightened by the prospect of a

‘James T. Shotwell, “Plans and Protocols to End War: Historical Outline and Guide,” International Conciliation, No. 208 (March 1925), 7-8; Shotwell, “Confi- dential Memorandum on the German Committee for Arbitration and Security,” in Shotwell to Nicholas Murray Butler, August 27, 1925, Box 142, Records of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Butler Library, Columbia University. Isaiah Bowman, The New World: Problems in Political Geogaphy (Yonkers-on-Hudson, 1921), 11.

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The Historian renascent Germany, France strengthened its ties with the successor states of Eastern Europe and resolved to preserve the integrity of the entire Versailles order.

The Anglo-French stalemate prevented the League’s prepa- ration of an acceptable disarmament formula until September 1923, when a compromise plan known as the draft Treaty of Mutual Assistance was approved by the Assembly at Geneva. Designed to provide a credible guarantee of general security as the prelude to disarmament, the draft Treaty granted the League Council extensive powers in implementing collective sanctions against aggressor nations. For this reason, criticism of the plan developed quickly within those states that opposed the extension of the League’s supra-national authority. Britain’s Conservative government was notably cool in its response to the proposal; and the Commonwealth was downright hostile. The lengthening chain of opposition demoralized League enthusiasts everywhere. After three years of bargaining and negotiations, Geneva seemed fully incapable of realizing its ambition to become the axis of European politics.

Prompted by Shotwell’s fears for the future of the League, the American Committee agreed at the start to draft a general statement which would place Europe’s immediate problems in fresh perspective and thus make them more amenable to solution. At the same time, Committee members implicitly assumed that the creation of a fresh perspective would illuminate America’s interest in European affairs and reveal the impropriety of the nation’s post-war policies. The New York group felt certain that America’s international economic entanglements entailed overseas responsibilities; and they looked upon Republican unilateralism as nothing more than dangerous aimlessness. Complete freedom of national action, they charged, not only inhibited popular understanding of the complexity of international affairs. I t also discouraged co-operative attempts to solve overseas problems that unavoidably affected American interests. Even worse, the pursuit

William M. Jordan, Great Britain, France, and the German Problem, 1918- 1939: A Study of Anglo-French Relations in the Making and Maintenance of the Versaifles Settlement (London, 1913), 198, 201-202; Arnold WolCers, Britain and France Between T w o Wars: ConPicting Strategies of Peace from Versailles to World War ZZ (New York, 1966, Norton edition), 20, 24, 165-166, 202, 325.

James T . Shotwell, “The Fifth Assembly of the League of Nations: An Address before the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations,” October 18, 1924, Box 1, Supple- ment 11, Records of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, Department of Special Collections, Library of the University of Illinois at Congress Circle, tran- script, 6-7; The Reminiscences of James T. Shotwell (New York: Columbia University Oral History Research Oftice: cited hereon as Shotwell, “Oral History,”), transcript, 237.

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Neutrality Revision of unilateralism worked deliberately to evade the most critical question before the American people: to what extent did the national interest coincide with the organized maintenance of international law and order.7 Frustrated by the evasion of unilateralism, leaders of the American Committee resolved that their effort to end the Anglo-French impasse in Europe should also serve to sharpen simultaneously a growing awareness at home of the wrongheadedness of American foreign policy. By May 1924, they concluded that the most effective way to accomplish these complementary ends was by the formulation of a draft treaty of disarmament and security, a contractural definition of the rights and responsibilities that all nations retained in an age of collective security.

Committee members never underestimated the difficulties involved in producing a draft treaty which would be general enough to accommodate the conflicting interests of the Great Powers yet so defined as to prescribe the conduct of each in time of crisis. Sensitive to American fears of binding overseas commit- ments, the Shotwell group carefully avoided any hint of political connection. It instead pretended to join non-League states like America with League powers upon an informal yet juridicial basis, by “a specific contract so closeIy defined that the nations signing it would not be involved by it in anything further than the specific obligations relating to measures of defense.” @ Without attaching the United States to the League structure, the treaty was to lay down channels of co-operation that intersected a t Geneva. The ambivalence inherent in the Committee’s determination to provide a non-binding link between America and the League led it to a tendency to exalt legalistic abstractions in the hope of overcoming unpleasant political facts. It was a failing which was never absent from the work of the Committee, and it continually eroded its claims to political realism.

