In the Time of the Americans

by David Fromkin

  In a memorandum dated January 31, Bullitt claimed that the liberals and socialists of the Central Powers would follow Wilson. “They trust him,” wrote Bullitt. With a vision close to that of the Bolsheviks (who believed that international class war would replace war between countries), Bullitt sensed that “… the air of Berlin and Vienna is quick with the first stirrings of revolution” and that “the war has entered the era in which it is no longer a war of rival states, but a world-wide social and political revolution.” He argued that “the President of Germany and Austria are not yet prepared to follow Trotzky [sic]. They are prepared to follow the President into a new world of international order and social justice.”

  Perhaps influenced by Bullitt, Wilson delivered a speech on February 11 appealing to the peoples of Europe over the heads of their governments and outlining four principles on the basis of which peace terms should be drawn. He apparently intended to exploit the political schisms that seemed to have opened up within the enemy countries, but ironically he aggravated instead those that separated the United States from the Allies. Wilson’s principles were those of self-determination. He asserted the right of peoples to choose independence for themselves, and made no mention of the precedent established by Abraham Lincoln in denying such a right to the Confederate States of the American South. He pointedly attacked the goal pursued by Britain and France, of reestablishing a balance of power on the continent of Europe. On the other hand, and without intending it, Wilson was enunciating principles similar to those advanced by von Kuhlmann, who had been attempting to negotiate a treaty of peace with Bolshevik Russia at Brest Litovsk.

  KUHLMANN’S POLICY, as it now appears, was to fashion a peace treaty with Russia that, in the name of self-determination, would break the country up into manageable pieces. He proposed to recognize the independence of units of the former tsarist empire. Many of the new countries, too weak or vulnerable to stand on their own, would be expected to fall within the German sphere of economic and political influence. Having made these gains in the east, Germany could afford to be generous. She could turn west to offer the type of terms that Wilson and the pope had long advocated: a peace without victory. Germany could withdraw from France and Belgium, return to the frontiers of 1914, and emerge from the war, on the basis of her winnings in the east, as the preponderant power in Europe. She would also have been successful in overthrowing the prewar balance of power, in which she had been “balanced” by the alliance of the Russian empire with France—for now there would be no more Russian empire.

  But Kuhlmann was frustrated by Trotsky, whose delegation made speeches and played to the galleries of world public opinion instead of negotiating seriously. When no significant progress had been made after three weeks of peace talks, the German generals pushed Kuhlmann aside and presented their own harsh terms. The Bolsheviks did not respond, so Germany signed a separate peace with a Ukrainian delegation, making Ukraine an independent country. Trotsky refused either to make peace on Germany’s new terms or to make war. Calling Trotsky’s bluff, the Germans resumed fighting. The Bolsheviks hastily asked to resume peace talks. The Germans issued an ultimatum offering a five-day session in which to sign on Germany’s terms.

  Trotsky, seeing his mistake, came over to Lenin’s view that Russia should accept whatever terms she could get. On March 3 the Bolshevik government agreed to what the Germans proposed, surrendering claim to Ukraine and a stretch of territory from Poland through the Baltic states to Finland, and the treaty was ratified March 15.

  In Germany, the Treaty of Brest Litovsk (as Bullitt reported to House) won the enthusiastic support of all parties except the one on the extreme Left. Bullitt had overestimated the ability of civilian leaders like Kuhlmann to break away from the control of Ludendorff and the military; and he had underestimated the nationalism of the German masses. On March 6 Bullitt wrote a memorandum to Frank Polk (his superior at State) and to House (for the President) saying that “Germany to-day is more unified in support of the policy of the Government than at any time since the first months of the war.” For Wilson to issue further appeals to the German people for a peace without annexations would only unite the people further behind their leaders, said Bullitt; annexations tend to be popular with those doing the annexing, as Bullitt now seemed to see. He advised his leaders that “for the present, therefore, we had better fight and say nothing.”

  Good advice, perhaps, but in March 1918 the AEF was still about a half-year away from being ready to launch its first campaign, the proposed drive on the Saint-Mihiel salient. Wilson had been waging a war of ideas in default of being able to wage a war of any other kind.

