1 Nicholas Roosevelt, A Front Row Seat (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1953), 118.
2 National Archives/Public Record Office, FO 371, 18351, R 2190/37/3, cited in: Siegfried Beer, Der “unmoralische” Anschluß: Britische Österreichpolitik zwischen Containment und Appeasement 1931-1934, Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für Neuere Geschichte Österreichs 75 (Vienna: Böhlau, 1988), 464.
3 Surprisingly, there has been very little research on US-policy towards the New Austria before, during and immediately after the Paris Peace Conference, except for several dated and documentarily mostly weak doctoral dissertations: see Simone Meisels, “Die Beziehungen zwischen Österreich-Ungarn und den Vereinigten Staaten 1917 bis November 1918,” PhD. diss., University of Vienna, 1961; Astrid Hausmann,“Amerikanische Außenpolitik und die Entstehung der österreichischen Republik von 1917-1919,” PhD. diss., University of Vienna, 1973; Ursula Freise, “Die Tätigkeit der alliierten Kommissionen in Wien nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg,” PhD. diss., University of Vienna, 1963; and more reliable: Georg E. Schmid, “Die amerikanische Österreichpolitik zur Zeit der Pariser Friedenskonferenz 1919: Die Coolidge Mission,” PhD. diss., University of Salzburg, 1968; Peter E. Schmidt, “The Relief of Austria, 1918-1922,” PhD. diss., Case Western Reserve University, 1977; and Wolfgang Pucher, “Die Beziehungen Österreichs zu den Vereinigten Staaten 1918-1932,” PhD. diss., University of Vienna, 1981.
4 Early analyzed by Otto Bauer, The Austrian Revolution (London: L. Parsons, 1925); Carlile A. Macartney, The Social Revolution in Austria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926); Kurt Trampler, Deutschösterreich, 1918-1919 (Berlin: C. Heymann, 1935); David F. Strong, Austria: October 1918 – March 1919 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939); Mary MacDonald, The Republic of Austria 1919-1934: A Study in the Failure of Democratic Government (London: Oxford University Press, 1946); and Charles Gulick, Austria from Habsburg to Hitler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1948).
5 James Headlam-Morley, “Note on the Austrian Treaty,” undated, in British Policy on Hungary 1918-1919: A Documentary Sourcebook, ed. M. Lojkó (London: School of Slavonic and East European Studies, 1995), 365.
6 James Headlam-Morley, A Memoir of the Paris Peace Conference 1919, ed. A. Headlam-Morley et al. (London: Methuen&Co., 1972), 161.
7 See Pucher, “Die Beziehungen Österreichs zu den Vereinigten Staaten,” 54-55.
8 A central telegraph office of the Hoover operation was eventually set up in Vienna, of which the food administrator later boasted: “Within a short time we had spread our organization over thirty-two countries and had included tens of thousands of nationals in our service. We had the only connected telegraph system over all Europe.” Herbert Hoover, The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1958), 90.
9 See Georg E. Schmid, “Die Coolidge-Mission in Österreich 1919: Zur Österreichpolitik der USA während der Pariser Friedenskonferenz,” MOESTA 24 (1971): 433-67.
10 Stephen Bonsal, Unfinished Business (Garden City: Doubleday, 1944), 90; for another version of the Santa Claus reference see Roosevelt, A Front Row Seat, 117.
11 Halstead was a journalist and newspaper editor by profession, had worked on the staff of Governor, soon to be President William McKinley in the mid-1890s and acted as U.S. consul in Birmingham from 1906 to 1915. After his second Vienna assignment he held consular jobs at Montreal (1920-1927) and London (1929-1932).
12 From summer 1919 onwards there was a special American mission to Hungary, headed by General Bandholtz. See Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), The Paris Peace Conference (PPC), Volume XII (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1947), 635ff. and Harry H. Bandholtz, An Undiplomatic Diary: By the member of the Inter-Allied Military Mission to Hungary, 1919-1920, ed. F.-K. Krüger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1933).
13 The state of war between the U.S. and Austria-Hungary was terminated by Congressional Resolution on 21 July 1921. The bilateral peace treaty between Austria and the United States was signed on 24 August 1921 and was ratified by Austria on 8 October 1921.
