The Paris Peace Conferences in 1919 gave 60 million people in East Central Europe their own states, and another 25 million became ethnic minorities. The Wilsonian commitment to “national self-determination” assumed that nationalism had been responsible for the War. Its containment, therefore, required that ethnocultural boundaries be made coterminous with political ones. So border changes combined with the imposition of minority rights regimes were the main strategies for accommodating identities and politics in the new East Central Europe. Wilsonians believed that the road to peace lay in democratizing nationalism – understood by American elites as “self-government of the oppressed” – and in preventing the return of the “atavistic imperialisms” rooted in Old Europe’s social and political structures.
The United States had brought the “big idea” to the conference, and it found fertile soil in East Central Europe. Wilson’s rhetoric of national self-determination resonated among the nationalities – Slovaks, Poles, Czechs, Serbs, Rumanians and others – who had been under illiberal German occupation, Russian, Austro-Hungarian or Ottoman rule. But where did these ideas come from? This article explores the influences on those tasked with mapping a new East Central Europe at the peace conference, focusing on the most influential of the Allied powers, the United States and the members of what became known as “The Inquiry,” a group of academics Wilson appointed to translate “national self-determination” into postwar boundaries.^[1]
Of course the principle of national self-determination was not an American invention. It had its roots in Central European socialism and was famously developed by the Austro-Marxists and espoused by Lenin years before Wilson’s speech. But its ideas found intellectual and political adherents in two very different contexts: (upper) middle class American Progressive intellectuals, and elites among the smaller nationalities in Central Europe’s crumbling multiethnic empires who saw it, and American support, as the key to political power. The language of self-determination resonated with American Progressives’ domestic social commitments to the liberal and democratic rights of “the common man.” Borrowed by Wilson from socialist internationalists in Central and Eastern Europe, repackaged in the language of American liberalism, and “scientifically” grounded in census and statistical data on the various nationalities, it not only appealed to the claims of East Central Europe’s small nationalities but, as the American administration saw it, it also allowed a counterbalance to the rightist forces of militarist, conservative nationalisms in Europe.^[2] In the Progressives’ analysis, self-determination was democratic and of the people, nationalism was of militarist old elites, amoral industrialists, and privileged aristocracies of the old order – many of the same criticisms they were leveling at the United States’ domestic ills.
Significantly, it was the American Inquiry’s constructions and definitions of what constituted “ethnicity” which provided nearly all the ethnographic research, and most of the political judgments, which guided the boundary deliberations at Versailles. Of course American plenipotentiaries did not get everything they wanted, and some of the final boundary settlements reflected where their judgments were overruled or, as they put it, where realpolitik had prevailed. Nevertheless, even when boundary decisions did not go their way, the American Inquiry’s extensive and meticulous research formed the ethnographic basis of the newly constructed nation-states. The aims of this article, then, are to retrieve the social and intellectual sources of the constructions of “national self-determination” in 1919 in the mapping of East Central Europe, and to explore the degree to which American elites universalized particular – and new – constructions of ethnicity, nationalism, and more pointedly, liberal assimilation. It elaborates, in other words, “Middle American” understandings of Mitteleuropean nationalities.

“THE INQUIRY”

