Chapter 10
Towards peace and reconciliation
after the Great War
Letter-writing to the League of Nations
Dead soldiers shout it from their graves! Twelve million skeletons of our healthiest men, who fell on the battlefield during the last war, raise their fleshless right arms over their last refuge. They demand peace for the living … Millions of mothers, spouses, sisters and mourning orphans, ask for peace. League of Nations, forbid war!
Stanisław Jan Czarnowski, Polish archaeologist and historian, sent these words to the League of Nations (LON) in 1926. Born in 1847, he died in 1929, just when the Western world, after a decade of efforts dedicated to reconstruction and peace, fell into tremendous economic turmoil. At age 67, Czarnowski was, of course, too old in 1914 to participate in the Great War, yet his feverish appeal to Geneva's organization testifies to his memory of the conflict. For him the grief of millions of women and the sacrifice of millions of men – whatever their nationality, since he refers to the total military losses of the war as a symbol of universal suffering – must lead to something more than death and destruction.1 He concludes that it is the responsibility of the LON to banish war, to ensure that peace emerges, after all the bloodshed.
Czarnowski is one of thousands who wrote to the LON, from the organization's creation in 1919 to the outbreak of the World War II. Many scoffed at the time – and still do today – at those who took up the pen to share their ideas about peace with the world. It is true that, of all the “unofficial correspondence” received at the LON, much can be described as idealistic at best, if not completely eccentric. The LON's archivist, Mr Leak, who dealt with this mail, used to put aside the most amusing letters and store them in what was ironically called “the museum of horrors” (Ruffin 1924). Eccentric or not, these letters have since been forgotten by historians, although they can provide a very rare insight into what ordinary people thought about peace and the role of the LON in international relations, and contribute to our understanding of the “peace atmosphere” that prevailed throughout the world after 1918.
The LON's tragicomic history is well known (see Northedge 1986) and numerous studies, including, most recently, the excellent survey by Zara Steiner, have examined the complexity of international relations in the interwar period (Steiner 2005; Steiner 2011). Over the past thirty years, peace historians, for their part, have circumscribed and decrypted the postwar pacifist outburst. They have shown how peace movements, eminent pacifists and “internationalists” tried to work towards a better understanding between nations, with relative success in the 1920s but then vainly amidst the distrust, extremist political discourse and verbal and physical violence that characterized the 1930s (Ingram 1991; Vaïsse 1993; Dyck 1996; Brock and Socknat 1999; Lynch 1999).
It comes as a fact that many people around the world shared a strong belief in peace after the Great War, and numerous collective initiatives in the interwar period support this assumption. For instance, 1920s peace contests in the U.S. and Europe led to tens of thousands of plans to bring about lasting peace and prosperity (DeBenedetti 1974; Bouchard 2007). Peace societies and war veteran associations, particularly in the U.S., France and Great Britain, were very active in organizing gatherings and collective actions to convince politicians to address peace issues (Prost 1977; Ceadel 2000; Bennett 2003). Finally, more than ten million people participated in the 1935 British “Peace Ballot” pertaining to Britain's involvement in the LON and in the collective security system (Ceadel 1980; McCarthy 2010). Still, ordinary people's understanding of such issues as world peace, war, and reconciliation has never been the focus of historians, in large part because of the difficulty and tediousness of finding testimonies. When archives do exist, they are widely dispersed, whereas it is fairly easy to trace the history of a formal peace association or a famous peace activist.2 Citizen letters sent to the LON are but one way to explore individual attitudes about peace in the interwar period. They enable us to shed light not on a given peace process or on a traditional agent of the international peacebuilding community but on a genuine grassroots discourse, universal in its scope, of which the LON is both the embodiment and the driving force.
This chapter is based on letters to the LON written in French and English. The majority of the unofficial mail received in Geneva was written in one of these two languages, those most commonly used in diplomacy and within internationalist circles. The Polish archaeologist Czarnowski, for instance, wrote his letter in French; many Scandinavians or Dutch, for their part, chose English. Moreover, letters from Great Britain – and the British dominions – France and the United States are overrepresented, which is understandable, given the importance of these great powers in the postwar international order, and the influence of their respective peace organizations, which were very active throughout the period. The letters pertaining to international issues analysed in this chapter come almost entirely from the Western countries – Europe and the Americas – or the British former settlement colonies, which inevitably gives a Western-centric tone to the whole.
Citizen letters to the LON are spread over more than 50 archival boxes dealing with various subjects, from disarmament to intellectual cooperation. The LON Secretariat decided that no specific section would be devoted to the “unofficial correspondence.” As a result, citizen letters are stored, along with the official correspondence, by subject. Thus, looking for those letters can become very time-consuming. Fortunately, dedicated boxes were assigned when the number of letters on a specific matter became significant.3
The first part of this chapter will examine the letter-writing process per se: what characterizes the practice of citizen letter-writing; and what motivates a citizen to write to the LON? The following sections are structured around two related questions: how did men and women who wrote to the LON address peace and reconciliation issues after the war? What role did they assign to the LON in order to bring about and strengthen the fragile peace of 1919? Through a qualitative analysis of the letters, I intend to show that the new international organization became the focal point of a renewed discourse on peaceful international relations, one centered on education and the development of an “international spirit.” For those who lived through four years of unprecedented violence and destruction, the LON represented a unique and exceptional opportunity to build the world anew, one in which fraternity, internationalism and trust would prevail over envy, nationalism and distrust. The failure of the World Disarmament Conference in the 1930s put an end to this dream.