The precise way of devising a program of European disarmament and security which would involve the United States

James T. Shotwell. “National Security and Disarmament,” memo attached to Shotwell to James G . Harbord, January 21, 1924, James G . Harbord Papers, New Yotk State Historical Society; Shotwell, “Cumments on the French Memorandum,” attached to Shotwell to Bliss, May 16, 1924, Box 267, Bliss Papers; Shotwell, “The Disarmament Problem,” January 10, 1924, ibid.

*David Hunter Miller, “A History of Disarmament Proposals since the Armistice,” speech in Chicago, July 7, 1924, in Box 4, David Hunter Miller Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress: and Miller’s remarks at the Institute of Politics, quoled in New York Times, August 7, 1924, 4.

g”In that way;’ the next sentence continued, “the issues arising under the treaty become justiciable rather than political.” Shotwell, “Comments on the French Memorandum.”

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The Historian in a responsible but non-binding manner was the subject of quiet debate within the American Committee for weeks. Finally, on June 17, 1924, Shotwell announced to the press that his private, unofficial group had drafted a treaty formula which it had already transmitted to the Temporary Mixed Commission, the League body responsible for the consideration of disarmament schemes. Although referred to as the Draft Treaty of Disarmament and Security (or the American Plan), the document was actually a loose collection of six major proposals: the outlawry of aggressive war; a definition of aggression; the pledge of sanctions; the acceptance of the already-existing network of limited European alliances; a recurring conference of experts and statesmen to deal with armaments; and an international inspection agency to ensure good faith in arms control. lo Massed together, these principles were to create atop the League structure a legal framework in which all powers could co-operate in realizing Geneva’s highest ideal, the strengthening of international security by the prohibition of aggressive war. l1

In substance, the Treaty’s pledge to outlaw aggressive war turned upon two key provisions - the definition of aggression and the “permissive sanction.” Because a definition of aggression was of central significance to a rationalized collective order, Shotwell and his colleagues agreed that they could not treat it as a matter of political expediency. l2 Dedicated designers and systems- builders they rather believed that, since an aggressive war constituted an international crime, it demanded juridical determination. As a result, the Treaty specified that a belligerent which refused to appear before the Permanent Court of Inter- national Justice within four days after it had been charged with violating the Treaty by resorting to war was, ips0 facto, the aggressor. The lingering fear that political consideration would complicate the crucial process of identifying the aggressor thus ended, The World Court would establish whether or not the Treaty had been breached; and the aggressor would brand itself

10The popular “outlawry” slogan was used by the Committee in a deliberate effort to win greater support within the fragmented American peace movement. Shotwell. “Commentary of the Draft Treaty of Disarmament and Security,” Znter- national Conciliation, No. 201 (August 1924), 46.

UFor the text of the Treaty, see the New York Times, June 18, 1924, 4; or “An American Plan to Outlaw War,” The New Republic, XXXIX, No. 502 (July 16, 1924), 208-210; James T. Shotwell, On the Rim of the Abyss (New York, 1936).

u James T . Shotwell, “Memorandum on the League and Disarmament,” Advisory Committee of International Questions of the British Labour Party, No. 322 (March 1924), 1. (Photocopy through the courtesy of the Librarian, The British Labour Party, Transport House, London.)

378-385.