President Wilson had committed the United States to the War late, indeed intentionally at a point when it was clear that the United States’ entry would be determinative in the outcome and so could decisively shape the post-war peace settlements. In early September 1917 Wilson was cognizant of rumors of an immanent peace and well aware that the Allied Powers were preparing their cases for the peace conference. He therefore asked his closest advisor, “Colonel” Edward House, to “quietly gather” a group of academic specialists to collect data on the political, economic, social, and ethnic requirements for working out an American position on what the post-war peace should look like. This effectively created the Inquiry, the United States’ first think tank. It was independent of the electoral process and worked in relative isolation, but it drew on information from the United States’ State Department and Military Intelligence units, and the Central Powers’ census data and maps; and because of its very specific mandate and close proximity to House, it became highly influential at the highest level of policymaking. Indeed its work was funded by a special reserve available only to the President. For the fourteen months of its existence the Inquiry was instructed not only to gather data in the form of ethnographies, statistics, personality sketches, histories, and economic conditions about the Central Powers, but they were also mandated to formulate the United States’ recommendations for mapping East Central Europe’s new boundaries.^[3]
Wilson distrusted his Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, and had little faith in the State Department’s ability to advise on post-war peace. But he was also an academic himself, formerly a professor of political science and Princeton University’s president, and had a particular affinity with academic “experts.” He also embodied the general ethos of the generation of intellectuals that emerged from the Progressive era in the United States, a generation committed to the “scientific” re-shaping of society and to a progressivism premised on liberal social reform. The members of the Inquiry reflected the assumptions and ideas embedded in the Progressivism of the expanding urban middle classes in the United States, of academia and public intellectuals, and professionals. Wilson and House felt they needed to make use of men trained in the collection of factual evidence, hence the commission was staffed with academics and scholars and not professional policymakers. Wilson and House were guided, in particular, by the general belief that academics could offer an important public service, and American academics, because of their disinterested review of factual evidence, could provide an especially important role in shaping the post-war world. So East Central Europe’s post-war territorial arrangements were to be constructed as a “scientific peace,” one based on the objective findings of American academic specialists rather than on the narrow national interests of European statesmen or the power politics of “old world” diplomacy.
Initially their headquarters were in the New York City Public Library, and later the American Geographical Society offices, where much of the Inquiry’s cartography and map work was provided by the Geographical Society using Prussian/German, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian ethnographic and census data and Imperial base maps as their starting points. The Inquiry worked until January 1919, when the Paris Peace talks began, at which point thirty-five of its members joined Wilson, House, Secretary of State Lansing, State Department, and Military Intelligence Division (MID) officials in Paris in what became the “American Commission to Negotiate the Peace.” The Conferences’ Territorial Committees’ boundary recommendations became “final and determinant,” and the Inquiry and American Commission members – and especially their detailed ethnographic research – became exceedingly influential on these commissions as official “technical advisors.”^[4] The United States delegation as a whole projected substantial influence in the Supreme Council at Versailles, in their roles as specialists in negotiations, their volumes of data, and in their boundary recommendations.^[5]
In the ranks of the Inquiry were specialists and experts of all kinds – some relevant, such as historians or economists of Poland or Austria-Hungary, while other specialists strained credulity, such as archeologists and scholars of Greek antiquity. Many years of American isolationism had left their legacy: there were very few qualified experts or area specialists, academic or otherwise, knowledgeable of world or diplomatic history. The Inquiry also included Central European and Russian émigrés, with the number of academics who had studied geography and history in Imperial Germany particularly noteworthy. Their roles in the Inquiry’s preparations were influential beyond their numbers both because of their unique ability to reflect back on policy and because of their linguistic skills. Yet this was a group of men (and a few women) noticeable by their general lack of expertise or experience in international politics or policymaking. Significantly, there was not a single specialist on Germany among the 150 members of the Inquiry.^[6] In fact Germany was not included among the fifteen subdivisions of the Inquiry assembled to prepare the European settlements.
Of the 150 members of the Inquiry, 65 percent had obtained their terminal degrees from Columbia, Chicago, Harvard, and Yale, and more than half were recruited from five institutions: Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, and the American Geographical Society. Most were recruited through social and professional networks of acquaintances, colleagues, and friends, rather than on the basis of academic qualification. For the most part, it was their general capacity and scholarship that was sought. In fourteen months the Inquiry produced hundreds of reports, census summaries, maps, and proposals. The judgments that created the postwar map of East Central Europe were primarily formed on the basis of the Americans’ empirical research and their interpretation of the ethnographic data.

