American History for Truthdiggers: A Savage 'War to End All Wars,' and a
Failed Peace
"Over There" (1917), with its patriotic lyrics and rousing melody, was a
rallying cry for Americans in World War I.
Editor's note: The past is prologue. The stories we tell about ourselves and
our forebears inform the sort of country we think we are and help determine
public policy. As our current president promises to "make America great
again," this moment is an appropriate time to reconsider our past, look back
at various eras of United States history and re-evaluate America's origins.
When, exactly, were we "great"?
Below is the 22nd installment of the "American History for Truthdiggers"
series, a pull-no-punches appraisal of our shared, if flawed, past. The
author of the series, Danny Sjursen, an active-duty major in the U.S. Army,
served military tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and taught the nation's
checkered, often inspiring past when he was an assistant professor of
history at West Point. His war experiences, his scholarship, his skill as a
writer and his patriotism illuminate these Truthdig posts.
Part 22 of "American History for Truthdiggers."
"Over there, over there, / Send the word, send the word over there. / That
the Yanks are coming, / the Yanks are coming . / We'll be over, we're
coming over, / And we won't come back till it's over, over there." -An
excerpt from George M. Cohan's song "Over There"
America wasn't supposed to get in the war. When the country finally did, it
was to be a war "to end all wars," to "make the world safe for democracy,"
one in which, for once, the Allies would seek "peace without victory." How
powerful was the romantic and idealistic rhetoric of Woodrow Wilson,
America's historian and political scientist turned president. None of that
came to pass, of course. No, just less than three years after the outbreak
of the Great War in August 1914, the working classes of the United States
would join those of Europe in a grinding, gruesome, attritional fight to the
finish. In the end, some 116,000 Americans would die alongside about 9
million soldiers from the other belligerent nations.
Today, the American people are quite comfortable with the mythical sense of
their role in the second of the two world wars. The Nazis had to be stopped
at all cost; the Japanese had deceitfully attacked our fleet; and-in the
end-America saved the day. The U.S. thus became, as a popular T-shirt
proclaims, "back-to-back" world war champs. Still, most of the citizenry
knows little about the First World War, which was once called the Great War.
The issues involved and the reasons for fighting seem altogether murky,
messy even. So, as a simple patriotic heuristic, Americans tend to frame the
First World War as a prelude to the second. Not simply in the sense that one
led in some way to the next, but that the German enemy was equally evil in
each-that the kaiser in 1917 was only slightly less militaristic than Adolf
Hitler in 1941. Germany's race for world domination, we vaguely conclude,
really began in the second decade of the 20th century and wasn't fully
thwarted until 1945. None of that is strictly true: The kaiser's government
was far more complex than that of Nazi Germany, for example, and a German
sense of guilt over the war was more collective in 1914 than 1939-but the
legend of the war and America's role in it can more easily be simplified by
use of this mental shorthand.
In reality, Europe blundered into war because of a mix of absurd factors
that undergirded the entire nation-state and imperial system of the day:
jingoistic nationalism, the race for Asian and African empires, a
destabilizing series of opposing alliances, and the foolish notion that war
would rejuvenate European manhood and, of course, be swift, decisive and
brief. Instead, technological advances outran military tactics and the two
sides-Germany, Austria and Turkey on the one hand and Britain, France and
Russia on the other-settled in for an incomparably brutal war of stagnation
and filth. Unable to win decisively on either front, both sides dug in their
men, artillery and machine guns and fought bloody battles for the possession
of mere meters of earth. It was to be the war that ultimately "finished"
Europe, destroying the long-term power of the continent and ultimately
shifting leadership westward to the United States. Not that any of this was
clear at the time.