Writing to the League of Nations
Citizen letter-writing, a social and political practice (Barton and Hall 2000), is a particular form of literary discourse, with its own rhetorical codes – for example, the frequent trope of humility when the sender is introducing himself or herself to the political authority – and it differs from interpersonal and literary correspondence on at least two levels. First, citizen letter-writing rarely meets the “serial criteria.” In most cases, the actual correspondence is limited to one or a few letters and subsequent formal acknowledgments. Second, as Annie Vénard-Savatovsky argues in her study of citizen letters sent to the French Presidency: “the reciprocal relationship is largely unequal and imaginary” (Vénard-Savatovsky 1993). Indeed, the letter is much more important and meaningful to the citizen who writes it than it is to the addressee. Consequently, the impact of an individual letter upon a political authority is in theory minimal; however, as the number of letters received on a given subject increases, so does the potential impact.
Letters sent to international organizations such as the LON can be considered as a subcategory of political correspondence, since the intrinsic writing motivation is not that of mediation between citizens and their elected representatives. The specific nature of this correspondence sent to an institution with no actual power over local, regional or national issues obliges us to look elsewhere for the purpose of such an initiative, since it is not to be found within the conventional political sphere. What motivates a citizen, then, to write to the LON?
From the outset, the League was based on a misunderstanding, often reflected in the letters, of the organization's role and powers. American President Woodrow Wilson, who was the LON's herald as early as 1916, based his discourse in favor of an international organization on the new importance of public opinion in international affairs, as if the LON would become the voice of the people. The world, in one of his most famous speeches on postwar settlement, was to be “made safe for democracy” with a set of new rules among nations and through the League (Knock 1992; Cooper 2010). His emphasis on colonial emancipation, peace, democracy, and public opinion had tremendous, worldwide appeal (Manela 2007). Responding to this discourse, numerous groups, associations and individuals promoted lasting peace projects that stressed the necessity of creating a “democratic” international organization, one in which, not only states, but individuals too, would have a voice (Bouchard 2008). Yet the 1919 Paris Peace Conference would decide differently: the LON would be a state-based organization only and would avoid any infringement on state sovereignty. In practical terms, this meant that no “unofficial” proposition would be considered if not beforehand endorsed by a member state. Thus, the LON was paradoxically not the place for individuals to send peace proposals, although for them it seemed the logical place to do so.
This did not stop citizens from writing to Geneva until the eve of World War II, either to give moral support to the LON, to suggest amendments to its Covenant to foster supra-nationalism or more peace-enforcing devices – like an international police force, very popular in France – or to propose detailed peace projects. Many introduced their letter with a few words of encouragement, while others took upon themselves the responsibility for publicizing the League's ideals all over the world. Robert Levy, a lawyer from the now, once again, French city of Strasburg, expresses both motivations in a letter dated July 1922:
Mr. Secretary General,
You must be aware that the League of Nations has countless and fervent supporters around the world. But it is a crowd whose voice is often too modest to be heard. Many know nothing about your organization, its work and its positive results. Yet good propaganda is more crucial for the League of Nations than it is for any other cause. It must be known, understood and supported by all men of good will and by every people. Only when the League of Nations is supported by people [underlined in the letter] will it impose itself to governments and reach its supreme goals. The League of Nations idea is a great idea, maybe mankind's greatest idea. It deserves our greatest sacrifices.4
Levy's letter is quite representative of an opinion expressed elsewhere regarding the role of the LON versus national governments in bringing about peace. Indeed, one important reason for writing to Geneva is the conviction that nation-states do not work for world peace but for their self-preservation and self-interest, and that only the League could transcend national chauvinism. In a letter dated September 17, 1924, Harry Clay Ferree calls, for example, for a “super-state” to be “brought about into existence by the ruling plebiscite of the peoples of earth – it must come over the heads of the powers that be, and the ‘little tin gods’ who voice their own selfish aims thinking they are interpreting the souls of their nations.”5
The peace settlement of 1919 – notably its key document, the Versailles Treaty – is, for that reason, often interpreted as a purely political and, therefore, unsound compromise between conflicting national interests. “I often asked myself which was the worst to mankind, war or the results of war,” J.P. Amick, an 80 year-old man from Cairo,6 writes on that subject, suggesting that the political agreement of 1919 only led to more instability. It is likely for that reason that Woodrow Wilson's aura – one of selfless concern for the betterment of humanity – remains as radiant in the letters as it was in 1919, and this is even truer after his death in February 1924. He is depicted as an apostle of Peace whose pure and idealistic program was misappropriated by nationalistic and deceitful leaders who talked of peace but prepared for the next war. The Swiss Alfred Beguelin, in a letter to the League's Council dated March 1925, recalls that he had the dreadful feeling that, at the time of the opening of the Peace Conference in 1919, “Wilson's will was weakening.” “Alas,” Beguelin continues, “amidst schemes and plots, Mr. Wilson's goals, which the whole world awaited, never succeeded because of hatred.” Beguelin goes on: “People want a peace based on just principles. Governments still have too much influence over the LON; they defend their own interests, which seriously hinders the establishment of a just and lasting peace.”7
Although the League emanated from states and had no power over them, for the men and women who wrote to it, it represented the only “reasonable” and disinterested international actor. Mediation between citizens and the League through interest-driven states seemed, therefore, unacceptable. Thus, one important reason to write to the League was the belief that citizens had an important role to play in the establishment of lasting peace and that the symbolic extent of their responsibility was no longer, as it was heretofore, constrained by national boundaries. It now embraced the world. One can argue that this conviction – that people without a political mandate can act in the international sphere – is the true foundation of the international civil society that would burgeon half a century later.