THE INQUIRY AND THE AMERICAN CONTEXT

The social world of the upper middle class Inquiry members was that of Progressive America, and they brought the experiences and assumptions of the era to bear on their research and recommendations. Wilson, the members of the Inquiry, and the American delegates to the country-specific Territorial Commissions, were all of the generation that came of political age in the 1890s and 1910s. Their ideas and their politics were shaped by American Progressivism’s moral and ideological content: a belief that social ills could be solved rationally, scientifically and pragmatically, an optimistic belief in the transformative power of liberalism, and a conviction in the need for a new moral social order. As intellectual elites, they articulated the progressive ethos of the era, and saw themselves as tasked to disseminate Progressive ideas, both at home and abroad, in their new roles as “academic experts.” In short, they espoused Progressivism’s analysis of the identity requirements for social and political stability.
Debates continue on the many ideological and intellectual tensions within Progressivism, and the social backgrounds of its adherents.^[7] The significance of these debates lies in what they imply about Progressivism’s social carriers. Progressivism’s ideological heterogeneity, combined with its relatively socially homogeneous base, may have been a function of the times to which it was responding: Progressivism was a militant social reformist ideology at a time when, as Hofstadter noted, American society was actually quite prosperous. The economic depression of 1893-1897 was over, labor relations were in a quiescent phase, race relations were in a period of temporary retrenchment following the turbulent Reconstruction era, wealth was everywhere with growing numbers of millionaires and billionaires, within the professions and universities salaries were rising, academics’ power and influence inside and outside government was increasing, and the expansion and institutionalization of the social sciences’ professional associations and proliferation of new journals, all offered prestige and networks for diffusing ideas. Progressive reformist elites like Wilson’s cabinet and the academics of the Inquiry, were not responding to economic dislocation – theirs or others’ – but to changes in power relationships from which they were benefiting, particularly in the rise of academic self-consciousness and influence.^[8]
In short, this was a prosperous and stable era – particularly when compared to the massive upheavals of the industrialization of the Gilded Age that had preceded it, and the conservative reaction and social and economic volatility that followed in the 1920s and 1930s.^[9] Progressive intellectuals stood in contrast to both the Populists before them and the New Dealers after them, the latter responding to economic depression and social dislocation.^[10] Increasing wealth and suburbanization, and growing ideological and political influence in a time of relative prosperity, meant that intellectuals could turn their ideological worries to moral character, social conscience, civic duties, and to the morally corrosive effects of the “new wealth.”^[11]
Moreover, Progressivism was the social reformist ideology of the upper and middle classes, north and south, urban and rural. It attracted support from two key ideological groups: the professoriat and the Protestant clergy. Its Protestant underpinnings gave it a pragmatic morality, and academics and intellectuals gave it social content and leadership.^[12] This was reflected in their adjectives of concern: morality, civic duty, citizenship, service, patriotism, character and conscience.^[13] Progressivism aimed not only at reordering society, but also at personal transformation. In its coercive intrusion into private identities, and in its attempts to remake individuals’ values, Progressivism shared with socialism a certain illiberalism.^[14]
This was nowhere more evident than in Progressive attempts at reforming the culture of the immigrant, or the “hyphenated” foreign-born. The years when this generation of elites was coming of age politically were the years of immigration: between 1880-1914 more than 23 million immigrants arrived, mostly Slavs, Catholics and Jews from Southern and Eastern Europe. They comprised nearly 80 percent of the United States’ urban populations and more than 15 percent of the total population, so their social impression was significant.^[15] These peasant immigrants of the “new wave” were residentially concentrated in urban ethnic enclaves, economically concentrated in low and unskilled industrial work, and had comparatively high levels of illiteracy. Frightened by the perceived conflation of class and “ethnicity,” especially in the cities of the Northeast, the famous Congressional Dillingham Commission produced a forty-two volume report in 1911 on the “new immigrants” from Southern and Eastern Europe (Catholics, Slavs, and Jews). It concluded they were largely unskilled laborers, culturally and intellectually inferior, and self-segregated into urban ethnic enclaves that were resistant to assimilation.^[16] Contemporary discussions of “melting pots” were actually more populist hope than reality.^[17]
These worries not only gave rise to the Chicago School’s sociological theorizing about the modalities of assimilation, but they also gave rise to the Progressive’s “Americanization Movement,” an official and non-official drive to remake the unassimilated immigrant into an American.^[18] Both these responses influenced the assumptions underpinning the Inquiry’s ethnographic research. By 1918, most educated society viewed new immigrant “ethnics not of color” in terms of their cultural and “racial” traits, occasionally fueled by the popularity of eugenicist thought. The social problems associated with urbanization, and the concomitant loss of America’s rural values, were seen as virtually identical to the problems of the overcrowded ethnic enclaves characterized by familial loyalties, community insularity, and the proliferation of ethnic newspapers, associations, and schools.^[19]
Most of the theorizing concerned the modalities of value inculcation and cultural assimilation. Upper middle class Progressive elites, particularly of the urban northeast, were themselves products of successful social and political mobility, and so could only with difficulty separate class assimilation from value or cultural assimilation. They directed their efforts at diffusing the cultural diversity “below” them by remaking the “foreign-born” into their own class image.^[20] They sought to transform the “hyphenated” by Anglo-Saxonizing their values, so that they might look more familiarly “middle class.” Analyses regularly conflated class and ethnicity by imputing economic liabilities to cultural values and traditions.^[21]
At the back of these analyses lay the assumption that by embracing liberal democratic principles people could be remade or culturally transformed.^[22] The baseline definition of “Americanness” was generally understood – not least by Wilson himself – to be that which was created at the time of the United States’ own nation-building, between 1776 and 1787.^[23] This was, in effect, a static and narrow, ethnicized construction of American nationality. The assimilation of new immigrants into this construction would require the sustained intervention of both state and civil society.^[24] Intellectuals, academics, and reformers used government and social science as instruments of assimilation in manuals such as “What Can You Do For Americanization?” (1918), directed at industrial leaders’ in attempts to Americanize the urban labor force on the factory floor, in the many books of advice to new immigrants about techniques of assimilation, and more diffusely in scholarly studies of assimilation.^[25] Schools, factory floors, churches, and community centers became venues for Americanization, targeting the moral and social menace of the United States’ new urban society with its “civic morality”. (In fact Wilson later joined those who blamed the “hyphenateds” lack of patriotism and non-assimilation for the Senate’s failure to ratify the treaty.^[26]) Though the Progressives’ wider political project sought an active participatory democracy and a more engaged citizenry,^[27] both in aim and method, Americanization policies coercively and illiberally sought immigrants’ cultural assimilation.^[28]
The sociologists and political scientists of the Inquiry, and Wilson himself, had contributed academic work underpinning many of these social policies.^[29] The work of the Chicago sociologists Park, Thomas and Znaniecki not only contributed to these social debates, but their studies were either commissioned by the Inquiry,^[30] or were drawn upon by other Inquiry academics to assess modalities of assimilation and ethnic and cultural adaptation. Their studies contributed analyses comparing the conditions under which assimilation was fostered or resisted by Poles living under Russian or Prussian rule, and the conditions under which Polish immigrants (among others) adapted or modified their ethnic practices in the United States.
While Park’s work assumed that assimilation, along the lines of the Americanizers, would be an inevitable outcome, Thomas and Znaniecki were more pluralist, with an implied theory of nationalism: they maintained that Poles had been loyal to the Prussian state when it treated them “without discrimination,” but that the Prussian state “raised the devil [of Polish nationalism]” with their Germanization policies.^[31] Thomas was a Progressive and believed that political solutions were indeed to be found to the problem of cultural assimilation. However, he located the solutions in a non-assimilative liberalism, both for the United States’ immigrant problem and in his recommendations to the Inquiry for East Central Europe.^[32]
On the whole, the Inquiry and the delegates at Versailles did not follow Thomas’ and Znaniecki’s recommendations. The geopolitical need for immediate workable boundaries lent itself to statist and cultural assimilationist views of nation building for the new states, and so to the modalities of assimilation rather than to a pluralism which might retain the smell of the old imperial states. In fact assimilation, not nationalism, was the clearest empirical and analytical bias in the Inquiry’s construction of “ethnicity” and interpretation of ethnographic data.
However they also held the Progressive beliefs, derived from analyses of the immigrant experience in the United States, that (a) economic or commercial ability and cultural and racial values were entwined and (b) that the embrace of (an aggressive) liberalism could remake or transform these values. These assumptions wove through the Inquiry’s ethnographic analysis of East Central Europe’s ethnocultural diversity. This conflation of class and culture amounted to judgments about relative “ethnic capacities.” So for certain cultural groups (Ruthenians, Ukrainians, Jews) assimilation was possible, while others (Poles, Czechs) had sufficient “ethnic capacity” that they could be entrusted with self-government. In their use of racial categorizations, and occasionally eugenicist characterizations,^[33] the assumptions underpinning the construction of social hierarchies among the United States’ immigrant populations mirrored those adopted at Versailles.