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Neutrality Revision by the refusal to accept available pacific procedure. lS

In order to substantiate its claim to be an effective deterrent to aggression, the draft Treaty was obliged to provide some means of collective enforcement which solved the Anglo-French conflict over the issue of mutual guarantees at the same time that it satisfied American opposition to overseas intervention. The upshot of the Committee’s long involvement in these immensely complex factors was the so-called “permissive sanction.” By its terms, the self-confessed aggressor forfeited all rights and immunities which international law normally provided for the protection of international commercial interests. The aggressor was to be outlawed in a most literal way, by being placed beyond the pale of law and deprived of the security which the law usually gave to its overseas business interests. In a world based upon credit, the uncertainty over foreign property holdings which followed upon this action would lead presumably to financial panic within the aggressor state and the consequent disruption of its military operations. l4

Besides thwarting aggression, the “permissive sanction” was attractive because it bound no signatory to a precise pattern of conduct. Each state was free to consult its own interests in the event of a breach of the contract. Signatories merely shared a common responsibility to suspend the protective covering which international law normally gave to the aggressor’s interests. The responsibility for overt action against the aggressor otherwise varied according to the desires or interests of the individual state. By this means, the American Committee hoped to allay French security fears while establishing the most advanced base from which Britain and, more important, America could agree to co-operate in preserving peace. l6

As the Committee deliberated, Shotwell arranged with friends in the League Secretariat to present the Treaty to the Temporary Mixed Commission. Through the efforts of the Secretariat, the League Council approved a resolution on June 16, 1924, which made the American plan an official League document and referred it to the consideration of member states. A few days later, the American Committee authorized Shotwell, Miller, and Bliss to

-“An American Plan to Outlaw War,” 210; “The Shotwell Disarmament Plan,”

““An American Plan to Outlaw War,” 211. “Ibid.; “The Shotwell Disarmament Plan,” 6. In a less restrained moment,

Shotwell characterized the “permissive sanction” as “a real stroke of genius” which opened “the door for the real entry of the United States into the League.” Shotwell to Arthur M. Sweetser, June 4, 1924, Box 14, Arthur M. Sweetser, Jr., Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

The League of Nations Herald, I. No. 24 (September 1. 1924), 6.

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The Historian attend the opening of the Fifth League Assembly in September in order to discuss the document with members of the TMC.le

While the three men prepared to sail for Geneva, a crossfire of criticism struck the Treaty from both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, the Plan was attacked both by nationalist elements, who felt that it endangered America’s future freedom of action, and pro-League spokesmen, who held it to be utopian in its neglect of those underlying political conflicts most provocative of war. l7 League sympathizers in Europe added their suspicion that the Plan’s emphasis upon the World Court and its “permissive sanction” appeased American nationalism at the League’s expense. l8 Critics on all sides agreed that the American Committee had deceived itself in thinking that the decisions of the World Court would serve as a point of conjunction for the United States and the 1.eague powers. The political disputes which affected the vital interests of nations simply could not be referred to judicial bodies for final settlement.

Support in America for the Plan came, like its opposition, from some unlikely sources. Irrecoricilable Senator William E. Borah praised the Treaty as “the most encouraging event in the movement for peace which has taken place for many a day”; and other anti-League critics grudgingly concurred. lo The Foreign Policy Association distributed the Plan to its membership, while liberal and pro-League press duly noted the document’s origin and potential. There was no serious attempt, however, to rally mass support behind the Treaty. Rumors had spread early that the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America was planning to direct its twenty million constituents upon a winter offensive in behalf of the proposal. 2o But the American Committee was neither politically nor temperamentally prepared for such action. It instead stood firmly by Shotwell’s original suggestion that the help of a few prominent men like former Secretary of

ldLeague of Nations, Oficial Journal, No. 7, Minutes of the 29th Session of the Council uuly 1924), 914: New York Times, June 18, 1924, 4; James T. Shotwell, “Reflections on War and Peace, in Perspectives on Peace, 1910-1960 (London, 1960), 20.

”General William A. Crozier, quoted in New York Times, August 9, 1924, 5; Raymond L. Buell, letter to the editor, ibid., August 14, 1924, 14.

”See the remarks of M. Carlo Schanzer of the Third Committee of the League Assembly, September 8, 1924, Oficiul Journal, Records of the Fifth Assembly; Meet- ings of the Committees, Special Supplement No. 26 (Geneva, 1924). 17; Shotwell, Autobiography, 185.

leWilliam E. Borah, “Toward the Outlawry of War,” The New Republic, XXXIX, No. 501 (July 9, 1924), 179; John Haynes Holmes, “American Politics and European Problems,” Foreign Afluirs (London), VI, No. 3 (September 1924). 59.