Europe lost an entire generation, killed, maimed or forever psychologically
broken by the war. Many Europeans lost faith in the snake oil of nationalism
and turned away from the standard frameworks of monarchy or liberal
democracy. Some found solace in socialism, whereas others doubled down on
ultranationalism in the form of fascist leaders. Despite 9 million battle
deaths-a number unfathomable when the war began-WWI solved little and sowed
the seeds for the European cataclysm of 1939-45. It is an uncomfortable
truth, especially for the United States, a nation that tends to see itself
as being at the center of the world; the U.S. played mostly a late, and bit,
part in the drama across the Atlantic. However, the populace believed its
own propaganda, crafted a myth of American triumphalism and learned all the
wrong lessons from the war. Instead of being a "war to end all wars," the
Great War turned out to be just the beginning of American
interventionism-the pivot toward the creation of today's fiscal-military
hegemonic state. And it didn't have to be that way.
Getting In: Wilson Takes Us to War
A 1916 campaign button for the re-election of Woodrow Wilson. Within weeks
of his second inauguration, the president, declaring "[t]he world must be
made safe for democracy," would successfully ask Congress to approve U.S.
entry into World War I.
Most Americans were horrified by the brutality of trench warfare in Europe
and thanked God for the Atlantic Ocean. A majority in the U.S., due to
cultural and linguistic ties to Britain, favored the Allies. Still, another
segment of the population, German-Americans and the viscerally anti-British
Irish-Americans, tended to favor Austria and Germany. So, while President
Wilson advised the people and his government to be "neutral in fact as well
as in name . impartial in thought as well as action," genuine neutrality was
always a long shot. One of the problems was Wilson, himself, who began to
see the war as an opportunity for the United States to lead "a new world
order." If he could do so as a peaceful arbiter, so be it; if it required
America's entry into the fields of fire, well, perhaps that couldn't be
avoided.
Only William Jennings Bryan, Wilson's first secretary of state and a
three-time Democratic presidential nominee, could be considered a truly
neutral voice in the Cabinet. "There will be no war as long I am Secretary
of State," the legendary firebrand thundered upon joining the
administration. He felt obliged to resign barely a year later, and the U.S.
slid toward war. Of course the U.S. had never been strictly neutral. Close
economic ties with the Allies ensured that. Rather than embargo both sides
or demand that Britain open its starvation blockade of Germany to U.S.
trading vessels, Wilson's government exported hundreds of millions of
dollars in goods annually to the Allied nations and funded some of their
debts. In just the first eight months of the war, U.S. bankers extended $80
million in credits to the Allies, and then, after Wilson lifted all bans on
loans, U.S. financial interests would float $10 million per day to Britain
alone! By the end of the war, the Allies owed $10 billion in war debts to
the U.S., the equivalent of some $165 billion in today's dollars. Indeed,
the U.S. economy had by 1917 come to rely on Allied war orders. How would
Wall Street recover these debts if not through Allied victory? And how could
the bogged-down Allies defeat Germany without the promise of American troop
reinforcements?
Furthermore, Wilson acquiesced to Britain's blockade of Germany. He told
Bryan it would be "a waste of time" to argue with Britain about the
blockade, but this made the U.S., in fact if not in name, a partner of the
Allies. German officials, with some sound logic, protested that the U.S., if
truly neutral, would condemn a British blockade that starved European
children. Wilson remained silent.
"Without Warning!," a 1917 cartoon in the Evening World Daily Magazine,
depicts a sword rising from the sea to destroy a U.S. merchant vessel. Above
the waves can be seen part of a German helmet. Such cartoons proliferated
after the sinking of the luxury liner Lusitania in 1915.
His voice was quite clear, however, on the subject of German submarine
warfare against Allied (namely American) shipping. Though the German navy
had been built up in the decades before the war, its battleships and
cruisers were still no match for the combined Anglo-French fleets.
Therefore, in order to stymie the blockade and attrit the Allied supply
lines, the Germans turned to submarine or "U-boat" warfare. Indeed, at
certain points during the war, the German U-boats nearly brought the Allies
to their logistical knees. It was only American distribution that kept
Britain, in particular, afloat. The German government spent much of the
conflict at war with itself over whether or not to sink American merchant
ships supplying the Allies. One can, after all, understand the German
predicament: Allied naval power was isolating the Central Powers and the
Americans were economically allied with Britain and France!
