Worldmaking (20 page)

Wilson's idealistic rationale for war was born of sincere conviction that a revolution in world affairs was necessary in the midst of an appalling conflict, one that held the potential to eradicate an entire generation of working-age European men. His ambition was conditioned by his intellectual background and his disciplinary proclivities that tended toward the social scientific, and by his desire to depart from precedent and attempt something never attempted before. It should also be borne in mind, however, that convincing Wilson's fellow Americans of the efficacy of participation in Europe's war was a formidable challenge, which required poetry in presentation as well as ambition in detail. The progressive journalist Walter Lippmann captured this requirement well when he wrote that “men will not die and starve and freeze for the things which orthodox diplomacy holds most precious.”
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The speech carried off this trick and was as well received in the press as it was on Capitol Hill, where war was authorized by a margin of 82–6 in the Senate and 373–50 in the House. Bryanites were again in the vanguard of this small but spirited congressional opposition, although some Republicans joined in and were duly stigmatized for their lack of patriotism. When the Progressive Nebraskan Republican George Norris stood up in the House and warned that “we are going into war upon the command of gold … I feel that we are about to put the dollar sign on the American flag,” his colleagues shouted him down with the most incendiary word in politics: “Treason! Treason!”
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The American military contribution to Allied victory in the First World War was more decisive than its actions to defeat Hitler twenty-five years hence—a statement that appears odd at first sight. The U.S. Army was dwarfed in size by those of the Old World belligerents in 1917, although its latent potential—sustained as it was by the world's largest economy—was vast. America fought for a little under a year on the western front in 1918, while its participation in the Second World War lasted four years and carried a far greater blood price. How are the two conflicts even comparable? The answer lies not in the numbers of U.S. troops deployed, nor the facility with which they fought, but in the fact that the military balance in 1917 was finely poised between the Allied and Central Powers, making the full weight of American participation, when fully mobilized, almost impossible for Germany and its allies to resist. The European component of the Second World War was decided primarily on the eastern front, by the gargantuan efforts of Stalin's Soviet Union and the twenty-six million Soviet citizens who died resisting the existential threat posed by Hitler. The European component of the First World War was decided by America's timely and decisive intervention. Nearly ten million French, German, British, Russian, Ottoman, Italian, Austrian, Hungarian, Belgian, Greek, Serbian, Romanian, Montenegrin, Indian, Australian, Canadian, South African, and New Zealand troops died on the battlefields to deny victory to the other side, producing a stalemate that offered just enough hope to maintain the momentum of death. With the combatants locked in lethal balance, Wilson's declaration of war saved countless lives. The United States was the only irresistible force in the First World War.

The main problem from the Allied perspective was that it took a full year for American troops to make their way to Europe in decisive numbers. And in the meantime, emboldened by American support but lacking its tangible benefits, Britain and France launched offensives throughout the summer of 1917 that ended badly. Low morale, which led to widespread desertions and mutiny, enervated the French army, which to that point had suffered nearly a million battlefield deaths. Then in October 1917, the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin seized power in Russia and announced their intention to seek peace with Germany so as to better protect the revolution at home. In signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on March 3, 1918, Lenin and Trotsky ceded one-third of the Russian Empire to Germany and gave it a free hand to devote all its attention to the western front.

Realizing that they now possessed the best and last chance to secure outright victory, Germany and its allies launched a series of furious offensives in the spring of 1918, just as the slow-turning cogs of U.S. mobilization propelled its army onto the battlefield. This infusion of fresh manpower, well-fed, spoiling for a fight, and oblivious of the horrors of the previous years, allowed the Allies to repulse Germany and strike back with a counteroffensive throughout the summer. By the late summer and autumn of 1918, a million American troops were launching themselves into battle—while three million were preparing to join the fray soon. The failure of its spring offensive, and the arrival of the American “doughboys,” hurt German morale. The Central and Allied Powers had fought to something approaching exhaustion by that summer, with the latter wilting badly. The U.S. Army reinvigorated the spirits of one side and rained down a deathblow on the other.

Wilson had joined the conflict on the Allied side as an “associate power,” meaning that the army, led by General Pershing, operated outside the Allied command structure, and the president retained more freedom of action than he would as a formal ally. Some might detect an irony here in that Wilson's veneration of international collaboration appeared not to extend to winning the war. Yet Wilson's rationale is explicable and admirably pragmatic: the American public was not prepared for a full-scale alliance with Britain and France, and the president retained hope that Germany might come to view American participation as the best way to concede surrender on more or less equitable terms—a possibility that would be extinguished if he hugged Paris and London too close. Wilson viewed his war aims as quite different from those of Britain and France. An important corollary to this stance of evenhandedness was making clear to the American public that the United States was fighting against the militaristic German government, not the people who suffered under its rule.