“Emerson Curtis to President Coolidge, August 5 , 1924, series 1, file 394 (peace), microfilm of the Presidential Papers of Calvin Coolidge.

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Neutrality Revision State Elihu Root was to be valued over “the support of all the sentimentalists in the country.”21 Rather than seek popular support, Shotwell and his friends preferred to hold a few private dinners in New York for leading Eastern attorneys and churchmen. They also managed through Under Secretary of State Joseph C. Grew to keep the State Department continually advised of their work. 22

The reluctance of the American Committee to propagandize on behalf of the Plan was more than matched by the unwillingness of the American government to take a position on the proposal. Although urged by a few ardent Republicans to support the Treaty, President Coolidge chose to bide his time and wait upon developments in Europe. The Administration’s indifference was accepted with equanimity by Committee members, who expressed no desire to inject the Plan into domestic partisan politics. But it seriously compromised the attractiveness of the Plan in Europe, where observers agreed that the success of the Treaty depended directly upon the amount of support that it received from the American government. 23

Shotwell, Miller, and Bliss originally believed that action at Geneva would determine the official American response to the Draft Treaty. When it became evident in mid-August that the League powers would not act positively upon the Plan until they were assured of Washington’s co-operation, the three men were caught in a vise from which they never escaped. They had been warned earlier of French hostility to the Plan. But i t was not until meeting in Paris with French military representatives and, later, with French Premier Edouard Herriot in Lyons that they found that French leaders considered the Treaty to be completely inadequate for their nation’s security. Opinion in Geneva was no more encouraging. With receding hope, the three men decided

nShotwell to Bliss, July 11, 1924, Box 267, Bliss Papers. Root congratulated the American Committee for “rendering a great public service in contributing intelligently to the process of discussion”; but he declined to help in any other way. Root to Shotwell, July 5, 1924, Box 139, Elihu Root Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

mShotwell to Root, July 1 and July 11, 1924, Box 139, Root Papers; Arthur Sweetser to Sir Eric Drummond, July 2, 1924, Box 14, Sweetser Papers. For the Committee’s informal contacts with the State Department, see Grew to Shotwell, May 6, 1924, Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59, 511.3, B 1/177b; Shotwell to Harbord, July 15, 1924, Harbord Papers: Shotwell to Charles Evans Hughes, November 18, 1924; Hughes to Shotwell, November 22, 1924, both in Box 68, Charles Evans Hughes Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

=Edwin L. James, in New York Times, August 12, 1924, 19. For a similar expression of opinion, see 0. D. Skelton (Counsellor, Canadian Department of External Affairs) to Raymond B. Fosdick, August 19, 1924, Raymond B. Fosdick Papers, Firestone Library, Princeton University.

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The Historian to recast the form of the Plan in order to make it more compatible with League procedure and thus more adaptable to League needs. 24

At the Fifth Assembly, the American Treaty was swept up in the ferment of those forces anxious to energize the Covenant. Herriot and British Prime Minister J. Ramsay MacDonald opened the meeting by expressing the League’s debt to those Americans who had successfully defined aggression. Two days later the Assembly ordered the American Plan, along with the draft Treaty of Mutual Assistance and the various criticisms of it, to serve as the combined basis of discussion in a new effort to construct a general security treaty. Within four weeks members of the Assembly’s First and Third Committees succeeded in synthesizing these several proposals into a novel formula. It was called the Protocol for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes, or, more commonly, the Geneva Protocol. 25

The Geneva Protocol represented the most determined effort in the inter-war years to produce a flawless universal mechanism that might outlaw the crime of aggressive war. After specifying a series of pacific means for settling disputes, the document massed a battery of collective sanctions behind a tripwire that was provided by the American definition of aggression. 26 Although the sanctionist provisions of the new plan were less rigid than those of earlier League plans, they were still marked by an automatism which made them repugnant to those states anxious to avoid an extensive commitment to the European order. The Protocol, most agreed, sinned by “ ‘an excess of legal perfection.’ ”27 It bore forward the fading hope of the French Left that the legal rationalization of the Covenant would act to strengthen the whole European order in the absence of overwhelming force.

