The War to End All Wars had ended with a peace to end all peace. With much of France in rubble, Germany humbled by defeat and the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, America bent on a return to isolationism, Italy’s new fascist movement and rise to power, Japan eyeing the growth of its empire, and Great Britain struggling to maintain its empire, the world’s peace, during what is now termed the Interwar Years, was a peace most fragile.
Politicians, journalists, historians, and economists predicted that a second world war was on the horizon. Those concerns increased when French and Belgian troops occupied Germany’s Ruhr Valley in 1923 after Germany defaulted on their reparation payment. Western diplomats quickly worked to avoid another global conflict.
During this decade, America had finally found its economic footing under presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge. The Allies who had borrowed heavily from the United States during the war, however, were burdened by debt. Attempts to have the debts erased were as successful as Germany’s attempts to have its reparations under the treaty’s terms erased.
The United States understood that such an elimination of debts owed would be diplomatically and economically foolish. The former Allies understood that eliminating the reparations, along with the other terms of the Treaty of Versailles, would open a path to German resurgence. Diplomats from the United States, France, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, and a handful of others believed there was opportunity to meet in the middle and renegotiate terms.
Meeting in Locarno
Following the Dawes Plan, delegates from Belgium, Britain, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Italy, and Poland assembled for a conference on Oct. 8, 1925, in Locarno, Switzerland. Aristide Briand, France’s foreign minister, and Gustav Stresemann, the foreign minister for Germany’s newly established Weimar Republic, both advocated for Franco-German reconciliation. During the conference, which included Britain’s Austen Chamberlain (the half-brother of Neville Chamberlain) and a late-arriving Benito Mussolini (who had taken power in Italy in 1922), Briand and Stresemann came to several significant agreements that proved mutually beneficial for the two nations.
One agreement, known as The Treaty of Mutual Guarantee (or The Rhineland Pact), guaranteed the borders of France, Germany, and Belgium, and included Britain and Italy agreeing to repel any military aggression that might transpire in the German frontier known as the Rhineland. It, therefore, demilitarized the Rhineland, which had been occupied by the victorious Allies. Altogether, the delegates signed seven treaties and also agreed to advocate for Germany’s inclusion into the League of Nations. Germany would be included the following year.
The Rise of Frank Kellogg
On the other side of the Atlantic, in the United States, Frank Kellogg had reached the apex of his political power. He had spent much of his adolescent years on a farm in Minnesota, but acquired an interest in law. With a roughhewn education, he began working for a law office in Rochester, Minnesota, as well as working as a handyman for a local farmer.
During those years, he borrowed textbooks and educated himself on history, law, Latin, and German. Before his 21st birthday, he passed the state bar exam, and soon became city attorney for Rochester and then attorney for Olmsted County. Ten years after passing the exam and proving his legal skill, he was hired by his cousin and U.S. senator, Cushman Kellogg Davis, to join his law practice.
Kellogg practiced law for the next 20 years representing major corporations and befriending leading men like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. By the time Theodore Roosevelt became president, Kellogg had begun his evolution into a trust-busting attorney, winning some of the biggest cases of the early 20th century against the General Paper Company, Union Pacific Railroad, and Standard Oil Company. By 1912, the Minnesota farmer was president of the American Bar Association.
Briand’s Open Letter
Fresh off a successful treaty conference and a newly minted Nobel Peace Prize, Briand tried his luck with the Americans. After a discussion with James Shotwell, a history professor at Columbia University, who had been the historian for the American delegation during the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, Briand was convinced to proffer a bilateral agreement between France and America in the case of war. Instead of going through diplomatic channels, Briand decided to put Coolidge and his secretary of State in a tough spot. On April 6, 1927, the 10th anniversary of America entering World War I. Briand had his proposal published by the Associated Press.The catch was that Briand had made the agreement solely between America and France. Kellogg and Coolidge were displeased with Briand’s importunity, especially considering rising American pacifism. The open letter added pressure to the administration to join the growing peace movement, regardless of how futile such an agreement might be.
Briand was about as pleased with Kellogg’s proposal as Kellogg had been with Briand’s. They nonetheless came to an agreement. Perhaps Kellogg’s and Briand’s enthusiasm for such an agreement can be surmised from the lack of effort and wording within the agreement itself.
Global Support
Nonetheless, the Kellogg-Briand Pact garnered not only American and French support, but global support. France, America, Great Britain, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Belgium, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Italy and Japan signed the pact, with most sources agreeing that 60-plus countries signed by mid-July 1929.It was a hopeful follow-up to the Locarno Pact of 1925. The U.S. Senate, which had refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 due to sovereignty concerns, had encouraged Kellogg to pursue such an agreement. And it was during this week in history, on Jan. 15, 1929, that the Senate voted in the affirmative 85-1 to accept the treaty.
A Young Plan, an Old Profession
Shortly before the stock market crash of October 1929, the Young Plan was created by a new committee on German reparations and was a follow-up to the Dawes Plan. It was slated to provide a loan of $300 million, would decrease the total amount owed by Germany, and would allow the country 58 years to pay off its total debt. It would also eliminate foreign supervision of German economic policy and remove all occupying forces from Germany. The Great Depression stopped the Young Plan in its tracks. Europe, along with America, fell into economic turmoil.
With the Great War still fresh in memory and with the Great Depression now plying its economic constriction, the powers that had wished to hold onto that fragile peace now proved both unwilling and unable to halt the rising militarism in both Europe and the South Pacific.
The decade following the idealistic terms of the Kellogg-Briand Pact proved the treaty was hardly worth more than the paper it was printed on. In 1931, the Japanese invaded Manchuria, followed by the invasion of the Chinese mainland in 1937. In 1935, Italy invaded Abyssinia (now Ethiopia). In 1936, Germany sent troops into the Rhineland. None of the “Great Powers” were willing to risk war through intervention or further economic problems through sanctions. The feared second world war was no longer on the horizon; it had arrived.
In many ways, the power of the Kellogg-Briand Pact failed in a moment in Munich, when the leaders of Germany, Italy, France, and Great Britain agreed to allow Germany to annex the Sudetenland during the conference 0f Sept. 29-30, 1938.
When British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned to London on Sept. 30, he spoke to the British people stating that “The peoples of the British Empire were at one with those of Germany, of France and of Italy, and their anxiety, their intense desire for peace, pervaded the whole atmosphere of the conference, and I believe that that, and not threats, made possible the concessions that were made.” It is considered the “Peace in Our Time” speech.
That peace would be short-lived.
