The Illusion of Victory (78 page)

Wilson’s tendency to put every dispute and every decision on the high plane of principle has made one historian imagine his reaction when a guest at his Thanksgiving Day table took the last of the white meat for himself. Wilson would never admit he was angry at this act of discourtesy. No, his wrath was because the man called into question “the very notion of an orderly society [and] . . . the social contract.” therefore the greedy fellow must become a perpetual enemy “because there can be no compromise with the forces of anarchy and nihilism.”
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Wilson had a few fixed ideas, which he had acquired in his academic years. Perhaps the most important was a belief in party government. He refused to bring any Republicans into his war administration, ignoring the example of England and France, both of which created mixed cabinets to sustain national unity. The war within the war that raged between Wilson and Congress had not a little to do with this attitude. He repeated this performance by refusing to invite any important Republican to Paris as an American delegate.

Wilson was not a very profound thinker or a good historian. Unlike Theodore Roosevelt’s books on the War of 1812 and the history of the western movement, Wilson’s biography of Washington and his other books on American history are virtually unreadable today. Only his didactic tract,
Congressional Government
, remains interesting.

Wilsonism would seem to be not a body of ideas or principles but a way of conducting politics—not a very good way. It led inevitably to the voter alienation and outrage that repudiated Wilson more decisively than any president in American history. The public Wilson was not a likable much
less a lovable man. When Theodore Roosevelt died, Joe Tumulty, still gripped by the illusion of Wilson’s greatness, wrote that it was time to launch a campaign to make Wilson as beloved by the people as TR was. The president, Tumulty noted, was respected, not loved. Within a year, respect for Wilson had evaporated, thanks to his postwar blunders.
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If these flaws are so apparent now, why was Wilson at first seemingly successful as a war leader? Because he was a superb orator, who appealed strongly to one side of the deepest dichotomy in American life, the clash between idealism and realism. This conflict threads like a bright, sometimes blood-soaked ribbon through American history, with idealists getting much the greater share of the praise in the history books. Wilson’s idealism is why he remained revered in some circles, even in the 1920s and 1930s, when no Republican and few Democrats, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, had a good word to say for him.

But idealism is not synonymous with sainthood or virtue. It only sounds that way. The most dangerous aspect of American idealism is its tendency to become utopian, to propose as ideals a foreign policy or political reforms or a world order that ignores the realities of the way men and women—and nations—live and prosper. Not by accident did the great English statesman Sir Thomas More, the inventor of the idea of utopia, take the term from the Greek word meaning “nowhere.”

Wilsonian idealism manifested its utopian derangements again and again. Its most egregious example was Wilson’s refusal to entertain any reservations to Article 10 of the league covenant, which committed the United States to sending soldiers to wars around the world on the vote of the League of Nations. The subsequent history of U.S. involvement with world affairs demonstrates rather decisively that succeeding generations have backed Henry Cabot Lodge, not Woodrow Wilson, in affirming an international commitment but retaining control of America’s sovereignty.

An ironic footnote to this conclusion was supplied by Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., the senator’s grandson. Writing to one of the senator’s biographers, the younger Lodge pointed out that “the United Nations of today falls squarely within the limits of that [Lodge] proposition. The representatives of nations at the United Nations are ambassadors, and for the very reason that the sovereignty of their country is not compromised.” Lodge added that the decision of the American people in 1920 “in the light of human experience of the last 30 years, seems remarkably farsighted. ”
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Woodrow Wilson’s war shared Wilson’s harsh fate. Few people tried to glorify it. Starting with John Dos Passos’s
Three Soldiers
, novelist after novelist vented his spleen on its idealistic pretensions. Revisionist historians such as Harry Elmer Barnes attacked Wilson’s reasons for intervention and demonstrated the absurdity of the war guilt clause in the Versailles treaty. Politicians who had opposed the war, such as Robert La Follette, became postwar heroes, especially among liberals. In 1924, La Follette ran for president on the Progressive ticket and received 4,822,856 votes—17 percent of the total.

