American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization

6. A Last Hurrah for Old World Geographies: Fixing Space at the Paris Peace Conference

On a cold December day in 1918, three army trucks arrived at pierside in Hoboken, New Jersey, where the SS George Washington was being prepared to transport the American delegation to the Paris Peace Conference. The “war to end all wars” was being followed by the conference to end all conferences, and the delegates at Paris would resolve the territorial, diplomatic , and economic issues that prompted war.A fiesta of egos and intrigue, laborious meetings and ponderous ceremonies, momentous decisions and interminable bureaucratic squabbling, it was attended by delegations from fifty-five countries and an army of hangers-on. It sported the national leaders of many of the world powers: Clemenceau of France, Lloyd George of Britain, Orlando of Italy, and Wilson of the United States shared the power. A vanquished Germany was made to lick its wounds while awaiting the outcome, and the new Russian government was not invited. With troops from more than a dozen national armies, including combatants from both sides of the war, still fighting on Russian soil, they had more immediate concerns than this imperialist convocation. They instead were hosting the Second Communist International. The army trucks had carried Inquiry materials from the American Geographical Society building in upper Manhattan, and when workers began unloading the hundreds of boxes filled with maps, bibliographies, books, reports , and statistics, reporters began to laugh and jeer. They did the same when the boxes were unloaded in Paris,1 just as skeptical that so many tons 6 A LAST HURRAH FOR OLD WORLD GEOGRAPHIES: FIXING SPACE AT THE PARIS PEACE CONFERENCE of dry, scientific material could have any use in what promised to be emotionally charged and politically driven peace negotiations. A “scientific peace” it surely would not be. The “liberal ideals” with which Wilson armed himself for the political clinches in Paris attracted similar opprobrium. From Lloyd George to hardnosed Republicans at home, he was ridiculed for believing that ideals and principles could compete with Machiavellian intrigue and backroom deals. But in large measure these indictments miss the point. Wilson’s rhetorical idealism was itself a ruthless political weapon applied in the most “realist” and partisan of causes. As William Appleman Williams and a generation of historians after him have argued, Wilson’s central aspiration was no less than the construction of a liberal capitalist world order providing free economic access.The primary architect of corporate liberalism at home, he enthusiastically inherited the Progressive campaign for tariff and banking reform that would free U.S. capital for overseas investment.2 For Wilson the Paris Peace Conference was a seamless continuation of that domestic posture . He well understood that as much as Britain had benefited from socalled free trade while it dominated the trade routes and markets, now the United States, by dint of its emerging economic superiority, would be the prime beneficiary of such apparent magnanimity. At the Paris Peace Conference , the first moment in the making of the American Century came to a head. Aboard the George Washington en route to Paris, Wilson offered a clear vision of the moral and nationalist exceptionalism that structured his liberal internationalism. He admonished a gathering of Inquiry personnel that the U.S. delegation would represent the “only disinterested people” at the conference , which involved both responsibilities and opportunities.3 The moral rhetoric of a liberal peace, therefore, functioned to give Wilson and the U.S. delegation the ammunition with which thoroughly “interested” solutions could be proposed in the language of moral magnanimity. In short, a kind of gestalt described Wilson’s continuous back-and-forth interpolation of the practical and the ideal. If, as Henry May has argued, Teddy Roosevelt was the “greatest spokesman of practical idealism” at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century,4 it was a mantle enthusiastically donned in the next decade by Wilson.At Paris, this constant interpolation of moral universality and national self-interest pivoted on questions of geography. The Paris Peace Conference was about many things—reparations, the League of Nations, economic settlements, international labor arrangements —but first and foremost it was about territory.Territorial settlements, especially in Europe, were the centerpiece of the conference. A continent 140 / last hurrah for old world geographies that had eight thousand miles of national boundaries on the eve of war had ten thousand after the peace conference and its attendant treaties. An astounding three thousand miles of...