14 Already in early 1919 Woodrow Wilson was convinced that “the real thing to stop Bolshevism is food.” See Woodrow Wilson Papers, Series 5B, Wilson to Lansing, 10 Jan. 1919. Cited in: Peter Pastor, Hungary Between Wilson and Lenin: The Hungarian Revolution of 1918-1919 and the Big Three (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 166.
15 FRUS, PPC, X, 158.
16 See Hanns Haas, “Die Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika und die alliierte Lebensmittelversorgung Österreichs im Winter 1918/19,” MOESTA 32 (1979): 233-55.
17 See Hanns Haas, “Die Pariser Friedenskonferenz und das Ende der Ungarischen Räterepublik,” MOESTA 29 (1976): 363-410; and Franz Adlgasser, American Individualism Abroad: Herbert Hoover, die American Relief Administration und Österreich, 1919-1923 (Vienna: Verbund der wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaften Österreichs, 1993).
18 Already by 1935 two political scientists from Stanford University submitted an authoritative edition of materials on the treatment of the Austrian question in Paris: N. Almond and R. H. Lutz, eds., The Treaty of St. Germain: A Documentary History of Its Territorial and Political Clauses, Hoover War Library Publications 5 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1935).
19 Harold Nicolson, Peacemaking 1919 (New York: Harcourt, Bross&Co., 1965), 34.
20 MacDonald, The Republic of Austria 1919-1934, 247.
21 Headlam-Morley, “Note on the Austrian Treaty,” 362.
22 See Robert Hoffmann, “Die Mission Sir Thomas Cuninghames in Wien 1919: Britische Österreichpolitik zur Zeit der Pariser Friedenskonferenz,” PhD. diss., University of Salzburg, 1971.
23 Headlam-Morley, “Note on the Austrian Treaty,” 364.
24 Headlam-Morley, A Memoir of the Paris Peace Conference 1919, 30 May 1919, 131.
25 Ibid., 26 May 1919, 126.
26 Maurice P. Hankey, The Supreme Control at the Paris Peace Conference 1919: A Commentary (London: Allen & Unwin, 1963), 160.
27 Nicolson, Peacemaking 1919, 356.
28 Halstead to Commission to Negotiate Peace (CNP), 13 June 1919, FRUS, PPC, XII, 530.
29 Halstead to CNP, 6 July 1919, ibid., 539.
30 See Robert Hoffmann, “Die wirtschaftlichen Grundlagen der britischen Österreichpolitik 1919,” MOESTA 30 (1977): 251-87.
31 See Franz Adlgasser, “The Roots of Communist Containment: American Food Aid in Austria and Hungary after World War I,” in Austria in the Nineteen Fifties, ed. Günter Bischof et al., Contemporary Austrian Studies 3 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1995), 171-88.
32 See Hanns Haas, “Österreich und die Alliierten 1918-1919,” in Saint-Germain 1919: Protokoll des Symposiums am 29. und 30. Mai 1979 in Wien (Vienna: Verlag für Geschichte und Politik, 1989), 31-33.
33 The coal for weapons deal in numbers: 20,000 rifles, 40,000 shells, 1,500,000 cartridges in the value of 21,515,375 German-Austrian crowns. See Adlgasser, American Individualism Abroad, 68-69.
34 See Wilhelm Böhm, Im Kreuzfeuer zweier Revolutionen (Munich 1924), and Adlgasser, “The Roots of Communist Containment,” 178-79. Gregory, a lawyer and investment banker from California, proved one of the most influential American operatives in Central Europe in 1919. See Pucher, “Die Beziehungen Österreichs zu den Vereinigten Staaten,” 74.
35 See Alfred D. Low, “The First Austrian Republic and Soviet Hungary,” Journal of Central European Affairs 20 (July 1960): 174-203.
36 Who in Halstead’s opinion ran “the one really efficient organization for the protection [of Vienna] – 5000 police.” He praised its head as “a man of unusual force and ability.” Halstead to SoS, 5 Sept. 1919, FRUS, PPC, XII, 564.
37 However, Halstead held regular contact with an assortment of business, industry and bank management personnel, many of which belonged to the conservative camp.
38 Halstead to the Secretary of State (SoS), 12 Aug. 1919, FRUS, PPC, Vol. XII, 561.
39 See Herbert Matis, “Disintegration and Multi-national Enterprises in Central Europe During the Post-war Years, 1918-23,” in International Business and Central Europe, 1918-1939, ed. A. Teichova and P. L. Cottrell (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), 73-100.
