Chapter 9: Rebirth of a Nation

If a modern "electronic brain" were fed data about every statesman of the twentieth century and then asked to pick out the two men most completely opposite and uncongenial, it would without a moment's hesitation settle on Jozef Pilsudski and Ignace Jan Paderewski. Even before their meeting each man had a fairly good idea of what the other man was like. Now for the first time they could size each other up in person.

Pilsudski, eying Paderewski's elegant clothes and quietly assured manner, recalled that this man was the darling of a capitalistic society in whose image he would try to rebuild Poland. Paderewski, noting the Marshal's rough, purposely shabby uniform, drooping mustaches, and abrupt, nervous behavior, remembered that this bold revolutionary had spent most of his adult life in prison, or in hiding, or in working under cover, always in the shadows of conspiracy. He was the sort of man who would stop at nothing, including murder, to gain his objective because he firmly believed that if the end was good, then the means were unimportant. Yet there was one point of agreement between them, Paderewski reflected, and surely it was a strong enough basis for cooperation. Each man, in his own way, loved his country and would gladly have given his life for her.

By the end of the exhausting interview Paderewski had come to the conclusion that this was not enough. Pilsudski remained absolutely unshaken in his refusal to have anything to do with Dmowski's Committee. Poland, he believed, belonged to the proletariat--the working man--alone. He would not admit that any other class of people had any right to be represented in the new government. As to the question of Allied recognition, he simply brushed it aside. He could take care of Poland all by himself, he seemed to imply.

It was a frustrating two hours.

The next day Paderewski left for Cracow, convinced that his mission had failed. But at three o'clock on the morning after his arrival, he was roused from sleep by a special messenger from Pilsudski. The Marshal, he was informed, requested his immediate return to Warsaw for further negotiations.

What could have happened, Paderewski thought, to change Pilsudski's mind even to this small extent?

What had happened was this: on January 4, representatives of the American Relief Administration had arrived in Warsaw to study conditions and to discuss terms with Pilsudski. The starving people of Europe had good reason to be familiar with the heroic work of the A.R.A. which had already saved millions of lives during that cruel winter of armistice.

In charge of the mission to Warsaw was Vernon Kellogg, gifted both as a scientist and an administrator. Somehow he managed to get the point across to the iron-willed Marshal that if he expected American Relief supplies and money to feed and clothe the desperate Polish people, he would have to find a way of cooperating with Paderewski and the Paris Committee. Faced with so practical a necessity, Pilsudski capitulated and asked Paderewski to help him form a representative government. Paderewski himself was named Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs. Pilsudski remained "Chief of State." It was a rather all-inclusive title.

The Americans were as good as their word. Better, in fact, because once they had reported back to their chief in Paris about the ghastly conditions in Poland, miles and miles of red tape were instantly cut in order to rush in the first supplies. Within a few weeks a life-giving stream of food, clothing, fuel, and medical supplies were pouring steadily into the country. Even Pilsudski was impressed. The A.R.A did its best for all suffering countries. But there seemed to be something special--almost personal--about its feeling for Poland, even though there was not yet an officially recognized Polish government. The pianist was a nuisance, Pilsudski must have thought privately, but he had his uses if his popularity made the Americans so generous.

What Pilsudski did not know was that there was indeed a personal attitude involved in the work of the American Relief Administration for Poland. For at the head of the organization was a man with a long memory--a former Stanford University engineering student who had once taken a flyer in the business of staging concerts.

Paderewski had completely forgotten that he had once saved a young man named Herbert Hoover from great financial distress. But Herbert Hoover had never forgotten it. The $400 debt that had meant so much to the student and so little to the artist had now been paid a thousandfold.

As Prime Minister of Poland, Paderewski moved his household into the Zamek. Did he remember the many times that the young music student had passed the royal palace and prayed for the day when a Polish leader would once more be in residence there? Perhaps. But Paderewski was too busy to spend much time reminiscing. The work of forming first a National Council of a hundred men and then a coalition cabinet of sixteen was incredibly difficult. In the course of his former career he had grown accustomed to long, hard work, but it was nothing compared to this! Poles, as we have seen, were not the easiest people in the world with whom to do business politically. And complicating life almost beyond endurance was Pilsudski. The Chief enjoyed long, drawn-out, usually pointless conferences that accomplished nothing except the complete exhaustion of the Prime Minister. He enjoyed them most at two or three o'clock in the morning, preferably just after Paderewski had finally managed to retire for the night.

"There is a smell of sulphur in the air whenever that man walks into a room!" Paderewski said, and he looked forward with increasing eagerness to the day when he could leave Warsaw for Paris and the Conference. What a joy not to be in the same city as Jozef Pilsudski!

If the full story of Paderewski's accomplishments at the Paris Peace Conference were told in this book, there would scarcely be room in it for anything else. The work of the next three months was the climax and the crowning achievement of his second career.

When Paderewski finally reached Paris, the Conference was in its eleventh week. His unavoidable delay in Poland, he quickly realized, had been a costly one. Dmowski had done his best in presenting the Polish claims. His five hour speech to the delegates was acknowledged as a masterful and scholarly treatise. But here was Dmowski himself to tell Paderewski that the Polish questions were all but decided and decided in the negative! Somehow nothing was going according to plan. Hostility, open and hidden, dogged his best efforts. "There is nothing to be done about it," he announced flatly. "Everything is settled." The opposition of Lloyd George to every one of his points, for example, practically guaranteed failure. What nation would go against the British leader just because of a minor issue like Poland?

