International week-enders

JAY FRANKLIN

EDITOR'S NOTE: The interesting informal photographs which illustrate this article are hy the wellknown German photographer Dr. Erich Salomon: (1) From left to right: Philippe Berthelot,General Secretary of the French Foreign Office; Dr. Heinrich Briining, German Ghancellor; Hymans, Belgian Foreign Minister; Dr. Julius Gorlins, German Foreign Minister; Aristide Briand, French Foreign Minister; Pierre Laval; Andre FramjoisPoncet, Chef du Cabinet—now French Ambassador to Germany; (2) Premier Pierre Laval and President Herbert Hoover; (3) J. Xaleski, Polish Foreign Minister; Baron Adachi, Japanese Delegate to League of Nations; Sir Austen Chamberlain, British Foreign Minister; Dr. Gustav Stresemann, German Foreign Minister; Aristide Briand, Scialoja, (back) Italian Foreign Minister; (4) Ramsay Macdonald speaking at a meeting of the English-German society. On his right: Dr. Heinrich Briining and Dr. Rechberg. On Iris left Excellenz von Nostitz; Sir Horace Rumbold, British Ambassador to Germany; Wilhelm Ouno, President of the Hamburg-American Line. In the foreground: (from back) Baron Siegfried von Kardorff, Vice President of the Reichstag; Baron von Weinberg; Dr. Julius Curtins; (5) Louis Louelieur, French Minister of Labor; Andre Tardieu, French Prime Minister; Dr. Julius Curtins; Henri Cheron, French Minister of Finance. Tn the foreground: Professor Paul Moldenhauer, German Minister of Finance; Dr. Carl Melchior, Banker; (6) Benito Mussolini; Dr. Heinrich Briining; Dr. Julius Curtins; (from back) Dino Grandi, Italian Foreign Minister; (7) Dr. Julius Curtins; Dr. Heinrich Briining; Pierre Laval; Aristide Briand

* Ever since two million young American voters took free passage to Europe to make America safe for the Prohibitionists, Washington has been a world capital. American policy has been windy and spacious, in days of prosperity, or cautious and niggardly in time of depression, but whether we blew hot or cold, we have been seasoning the broth, and there has been no lack of cooks to show us how it should he done. As a result, the international week-end habit seems to he a firm feature of American diplomacy. For a while, it was a one-way proposition. Foreign diplomats, interested in smaller American navies or larger American loans, dropped in on us casually, looked us over, and departed, breathing public platitudes and private relief.

We had the King and Queen of the Belgians, the Prince of Wales, Queen Marie of Roumania, the Prince Regent of Japan, and the King of Siam. We have had, off and on, many of the major European statesmen, including Winston Churchill, David Lloyd George, Richard von Kiihlmann, Ramsay Macdonald, Andre Tardieu, and Premier Laval. We have had debt funding commissions and diplomatic missions. For years, we sat hack and lapped it up; it was, we thought, a tribute to our marvellous climate, our beautiful blue eyes, our intelligence. Grover Whalen developed a bed-side manner with visiting firemen which later raised him to the rank of Police Commissioner of New York City. Ticker-tape poured from New York windows every time a squad of motor-cycle cops headed north from the Battery. After a while, our statesmen began to suspect that there was method in the madness, when, after every visit, the departing guest left with a neat little understanding in his pocket or a nice big bond issue in his wake.

When Ramsay Macdonald came over, sat on a log by the Rapidan and worked out in a week-end the basis of a naval agreement which had defied the experts of three Great Powers for three long years, Secretary Stimson took a leaf out of the British book and returned the compliment by going to the London Conference, hiring a fine countryplace near London, bringing along two of the most attractive and able men then in American public life—Senator Reed and the late Dwight Morrow—and putting on a show which enabled the American Delegation to come out of the London Conference with an agreement from our two naval competitors to allow us time to catch up with their cruiser programmes.

When the Moratorium burst upon us in 1931, we beat the Europeans to the draw. Secretary Stimson had sailed for Europe and, while the world-shattering financial events of last year detonated, he was slipping unobtrusively from capital to capital, making contacts with M. Laval of France, Herr Curtins of Germany, Signor Grandi of Italy, and, of course, his old friend Mr. Ramsay Macdonald of Great Britain, all under cover of a much needed vacation. The rumor that M. Benes of Czechoslovakia hid behind a pillar in the Duomo at Milan in order to bump into him by accident is, naturally, untrue; hut there was an astonishing hurrying and scurrying of European statesmen to establish informal personal contacts with our Secretary of State. Then Mr. Stimson came home and waited for the return calls. As events crowded, so did visits.

M. Laval and his daughter Jose arrived, met President Hoover and casually arranged something practical about the gold standard. Then Signor Grandi, with his magnificent blue-black heard and his very charming wife, came along and sewed up the idea of a year's suspension of naval construction by all the Powers. There was talk of a visit from Herr Briining and it was even rumored that Comrade Stalin would not mind an invitation to come and "tell all" at Washington.

The result of all this coming and going has been to dispel one of the most stubborn and unflattering myths in American public life: the idea that an American diplomat cannot sit down at the same table with a foreign statesman and arise thence until he has parted with the Monroe Doctrine, American isolation, the national savings account and the family portraits. The myth, naturally, originated in the days when we were a small and relatively insignificant second-class Power. When, under those circumstances, we had to confer with foreign diplomats—especially with British diplomats—we naturally came out with the short end of the stick. Roosevelt made up for it, to a certain extent, by tactics since adopted by Signor Mussolini, loud and very virile in method, cautious and often inept in action. Some of Roosevelt's diplomacy, seen twenty years later, makes pretty ugly reading. In one major instance, the Russo-Japanese War, lie came close to a disastrous blunder, but on the whole "Teddy" kept us out of trouble and made a big name for himself. The myth might have died a natural death if Wilson had not gone to Paris. There Wilson made the sort of personal contacts which every foreign statesman would like our leaders to make. Naturally a student and philosopher, when Wilson found himself up against experienced politicians like Clemenceau, Lloyd George, not to mention Venizelos, he floundered. Before he knew it, be found himself making decisions on matters in which the American interest had no proper interest, and committed to actions which, in his heart of hearts, be must have known America would never take—such, for example, as the unratified Treaty of Guarantee by which the l nited States agreed to protect France against any future invasion. If there ever was a time when an American statesman should have stayed at home and should have left personal contacts with foreign statesmen to such experienced old campaigners as Colonel House, it was in 1919. The result, of course, was the rejection of the Treaty of Versailles by the Senate and the revival in its most virulent form of the notion that no American statesman could be trusted outside of the three-mile limit.

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Informal photographs by Dr. Salomon of European leaders deciding nations' fates over week-end wine and coffee cups

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Ever since Kipling said that "sometimes in a smoking room one learns why things were done" and warned foreigners to "beware my country when my country grows polite", it has been obvious that the best sort of foreign policy is one which is not committed to paper, in which there are no finalities, which waits for something to turn up on the sound theory that something generally does.

We are slowly discovering that we can play this sort of game too, and that one day of discussion with the man who runs the show is worth a year of diplomatic correspondence with his subordinate.

The real solution is, of course, a compromise between glad-handing and book-keeping. We have need for both contact men and statesmen; diners out and workers in: men who write notes and men who can call the Prime Minister of Great Britain "Mac". One does not exclude the other; and we are beginning to see how each helps.