When, however, a German sub sank the British luxury liner Lusitania in May
1915, killing more than 120 U.S. citizens, there was a great outcry from
Americans. Former President Theodore Roosevelt, always a reliable war hawk,
called the attack "murder on the high seas!" He was still a popular figure,
after all, so his demand for war in response to German "piracy" was a
serious matter. It turned out the Lusitania, traveling from the United
States to Britain, was carrying 1,248 cases of three-inch shells and 4,927
boxes of rifle cartridges. The British had put the American passengers at
risk as much as the Germans did. In response, in one last plea for "real
neutrality," Secretary Bryan called for calm and stated, "A ship carrying
contraband, should not rely on passengers to protect her from attack-it
would be like putting women and children in front of an army." When Wilson
failed to sufficiently curtail warlike rhetoric, Bryan tendered his
resignation. With him may have gone any real chance at U.S. neutrality.
The British, to be fair, had also contravened America's "neutral rights"
throughout the war. They upheld the blockade, denied the U.S. the ability to
easily trade with Germany, and even went so far, in July 1916, as to
blacklist 80 U.S. companies that allegedly (and legally) traded with the
Central Powers. Furthermore, key immigrant communities in the U.S. were
appalled by Britain's forceful put-down of Ireland's 1916 Easter Rebellion
for independence and the subsequent execution of rebel leaders. Wilson, weak
protestations aside, gave in to London at every turn.
Initially, Germany promised no further surprise attacks on passenger vessels
and American merchant ships, but as the war ground on, German Chancellor
Theobald Bethmann-Hollweg faced a decision between submission, on one hand,
and utilizing the U-boats to their fullest, on the other. Fatefully, it
turned out, the German military forced Hollweg's hand and Berlin declared
"unrestricted submarine warfare" in early 1917. This was not the only
affront to American prestige. In late February 1917, the British leaked a
German message-the famous Zimmerman telegram-seeming to offer an alliance
with Mexico and the potential for the Mexicans to "reconquer its former
territories in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona." Despite the truth that
Washington had, indeed (probably) illegally conquered the region and turned
northern Mexico into the Southwest United States in the 1840s, Americans
were in no mood for subtleties, and anti-German sentiment exploded across
the country. It was to be war.
Still, this outcome was never inevitable. Germany sought not to conquer the
world, but to win-or at least honorably extract itself from-a stagnant and
costly European war. Nor should the reader give in to the (mostly false)
notion that Germany was an authoritarian, brutal Nazi-like dictatorship,
while the Allies were liberal democrats. Austria was a dual monarchy, but
Germany had a mixed government with a royal kaiser but also a parliament and
one of the most progressive social welfare systems in the world. Besides,
Russia-a key country in the Triple Alliance-was perhaps the most backward,
largely feudal, monarchy on the planet. Furthermore, as the famed
progressive Sen. Robert La Follette of Wisconsin reminded Americans as he
cast a vote against Wilson's April 2, 1917, call for war, Britain and France
possessed their own global empires. In that sense, the U.S. merely sided
with one set of flawed empires over another. La Follette exclaimed on April
4th that "[Wilson] says this is a war for democracy. . But the president has
not suggested that we make our support conditional to [Britain] granting
home rule to Ireland, Egypt, or India." The man had a point.
Nevertheless, Wilson's request for a war declaration passed the Congress and
mobilization began. The president stood before the legislature and claimed
the U.S. "shall fight for the things we have always carried nearest to our
hearts-for democracy . for the rights and liberties of small nations. . We
have no selfish ends to serve." Wilson was only formalizing a millenarian
message he had been spreading for years. In 1916, in a speech one historian
has called "at once breathtaking in the audacity of its vision of a new
world order" and "curiously detached from the bitter realities of Europe's
battlefields," Wilson declared that America could no longer refuse to play
"the great part in the world which is providentially cut out for her. . We
have got to serve the world." And so it was, whether in the interest of
"serving the world," or backing its preferred empires and trading partners,
the U.S. would enter its first war on the European continent. It would not
be the last.