Curiously, inadvertently or not, the League nourished this belief, first by asking citizens to write to Geneva and, second, by giving citizens’ letters unexpected value and importance. Indeed, on at least two occasions, the League's officials asked people to submit their opinions regarding international issues – once in 1920–1921 when the organization considered potential amendments to its Covenant and again in 1932 at the beginning of the World Disarmament Conference. As we will see, the popular response to the latter was outstanding. As for the way individual letters were considered, it is striking how seriously these were read by public servants, as long as they sounded realistic. LON's employees read every letter that arrived in Geneva, sometimes annotating it, underlining important arguments, sending it to the relevant section for further development, and writing summaries before forwarding it to their superiors, sometimes up to the League's Secretary General himself, who personally answered some of the letters.8 T.E. Cunningham's May 1921 suggestion of amending the League's Covenant was, for example, promptly sent to the Third Commission on Amendments for examination.9 Overall, no less than 19 employees from six different sections had this citizen's proposal in their hands. This case is not exceptional: a single letter could eventually be read by ten persons from various branches.10 Although a formal acknowledgment was the most common response, many citizens received a personalized reply to their letters.
The tremendous energy put into this activity bears witness to the creation of a real dialogue between citizens and the League. Its origin is to be found in the idea shared by the League's officials and the citizens that the establishment of lasting peace rested upon the participation of everyone, and not just the political and intellectual elite. William Rappard, chief of the Mandate Section in the 1920s, perfectly summed up this belief in a note dated May 1922. Forwarding to the Information and Disarmament sections a disarmament proposal from an Austrian pacifist, Miss Jüllig, he revealingly admitted: “the disarmament problem is so urgent and so difficult to solve that no serious project which claims to solve it should be immediately discarded.”11 In other words, peace was too important an issue to disregard a citizen's proposal on the basis that it came “from below.” This humility in the search for peace seems to have been a common feature among the League's officials. A citizen living in Cuba, Frederik Norman, implied the same in a letter sent in April 1932:
It was private individual who invented the steam engine, the electric lamp; it was a private individual who discovered radium and the X-rays; it may perhaps be a private individual who finally shall succeed in finding a way to disarm because private individuals are more likely to regard the world as a whole than are officers, hired by governments whose principal duty consists of safeguarding the national interests.12
Thus, citizen letter-writing to the League was based on three assumptions: first, that lasting peace called for the involvement of every man and woman; second, that the League, notwithstanding its official stance, welcomed and even encouraged unofficial suggestions and propositions; and finally, that national governments were no longer to be the sole actors on the international scene. In fact, since their function was to safeguard national interests at all costs, they could not be trusted to bring about lasting peace. In the following sections, we will examine how citizens address war, peace and reconciliation issues and what role they assign to the LON, through the examination of two important themes, peace as a change of attitude and the oneness of mankind, as well as a study of public reaction to the Disarmament Conference.
Peace, reconciliation, and the League of Nations
Reminiscences of the Great War were omnipresent in the interwar period. Jay Winter has shown that European populations, even those lucky enough not to have their own land used as a battlefield, were constantly reminded of the conflict, through their own memories and mourning, their encounters with countless crippled or disfigured war veterans – the famous gueules cassées as the French called them – or in the civic space (Winter 1995). Monuments, war memorials, new street or public place names, commemorative plaques, all kept the memory of the war very much alive. One central icon of collective remembrance of the war in France, Great Britain and elsewhere was the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, which epitomized the close link between the national body and the individual sacrifice (Inglis 1993). In 1932, E.H. Gilbert, from London, wrote to the LON Council to express a rather unusual opinion about the symbolic meaning of the Unknown Soldier's tomb embedded in Westminster Abbey's main aisle twelve years before. His letter will introduce us to some of the ways citizens relate to war, peace and reconciliation through their letters to the League.
Gilbert is convinced that individuals do not want war, yet nations, acting on emotion rather than reason, were led into it because they were “stimulated through their emotions” to do so. Gilbert believes emotions still guide nations, and “one of the greatest appeals to the emotions of a nation [is] that of the Unknown Warrior.” The problem is that this Soldier …
lies there alone, the solitary symbol of one [underlined in the letter] of the contending nations. In bringing him back to his native land we severed him from the common-kinship of the soil which, with his “enemy” he shared alike. We missed the lesson that “the reconciling grave swallows distinction first, that made us foes; that all alike lie down in peace together.”
Instead of being an international indictment of war, we unwittingly made him merely the symbol of a national sacrifice.13
Thus, for the fifteenth anniversary of the Armistice in 1933, Gilbert suggests interring “side-by-side with our own Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey, a German, a Frenchman, an Italian, an American, a Belgian, a Russian, a Turk and an Austrian – each taken from a nameless grave on the battlefields.” It would be even more powerful, Gilbert writes, if all former belligerents were to follow the British example and bury alongside their own Unknown Soldier their friends and foes. “Could any more noble gesture in the interests of Peace and of the futility of war be made by a nation to the World, than this?”