  According to a recent biographer of the President, “Wilson was profoundly and bitterly disappointed” by the Brest Litovsk terms, which he saw as “condemning the Russians to total military and economic subordination.” As had been the case with the U-boat campaign that brought America into the war, Wilson had expected better of the Germans. Losing his illusions about Germany, Wilson now allowed himself none about the Allies; he recognized that given the chance, Britain and France would impose terms equally harsh on a defeated Germany. “From this time on,” concludes Wilson’s biographer, “Wilson knew that his chances were slim” of bringing the war to a close on the basis of America’s vision of a better world.

  The President was losing faith in his ability to carry out his mission, and somehow was losing his touch. It was to be a cruel spring for him. In the second quarter of 1918, his failures came home to the American public. When the German armies, freed by Brest Litovsk and brought back from the Russian front, overwhelmed the Allies in fresh offensives, they dramatized the failings of the United States a year after declaring war: the troops who had not yet arrived in Europe, the ships and airplanes and guns that had not yet been produced, the AEF not yet formed and therefore not yet ready to launch its first attack at Saint-Mihiel.

  To Wilson’s young followers, men like Bullitt and Lippmann, it was also painfully evident that in the ideological contests they and the President regarded as so important, America needed to do better.

  THE BOLSHEVIK COUP D’ÉTAT in Petrograd in November 1917, followed by the peace of Brest Litovsk in March 1918, had put the Russian government in the hands of men who were Woodrow Wilson’s ideological rivals, for they claimed that Wilson was a representative of the system that brings about wars and that only their system, not his, could bring into being a new world in which there would be no more wars. So in 1918 Wilson found that his war of ideas had become a two-front war. As against the nationalism and ambition of the European powers, he had to continue to oppose his generous vision of a peaceful world in which there was justice for all; and as against the competing generous vision in which the Bolsheviks claimed to believe, he had to show that his was the real thing and theirs was the fraud.

  To the extent that he was helpful to Wilson in formulating the Fourteen Points, Walter Lippmann had been an effective clarifier of Wilson’s vision. By an odd coincidence, it was a college classmate of Lippmann’s who became one of the most effective propagandists for the competing vision. John Reed, who always had opposed America’s entrance into the war, had gone to Russia with his wife, Louise Bryant, in the summer of 1917 to observe and report; while there, he became a witness of the unlikely events that delivered a great country into the hands of what had been an underground fringe of the revolutionary Left.

  Seen through Reed’s romantic eyes, the rise of the Bolsheviks was a stirring drama that promised one day to bring history to a happy end. He was careless of facts, but claimed that as an artist, he aimed at the essential truth. When the illustrator of his works objected, “But it didn’t happen that way!” Reed replied, “What the hell difference does it make?”—and went on to show that the illustrator’s drawings were inaccurate, too, in the literal sense, even though designed to convey a truthful overall impression. Whether the impression it conveyed was truthful or not, Reed’s eyewitness account, Ten Days That Shook the World (191
9), was to give readers a sense of immediacy—of having been there and lived those days themselves. It was through this account, rather than any book written by Russian Bolsheviks themselves, that much of the world eventually came to learn of the events of November 1917.

  To Walter Lippmann, who persuaded Colonel House and Secretary of War Baker of it, Reed seemed the right person to help convince the new Russian leaders that Wilson was sincere in seeking an unselfish peace, a peace with no gains for any of the belligerents, a peace such as the Bolsheviks claimed to espouse themselves. But Reed, when asked, would not undertake the mission; he looked beyond world war to world revolution.

  Bringing the notes for his book with him, Reed returned to the United States a month after the signing of the Treaty of Brest Litovsk. Government agents searched his luggage when his boat docked and confiscated the notes as revolutionary propaganda. A friend suggested asking Lippmann to help get the notes back, but the classmates had quarreled years before about who was the more serious and dedicated radical,* and Reed said, “I wouldn’t ask Walter L for anything for the whole world.” For help, Reed turned instead to Bullitt, who tried but failed.