40 Halstead to SoS, 9 Sept. 1919, in: FRUS, PPC, Vol. XII, 566-67.
41 Halstead to SoS, 15 Sept. 1919, ibid., 571.
42 A. W. DuBois to SoS, 21 Sept. 1919, ibid., 575.
43 Halstead to SoS, 26 Sept. 1919, ibid. 576. When in mid-October the new coalition cabinet was presented Halstead’s deputy made a point of stressing that it included four Jews. A. W. DuBois to SoS, 18 Oct. 1919, ibid., 582.
44 Halstead to SoS, 10 Oct. 1919, ibid., 579.
45 Ibid., 580.
46 Halstead to SoS, 18 July 1919, ibid., 548.
47 Halstead to SoS, 7 Nov. 1919, ibid., 584-86.
48 Halstead to SoS, 26 Nov. 1919, ibid., 591.
49 Halstead to SoS, 27 Nov. 1919, ibid., 593.
50 Halstead to SoS, 21 Nov. 1919, ibid., 587-89.
51 Halstead to SoS, 26 Nov. 1919, ibid., 590.
52 Ibid.
53 Ibid., 591.
54 Halstead to SoS, 3 Dec. 1919, ibid., 598.
55 Halstead to SoS, 12 Dec. 1919, ibid., 602. Another American observer detected a kind of victim attitude among most Austrians and noticed a “complete assumption that [the Americans] were free from resentment and filled with a sympathetic desire to put them on their feet.” See Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2002), 249. The victim card would be played again after the next World War, that time perhaps with more initial success.
56 During these days, Halstead was the private guest of Josef Redlich, the renowned professor of constitutional law at the University of Vienna and former minister of finance, who on this occasion commented in his diary on December 9, 1919: “Daß ich so viel Trauriges miterleben muß: das verhungernde Wien, der mit Blödsinn vermischte Haß und die konfuse Gleichgültigkeit, mit der die Entente das ganze österreichische Problem behandelt.” (“That so many sad things have to happen to me: a starving Vienna, hatred paired with stupidity and this confused apathy with which the Entente is treating the whole Austrian Problem”). in F. Fellner, ed., Schicksalsjahre Österreichs 1908-1919: Das politische Tagebuch Josef Redlichs, II. Band (Vienna: Hermann Böhlau, 1954), 349.
57 Halstead to SoS, 12 Dec. 1919, FRUS, PPC, Vol. XII, 604-06.
58 See Henri Allizé, Ma Mission à Vienne, mars 1919-août 1920 (Paris 1933).
59 See Hanns Haas, “Henri Allizé und die österreichische Unabhängigkeit,” in Austriaca. Cahiers universitaires d’information sur l’Autriche, 3ème Spécial Colloque: Deux fois l’Autriche après 1918 et après 1945, Actes du colloque de Rouen 8-12 novembre 1977, 3e volume (Rouen: Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Autrichiennes, 1977), 241-84.
60 As, for example, Headlam-Morley complained: “There is practically no one on the spot who has really sound knowledge and experience.” Headlam-Morley, A Memoir of the Paris Peace Conference 1919, 147.
61 Halstead was fully aware of this when early in his mission he pleaded that “it is earnestly hoped that the views of those on the spot who should understand the situation best will receive noted consideration.” Halstead to CNP, 7 July 1919, FRUS, PPC, XII, 540. Almost a month later he qualified his stance: “I fully appreciate that writing from Vienna I must to a degree be influenced by my situation and that from this single angle it is absolutely impossible to view the grave problems presented to the Peace Commission as broadly as it is viewed by those upon whom the responsibility rests in Washington and Paris.” Halstead to SoS, 3 Aug. 1919, ibid., 557.
62 MacMillan, Paris 1919, 247.
63 See Duane Myers, “The United States and Austria, 1918-1919: The Problem of Self-Determination,” Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association, 1975, 5-15.
64 Headlam-Morley, A Memoir of the Paris Peace Conference 1919, 25 June 1919, 163.
65 Even though Austria had become the fourth largest beneficiary of allied aid, after Germany, Poland and Belgium. See MacMillan, Paris 1919, 249.