Instead of strengthening the Covenant, the pretensions of

Shotwell, “Confidential Memorandum to Members of the Committee on Dis- armament and Security,” attached to Pauline Stearns to Bliss, November 11. 1924, Box 267, Bliss Papers; Shotwell, “The Fifth Assembly of the League of Nations” transcript, 25.

For the revised version of the Treaty, see League of Nations, Oficial Journal, Records of the Fifth Assembly, Minutes of the First Committee (Constitutional Questions), Special Supplement No. 24 (Geneva, 1924), 169-172.

SF. P. Walters, A History of the League of Nations (2 vols.; New York and London, 1952), I, 268-272.

*For details of the relationship between the American Plan and the Protocol, see Philip J. Noel-Baker, The Geneva Protocol for the Pacific Settlement of Disputes (London, 1925). 18-19, et passim; Hans Wehberg, The Outlawry of War, trans. by Edwin Zeydel (Washington, 1931). 25-26.

Vittoriano Scialoja, quoted in Charles de Visscher, Theory and Reality in Public International Law, trans. by Percy E. Corbett (Princeton, 1967), 56.

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Neutrality Revision the Protocol to compulsory arbitration and collective sanctions cast greater doubt upon the ability of the League to promote a system of general security. British leaders waited a respectful moment and then dismissed the League proposal with two fatal criticisms. Its purposes exceeded the limits of. British power. And it violated a “cardinal point” of British foreign policy, the desire to maintain friendly relations with the United States.2s His Majesty’s Government refused to commit its seapower to the punishment of the covenant-breaking state as long as the United States stood by its neutral right to treat all belligerents as equals and declined to accept any distinction between victim and aggressor. The fear of conflict between British seapower, acting in its expected capacity as chief enforcer of League sanctions, and American neutral rights overrode any desire in London to settle the problems of the Continent by the vitalization of the League idea. 29 When the State Department indirectly condemned the Protocol by reiterating America’s traditional freedom of diplomatic action, it confirmed the aversion that British leaders felt for the document. American neutrality joined in the end with Britain’s combined desire to limit its overseas commitments and avoid antaFonizing the United States to vitiate the dream of a general security system. 3o

The American Committee’s delegation to Geneva, which terminated its mission on September 10, was deeply dissatisfied with the expansive aims of the Protocol. Already disheartened by the failure of their Plan to gain greater consideration at Geneva (a failing which they blamed upon official American disinterest), the three men complained that the League plan reached “far beyond anything we believed possible when we began our work,

*Great Britain, Parliamentary Papers, XXXI (Accounts and Papers, Mix. No, 5), Cmd. 2368, “League of Nations: Statement by the Right Hon. Austen Chamber- lain, M. P., on behalf of His Majesty’s Government, to the Council of the League of Nations, respecting the Protocol for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes,” 4.

The quoted phrase is that of Sir Esme Howard, British Ambassador in Wash- ington, who used i t in urging that Britain and America conclude an informal understanding as to the course that each would pursue in the event that Britain was called upon to enforce League sanctions against an aggressor state. Howard’s advance was firmly rebuffed by Secretary of State Hughes. Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1925 (2 vols.; Washington, 1940). I, 16-20.

88 Jordan, Great Britain, France, and the German Problem, 211; Walters, History of the League of Nations, I, 283-84; Gwendolen M. Carter, The British Common- wealth and International Security: The Role of the Dominions, 1919-1939 (Toronto, 1947), 122-23.

Carter, British Commonwealth and International Security, 122-23.