Gilbert's touchingly candid suggestion implies that the first step towards reconciliation and peace is through a change of mind: “Think War in sufficient volume, and war is inevitable; think peace, and war is impossible,” as he sums up. Even a potentially bellicose and unquestionably nationalistic symbol as strong as the Unknown Soldier can be reinvested and reinterpreted to become an instrument of peace and of the coming closer of nations. With his “Companies of Unknown Warriors,” as he calls them, Gilbert also addresses another concern, which is the fear that the war only led to incalculable losses, and nothing more. Revealingly, he starts and finishes his letter by expressing this anxiety. “It does not need the vision of a statesman to see that the last war, as a war-to-end-war, is likely to be a dismal failure,” he says by way of introduction, while concluding that “time is running short in which to show that ‘they [the soldiers] did not die in vain’.”
When discussing the last war and ways to promote peace, other citizens echo some of Gilbert's ideas. To bring about peace, emphasis should be placed on the vanity and cruelty of war, not on its glory. Peace is a mental process that should be instilled at the youngest possible age. The “new international spirit” that the LON embodies should triumph over the chauvinist discourse that denies the brotherhood of mankind and promotes rivalries and violence.14 There is also the fear that the world has not changed, although the Great War was supposed to be the last.
A change of mind
Peace through a change in attitude is one of the most widespread themes among the letters. The idea is certainly not new; if only men of good will … . Already, before the war, well-known internationalists like Nicholas Murray Butler, President of Columbia University and future Nobel Peace Prize winner (1931), talked a great deal about the fostering of an “international mind” (Butler 1912, 1917) that would neither deny nor play down patriotism and love of country but would transcend them in order to consider world problems from a fresh perspective, no longer solely preoccupied with national interests. It was believed that the newly founded LON would devote much time to propagating such an international spirit.
Almost a year to the day after the Armistice, Mark Kearley, from Toronto, son of Viscount Devenport Kearley who served as British Minister of Food Control during the Great War,15 presented his views on peace to the LON. In a 14-page typed letter addressed to Eric Drummond,16 Kearley built a strong argument in favor of a new internationalist education, and he did not hesitate to use General Jan Smuts’, South African Prime Minister and one of the leading proponents of the LON in the British Empire, or the Secretary-General's own speeches about the “new creative spirit” and the “international character of mind” of the LON to support it. But most significantly, Kearley's text was haunted by the trauma of war. Although he did not experience it as a soldier – he was jailed in Germany during the war as a foreign civilian prisoner – he witnessed the suffering and the deprivations of the German population and especially of the women:
Men can never hope to understand all that the women of Europe suffered during the war, their sorrows and their sacrifice … It is because we must prevent such horrors from reoccuring [sic] that we must make every effort to ensure the ideals of the League penetrate every heart and every home.
On numerous occasions Kearley refers to the Great War and, like Gilbert, he proposes using the means by which political authorities led people to endorse war, namely patriotism and propaganda, now for the cause of peace. Kearley writes:
Patriotism was necessary during the war, but I believe that the times of peace, if they are to mean more than a mere absence of hostilities, call for a still greater patriotism, not only for one's country but for the race, for humanity as a whole.
The LON should thus not “relapse into a dry-as-dust diplomatic institution” – here again is the common refrain targeting national governments and diplomatic agents – but reach the people and concentrate on disseminating this new vision. As for propaganda, which was so important during the war, it should now be used as an instrument of peace:
The war has shown what a mighty weapon a properly organised propaganda can be, and it is to war-propaganda that we largely owe our victory. What a field there is for the League of Nations, if it will but set on foot a propaganda of knowledge, truth and understanding. … The work of the League, as I understand it, is to break the power of frontiers, not to trace new ones. Thought [underlined in the letter] breaks down barriers and if by its means understanding and sympathy for one's neighbors is brought into every home, I believe that in a little while the national boundaries of to-day will become as the imaginary line that severs Brittany from Normandy, or Berwick from Northumberland. The French say truly Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner.
According to him, propaganda and education for peace should primarily be aimed at younger generations, above all at those who were born after 1918 and who had not directly witnessed the terrible effects of war on mankind. Kearley's realistic portrayal of the war is far from the schoolbooks’ traditionally heroic and romanticized depictions:
It is essential that the war be properly taught in schools, not as some great glorious thing with flashing bayonets and medalled heroes, but as a terrible ghastly thing full of terrors far worse than Death – for death is swift and kind – years of blind rage and hatred and fear, and deliberate entanglement of Thought and mutilations too terrible to speak of – not the loss of an arm and a leg – but I refer to the blinded, the gassed, the disfigured whom nobody will ever love, upon whom one cannot look without revulsion. That is war. Months and months in mud, yards deep, among rotting and reeking corpses, among rats and vermin.
This passage shows Kearley's emotion when addressing the impact of war on men and women; it is incidentally the only syntactically confused part of an otherwise very elegantly written letter. Rooted in an instinctive rejection of war, it mirrors the most poignant anti-war discourse of British and French veteran associations in the 1920s and 1930s. Although Kearley proposes a positive peace education that should, as he says: “honour the benefactors of humanity not their destroyers,” he nonetheless believes that showing children the reality of war is essential to a global change of mind towards peace.
Throughout the archives, hundreds of letters, usually forwarded to the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation,17 dealt, like Kearley's, with peace-oriented educational schemes. The revision of history books, first to highlight collaboration among nations rather than hatred, and second to focus on the peaceful progress of mankind through scientific knowledge rather than emphasizing war as a means of change, are common among those.18
Oneness of mankind
If we follow this line of thought, it is because people were raised in an atmosphere of distrust of those on the other side of the border, and with the idea that nations have to fight for survival, that they accept war and endorse its violence. Proposals for a new internationalist education or for revised schoolbooks, especially regarding the teaching of history, are two examples of actions that could be taken by the LON to bring men and women of different nations closer. In the interwar period, these kinds of initiatives were labeled moral disarmament (Hermon 1989; Siegel 2004) as opposed to material disarmament – which will be addressed in the next section. The letters raise the oneness of mankind as an important concept to counter the culture of enmity among nations and foster moral disarmament.