MAPPING EAST CENTRAL EUROPE: INFLUENCES AND INTERPRETATIONS

The delegates from the United States, with the Inquiry’s research in hand, developed hierarchical understandings of East Central Europe’s nationalities by constructing “ethnic capacity” measures. They then assessed these against Mitteleuropa’s two great geopolitical imperatives: balancing future German expansion and containing the existing Bolshevik-communist threat. Influential in the interpretation of their data were immigrant groups in the United States and East European nationalists. The Inquiry was particularly reliant on immigrants, émigrés, and nationalists for accounts of the ethnographic facts “on the ground” and for their linguistic abilities. Their influences were not unbiased: when Wilson called together his academic experts on the George Washington as they sailed to Paris, he famously asked to be briefed on their final recommendations. When told that there were more than three million Germans in Bohemia, his response was one of shock – “but Masaryk never told me that!”^[34]

IMMIGRANTS, ÉMIGRÉS, AND EAST CENTRAL EUROPEAN NATIONALISTS

Wilson, House, and the Inquiry often solicited the advice and recommendations of immigrants and nationalist exiles.^[35] The organized influence of East European immigrants began during the war and continued through the Inquiry’s work and during the conference. Czech immigrants formed a Bohemian National Alliance in Cleveland through which Masaryk successfully lobbied Wilson, House, and the Inquiry, and from which the “Cleveland Pact” emerged, a joint Czech-Slovak call for an independent Czech-Slovak state; a Yugoslav National Council was set up in Washington; the Polish pianist-turned-politician Ignacy Paderewski struck up a friendship with House, and through him gained Wilson’s adherence to an independent Poland, driving the effort to find “scientific justification” for a Polish corridor; the American Jews, Brandeis and Morgenthau, were successful emissaries to Wilson, House, and the Inquiry’s Miller in calls for minority protection treaties and an independent Jewish homeland; a Montenegrin Committee for National Unification was set up; and the Carpatho-Ruthenians, a nationality not well known in the United States, met in Homestead, Pennsylvania, created the American National Council of Uhro-Rusins, and eventually their leader, Zatkovich, organized a plebiscite among Ruthenians in the United States around the idea of joining a Czechoslovak state headed by Masaryk – without ever consulting Ruthenians in Europe. The American-Ruthenian efforts were only the most obvious case of “the tail wagging the dog.”^[36]
These influences on the Americans were significant not because of domestic electoral politics, but because they helped shape the Inquiry’s ethnographic “fact finding” as well as their interpretations and analysis of the data. Once Wilson and the Inquiry were resigned to the inevitable break-up of the Habsburg Empire,^[37] East Central European émigrés and elites had room for maneuver, and through letters, personal meetings, and commissioned studies they managed to find receptive audiences both in Washington and in New York with the Inquiry.
In 1916 the Czechoslovak National Council was headquartered in Paris but had a branch in the United States. Beneš was secretary and Masaryk chairman. They provided the Inquiry’s Robert Kerner with the Council’s nationalist émigré publication, Bohemian Review, and with a copy of Capek’s Slovaks in Hungary.^[38] In fact Masaryk’s famous journey at the age of 68 from Moscow to the US via Vladivostock and Vancouver to Chicago symbolized the two main groups in the United States behind a new state: political exiles from Austria-Hungary and Czech immigrants in the Bohemian National Alliance.^[39]
The Americans saw Czech leaders as modest and reasonable. The Czech poet Jean Grméla contributed a lengthy letter to Wilson and the Inquiry, in which he outlined Czech claims to independence, evoking Wilsonian language on the need to liberate peoples oppressed by autocracy and imperialism.^[40] Lacking a German specialist, the American Inquiry turned to Masaryk for an analysis of pan-Germanism and pan-German literature, which he provided in some detail with a discussion of the nationalist school in German philosophy.^[41] Masaryk was also a key figure in the creation – appropriately in Independence Hall, Philadelphia – of a new liberal and pluralist “Mid-European Union,” which included also “Uhro-Rusians,” Albanians, and Zionists. Masaryk’s liberal declaration in Philadelphia stated that this Union of nationalities would abandon “the old militaristic attitude and ways,” “denounce all attempts and practices of forcible denationalization,” espouse liberty and equal rights for all minorities, repudiate pan-Germanism, the use of “unreliable official statistics” and census figures for nationalities, and promised that schools of the liberated nations would inculcate patriotism and fight autocracy.^[42] In 1918 Masaryk presented the Declaration of Czechoslovak Independence. Although Wilson was slow to respond, the impression created was the moving story of two liberal professors seeking democracy and self-determination and defeating the autocratic forces of the corrupt Austro-Hungarian Empire.^[43]
Beneš also contributed a number of proposals and recommendations to the Inquiry and to British and American policy elites, noting the need for a strong frontier on the Danube and the Bohemian Germans’ vital economic interests in staying with the new Czechoslovak state.^[44] In his capacity as Professor of Sociology in Prague he contributed analyses of the Czech peoples’ ethnic capacity (our term): they are “highly intelligent, exceptionally well-organized, inspired by an intense national spirit… and economically independent, possessing great natural wealth. [The Czechs] were not a weak and inexperienced people with whom self-government would be an experiment, but were ready from tomorrow to lead an independent life”; he argued that the Slovaks now wanted union with Bohemia, recognizing their mutual dependence, and because “some of the greatest of the Bohemian leaders were Slovak.”^[45] Beneš maintained that the economic position of a new Czechoslovak state surrounded by “unfriendly Teuton and Magyar territory” would be especially strong in that it was rich in mines, raw materials, agriculture, banking, and its commercial relations with Hungary and Poland would be strong.^[46]
As to the Germans of Bohemia, Beneš admitted difficulty: if the new League offered substantial protection, then a boundary on purely ethnographic grounds would be acceptable, otherwise a “natural defenses” boundary would have to be established and one million Germans would have to be removed from Czechoslovak territory, with 1.4 million Germans remaining.^[47] Beneš reassured that there should be no worries about Czech treatment of its Germans:

“[T]he Czechs [are] good practical politicians, and fully realize that such a policy [of maltreatment] would be perilous in the extreme, as it would alienate the sympathy of those otherwise inclined to protect them, and at the same time offer the Germans a pretext for overrunning their country to liberate the “oppressed” Germans. The Czechs fully [understand] that their own advantage would demand the most enlightened and tolerant treatment of any Germans left within their borders…. An autocracy could practice tyranny without violating its ideals, whereas such a practice would violate the fundamental principles of the enlightened democratic state which the Czecho-Slovaks proposed to establish.”^[48]

Beneš’ liberal analysis of the minority question, and his vigorous articulation of the Czechs’ “ethnic capacity” was convincing to the Inquiry specialists Seymour and Kerner, and it was exactly what Wilson wished to hear.
On the Balkans, too, memoranda and conversations between Serbian Ministers, representatives of the South Slav Council in Washington, and the Inquiry petitioned regarding the importance of the Banat to Serbia (on the grounds that Rumanians there wished to join Serbia and not Rumania), of the Macedonian question, and of the Declaration of Corfu’s unanimity among Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.^[49] The Macedonian Bulgarian National Association of immigrants in the United States organized, too, resulting in the “Appeal to the World for a Just Solution of the Macedonian Question,” which offered their own construction of “ethnic Macedonians” in appeals in Wilson’s language.^[50]
The pianist Ignacy Paderewski became the most visible spokesman for Polish-Americans. Even more than Masaryk, he cultivated a close and intimate friendship with House, and in turn House kept Wilson’s mind firmly focused on the importance of the Polish cause, both for geo-strategic reasons and in line with his principle of national self-determination. In fact Poland was the only country singled out as deserving self-determination as early as the Fourteen Points speech.^[51] By the time of the Peace Conference, the Inquiry had overcome initial uncertainties about the Polish nationalists’ territorial claims and strongly supported them.^[52] The influence of Robert Lord, the Inquiry’s Polish specialist, and two Polish collaborators, Professors Zowski and Arctowski, on Poland’s postwar boundary was enormous.^[53] In fact, Zowski and Arctowski discreetly supplied Paderewski and Dmowski with information on the Inquiry’s research: they alerted the Polish National Council in Chicago that nothing had been researched on the Polish corridor and Danzig, this in turn led Paderewski to nudge House, and a report was forthcoming.^[54]
Jewish-Americans, led by highly assimilated American Jews of German descent, were the most unwavering supporters of the Versailles settlement, especially in its treaty provisions for minority rights. The Zionist Organization of America was a large, mass movement which included Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter and others with institutional and personal access to the White House, and therefore to the Inquiry. American Jewish influence, apart from the question of Palestine, was most notable in Versailles’ minority treaties.^[55] The provisions on minority protections were included at American insistence largely as a result of Jewish-American domestic petitioning at the highest levels.^[56] The Americans were persuaded by arguments that continued oppression of Polish Jews would cause them to become “states within states,” and in the end serve Bolshevik interests; and they had right before them – if it was needed – an evidence of successful German-Jewish assimilation.
Cognizant of the impossibility of drawing boundaries without creating minority and irredentist problems, the Americans set up the “Committee on New States” which met in Paris for six months to work out how minorities should be protected. They considered different versions of autonomy as well as universalist forms of protection, specific treaties for each state (Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Rumania, Greece) and what manner of recourse they would have to the League of Nations. The committee deliberations were British in format but almost entirely American in content.^[57] After a joint British-American Investigating Mission to Poland in 1919 to assess the situation of Polish Jews – the most significant minority question before the Committee – a report was co-submitted by the (anti-Zionist) American Jew Henry Morgenthau. Although the report in its totality resulted in “complete vindication of the Polish government,” Morgenthau’s recommendations were two-fold: a treaty guarantee to be signed by Polish authorities testifying to their “fidelity to the principles of liberty and justice and the [civil] rights of minorities,” together with the transfer of significant economic aid to rebalance the underlying socio-economic causes of Polish anti-Semitism and pogromism.^[58] Substantial economic aid was not part of the post-World War I package,^[59] but American insistence on minority treaties with provisions for the liberal accommodation of minorities was.
The final minority protection treaties were, at their core, Wilsonian and American, with the first eight articles echoing the language of the United States Constitution in its protection of civil and religious liberties without distinction to birth, language, or race, and the free exercise of religion.^[60] But they stopped short of allowing aggrieved minorities from petitioning the League directly: Wilson did not want to interfere in Poland’s self-determination, and Lloyd George did not want to create an open door to continuous grievance.^[61] And yet despite its lack of effective sanction, the minority rights treaties were an American idea, derived from the work of the Inquiry on historical (territorial) grievances and assimilation potentials.^[62] The Inquiry’s research suggested the need for “civil rights” in a remapped East Central Europe,^[63] and the final treaties attempted an American-constitutionalist accommodation for those minorities in the new states that could not be culturally assimilated.