Another source of postwar disillusionment was the memoirs of British and French generals and statesmen, most of whom went out of their way to explain that the Americans had not won the war. They argued that the raw American army could never have succeeded against the German army the European Allies fought from 1914 to 1917. British and French troops had weakened the kaiser’s mighty host and thinned its ranks to the point where it was easy for the Americans to deliver a knockout blow. This argument grew so unpleasant, Major General Robert Lee Bullard wrote a book that he sarcastically titled
American Soldiers Also Fought.
In his usual blunt style, Bullard said the former Allies’ “patronizing disparagement” had been spread across the United States and “allowed to stand in the public mind virtually unchallenged.” He might have added that this sad fact was a tribute to Woodrow Wilson’s mishandling of the Treaty of Versailles and the consequent American disillusion with the war.
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Almost nine decades later, with the fog of propaganda swept away, it is hard to believe that anyone could advance such arguments. German losses on the Western Front were consistently much lower than the combined British and French losses. By the time the Americans arrived in 1918, the British and French armies were essentially beaten men. Nothing else explains the mass surrenders during the German offensives of 1918. Only the Americans faced the Germans with undaunted confidence. There were no British troops and only a single regiment of native-born French soldiers on the opening days of the battle of Soissons, the turning point in the war. As General Bullard put it,“After the long continued lack of success of our Allies, . . . [the] turning of the tide and the decisive results” of mid-1918 could only be attributed to the Americans.
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If the United States had refused to intervene in 1917, would a German victory in 1918 have been a better historical alternative? The answer is debatable. By 1918, the Germans, exasperated by the Allied refusal to settle for anything less than a knockout blow, were contemplating peace terms as harsh and vindictive as those the French and British imposed, with Wilson’s weary consent, in the Treaty of Versailles.
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There is another possibility in this newly popular game of what-if. What would have happened if Wilson had taken William Jennings Bryan’s advice and practiced real rather than sham neutrality? Without the backing of American weaponry, munitions, and loans, the Allies would have been forced to abandon their goal of the knockout blow. The war might have ended in 1916 with a negotiated peace based on the mutual admission that the conflict had become a stalemate. As a genuine neutral, Wilson might even have persuaded both sides to let him be a mediator. Lloyd George’s argument—that unless the United States intervened, Wilson would have no place at the peace table—was specious at best. Both sides would have needed America’s wealth and industrial resources to rebuild their shattered economies.

Germany’s aims before the war began were relatively modest. Basically, Berlin sought an acknowledgment that it was Europe’s dominant power. It wanted an independent Poland and nationhood for the Baltic states, to keep Russia a safe distance from its eastern border. Also on the wish list was a free trade zone in which German goods could circulate without crippling tariffs in France, Italy, Scandinavia and Austria-Hungary. It is not terribly different from the role Germany plays today in the European Economic Union. But the British Tories could not tolerate such a commercial rival in 1914 and chose war.
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Some people whose minds still vibrate to the historic echoes of Wellington House’s propaganda argue that by defeating Germany in 1918,
the United States saved itself from imminent conquest by the Hun. The idea grows more fatuous with every passing decade. A nation that had suffered more than 5 million casualties, including almost 2 million dead, was not likely to attack the strongest nation on the globe without pausing for perhaps a half century to rethink its policies. One can just as easily argue that the awful cost of the war would have enabled Germany’s liberals to seize control of the country from the conservatives and force the kaiser to become a constitutional monarch like his English cousin.

A victorious Germany would have had no need of political adventurers such as Adolf Hitler. Nor would this counterfactual Germany have inserted the Bolsheviks into Russia and supported them with secret-service money. Lenin and Trotsky might have agitated in a political vacuum in Switzerland unto a crabbed old age. Or ventured a revolution in their homeland that would have come to a swift and violent end. On the eve of the war, Russia had the fastest-growing economy in Europe. The country was being transformed by the dynamics of capitalism into a free society. The war created the collapse that gave Bolshevism its seventy-year reign of blood and terror.