On February 1932, a group of five men, specifically three Frenchmen, one Swiss and one German, sent these words to Arthur Henderson, President of the World Disarmament Conference:
Being of different nationalities, we believe that every man belongs to Mankind before his own nation and that the best way to serve his country is to serve Mankind.
In order to create in each man this feeling of fraternity, we therefore take the liberty, Mr. President, of proposing the following referendum to all the national delegations in Geneva:
“Do you agree that all nations should be replaced by a single state, with one parliament and equal laws for all; or do you prefer the indefinite preservation of your nation under the present status quo?”
We are convinced, Mr. President, that a question like this one, asked to every human being, would be a giant step towards the cause of peace because it would entail moral disarmament, which is the only effective disarmament because it is the only honest one.19
Interestingly, this appeal for a super-state is not based on the idea, very common in the interwar period among a realist branch of the internationalist school, that nation-states need a power above them in order to stop acting anarchically (Bouchard 2008). Here, it is the oneness of mankind that demands a super-state: it is the natural regime for humanity as a whole. Indeed, no political theory supports this suggestion and what these five men want with their rhetorical referendum question is to denounce obtuse nationalism and promote a new global consciousness.
The theme of the oneness of mankind is particularly suited to religious beliefs. In fact, countless letters – and some of the most eccentric at that – find in God – the Christian one chiefly – the basis of a true peace. This is no surprise. The first modern peace societies emerging at the beginning of the 19th century were religious-based associations (Cooper 1991) and the link between peace and Christianity is still very strong a century later, particularly in Great Britain and the United States – though far less so in France. Peace songs and hymns sent to the League, comprising a particular subset of correspondence to the LON,20 are filled with both religious and universalist references, as if the medium called for them – many, such as Glenna M. Podmore, do insist in their letters that music is the only true “international language.” Sending her International Anthem in 1933, she writes: “Being a musician, and of a more or less universal consciousness, I have long been impressed by the great need of a musical medium by which an international sentiment could be uttered.”21 The lyrics are archetypal of the link between peace, religion and the universality of mankind often found in songs sent to the League:
Let the lands of the earth, lifting voices in song
With praise for all nations, all races and creeds
Do homage to God by serving creation
And value the gifts on His children bestowed
Acclaiming the beauty in all peoples [sic] worth
One country for all, all countries for one in undying unity
There is but one race, the race of humanity
Let us share all God's blessings in understanding and love.
Interestingly, Podmore sent another letter to the League a couple of weeks later in which she deeply apologized for the references to God in her International Anthem. She thus re-sent what she called a “truly” universalist song with no mention of a particular deity. Although many call upon the oneness of mankind to bring peace, Podmore's letter is one rare instance of a discourse on global consciousness that does not overshadow non-Western/non-Christian people.
The oneness of mankind is also omnipresent in flag and emblem proposals sent to the League. In 1929, the International Federation of League of Nations Societies (IFLNS), in Brussels, launched a worldwide contest to choose an emblem for the LON. Close to 3,000 proposals were submitted from 36 countries. Hundreds sent their proposals not to the IFLNS but to the LON. The outcome was somewhat anticlimactic. The international jury, composed of ten renowned internationalists, swiftly eliminated the majority of the proposals on the basis that they did not respect heraldic principles. Indigo and purple, for example, are not heraldic colors: all flags representing a rainbow – and they are plethoric – were therefore eliminated. Many others were rejected because they lacked universality, representing Christian symbols like a cross or a dove, or using French, English or Latin words or maxims – a French citizen saw no problem in writing on his flag Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. Disappointed by the overall mediocrity of the few remaining, the jury chose not to give any first prize but instead awarded two equal second and three third prizes (Ruyssen 1930). Notwithstanding the contest's awkward ending, the IFLNS officially submitted the five best proposals to the LON.22 The League chose none of them and went on without a flag for the rest of its existence.
How can one illustrate LON ideals and its scope? Stars, crosses, the rainbow, the sun, and various representations of the earth are commonplace. A good flag should be instantly and universally readable, and should be easily replicated, even by a child's hand. Edith Palmer, for that matter, did a great job; unfortunately the New Jersey woman sent her proposal a month too late; a copy arrived in Geneva at the end of April 1930. Like most participants, she tried to express, in simple geometric forms and a limited number of colors, abstract notions such as universality, peace or humanity. The description she offers of her flag reads as follow:
On the white Peace flag the Square, symbol of equality, blue, color of the all embracing heavens. The side of the square stands for the fundamental Ideals: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, Sincerity. The [yellow] Star [inside the square], symbol of the new day is formed by a union of equals. It carries in its center the Circle, symbol of Unity; red, the blood of the whole Human Family.23
With a few words and a rather simple design, Palmer summed up many of the virtues attributed to Peace, which is symbolized in her flag by a mere white square, a simple frame that supports all other signs – incidentally, no flag sent to the League was audaciously just white. At the center of the composition, a red circle symbolized unity and the oneness of mankind through the allegory of human blood.