Over There: America at War
The United States may have been an economic powerhouse holding most of the
financial cards in the deck, but its military was woefully unprepared for
war on the scale of what was being waged in Europe by 1917. Though some
limited preparations began with the 1916 National Defense Act-which
gradually raised the size of the regular Army to 223,000 men-the U.S.
military remained tiny (only the 17th largest worldwide) compared with those
of the belligerent nations. After all, the combined German and French
fatalities at a single battle-Verdun in 1916-exceeded the total dead of the
U.S. Civil War, still the bloodiest conflict in American history.
Meanwhile, the Germans nearly won the war before the U.S. could meaningfully
intervene. After the 1917 Russian Revolution turned communist, the new
Russian leader, Vladimir Lenin, made a humiliating peace with Berlin. The
Germans now shipped dozens of divisions westward and attempted one last
knockout blow against the British and French on the Western Front. And,
since President Wilson and the leading U.S. Army general, John J. Pershing,
insisted that American soldiers fight under an independent command, it took
many extra months to raise, equip and train an expeditionary force. It took
more than a year before the U.S. could muster even minimal weight at the
front. Nonetheless, the British and French lines (just barely) held in early
1918, and the infusion of 850,000 fresh, if untested, American troops helped
make possible an Allied summer counteroffensive that eventually broke the
German front lines.
It was all over by Nov. 11, 1918 (once called Armistice Day, now celebrated
as Veterans Day in the U.S.), when the Germans agreed to an armistice in
lieu of eventual surrender. Still, when peace came, the German army largely
remained on French soil. There was no invasion of Germany, no grand
occupation of the capital. The end was nothing like that of the next world
war. To many German soldiers and their nationalist proponents at home, it
seemed that the army had been sold out by weak civilian officials-especially
the socialists (and Jews) in the government. This belief, along with the
later insistence by the Allies on a harsh retributive treaty at Versailles,
sowed the seeds for the rise of fascism, ultranationalism and Hitler in
1930s Germany.
When all was said and done, the U.S. had suffered just 116,000 of the 9
million battle deaths of the war. Despite collective American memories of
Uncle Sam going to the rescue, an honest reflection requires admission that
it was Britain and France-which together had suffered roughly 2 million
dead-that won the war for the Allies. The U.S. was a latecomer to the
affair, and while its troops helped overrun the German lines, Berlin was
cooked as soon as its spring offensive failed in 1918. The United States had
hardly saved the day. It was a mere associate to Allied victory. Such
humility, though, tends not to suit Americans' collective memory.
Over Here: War at Home and the Death of Civil Liberties
An ad encouraging Americans to buy war bonds to help defeat the "Hun," a
pejorative term for Germans.
The war that Wilson claimed was being waged to make the world "safe for
democracy" forever changed and restricted American civil liberties. It
strengthened a fiscal-military federal state that shifted to a war footing.
Every single facet of Americans' lives was now touched by the hand of
federal power. First off, the war required a mass military mobilization. The
era is often remembered for its intense public patriotism, but, when only
73,000 men initially volunteered for the military, the government brought
back conscription for the first time since the Civil War and drafted nearly
5 million men from 18 to 45 years old. Some noted progressives got carried
away with the idea of federal power and regulation. "Long live social
control!" one reformer enthusiastically wrote. Another wing of anti-war
progressives wasn't so sure. The longtime skeptic Randolph Bourne-who noted
with distaste that "[w]ar is the health of the state"-worried that most
progressives were allying themselves with "the least democratic forces in
American life." He concluded, "It is as if the war and they had been waiting
for each other." And, throughout history, so often they have been.
