Ho Chi Minh Petition
During this era of new internationalism, many in Africa and Asia hoped the United States or Europe would listen and begin to offer them more freedom. In 1919, Ho Chi Minh, the future leader of the independent North Vietnam, wrote a petition to Woodrow Wilson asking for greater autonomy for Vietnam. Wilson never saw it. Read this petition to understand what Minh hoped to achieve and his demands.
Ho Chi Minh appealed to the United States to help the Vietnamese win independence from the French several times. His first attempt to win American support was at the Paris Peace Conference at the end of World War I, in which the Allied forces met to set the peace terms for the defeated nations.
Nguyen Ai Quoc (one of Ho Chi Minh's early aliases) sent this letter as a representative of "le Groupe des Patriotes Annamites" ("the Group of Annamite Patriots") to Secretary of State Robert Lansing. He had reason to be hopeful. President Wilson's Fourteen Points Declaration (a statement of principles for peace to end World War I) called for self-determination for all peoples. But Wilson's priority was European self-government. Although Ho Chi Minh received a note saying that the petition would be shared with President Wilson, there was no further response.
The letter contains the enclosure "Revendications du Peuple Annamite" ("Claims of the Annamite People"). It is a call for reform of the French colonial system directed at French colonial officials. Ho Chi Minh used the term “Annamite” because “Vietnamien” (Vietnamese), with its nationalist overtones, was forbidden by the French. Annam is the name the French gave the central region of French Indochina. The petition was published in L'Humanité, a French socialist newspaper. Copies were distributed on the streets of Paris and found their way to Hanoi.
The letter and enclosure are written in French. There is an English translation of the letter, made by the National Archives in 1969.
Source: Docs Teach, https://www.docsteach.org/documents/document/ho-chi-minh-lansing
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