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The Historian and even farther . . . than may appear to be wise.”31 Anxious to regain the momentum lost by the zeal of the Fifth Assembly, Committee leaders abandoned their attempt to devise a general formula which would accommodate the collective forccs of international order to the needs of American foreign policy. Instead, they began to emphasize the importance of re-working American policy so that it would no longer inhibit the formation of collective security arrangements. Specifically, the New York group tried to re-define the hallowed American doctrine of neutrality in a way that would assure law-abiding members of a collective order that the United States would never permit the exercise of its neutral trading rights to aid the subversive designs of an aggressor state. With modern war “uncertain in its direction and contagious in its spread,” Shotwell warned, there

is no longer any such thing as neutrality when the great states are involved. The recognition of this new fact came with accelcrating force while the world was still engaged upon the last war, but its implications are only now beginning to be realized.32 Thus the movement for neutrality revision grew directly from

the American Committee’s attempt to assist in the construction of a general security system based in Geneva. The shift in focus was logical in both intellectual and political terms. International jurists had long maintained that neutrality, impartial by definition, was theoretically irreconcilable with the demand for partiality intrinsic to the League idea. But it took the security debate of 1924 and Britain’s manifest fear of inviting a neutral rights show- down with the United States to convince ardent American League supporters that no collective arrangement would succeed in practice until America first modified its neutrality. By the late winter of 1925, Shotwell was driving a faction of the League of Nations Non-Partisan Association, the leading pro-League pressure group in the United States, to demand that its leadership petition Washington for the modification of American

Shotwell to Bliss, October 3, 1924, Box 267, Bliss Papers: Shotwell, “Confidential Memorandum to Members of the Committee of Disarmament and Security”: James G. McDonald to Christina Merriman, September 7, 1924, Records of The Survey, Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota Lihrary.

James Shotwell, “At Last - A Feasible Substitute for War,” Our World Weekly, Vol. 1, No. 10 (December 22, 1924), 152; Shotwell, “The World Has Taken Up the Challenge of the Christian hlessage,” The Christian Register, Vol. 103, No. 51 (December 18, 1924), 1221; Shotwell, “The Challenge to Peace,” Our World, Vol. 6, No. 3 (December 1924). 4: “Aux Etats-Unis des groupes politiques influents veulent mettre la guerre ‘hors la loi,’ ” L’Europe Nouvelle, VII, No. 344 (20 September 1924), 1242.

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Neutrality Revision neutrality.33 Hunter Miller called publicly for a policy of “righteous neutrality” which would allow the United States to avoid involvement in international crises without tacitly assisting aggression. 34 And Americans attached to League agencies insisted that the greatest immediate contribution that America could make to the League’s success was a pledge to prohibit any kind of moral or material support to go, under cover of neutrality, to a state which violated its public pledge to a collective order by resorting to war.36 The State Department itself could not ignore the implications which the collective features of the American Plan and the Geneva Protocol held for the nation’s traditional neutrality. Charles Cheney Hyde, Department Solicitor, stated plainly that “wars are today won or lost according to the aid which comes from neutral territory”; and he went on, if ambivalently, to suggest that the United States

might well propose that a state should be permitted to enjoy a right to withhold aid from another which becomes a belligerent in violation of its undertaking, and even possibly agree to exercise such a right as against such an offender on the distinct understanding that such action should in no wise impair the neutrality of the withholding state.30 The drive for neutrality revision grew during the rest of

the Twenties into the most feasible and far-reaching basis for American support of organized peace. Chances of American entrance into the League remained slight throughout the decade; and the possibility of American accession to the World Court seemed of little real consequence. But the demand that the

88 League of Nations Non-Partisan Association Memorandum from Charles C. Bauer, n. d. Box 85, Sweetser Papers; “Memorial presented to Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg, May 2, 1925, by Manley 0. Hudson on behalf of the League of Nations Non-Partisan Association,” Records of the Department of State, FW 500. C/269. Minutes of the Board of Directors, April 14, 1925, Minutes of the Executive Committee, October 13, 1926, Minute books of the League of Nations Non-Partisan Association, now in the possession of the United Nations Association of the United States of America.