Gazing at history’s alternatives is a stimulating and even an enlightening pastime. But ultimately it cannot tell us much about how to deal with the history that actually happened in the shrouded, mostly forgotten past.

Best to face the whole truth about World War I. It happened. The United States intervened for reasons that seemed persuasive to Woodrow Wilson and a majority of Congress, however much these justifications seem like half-truths and even untruths almost a hundred years later. Can we describe this intervention in terms that are useful to us today? Or should the war simply be written off as a gigantic blunder?

To write it off would be unwise. There are too many continuities between the Great War and the second, greater war spawned by the peacemakers at Versailles—continuities that remain a basic part of America’s world posture today. Perhaps the best way to look at Woodrow Wilson’s tragically flawed intervention in World War I is, in the words of the historian Lloyd C. Gardner, as a covenant with power. Painfully, with mistakes aplenty, the United States recognized that power is at the heart of history.
Because it was the strongest, most prosperous nation on the globe, how it used its power was bound to have a large impact on the rest of the world.
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At the Paris Peace Conference, Wilson discovered limitations to America’s power. He discovered other limitations in the hearts and minds of the American people and the politicians who represented them, when he returned to the United States. Additional limitations resided in the hearts and minds of other peoples, perhaps even in the overused idea of human nature itself, with its tendency to egoism and self interest. Still more limitations lay in the prime illusion of idealism —the expectation that noble words can easily be translated into meaningful realities.

Woodrow Wilson struggled to deal with his inadvertent covenant with power. Like Lincoln, who suspended habeas corpus and jailed hundreds of dissenters during the Civil War, Wilson tolerated a brutally realistic government of the home front. But Wilson corrupted the peace process by proclaiming principles that he failed to support, and by his lack of candor, which culminated in his blatant lie to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about the secret treaties. Worst of all was his tendency to utopianism —the truly fatal flaw in his dream of flexing America’s idealized muscles in the name of peace.

The next man to lead the United States into a great war had even less candor in his political makeup. Wilson evaded the gritty truths about a covenant with power. Franklin D. Roosevelt at first tried to avoid the whole idea. In the mid-1930s FDR did little or nothing to prevent liberals led by progressive Republican Senator Gerald Nye from holding a series of hearings that convinced millions of Americans that the Great War had been fought to enrich J.P. Morgan, Jr., the DuPonts and other tycoons. In discussing the subject with Senator Nye in 1935, Roosevelt remarked that he now thought William Jennings Bryan was right—Wilson’s intervention in 1917 was a mistake. He said the same thing in a letter to Josephus Daniels around this same time.
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In August 1936, Roosevelt said if another war broke out in Europe, it would be difficult to resist American business leaders who wanted to sell arms to the belligerents. But if the United States had to choose between profits and peace,“the Nation will answer—must answer—we choose peace.” this was very close to a total repudiation of Wilson’s war by the man who had served in his administration and had been an ardent interventionist.
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Not long after World War II began in 1939, Roosevelt became a carefully concealed interventionist. When he campaigned for a third term in 1940, he told the American people he would never send their boys to foreign wars—while ordering his generals and admirals to prepare a war plan that called for an invasion of Europe by 5 million men in 1943. As FDR saw it, American disillusion with Woodrow Wilson’s war was still too widespread and too intense for him to tell the truth to the American people.

What had happened? Woodrow Wilson’s covenant with power remained a reality, twenty years after he had bungled its presentation to the American people. By breaking his promise to Germany to make peace on the basis of the Fourteen Points, Wilson had also betrayed the liberals who created the Weimar republic at his invitation. In 1941, the republic was dead and Germany was ruled by a man who personified the accumulated rage at that betrayal: Adolf Hitler.