Robert Lansing Quotes
Will it not breed discontent, disorder and rebellion? The phrase is simply loaded with dynamite. It will raise hopes that can never be realized. It will, I fear, cost thousands of lives. What a calamity that the phrase was ever uttered. It will cost thousands of lives.
President Woodrow Wilson advocated the concept of self-determination for the newly freed countries of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires. His Secretary of State disagreed sharply.
Robert Lansing, 1864-1928, U. S. Secretary of State (Democrat), Statement during World War I
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The President was Woodrow Wilson and the Peace Conference was that at the end of WWI. While the right of self determination is broadly accepted in American society, it was not always so.
Reformers attempted to serve a New York Supreme Court writ on McKane to prohibit him from continuing corrupt election fraud practices.
Robert Lansing was an American lawyer and diplomat who served as Counselor to the State Department at the outbreak of World War I, and then as United States Secretary of State under President Woodrow Wilson from 1915 to 1920. A conservative pro-business Democrat, he was pro-British and a strong defender of American rights at international law. He was a leading enemy of German autocracy and Russian Bolshevism. Before U.S. involvement in the war, Lansing vigorously advocated in favor of the principles of freedom of the seas and the rights of neutral nations. He later advocated U.S. participation in World War I, negotiated the Lansing–Ishii Agreement with Japan in 1917 and was a member of the American Commission to Negotiate Peace at Paris in 1919. However Wilson made Colonel House his chief foreign policy advisor because Lansing privately opposed much of the Versailles treaty and was skeptical of the Wilsonian principle of self-determination.