Six months earlier, Paul Ribes, a former French soldier living in Arles, also used the symbolism of blood but gave it a considerably narrower interpretation:
I'm just a French poilu who suffered because of war, and who is putting all his faith in the League of Nations to eradicate this terrible calamity for good. The flag I propose … is made of five colors. Horizon blue (the color in the memory of our late lamented chief, Marshall Foch, and the memory of the poilus who also wore this color on all battlefields) is placed appropriately. Green is the color of hope for the entire world in the League of Nations. Red, the color of blood, will be a reminder of the harsh sacrifices of the soldiers of various countries.
As for black, it is obvious that this flag, born out of the war, should mourn the heroes that fought for the liberty of the people. In the middle, white is to be the symbol of the loyalty and frankness of the League of Nations’ members. It will bear this inscription:
‘Born out of the war, I work for peace’.
In the middle of the diamond, [there is] a dove holding an olive branch.24
This fascinating description not only shows how the seemingly universal concept of peace is inclined to extreme nationalism – to a point where the same colors have near-opposite meanings, but also illustrates the depth of the traumatic experience of war for those who fought in it. More than ten years after the Armistice, Paul Ribes still thinks about peace with the last war in mind, even when considering LON abstract ideals represented on a flag. War is more than a memory; it still colors his world.
“To create and guarantee world peace will always be difficult, IF NOT IMPOSSIBLE [in capitals in the letter], as long as the people all the world over have not the consciousness of oneness,” writes Dr Ludvig M. Freda in a letter dated September 7, 1929.25 Interestingly this German citizen living in the U.S. did not propose a flag design; instead he wrote a three-page letter, densely typed, to explain why it was so crucial to the League to adopt one. For him, the national flag is not a mere symbol, it is the community. Through a kind of transubstantiation, the flag becomes “the nation; who offends the flag, the cloth, offends the nation.” Freda concludes his letter with what he thinks is the real importance of the flag for the League: “Should not this matter of a humanity-flag which in reality is not the matter of a flag, but the matter of world-oneness and world-peace, offer you an opportunity … to do something really great for suffering and waiting humanity?”
In hindsight, it seemed that, in giving up on the flag idea, the LON missed a great symbolic opportunity. This was yet another occasion on which the League failed to raise itself above the nations. With its own flag, the League would have symbolically shown that, although a state-based organization, it could claim to represent the whole world, a community of men and women dedicated to peace. This is probably why the World Disarmament Conference of 1932 opened in the midst of such an emotional build-up: the League had one last opportunity to be the voice of mankind against national interests.
The Disarmament Conference, a turning point
Disarmament was a pivotal postwar issue. Directly inspired by point 4 of Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, Article 8 of the Covenant of the League of Nations stated: “The Members of the League recognise that the maintenance of peace requires the reduction of national armaments to the lowest point consistent with national safety and the enforcement by common action of international obligations.” As Maurice Vaïsse rightly pointed out: “of all the hopes that the creation and the existence of the LON carried, the biggest was undoubtedly the reduction of the burden of national armaments” (Vaïsse 1983). A substantial proportion of all the citizen letters deal in some ways with this central question. In the 1920s, all the disarmament meetings – paradoxically, the LON took no part in these Great Power gatherings – focused, with some success, on naval issues (Goldman 1994). In 1925, the LON's Preparatory Commission on Disarmament started working on a new and more ambitious conference that would address global disarmament with, not only LON members, but also the United States and Soviet Russia in attendance. The Great Depression of 1929, the Manchurian Crisis and then the rise of political extremism in Germany would soon cast a shadow over the upcoming summit (Steiner 2005: chap. 12). Hitler's arrival at the German Chancellery a year after its opening doomed it. Overall, the Geneva Conference of 1932–1934 would be an utter disaster: not only did it fail to bring about disarmament; it actually gave way to Germany's rearmament and in the 1930s arms race. Most of all, the Conference demonstrated the LON's inability to resolve any international deadlock, especially when Great Powers were involved. The letters sent to the LON show that citizens felt strongly about it and were quite concerned about its potential outcomes. Their expectations in 1932 were as high as at the end of 1918, when everything seemed possible in the name of peace. They knew very well that this Conference might be the last chance for peace; it would either bring disarmament, or war.
This apprehension was shared by the League's officials as well. In August 1932 – the Disarmament Conference opened in February of the same year – Conrad Hobbs, from Boston, wrote to the LON to suggest the creation of an International Peace Garden between France and Germany, following the example of the American-Canadian Peace Garden recently unveiled at the Manitoba/North Dakota border.26 His idea is taken into consideration by the LON. “The International Peace Garden idea suggested by Mr. Hobbs is a good one,” writes one of the highest ranking officers at the League's Secretariat, American Arthur Sweetser, in his confidential comments. In his reply to Hobbs, Sweetser bluntly admits that his proposal, though sound as it is, came “at a bad time.” “It might quite well be that at a given moment when an atmosphere of reconciliation has been firmly established it might fittingly find expression in some such way,” concludes Sweetser. The League's official was not compelled to give such an opinion – in fact it was “a personal rather than an official expression.” However, this quite pessimistic point of view regarding the world's stability is disturbing. Twelve years after Versailles, four years after the signature of the Briand-Kellogg pact, which was interpreted as the peak of détente in the 1920s, Sweetser believes that an atmosphere of reconciliation is still missing in the world. This is all the more reason to see in the Disarmament Conference the ultimate opportunity to save peace and foster reconciliation.