“MAPS WERE EVERYWHERE”^[64]

The Inquiry produced or collected more than 2,500 pieces of documentation and over 1,200 maps – nearly all the material from non-classified sources. The documentation consisted of specialist area reports, maps, summaries of population distributions, demographic and fertility studies, ethnographic, religious and linguistics statistics, and studies of natural resources and economic infrastructures. The reports on the various nationality claims were historical assessments, often reaching back more than several centuries, discussions on economic resources, roads, and sea-routes, and analyses of nationalist elites’ territorial disputes. Most of it arrived in abbreviated form in Paris, and formed the raw material from which the specific territorial commissions worked. The interpretation of this material reflected American political and cultural sensibilities.
It is usually held that the dilemma in Paris was national self-determination versus economic unity, or versus realpolitik, or European power politics, and that the settlements were premised at one moment on the nationality principle, at others on historical grounds, but always in anti-German terms.^[65] And yet the postwar boundaries, on the whole, did have a certain ethnographic coherence, largely predicated on a composite American notion of “ethnic capacity” set against Allied geo-strategic considerations. There emerged, in other words, a new construction of ethnicity for the East Central European context animated by American assumptions of liberal assimilation to check both German power and Bolshevik expansion.
Specifically, two distinct layers of interpretation of the ethnographic materials formed the basis of East Central Europe’s postwar boundaries. The first layer of interpretation was embedded in the raw material itself: the biases inherent in Russian, Austrian, Prussian, and Turkish official census statistics and ethnographic data.^[66] The second was the political and sociological judgments that the Americans in the Territorial Commissions in Paris brought to bear on this vast data, including the biases of the émigrés working inside the Inquiry.^[67] Maps constructed from these statistics carried the biases, and the anti-Semitism, inherent in German geography and cartography, as well as the thinking of the lead American geographer, the German-trained Isaiah Bowman, who had enormous power and influence.^[68]
They were aware of the inherent problems of the census data and of the maps that drew on it.^[69] The 1910 United States census had categorized its immigrants in terms of constructed “races” (e.g., Northern Italians, Southern Italians) and by the administrative units from which they came in Europe (Moravians and Bohemians – not “Czechs”).^[70] In fact, the United States had never used language as a criterion for ethnicity or race in their domestic statistical counting. The Inquiry moved away from this practice since they were using Prussian, Austrian, and Russian census data and maps, all of which used some form of linguistic criteria as ethnographic or “nationality” indicators.^[71] They also discarded the formal use of “race” (although they used it regularly in their reports) on the grounds that it was inapplicable in Europe (unlike its applicability in Asia and in the African colonies), and because it would lend credence to German racialist writings.^[72] Moreover, languages could be learned and unlearned by new generations “especially when resources of universal education are wielded by the compulsive power of the modern state”; so not only was language not, in the end, a test of political affiliation, but governments could also “make [their] own language statistics…. It is easy for the census-taker to impose on the weak or ignorant, [or] to interpret all doubtful cases in one direction.”^[73] For boundary purposes this implied that nationality or ethnicity could be elastic and malleable.
The Inquiry’s Polish specialist, Lord, noted the problems with finding “an ethnographic Poland” on the basis of Prussian official census language statistics given its Germanization policies, and the general lack of ethnographic data on the border populations.^[74] In compensation for what the Inquiry perceived to be an inherent bias in the census data, they compared it with language statistics from the Prussian school census (equally official but less politically distorted, they thought) in order to come to some “scientific” assessment of the ethnic makeup of the German-Polish borderlands.^[75] Arctowski, the Polish nationalist professor noted in his report on Poland’s population statistics that the Polish figures in the Russian census “must be considered as not very trustworthy,” evidenced by comparing them to the German census figures.^[76] Similarly, a study by a Hungarian specialist, Handman, noted the potential for undercounting Rumanians in the (Austro-) Hungarian census due to the coercive policies of Magyarization, something further evidenced by the discrepancies between Rumanians “mother tongue” and “religious” statistics.^[77]
Moreover, the hundreds of Inquiry maps used in Paris – those from the Central Powers and Russia and those constructed by the American Geographical Society – were likewise treated with skepticism.^[78] Kerner and Seymour, the Inquiry’s Habsburg specialists, criticized British government “Racial Contour” maps of Austria-Hungary on the grounds that they harshly undercounted Germans and Slovenes and showed political bias in translating Austrian census data; they were also accused of favoring the Italians over the Yugoslavs due to the impressions created by their choice of map colors.^[79] Beneš criticized the ethnographic maps of the Balkans and Austria-Hungary produced for the Inquiry’s Territorial Commission by Jovan Cvijic, a Serbian professor of Geography in Belgrade, because they were not based on appropriate baseline figures.^[80] Although Cvijic’s credentials were impeccably “conscientious and scientific,”^[81] there was some contention about the fact that Cvijic thought the Hungarian census-based maps were essentially correct if supplemented by the Patriarchal census of the Banat^[82] – all of which were contested by Seton-Watson, among others.^[83]
As a rule, ethnographic ambiguities in delineating new boundaries were resolved in favor of Polish and Czechoslovak interests and against German interests. For instance, Inquiry-derived recommendations gave key Ukrainian-Ruthenian territories to Poland (in territories where Ukrainians outnumbered Poles 2-to-1 ultimate status would be subject to a later plebiscite) because Poland had “a high culture and lived by industry and commerce.” Ukrainians were “ignorant and inarticulate masses of peasants” with a “small class of intellectuals” who were “accustomed to [looking to] Berlin and Vienna for aid and direction” since they had never had to properly run a government; the only practical solution was to “entrust Poles with the occupation and administration of the country, subject to certain guarantees.”^[84]
With regard to Bohemia’s German minority, it was argued that a strictly ethnographic frontier on the principle of national self-determination would have “given an almost impossible and fatal configuration to Czecho-Slovakia,” since it “presents a somewhat fantastic appearance on the map. It looks like a tadpole.”^[85] More than three million Germans were included in the new Czechoslovak state in part because their economic interests would bind them to the new state more than shared language would to Germany: Bohemia’s Germans “have never, since their immigration, belonged to Germany. And it may perhaps be doubted whether the presence of this German fringe is a sufficient reason for dismembering so ancient a state or a country so clearly marked out by nature to be a unit.”^[86]
In another set of logically and empirically unrelated justifications, the Inquiry (and the final Versailles treaty) argued that according to “every honest linguistic map of the region” the Corridor had to go to Poland: unimpeded sea access would make Poland economically viable, and although Danzig was 90 percent ethnically German, geographically and economically it had been a Polish protectorate between 1400-1700, and that in the end, ethnolinguistic distributions mattered less than “balancing the respective interests at stake”: Lord wrote in 1920, “who would argue that the right of a million and a half Germans in East Prussia to have a land connection with Germany… outweighs the right of over twenty million Poles in the hinterland to secure access to the Baltic”?^[87] Just a few years later, of course, pan-German nationalists would.
In fact, Shotwell and Bowman, two of the most influential Americans at Versailles, saw the dangers of a literal application of the Fourteen Points principles.^[88] In the drawing of the boundary between Hungary and Yugoslavia, Bowman headed the American delegation in the Commission for Rumanian and Yugoslav Affairs. His argument against using the Drava River as the frontier is worth quoting at length:

“[G]rave risks [are] involved in constituting a variable river as a boundary line. It is thus that the frontier between Mexico and Texas follows the Rio Grande, a river with numerous bends; one of these bends closing up into a circle has created an American enclosure within Mexican territory which is a meeting place for all the bandits in the region. The US and Mexico were obliged to make a convention to put an end to this intolerable situation. If one would avoid the inconvenience of the administrative frontier… the administrative frontier is that of the former riverbed of the Drava. In changing this to coincide with the present riverbed we will only be substituting present riverbeds for the former ones and at the next shifting of its course we will have one more artificial frontier. Briefly, we have a choice between a natural movable frontier and a fixed frontier. A consideration of economic nature has been added to those of geographic order which led the American Delegation to… the application of a new principle: the maintenance of an administrative frontier… so that economic inconveniences are equal for both Serbo-Croatian and Hungarians. This would compel the two states to come to an understanding [as did the United States and Mexico].”^[89]

Bowman’s argument prevailed: the boundary drawn between Hungary and Croatia followed the old Habsburg administrative units, to “avoid the calamity” of the Rio Grande.^[90]
On the whole, both the Inquiry and the American delegates at the Conference were actually quite conservative in their approach to boundary delineations and conventional in the criteria they actually used. Their recommendations were far less radical than Wilson’s principle of national self-determination warranted, had it been strictly applied.^[91] The final boundaries drawn around Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia were as much influenced by trying to fortify a new Mitteleuropa to check the German and Bolshevik threats as they were by the principles of national self-determination.^[92] Geopolitical worries were generally buttressed by ethnographic arguments, not the other way around.

MITTELEUROPA AS MIDDLE AMERICA?