84 David Hunter Miller, “Sovereignty and Neutrality,” International Conciliation, No. 220 (May 1926), 40.

55 Sweetser to Charles C. Bauer, June 11, 1925, in League of Nations Non-Partisan Association Memorandum. Box 85, Sweetser Papers; Sweetser, “The Protocol and the United States,” n. d., ibid.; Arthur Bullard to William Short, December 11. 1924, Box 11, Arthur Bullard Papers, Firestone Library, Princeton University. For the League’s hopes in regard to this subject, see Roth Williams, T h e League, the Protocol, and the Empire (London, 1925), 120-22; and T h e Washington Post, October 20, 1924. 5.

88 Charles Cheney Hyde, “Memorandum re Protocol of the League of Nations for Pacific Settlement of International Disputes,” November 20, 1924, 33-34, Records of the Department of State, 511.3 B 1/2461/,.

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The Historian United States withhold the benefits of neutrality from aggressors exerted wide popular appeal. And its international significance was unmistakable. There was no doubt, wrote the British journalist David Mitrany in 1925, that the revision of American neutrality “would perfectly interlink” the United States with the “one definite general obligation” shared by members of the League, the responsibility not to give aid and comfort to an aggressor nation. 87 Progressively, the movement for revision won the support of churchmen, feminists, pacifists, and other peace activists, The issue became enmeshed in the origins and negotiations of the Kellogg-Briand Pact; and it persistently overshadowed talks toward international arms limitations. By 1929, Senator Arthur Capper’s resolution (which had been formulated by Shotwell) to prevent private American arms ship- ments to aggressor states reportedly commanded “support in the highest quarters in this country” and “might have been adopted but for the turn of events in Europe and Asia during 1930 and 1931.”30 When the Democrats returned to power in 1933, the cause of revision was briefly implemented by the State Department with President Roosevelt’s approval, only to be overridden when the President reversed his position in the face of isolationist opposition.40 From an unofficial draft treaty in 1924, the case for neutrality revision had climbed within a presidential nod of becoming the touchstone of American foreign policy.

Lost causes are usually of little interest in American history. But often it is only through them that the rich complexity of past policy debates can be fully appreciated. The 1924 American Plan and the drive toward neutrality revision that followed from it were certainly lost causes. Yet they together illuminate the sophistication of the debate that took place within post-war America over the means by which the United States could most satisfactorily maintain its international primacy. Among many available alternatives, the American Draft Treaty represented the most serious attempt in the post-war decade to codify the nation’s most popular international ideals - disarmament, the World

81 David Mitrany, The Problem of Znternational Sanctions (London, 1925), v, 42, 55, 84. His emphasis.

-Robert H. Ferrell, Peace Zn Their Time: The Origins of the KeZZoggBriand Pact (New Haven, 1952). 67-70, 115-118, 127, passim; Merze Tate. The United States and Armaments (reprint ed,; New York. 1948), 115-116.

“Edwin Borchard and William Potter Lage, Neutrality for the United States (New Haven, 1937), 295-6.

a Robert A. Divine, “Franklin D. Roosevelt and Collective Security, 1933,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XLVIII, No. 1 (June 19Sl), 51-59. For a differing view, see Howard Jablon, “The State Department and Collective Security, 1933.34,’’ The Historian, XXXIII. No. 2 (February 1971), 248-263.

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Neutrality Revision Court, the outlawry of war - in support of the peacekeeping purposes of the League system. The proposal proved abortive for several reasons. Washington was indifferent. Europe was skeptical. And the document itself underestimated the degree of distrust among the Great Powers. Yet the Treaty’s very failure was of redeeming value for an influential segment of the nation’s policy- shaping elite. As nothing else did, the experience of the American Plan brought concerned leaders to confront the deadly impact of American neutrality upon collective efforts toward disarmament and security. It was an expensive lesson; but it resulted in the creation of a vital new challenge to the propriety of American unilateralism in an interdependent world. When international politics collapsed in the 1930s in shocking disarray, the promise of this challenge blossomed into a practical policy alternative of extraordinary potential. That it was rejected then remains even today one of the many missed opportunities of that depressing decade.

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