The government first sought to control the economy and ensure that American
business was placed on a war footing. The War Industries Board (WIB)
regulated the production of key war materials through a combination of force
and negotiation with the "captains of industry." Though the WIB quickly
transitioned the U.S. to a war economy, one the organization's own leaders,
Grosvenor Clarkson, described the potential dark side of such a system: "It
was an industrial dictatorship without parallel-a dictatorship by force of
necessity and common consent which . encompassed the Nation and united it
into a coordinated and mobile whole." Additionally, Wilson's government
needed to get control of the country's proliferating labor unions to ensure
a smooth economic war machine. His National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)
attempted to mediate disputes between capitol and labor. It never really
worked. Strikes continued and even grew throughout the war years, and the
NLRB-with the backing of police, militia and federal troops-worked overtime
to quash workers' demands. The result was a sense of national need over
individual freedom. George Perkins, a top aide to financier J.P. Morgan,
caught the mood when he exalted that "[t]he great European war . is striking
down individualism and building up collectivism." It would do so in
industry, and also in culture and politics.
Though waves of patriotism and anti-German anger swept the nation, many
Americans-especially the ethnic Irish and Germans and a broad swath of
Midwesterners-remained skeptical of the war. Furthermore, this was an era of
strong socialist (anti-war) power in American politics. The Socialist Party
candidate for president in 1912, the former union leader Eugene Debs, had,
after all, won nearly a million popular votes. As surprising as this sounds
at present, 1,200 socialists held political office in the United States in
1917, and socialist newspapers had a daily readership of some 3 million
citizens. For all his external rhetoric about peace, liberty and democracy,
President Wilson wasn't taking any chances at home. He and his congressional
supporters delivered a propaganda machine and civil liberty curtailments
unparalleled in the annals of American warfare. Indeed, Wilson was obsessed
with sedition and disloyalty, warning, "Woe be to the man or group that
seeks to stand in our way. ." And he and his Congress were willing to back
up such threats with action.
A campaign button for Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party candidate for
president in 1920. Though he ran from federal prison he received over
900,000 votes.
In 1917-18, Congress passed the Espionage and Sedition Acts. In a sweeping
violation of Americans' constitutional rights, for example, the Sedition Act
declared illegal "uttering, printing, writing, or publishing any disloyal,
profane, scurrilous or abusive language about the United States government
or the military." Apparently, this applied to any criticism of the draft.
Thus, when Eugene Debs spoke critically, and peaceably, about the war
outside a conscription office, he was arrested and later sentenced to 10
years in federal prison. Standing before the judge at his sentencing, Debs
made no apologies, asked for no leniency and uttered some of the most
beautiful words in American history: "Your honor, years ago I recognized my
kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit
better than the meanest on earth. . I say now, that while there is a lower
class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while
there is a soul in prison, I am not free."
Debs was not alone. Some 900 people were imprisoned under the Espionage
Act-which is still on the books-and 2,000 more were arrested for sedition,
mainly union leaders and radical labor men such as members of the Industrial
Workers of the World (IWW), or "Wobblies." Appeals to the Supreme Court
failed; all branches of government, it seemed, were complicit in the
curtailment of standard civil liberties. Interestingly, the now aged
Espionage Act was used extensively by the Obama administration to charge
journalists, as well as Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. What's more,
over 330,000 Americans were classified as draft evaders during World War I,
and thousands of them, mostly conscientious objectors, were forced to work
in wartime prison camps, such as the one at Fort Douglas, Utah, for the
duration. Finally, even the mail was restricted, with the postmaster general
refusing to deliver any socialist or anti-war publications and materials.