One of the most consequential results of the Versailles conferences was the several thousand miles of new boundaries drawn in the mapping of East Central Europe. This is where American influences were greatest. Our suggestion is that in important ways, East Central Europe was shaped by distinctly American interpretations of Central European data on ethnicity and assimilation and by the influence of émigrés on American political elites. The Inquiry’s recommendations were sometimes disregarded or modified by Conference negotiations, but they constituted the collective judgments of the American commission in Paris. Their research and interpretations decisively influenced the workings of the commissions and the writing of the peace treaties, not least in their role as territorial advisors and academic experts. While the British delegates were primarily concerned with wider colonial balances of power, and the French (particularly Clemenceau) with debilitating German power, only the Americans had worked out very specific – indeed often minute – proposals and rationales for each of the many contested ethnonational borders and boundary disputes.^[93]
American elites understood German nationalism as undemocratically anchored in a particular social class – in parallel with their own domestic analysis of big capitalists and industrialists; the answer (in both cases) was the same: go to the people and let them determine their own fate, on the problematic assumption that by liberating them from the corrupt and autocratic influences of the old elites, they would be more liberal, less nationalistic, more progressive, and more democratic.
Here Progressive America’s domestic and international policies are usually seen as linked, though the precise causal relationship is debated.^[94] The absence of realism in Wilson’s moral, idealist internationalism is often noted;^[95] and scholars have tied the roots of both its moral universalism and its pragmatism to an historic sense of American exceptionalism.^[96] It is true that some of the Inquiry’s key members, including Lippmann, Isaiah Bowman, and James Shotwell were liberal internationalists, and the ideas of other liberal internationalist publicists were solicited by the Inquiry.^[97] They often explicitly related the United States’ peaceful ethnic diversity to a belief that it could be universalized through the extension of American liberal principles abroad.^[98] If instilling liberalism through Americanization policies could remake the foreign-born at home, then the application of its principles could also do so abroad.
But inside the core of this liberal internationalism – or what has come to be generically known as Wilsonianism – sat the same coercive illiberalism evident in their domestic social reforms: the belief that personal, private (cultural) identities could, and should, be reformed by the inculcation of liberal principles – even if it was done coercively by both the state and civil society. In fact, the Progressive assumption that liberalism would transform cultural differences and mute historical animosities lay behind much of the Inquiry’s ethnographic research, boundary recommendations, and their push for the minority treaties.
It was most evident in their construction of the “ethnic capacities” of East Central Europe’s nationalities and in their assessments of nation-building’s liberal assimilationist potential. In part because they misunderstood the social foundations of their own democratic liberalism, or the social sources of their own historical exceptionalism (though this was there to be seen since the United States Civil War and Reconstruction were in recent memory), they did not see – although it was also there to be seen – the potential for the ethnicization of the new nation-building projects. They were virtually blind to the potential viciousness of the “populist” nationalisms they endorsed and sought to promote and protect. This too was surprising, not only given the extensive and consistent contact that Inquiry academics had through their preparations and during the conference itself, with Polish, Czech, Hungarian and Serbian nationalists, but also given the care and meticulousness of the Inquiry’s historical analyses, which can be read like chronicles of autocratic cultural oppression and ethnic survival.^[99] In short, the Inquiry and the American delegates were convinced of East European nationalist leaders’ liberal credentials.^[100]
More importantly, a study of the Inquiry’s research and the United States’ influences at Versailles is suggestive of their acts of omission as well. The two most significant minorities created or endorsed by Versailles were, arguably, the “beached” Germans and the Jews. In the more than 2,500 reports and studies, hundreds of maps, correspondence, field missions, and other fact finding American ethnographic efforts on which deliberations were based, only a small handful considered these two minorities.^[101] The American assumption of eventual Jewish assimilation, together with a persistent anti-German geopolitical bias – a bias reinforced by the French and British delegations – controlled not only the collection of data, but also the analysis and policy recommendations drawn from it.
They were not indifferent to this in their retrospective accounts, published in the 1920s and beyond. Key Inquiry figures defended the boundary decisions made at Versailles, particularly in response to Keynes’ attacks, either through a recognition that no perfect boundary would have been possible given the complex ethnic stratifications of East Central Europe,^[102] or because the greater salience of the rise of economic autarchy,^[103] or because of the working assumption of the Americans at Versailles that geo-strategic concerns were considered less important since the new order was to be a liberal League of Nations world and not a return to the old balance of power, militarist world of European alliances.^[104]
However, by then the core of what constituted “Americanness” was changing. Americanizers’ and Progressives’ ethnicized conception before WWI feared immigrants’ failure to assimilate, but by mid-century, pluralists like Thomas were proven right: assimilation did take place, albeit with certain ethnic identity retention, giving way to a more universalistic construction of Americanness. By contrast, the rise of interwar nationalizing states in Central Europe, Nazism, and the inability of the League to protect minorities, all evidenced the failure of Versailles’ liberal engineering of historic animosities and the remaking of cultural identities. The American delegates’ analyses, drawn from the Progressives’ analyses of the United States’ immigrant experience, held that cultural or values assimilation and transformation would lead to economic prosperity and political stability. By the post-World War II settlements under Roosevelt and Truman, American analysis, reflecting the intervening changes in both American society and in East Central Europe,^[105] reversed the sociological relationship: economic prosperity and political stability would, without state intrusion into private identities, lead to liberal cultural assimilation.