Citizens’ mobilization before and during the Conference was phenomenal, as thousands of signed petitions – adding up to 10 million signatures – collective resolutions and individual letters arrived in Geneva. Peace associations had been waiting for this conference for years and would not just sit idly by; they would actively pressure the politicians to get results. In the summer of 1932, literally millions of cards with a standard text that citizens were invited to adapt according to the addressee were sent to national politicians, as well as to the LON. The standard British one reads as follow:
This meeting of the [the group's name is indicated here] views with increasing alarm the small achievements of the Disarmament Conference to date.
It is of the opinion that this situation is contrary to the expressed desires of the peoples of the whole World, and is largely occasioned by reason of a wrong approach to the problem. Instead of seeking to achieve the largest measure of disarmament, the aim of most representatives appears to be to safeguard those armaments which are considered most vital in their own country.
Particularly, it regrets the unhelpful attitude of the British Delegation, both towards the proposal for Total Disarmament which was put before the Conference, and towards the limited proposals which have since been made, and would urge that any limitation which does not envisage total disarmament within a fixed period will be valueless, as it will lead to concentration upon the arms which are permitted to remain.
It thus demands in the name of the British people, whose desire for disarmament is surpassed by none, that the policy pursued hitherto by the British representatives shall be speedily reversed and the Conference be encouraged to consider proposals which are in accord with the desires of our country.27
Such a mobilization took the LON by surprise. It was decided that all the petitions, temporarily exhibited on the ground floor of the LON office in Geneva, were to be moved to the Disarmament Commission building to remind the delegates of their responsibility before the world.28 As for the President of the Conference, British Foreign Affairs Minister Arthur Henderson, he received his fair share of individual letters. Many wrote to wish him good luck at the opening of the meeting, and to remind him of his immense responsibility.29 Letters frequently draw a link between the Great War and the Disarmament Conference. Moreover, they illustrate the extent of popular expectations, often tinged with religious faith. A British woman wrote to Henderson on the opening day:
This great day, looked forward to by all peace loving people, is dimmed and clouded over by the present war news in the East [the Manchurian crisis]. The world stands in dreadful peril of a conflagration far worse that 1914–1918.
The League of Nations was formed after that disaster to try and avoid any recurrence in the future, but unfortunately the right spirit is not with all, just with a few. Lip service will not do only. A genuine desire to help mankind and complete trust in God is the only way.30
A couple of days later, Henderson received another letter, this time from a Swiss woman:
What will be the outcome of this conference? ‘War or peace?’
… Thirteen years after the war, do we still remember this slaughter that killed more than ten million soldiers, and twice this number of collateral victims [?] … We work for better days [said the soldiers], so there will be no more bloodshed, no more killed, no more mutilated victims; we work, we whose mothers cried so much, so that other mothers will never know those burning tears.
… We, Mothers of Switzerland, pray that the conference will be held in a spirit of good will and understanding. … We must pray because it is God's hour.31
On March 15, a young boy from Iowa sent these words:
I take the liberty to write this in behalf of all the vows and pledges I have ever taken and in the fact that I call myself a Christian. This is my earnest plea. If the conference does not decide then no other conference will and war will follow and wreck all our plans for future life and the wounderful [sic] world that was planned by those who died would fail.32
As the months passed, letters expressed concerns that not enough was being done in favor of disarmament, and that time was working against an agreement. Citizens particularly focused on the wordy and irrelevant discourse of military experts to the detriment of genuine political discussions. A group of citizens from California wrote to Henderson a year after the opening:
We protest against the slowness of the World Disarmament Conference. We have been informed that when the Versailles Treaty was made [sic] the military experts decided in 48 hours what aggressive weapons were. If so, why not decide at once, now, by holding to the 1919 decision?33
Just four months after the opening, the Geneva section of the League of Pacifist War Veterans (Ligue des anciens combattants pacifistes) sent a copy of a recently passed resolution which raised the same concern in a more formal and articulate manner. The Ligue
notes with disappointment that, more than four months after its opening, the Disarmament conference has not reached any positive result;
[notes] that for the past two months, the Conference was left to technical commissions of military experts who seem to focus more on the problems of disarming than on ways to disarm;
believes that heads of governments should act responsibly and draw up clear political instructions in favour of disarmament out of respect for the Treaties and the people's expectations;
and reminds [the LON] that the military experts’ role must be limited to the execution of political instructions formulated by responsible governments.34
All these testimonies and many more letters show the fear that states were using delaying tactics to preserve their own armaments as much as possible while arguing for the others’ disarmament. Reconciliation, relying so much on mutual trust, was not on the agenda. Letters clearly reveal citizens’ awareness of these tactics. In other words, governments were again accused of foul play to the detriment of peace. Finally, all these letters imply that the Disarmament Conference was the LON's ultimate test: if an agreement was not reached under its auspices, it meant that mankind was again being deceived by national interests, and that no one could reasonably expect the LON to bring lasting peace anymore. The soldiers of the Great War really had died in vain.
Conclusion
Like any other “unofficial correspondence” to political authorities, the flow of letters to the LON fluctuated wildly between periods of literary frenzy and quieter periods. The LON's flag contest and the World Disarmament Conference generated significant volumes of correspondence, so massive in the latter case that the LON Secretariat had to urgently find new storage space.35 Other subjects were popular throughout the period, like the much debated question of an international language – Ido, Esperanto, Volapuk, etc. – or the persistent problem of calendar reform.36
In their own ways, these two issues also addressed the theme of the “oneness of mankind.” As I have shown, many citizens emphasized the existence of a human race to promote peace and fraternity. “There is but one race, the race of humanity,” sang Glenna Podmore. They see the world as one and believe that men and women of all nations should urgently rediscover it. The “consciousness of oneness,” as Ludvig Freda called it when advocating a LON flag, would one day transcend nationalism and distrust. It was the League's responsibility to make this dream happen.
