760c.60f/60: Telegram
The Acting Secretary of State to the Ambassador in France (Wallace)
1515. Your no. 1751 of September 25. The Department considers that unless the United States were represented on the Teschen Commission, you would not be in a position properly to pass upon recommendations which the Commission might submit to the Conference of Ambassadors. Therefore your colleagues should be informed that an informal American member will be appointed to represent the United States on this Commission immediately. (The Department is telegraphing to Vienna for DuBois to report in Paris at once to assume this duty, inasmuch as it appears that Foster is not available.)
The Department notes that you hesitate to take this action while you withhold your signature to the Teschen Agreement. You may, in this connection, point out to your colleagues if necessary that the United States has not yet ratified the Austrian treaty under which by article 91 Teschen is apparently ceded to the Allied and Associated Powers. This Government would be reluctant to sign an agreement which may supplement, in effect, the Austrian treaty, on account of this technical difficulty. The Department does not believe that your colleagues would desire this Government to be prevented by this technicality from taking part in the establishment of a just and permanent settlement of the question.
Referring to second paragraph of your telegram, the Department took the position, you will recall, that authority to make rectifications in the Spa line should be given the Delimitation Commission itself, but that this view was not accepted in the agreement of July 28. The Department desires that it be clearly understood that the Government of the United States considers that the recommendations of the experts who have studied the problem of frontier delimitation on the spot should prevail over considerations of politics which otherwise might influence your colleagues in fixing this boundary; at the same time the Department will not insist that the Conference of Ambassadors shall agree in advance to accept the recommendations of the Teschen Commission.