As the war continued, however, it became impossible for Wilson to lead the fight against Kaiser Wilhelm while restraining anti-German sentiment at home. At the highbrow end of the spectrum, concert halls refused to host performances of Beethoven and Bach. At a more workaday level, dachshunds were renamed “liberty hounds,” sauerkraut became “liberty cabbage,” and phrases such as “liberty measles” even became common parlance.
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Anti-German feeling increased in intensity, turning violent at times, just as Wilson had predicted it would to the editor of the New York
World
. “To fight you must be brutal and ruthless,” Wilson lamented to Frank Cobb, “and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fiber of our national life, infecting Congress, the courts, the policemen on the beat, the man in the street.”
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Wilson might have included “the president in the White House,” for the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 were both informed by a ruthless aim: to silence internal dissent. In October 1917, the historian Charles Beard resigned from Columbia University's history department to protest the firing of two colleagues who had publicly criticized the war. Beard had earlier observed that “if we have to suppress everything we don't like to hear, this country is resting on a pretty wobbly basis. This country was founded on disrespect and the denial of authority, and this is no time to stop free discussion.”
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The socialist leader Eugene Debs was jailed for uttering the factually accurate remark “The master class has always declared the wars: the subject class has always fought the battles.” In April 1918, a mob in St. Louis lynched Robert Prager, a German-born American with suspected socialist leanings. The orchestrators of the lynching were acquitted by a jury after twenty minutes of “deliberation.”
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Wartime America was becoming increasingly febrile, as Wilson had feared. But his Espionage and Sedition Acts made the situation yet more volatile by fueling the actions of hate-filled “patriots.”

As the federal government mobilized its military capabilities, and Americans learned to dislike Germans, the president applied the finishing touches to his strategy to win the peace. In the fall of 1917, Wilson requested Colonel House, his closest adviser, to assemble a group of scholars to identify the most salient postwar problems and offer advice on the best way to secure an enduring peace. The “Inquiry,” consisting of over 150 staff members, produced more than three thousand papers and reports and displaced the State Department, in the president's mind, as the principal repository of usable foreign-policy expertise.
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In October 1917, Wilson's intellectuals convened for the first time, at the New York Public Library. After passing through its Beaux Arts portico, each scholar would inform either the head librarian or his associate—the only staff aware of their purpose—that they were members of the “Inquiry,” at which point they were ushered away to a private room to commence deliberations.
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James T. Shotwell, a historian from Columbia University, came up with the group's title, later remarking that it constituted a useful “blind to the general public; but would serve to identify it among the initiated.”
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Increasingly concerned by the need to preserve anonymity, House moved the Inquiry in November from the bustle of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue to the headquarters of the American Geographical Society, on West 155th Street and Broadway. The director of the society, and soon to be president of the Inquiry, Isaiah Bowman, declined to inform his board of the purpose of his new tenants. For the Inquiry's intellectuals, these cloak-and-dagger thrills were quite a change from the normal routine of students, seminars, and archives.

Walter Lippmann served as the first secretary of the Inquiry. As an undergraduate at Harvard, he had worked with the philosopher George Santayana and “took tea” with the father of pragmatism, William James. Lippmann's intellectual gifts were such that Theodore Roosevelt described the twenty-eight-year-old as “the most brilliant young man of his age in all the United States.”
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Three years later, Wilson instructed Edward House to hire Lippmann—who was serving at that point as an assistant to Secretary of War Newton D. Baker—and allow him significant latitude in forming the Inquiry's membership and its recommendations. It was a task he performed with his customary verve. “We are skimming the cream of the younger and more imaginative scholars,” Lippmann remarked. “What we are on the lookout for is genius—sheer, startling genius, and nothing else will do.”
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On December 23, 1917, the three primary participants in the Inquiry, Sidney Edward Mezes, David Hunter Miller, and Walter Lippmann, presented a long memorandum to the president titled “The Present Situation: The War Aims and Peace Terms It Suggests.”
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After the Christmas holidays, on January 15, 1918, Wilson and House got together to draft a definitive statement of foreign-policy aspirations, culled from the Inquiry's memorandum. As House noted in his diary, “We actually got down to work at half past ten and finished remaking the map of the world, as we would have it, at half past twelve o'clock.”
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The British diplomat and intellectual Harold Nicolson later observed: “Had the Treaty of Peace been drafted solely by the American experts it would have been one of the wisest as well as the most scientific documents ever devised.”
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Wilson and House condensed the most important of the Inquiry's recommendations and divided them into “Fourteen Points,” identified by scribbling on the margins of the original document. In a speech delivered to a joint session of Congress on January 8, Wilson presented what he described as “the only possible programme” to safeguard the world's peace.

      I. Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind, but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.

    II. Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas, outside territorial waters, alike in peace and in war, except as the seas may be closed in whole or in part by international action for the enforcement of international covenants.

  III. The removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers and the establishment of an equality of trade conditions among all the nations consenting to the peace and associating themselves for its maintenance.

   IV. Adequate guarantees given and taken that national armaments will be reduced to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety.

    V. A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the Government whose title is to be determined.

   VI. The evacuation of all Russian territory and such a settlement of all questions affecting Russia as will secure the best and freest co-operation of the other nations of the world in obtaining for her an unhampered and unembarrassed opportunity for the independent determination of her own political development and national policy, and assure her of a sincere welcome into the society of free nations under institutions of her own choosing; and, more than a welcome, assistance also of every kind that she may need and may herself desire.

  VII. Belgium, the whole world will agree, must be evacuated and restored, without any attempt to limit the sovereignty which she enjoys in common with all other free nations.

VIII. All French territory should be freed and the invaded portions restored, and the wrong done to France by Prussia in 1871 in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine, which has unsettled the peace of the world for nearly fifty years, should be righted, in order that peace may once more be made secure in the interest of all.