8 - The American Mission to Negotiate Peace: An Historian Looks Back

Summary

On December 9, 1919, the remnant of the American Mission to Negotiate Peace closed its books in Paris, and its personnel prepared to embark for the homeward voyage. Less than a year earlier, President Woodrow Wilson had led the mission to Europe, greeted by enthusiastic crowds in every city visited on the eve of the Paris Peace Conference. The importance of the conference was underscored by the attendance for nearly six months of the president of the United States as one of the five American commissioners plenipotentiary At its height, the mission numbered nearly 1,300 civilian and military members, constituting what may have been the largest national delegation ever to attend an international conference. Besides the numerous clerks, orderlies, security officers, and other service personnel, a good many members of the American mission, drawn from the regular and wartime bureaucracies in Washington and New York, served as advisers to the American plenipotentiaries and often served as negotiators themselves on the fifty-eight committees into which the peace conference was organized. For six months following the signing of the Versailles treaty with Germany on June 28, the United States had maintained a detachment of delegates who participated in the work of the remaining peace treaties with Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey The passing of the American mission ended a notable episode in American history.