Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Prologue: 1919-1945-1989
- PART ONE PEACE PLANNING AND THE ACTUALITIES OF THE ARMISTICE
- PART TWO THE PEACEMAKERS AND THEIR HOME FRONTS
- 6 Great Britain: The Home Front
- 7 The French Peacemakers and Their Home Front
- 8 The American Mission to Negotiate Peace: An Historian Looks Back
- 9 Between Compiègne and Versailles: The Germans on the Way from a Misunderstood Defeat to an Unwanted Peace
- 10 A Comment
- PART THREE THE RECONSTRUCTION OF EUROPE AND THE SETTLEMENT OF ACCOUNTS
- PART FOUR THE LEGACY AND CONSEQUENCES OF VERSAILLES
- PART FIVE ANTECEDENTS AND AFTERMATHS REFLECTIONS ON THE WAR-GUILT QUESTION AND THE SETTLEMENT
- Bibliography
- Index
8 - The American Mission to Negotiate Peace: An Historian Looks Back
from PART TWO - THE PEACEMAKERS AND THEIR HOME FRONTS
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2013
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Prologue: 1919-1945-1989
- PART ONE PEACE PLANNING AND THE ACTUALITIES OF THE ARMISTICE
- PART TWO THE PEACEMAKERS AND THEIR HOME FRONTS
- 6 Great Britain: The Home Front
- 7 The French Peacemakers and Their Home Front
- 8 The American Mission to Negotiate Peace: An Historian Looks Back
- 9 Between Compiègne and Versailles: The Germans on the Way from a Misunderstood Defeat to an Unwanted Peace
- 10 A Comment
- PART THREE THE RECONSTRUCTION OF EUROPE AND THE SETTLEMENT OF ACCOUNTS
- PART FOUR THE LEGACY AND CONSEQUENCES OF VERSAILLES
- PART FIVE ANTECEDENTS AND AFTERMATHS REFLECTIONS ON THE WAR-GUILT QUESTION AND THE SETTLEMENT
- Bibliography
- Index
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.
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- Information
- The Treaty of VersaillesA Reassessment after 75 Years, pp. 189 - 202Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998
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