On this day in Paris, France, some of the most powerful people in the world meet to begin the long, complicated negotiations that would officially mark the end of the First World War.
Leaders of the victorious Allied powers–France, Great Britain, the United States and Italy–would make most of the crucial decisions in Paris over the next six months. For most of the conference, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson struggled to support his idea of a “peace without victory” and make sure that Germany, the leader of the Central Powers and the major loser of the war, was not treated too harshly. On the other hand, Prime Ministers Georges Clemenceau of France and David Lloyd George of Britain argued that punishing Germany adequately and ensuring its weakness was the only way to justify the immense costs of the war. In the end, Wilson compromised on the treatment of Germany in order to push through the creation of his pet project, an international peacekeeping organization called the League of Nations.
Representatives from Germany were excluded from the peace conference until May, when they arrived in Paris and were presented with a draft of the Versailles Treaty. Having put great faith in Wilson’s promises, the Germans were deeply frustrated and disillusioned by the treaty, which required them to forfeit a great deal of territory and pay reparations. Even worse, the infamous Article 231 forced Germany to accept sole blame for the war. This was a bitter pill many Germans could not swallow.
The Treaty of Versailles was signed on June 28, 1919, five years to the day after a Serbian nationalist’s bullet ended the life of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and sparked the beginning of World War I. In the decades to come, anger and resentment of the treaty and its authors festered in Germany. Extremists like Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist (Nazi) Party capitalized on these emotions to gain power, a process that led almost directly to the exact thing Wilson and the other negotiators in Paris in 1919 had wanted to prevent–a second, equally devastating global war.
Also On This Day,
2009- GM auctions off historic cars
The vehicles came from GM’s Heritage Center, an 81,000 square foot facility in Sterling, Michigan, that houses hundreds of cars and trucks from GM’s past, along with documents chronicling the company’s history and other artifacts and “automobilia.” Rumors spread that the financially troubled GM was selling off its entire fleet of historic vehicles, but that was not the case. As The New York Times reported shortly after the January auction: “Much has been made of the timing of the sale coinciding with G.M.’s current situation, but G.M. is simply doing the same thing that many large-scale collectors and museums regularly do in culling certain pieces from their collections. This was hardly a wholesale dumping of G.M.’s heritage.”
Nevertheless, at the time of the January 2009 auto auction, GM was facing enormous financial difficulties. In June of that same year, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. At the time, the automaker reported liabilities of $172.8 billion and assets of $82.3 billion, making it the fourth-biggest U.S. bankruptcy in history. Bankruptcy was a move once considered unthinkable for GM, which was founded in 1908 and became a giant of the U.S. economy in the 20th century. GM pursued a strategy of selling a vehicle “for every purse and purpose,” in the words of Alfred Sloan, who became president of the company in 1923 and resigned as chairman in 1956. By its peak in 1962, GM produced 51 percent of all the cars in the U.S. However, by the late 1960s, GM had begun a slow, decades-long decline that critics charged was due, in part, to the company’s failure to innovate quickly enough. In 2008, GM was surpassed by Japan-based Toyota as the world’s top-selling maker of cars and trucks, a title the American automaker had held since the early 1930s.
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