Yet those who promoted a worldwide language or a universal timekeeping method considered the problem the other way around. The oneness of mankind was still a crucial route to peace, but instead of helping men and women to gradually become aware of this reality, oneness had to be implemented through a set of standardizing norms and rules. Uniformity, it seemed, was what was missing in the world. Human diversity suddenly appeared as an obstacle to reconciliation and concord. Alterity meant war: men and women were to be bound by the same laws, the same language, the same conception of time, the same God in order to live in peace. Here again, the LON was instrumental, but this time by leading the world to homogeneity, espousing the imperial design of European countries, spreading reason and civilization, thus peace, to the world as a whole.
What is important to keep in mind, though, is less this tension between diversity and uniformity than the fact that, in both cases, the LON was perceived as the key to a new and better world; peace and reconciliation rested almost entirely upon its modest shoulders. The League was the first international actor to carry such hopes. Moreover, it was the first time in history that citizens could express their views about the world, the future and, of course, peace in a forum dedicated to this ideal. A truly remarkable dialogue emerged between the League and the citizens, which fostered the impression that the LON was genuinely working for mankind. Throughout this chapter, we have seen that national governments were repeatedly accused of being responsible for world instability. To bring lasting peace, it seems that the League had to square the circle: though “born out of the war” as Paul Ribes said, above all the League arose from the states. Yet, to live up to people's expectations, it had to free itself from state supremacy.
Notes
1 League of Nations Archives in Geneva [hereafter LNA], box R1564, file 38912/38548. All French citations have been translated by the author.
2 The Swarthmore College Peace Collection holds hundreds of archival collections of pacifist associations and more or less renowned pacifists [www.swarthmore.edu/library/peace/].
3 This is the case for letters dealing with world peace proposals (boxes R1563 and R1564), the LON”s flag or emblem (R1549, R3568 and R5645), an international language (R1550, R1554, R1555, R1556, etc.), the World Disarmament Conference (R2248, R2253, R2282, R2450 to R2457, etc.) and calendar reform (R1097 to R10109).
4 LNA, R1338, 21964/21963.
5 LNA, R1564, 38912/38548.
6 LNA, R1564, 38912/38548.
7 LNA, R1564, 38912/38548.
8 See for example LNA, R1332, 2382/2382.
9 LNA, R1584, 13110/13110.
10 The folder in which a document is archived lists the name and affiliation of all the persons who looked at it, as well as the date of consultation.
11 LNA, R219, 20534/20534.
12 LNA, R4223, 1660/664.
13 LNA, R3576, 5032/5032. The quotation is taken from Thomas Southerne's The Fatal Marriage (1694).
14 Eleanor B. Wemyss suggests for example the creation of a “League of Nations Day” on January 10 “in favour of peace and brotherhood and the principles of the League.” LNA, R1558, 23082/23082.
15 Kearley uses the respectability of his family credentials to assert the seriousness of his opinions: “You will understand that I do not cite this [his father's political role] in any snobbish way, but in the hopes that that fact may lead you to consider [my letter] and not condemn it to the paper basket unread.” Citizens who write to the LON sometimes resort to this discursive strategy in such ways as to present themselves and their suggestions as sound and reasonable, as opposed to idealistic and naively pacifistic stances that could be swiftly rejected on that basis. A British petition asking for the use of Esperanto as an international language to bring about peace thus makes clear that “only people whose signatures might looked upon as carrying weight should be requested to sign” (LNA, R1549, 1486/579).
16 LNA, R1332, 2382/2382. The Secretary-General personally acknowledged Kearley's letter.
17 See for instance LNA, boxes R1051, R1055, R1712, R2218, R3992, R4023 and 4061.
18 Founded in 1922, the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation worked in vain during the interwar period on a common history book that would “objectively” present the origins of World War I. After World War II, the project of a “peace-oriented” interpretation of history was resuscitated as part of UNESCO's responsibility through the Commission for Revision of Schoolbooks (see Pingel 2010).
19 LNA, R2449, 32816/31155.
20 Songs and hymns are filed in boxes R1551, 1558 and 5702.
21 LNA, R1558, 3184/3184.
22 LNA, R3568, 2360/2360, letter by Theodore Ruyssen to Eric Drummond, September 27, 1930.
23 LNA, R3568, 2360/2360.
24 LNA, R3568, 2360/2360.
25 LNA, R3568, 2360/2360.
26 LNA, R3605, 38764/38764. The International Peace Garden still exists today (www.peacegarden.com).
27 Box LNA, R2454, for example, is filled with cards of this kind and with formal petitions from various British and Canadian associations.
28 LNA, R24565, 31155/34690.
29 Most letters can be found in LNA, R2452.
30 LNA, R2452, 32828/31155. Henderson personally replied to this letter.
31 LNA, R2449, 32817/31155.
32 LNA, R2449, 32815/31155.
33 LNA, R4223, 724/664.
34 LNA, R2457, 37837/31155.
35 LNA, R2449, 32828/31155.
36 Thirteen boxes (R1097 to 1109) amounting to more than 400 files – each of which usually contains more than one proposal – are dedicated exclusively to calendar reform.