Wilson also needed a government propaganda machine to drum up support for
the war, especially among apathetic Midwesterners, socialists and so-called
hyphenated Americans. He found his answer in the Committee for Public
Information (CPI), which, led by the journalist George Creel, employed
social scientists and greatly exaggerated German atrocities to motivate the
public. The CPI employed 75,000 speakers and disseminated over 75 million
pamphlets during the war years. One social scientist bragged that wartime
propaganda was designed to create a "herd psychology," and philosopher John
Dewey referred to the methods as "conscription of thought." Fact, it seemed,
was secondary to results, and the preferred outcome was a united,
anti-German public ready to fight and die both in the trenches abroad and
for "patriotism" at home.
Not all Americans were willing to acquiesce to this state of affairs, and
some wrote critically of the wartime climate in the United States. One
Harvard instructor complained, "With the entry into the war our government
was practically turned into a dictatorship." Furthermore, the journalist
Mark Sullivan maintained that "[e]very person had been deprived of freedom
of his tongue, not one could utter dissent. . The prohibition of individual
liberty in the interest of the state could hardly be more complete." The
effect fell worst on German-Americans and Southern blacks.
John Meints, a German-American who farmed in Minnesota, is shown after being
tarred and feathered in 1918. The vigilantes who brutalized him were
celebrated in the press, and no one was ever prosecuted.
The problematic results of all this were altogether predictable.
Hypernationalist Americans, treated to lies and exaggerations about their
German enemies, began to take matters into their own hands and to police
"loyalty" at home. Across the country, 250,000 citizens officially joined
the American Protective League (APL) while many more joined informal
militias. APL members opened mail and bugged phones to spy on suspected
"traitors." These excesses also infected the culture and language in a
number of ludicrous ways. German-sounding words were Americanized or
renamed. Hamburger became Salisbury steak, sauerkraut was changed to
"liberty cabbage" and the German measles was rechristened the "liberty
measles." (One is reminded of french fries being renamed "freedom fries"
when France refused to back the United States' 2003 invasion of Iraq.)
Such farce aside, the actions of the APL and unofficial militias quickly got
out of hand and often turned violent. Americans suspected of disloyalty were
taken to public squares and forced to kiss the flag or buy liberty bonds.
Others were brutally tarred and feathered or painted yellow. One
German-American, Robert Prager, was hanged by a mob in Illinois. In response
to the incident the supposedly liberal Washington Post reported, "In spite
of the excesses such as lynching, it is a healthful and wholesome awakening
in the interior of the country."
African-Americans also, predictably, suffered during the war, both in terms
of humiliation and physical attacks. The famed civil rights leader W.E.B. Du
Bois predicted at the start of the war that "[i]f we want real peace, we
must extend the democratic ideal to the yellow, brown, and black peoples."
That proved to be a bridge too far. In the Army, blacks served in segregated
units and, ironically, found wartime France much more hospitable and
egalitarian than the American South. Many never returned home. Those who did
so returned to a country beset with race riots. Dozens of blacks and others
were killed in riots in Chicago, East St. Louis and 25 other cities. At the
same time, a new manifestation of the Ku Klux Klan-now concerned with not
only blacks but immigrants, Jews and Catholics-grew in numbers. This
expansive version of the Klan operated publicly and even controlled many
political offices during the period. Lynching exploded across the South: 30
black men in 1917, 60 in 1918, 76 in 1919-including 10 war veterans, some
still wearing their uniforms. It seemed that the American South could not
bear the sight of "uppity" blacks returning home as "men" wearing the
uniform of the U.S. Army.
The war's end also broke the back of the then-powerful American Socialist
Party. After the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the U.S. government helped
foment a veritable "Red Scare," an illogical fear of all speech and action
on the American left. One observer noted, "Not within the memory of living
Americans, nor scarcely within the entire history of the nation, has such a
fear swept of the public mind. ." During the scare, which reached a peak in
1920, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer created the General Intelligence
Division, led by a young and zealous J. Edgar Hoover (later the longtime
head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation). In the federal counterattack
that followed, 4,000 supposed "radicals" were arrested, and hundreds were
stripped of their citizenry and shipped to the Soviet Union. It was the
death knell not only of American socialism but also of the more liberal and
skeptical brand of progressivism. Randolph Bourne would see the future
clearly in the midst of the war. "It becomes more and more evident that,
whatever the outcome of the war, all the opposing countries will be forced
to adopt German organization, German collectivism, and [to indeed shatter]
most of the old threads of their old easy individualism," he wrote,
continuing on to say that "[Americans] have taken the occasion to .
repudiate that modest collectivism which was raising its head here in the
shape of the progressive movement." Bourne was right: Progressivism-for
now-was dead. It, along with 116,000 American men and a handful of American
women, was killed by the war.