Poor Paderewski, weary from months of trying to establish order in Pilsudski's peculiar brand of chaos, now realized that he had a tremendous job of political "fence-mending" to do in Paris. For the problem was Dmowski himself. The small nations at the Conference--those whose main business was asking rather than dispensing favors--had to depend to an enormous degree on influence. And influence was largely a question of personality. In personality Dmowski was sheer disaster. Not only did his cold and academic manner do little to win him friends among the delegates, but his terrible anti-Semitism won him active enemies among Jewish and non-Jewish delegates alike. And of all the delegates who hated Dmowski, Lloyd George hated him the most. So irked, in fact, was the fierce little Welshman that Paderewski's arrival only succeeded in rousing him to greater heights of anti-Polish feeling. "After all," he said, "what can you expect from a country that sends as its representative a pianist!"

Paderewski decided to start repairing the damage at the very top. Immediately after his arrival he paid a call on the powerful President of the Conference, Georges Clemenceau--the "tiger of France."

The present "tiger" met the former "lion" with a ghost of a twinkle in his stern eyes. "Are you, by chance," he asked solemnly, "a cousin of the famous pianist Paderewski?"

Paderewski, with equal solemnity, bowed and said, "I am the very man, Mr. President."

Clemenceau sighed deeply. "And you, the famous artist, have become merely a Prime Minister! What a comedown!"

The two men laughed as they shook hands warmly. They were off to a good start.

It was not long before nearly every delegate to the Conference--even Lloyd George--came to the conclusion that the Polish question must definitely be reconsidered before any final decision was made. Paderewski quickly became one of the most admired and therefore influential men in Paris. He was useful, too, as it developed. President Wilson and Colonel House sought his help in explaining some American attitudes to the Europeans, while the European delegates could always count on him to interpret their feelings for the Americans. More than any other man in Paris, Paderewski belonged both to the old world and the new.

"He came to Paris," Colonel House later wrote, "in the minds of many as an incongruous figure, whose place was on the concert stage, and not as one to be reckoned with in the settlement of a torn and distracted world. He left Paris, in the minds of his colleagues, a statesman, an incomparable orator, a linguist, and one who had the history of Europe better in hand than any of his brilliant associates."

One of the delegates, a smooth, professional orator, summed it all up rather nicely after a particularly wonderful speech by Paderewski. "Ah," he sighed to a group of his colleagues, "if we could play as Paderewski speaks!"

The gains that Paderewski eventually won for his country were not all that he had hoped for, but they were far greater gains than any other man in the world could have made. They represented, as one statesman put it, "a triumph of personality." Matters of boundaries, perhaps, left something to be desired, but these were not the major issue. The establishment of Poland as a nation, free and independent among the nations of the world--this was the major issue, and this was finally brought about on June 28, 1919, when the Treaty of Versailles was at last presented to the delegates for their signatures.

"What M. Paderewski has done for Poland will cause eternal gratitude," wrote Secretary of State, Robert Lansing. "... His career is one that deserves to be remembered ... by every man to whom love of country and loyalty to a great cause stand forth as the noblest attributes of human character."

In the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, a roar of applause and approval greeted Paderewski as he stepped forward to sign the treaty for Poland. No other delegate except those of the "big four" nations received such an ovation. But Paderewski's ears were accustomed to the sound of applause, and it was probably the last thing in his mind as he signed. His whole life had been directed toward this moment. He had worked, he had prayed unceasingly for the new life of his country. Now it was an accomplished fact, acknowledged by the whole world, witnessed by a stroke of his own pen.

Paderewski's career as a statesman was drawing to an end. It lasted only six months longer, and the half year was a bitter anti-climax. When the Paderewskis returned to Warsaw they found the atmosphere unbearably hostile. Now that Pilsudski had "used" his rival to gain Allied support, he was determined to get him out of the way as quickly as possible.

Growing opposition of the meanest kind blocked Paderewski's attempts to build an honorable, democratic government for his country. Pilsudski had little interest in democracy and no interest at all in maintaining the peace. He yearned for the smell of powder again, and he planned to strike for further Polish gains by making war on Russia. But first he must eliminate the peace-loving Prime Minister.

Political intrigue is a merciless game. Paderewski found himself attacked through the two things he loved most in the world: his faith and his wife. Anti-clerical feeling ran high among the socialists of the country. They used Paderewski's staunch and well-known devotion to the Church to "prove" that he was a "tool" of the clergy and was therefore, somehow, dedicated to the enslavement of the working man. It was a fantastic charge from start to finish, but people believe what they want to believe, and disgruntled elements in the Sejm--the Polish assembly--eagerly spread the story.

Even more cruel were the charges leveled against Mme. Paderewska, she who had worked herself almost to the breaking point not only to ease her husband's arduous life, but to further the cause of Polish relief. She was accused of undue interference in matters of state, of being a bad influence on the Prime Minister, of any vindictive thing that could be thought of to discredit her husband.

A man of Paderewski's moral courage can weather almost any attack made against him, but the abuse of his wife cut him to the heart. For weeks he wrestled with his conscience. He was thinking, as usual, first of Poland; last, of himself. If he stepped aside now, would it not end the terrible dissensions that rocked the newborn country? But if he did so, would he not be deserting his country when she needed him, deserting her, perhaps, out of a selfish, if natural, longing for personal peace?

At last, on December 5, 1919, Paderewski announced his resignation from office. A few days earlier, at a wildly agitated meeting of the Sejm, his government had received a vote of confidence, but the vote had been carried by a very slim majority. Too slim a majority, Paderewski felt, to represent a true mandate of the people, particularly since one of the parties that voted against him in the Sejm actually had more followers, numerically, than any of the parties who voted in his favor. If he stayed on, nothing could follow but further discord. If he left now, then surely the country would somehow make her way to internal peace and unity.

Paderewski generously agreed to the panic-stricken request of the Sejm that he try to form a new cabinet. Then he quietly left Warsaw, and after five years of voluntary exile returned to his beloved home on the shining Swiss lake.