Men like Eugene Debs and Randolph Bourne, along with other skeptics, were
ahead of their time. They realized a universal truth that applied then as
well as now. Things are lost in war-freedom, liberties, individualism. Some
are never recovered. That, along with battlefield triumphs, must define the
American experience in the Great War.
The Seeds of the Next War: Wilson, Versailles and the Road to WWII
The manner in which the First World War ended helped sow the seeds for a
second world war. Though Wilson personally brought his sense of America's
special destiny to the peace conference at Versailles, France, and despite
his wide popularity among the masses of Europe, he was unable to craft the
treaty and postwar world he desired. Indeed, his idealistic, and perhaps
naive, sense of American duty and interventionism, which has ever since been
labeled "Wilsonianism," has never really left the scene in America. The
realpolitik-minded Allied leaders of Britain, France and Italy were in no
mood for lectures on democracy and human rights from Mr. Wilson. Given his
personal popularity, and America's latent power, they appeased him to some
extent, but that was all.
Even though he stayed in Europe for six full months, Wilson's preferred
peace would not come to pass. Despite the romantic liberty-rhetoric of his
so-called Fourteen Points, the president was forced to accede to the Allies
on key elements that would poison the well of peace. Germany, in the "war
guilt" clauses of the treaty, was held solely responsible for the outbreak
of war. Berlin was also saddled with a crippling war debt and forced to
compensate the victorious Allies with territory and enormous sums of cash
for decades to come. Adolf Hitler would play on Germans' (sometimes
legitimate) grievances regarding these matters to rise to power decades
later. So much for "peace without victory."
On issues of colonialism, too, Britain and France were never willing to play
ball. They sought perpetuation and even expansion of their empires (at the
expense of Germany, of course) in Asia and Africa. So died Wilson's promises
of a war for the "rights of small nations." Britain and France carved up the
old Ottoman Empire and redrew lines in the Middle East that to this day
contribute to disorder and civil war. When the Allies rejected Japan's
proposal for a "racial equality" clause in the treaty, the ministers of that
nation-a member of the Allied war against the Central Powers-nearly walked
out. Eventually they did leave, with lasting resentments that would come
back to haunt the U.S. and the other Allies in the Pacific.
Many representatives from colonial nations had placed an enormous amount of
trust in Wilson. Never trusting the tainted imperial governments of Britain
and France, these unofficial peace delegates hoped that Wilson's Fourteen
Points would save them. A young French-educated Vietnamese man named Ho Chi
Minh was unable to even gain entrance to the proceedings. He would not
forget, and 40 years later emerged as an anti-colonial guerrilla leader.
Furthermore, when it became clear that the European colonies would not
receive postwar home rule, riots and protests erupted in India, Egypt and
China. Observing this, and commenting on the failures of the Treaty of
Versailles, a young library assistant named Mao Zedong-later the leader of
China's communist revolution-protested, "I think it is really shameless!"
Russia, because it was communist, was excluded from the conference. In fact,
in an episode lost to U.S. (but not Russian) history, 20,000 U.S. troops
joined many more other Allied soldiers in an occupation of parts of Russia,
backing the non-communist "White" Russian armies in their failed attempt to
overthrow "Red" power. The Soviet government and its successor state, the
Russian Federation, now led by Vladimir Putin, would never forgive the West
for this perceived transgression.
Still, President Wilson hoped that the new League of Nations-the deeply
flawed precursor to the United Nations-would achieve what the basic contours
of the treaty could not. Wilson took these matters personally and embarked
on a nationwide tour of American cities to sell the treaty and league to a
citizenry (and Congress) increasingly skeptical of international
involvement. Wilson asked the people, "Dare we reject it [the treaty] and
break the heart of the world?" But Americans did reject it, as would their
representatives in the Senate, where it lost by seven votes. The U.S. would
sign a separate peace treaty with Germany and declined to join the
now-weakened League of Nations. By this time Wilson, having suffered
strokes-including a final one that paralyzed half his body-was nearly an
invalid. His advisers and wife would keep his medical condition a secret
from the American public, remarkably, nearly to the end of his second term.
Perhaps a more equitable, or Wilsonian, peace treaty would have assuaged
German shame and avoided the rise of Hitler. Beyond that, one must wonder
whether a swift, limited German victory-along the lines of the
Franco-Prussian War (1870-71)-might also have avoided the catastrophe of
Hitler and the Second World War. And then there is the matter of America's
"retreat" from Europe after declining to join the League of Nations. Could
U.S. involvement and leadership have avoided the rise of fascism and
outbreak of conflict in Eastern Europe and the Pacific? In truth, these
questions-counterfactuals really-are unanswerable. Still, they are important
to consider. What is certain is that Allied imperialism survived for 40 to
50 years, leading to outbreaks of left-leaning guerrilla wars in the 1950s
and '60s; European nationalism remained a major factor, contributing to the
rise of its most extreme form, fascism; and American "Wilsonianism" emerged
from the war as a still powerful force in U.S. foreign policy, guiding a
full century's worth of (ongoing) American worldwide military
interventionism.
* * *
Historians continue to argue whether the Great War was the culmination or
the death knell of progressivism. In a sense it was both. Indeed, the use of
an activist, empowered federal government to rally the populace and control
the people that World War I personified was always the dream of one strand
of progressives. Yet, in the end, we must conclude that war-and its domestic
excesses-destroyed the foundation of the progressive movement. The citizenry
had tired, temporarily at least, of big government and federal interventions
at home and abroad. The progressive push for a stronger, European-style
social democracy withered just as swiftly as the Treaty of Versailles
itself. In the election of 1920, the Republican Warren G. Harding swept to
victory on a platform of a return to "normalcy," and two straight
conservative, business-friendly Republican administrations followed. As the
progressive warrior Jane Addams had warned when the U.S. entered the war,
"This will set back progress for a generation." How right she was.
Those three presidents-Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover-would, it
must be said, keep the U.S. out of any major international war, but they
would also crash the economy and dismantle the social safety net, paving the
way for the Great Depression. And though the policy of "isolationism," which
actually personified the views of George Washington and more than 150 years
of American tradition, briefly flourished between the wars, it would
eventually become a pejorative term. When war again brewed in Europe, partly
because of the way the Allies mishandled their "victory" and negotiation of
the "peace," most Americans and their leaders were able to fall back on
their comfortable myth of the U.S. having "saved the day" in 1917-18.
Forgotten were the last war's horrors, the domestic excesses of the warfare
state, and the once prevalent (if vanquished) anti-war movement that had
flourished not 30 years in the past.
Americans believe their own lies-the lies they are told and those they
themselves craft. And the U.S. has failed to see through its falsehoods
about the Great War even though a century has passed since it ended. Its
sense of messianic destiny and unparalleled accumulation of military power
is such that-as the world celebrates (or mourns) the 100th anniversary of
the end of World War I-the U.S. alone still views that conflict in heroic
terms. Americans, at least the 1 percent willing to volunteer to go to a war
and the numerous policymakers ready to send them off, still stand ready, as
the song said, to go "over there." Only now everywhere is over there and
American hubris appears to know no bounds. And, one could argue, it all
began with the fictions we told ourselves about America's experience in
World War I-and more's the pity.
* * *