  On May 20 Bullitt wrote to the President through House that Reed had been back for a few weeks, that he had “served for a time as Director of Revolutionary Propaganda for the Bolsheviki,” and that he had written a memorandum for Bullitt, which was enclosed. Page 14 of the memo, Bullitt claimed, contained policy recommendations that, though coming from Reed, might as well have come from Lenin and Trotsky, who would have made the same proposals themselves. A copy of Bullitt’s covering memo has been found in the Wilson papers, but the attached memorandum from Reed is missing.

  FEW ASPECTS of Wilson’s war leadership were more difficult for his admirers to explain than his attempts to stifle dissent, especially from the Left, and to manage domestic public opinion. When the United States entered the war, Wilson appointed a controversial journalist, George Creel, to head the Committee on Public Information. And from then on, to civil libertarians, it was downhill all the way.

  Creel’s mandate was to tell the truth about the war to the American public, an endeavor he described as “the world’s greatest adventure in advertising.” Creel went ahead with vigor to censor newspapers, magazines, and films; to ban books; and to disseminate the administration’s message in all media.

  Using executive orders or powers granted by such legislation as the Espionage Act, the Trading with the Enemy Act, and the Sedition Act, the Wilson administration drove publications of which it did not approve out of business, while prosecuting dissenters personally and sending them to jail. The postmaster general, the attorney general, and other officials of the administration would resort to such means as denying the right to use the post office. Socialist Eugene Debs, who had received almost a million votes in running for president in 1912, was sentenced to ten years in prison, while antiwar labor leader William Haywood was sentenced to twenty.

  Wilson was fiercely loyal to those in his administration who suppressed dissent, and especially to Creel, who painted the President’s war leadership in a glowing light. Less partisan observers were appalled. Allen Dulles, the knowledgeable young State Department official who kept watch on central European affairs from his office at the U.S. legation in Bern, Switzerland, wrote on April 29, 1918, that “we have fallen down in our year’s war effort. Creel sends over daily long bombastic telegrams of the marvels which we are accomplishing, which are regularly consigned to the waste basket.”

  Walter Lippmann, who deplored the crudeness of Creel’s efforts, was delighted in the spring of 1918 to be asked to join a small group that would run an independent propaganda effort abroad on behalf of the army. With his keen interest in public opinion, propaganda, and the war of ideas, Lippmann was sure that he could do right everything that Creel was doing wrong. Moreover, the job opportunity came at just the right time; rivalries within the directorate of the Inquiry had grown intense, personal relationships were strained, and Lippmann was on what seemed to be the losing side of a power play in which Isaiah Bowman eventually would take over de facto leadership from Sidney Mezes. It was time to leave, so Lippmann gratefully accepted the new assignment.

  Lippmann received a commission as a captain in army intelligence, and embarked for Europe in July in that capacity as well as in the role of House’s liaison with the British counterpart of the Inquiry. His mission was not a success. His cabled reports to Washington criticized Creel’s propaganda and urged that Wilson’s liberalism be emphasized in appealing to European opinion. Wilson took the criticism personally. “I am very jealous in the matter of propaganda,” he told Lansing, and “want to keep the matter of publicity in my own hands.” He associated Lippmann with The New Republic’s denunciation of the administration’s attacks on civil liberties. “I am very much puzzled as to who sent Lippmann over to inquire into matters of propaganda,” Wilson remarked to House. “I have found his judgment most unsound.… [H]e, in common with the men of The New Republic, has ideas about the war and its purposes which are highly unorthodox from my own point of view.”

  Wilson did not say how his own view of the war’s purposes differed from Lippmann’s. But he did order Lippmann and his unit to be put under Creel’s command. Although Creel had demanded Lippmann’s recall from Europe, he acquiesced in new dispositions: Lippmann was sent to France at summer’s end, with offices at AEF headquarters in Chaumont, to write propaganda leaflets to be dropped behind enemy lines.

  For the great news—more than a year after entering the war—was that the AEF at last was ready to mount its first campaign.

  * See this page–this page.

  18

  HOW TO FIGHT THE WAR

  EVEN BEFORE THE AEF finally took the field, it had become clear that General Pershing was right: the United States wanted to fight the war under its own officers—not only because America had her own goals, but also because Americans had their own ideas about how the war ought to be fought. In American eyes Allied military leadership was mired in defensive thinking. The United States believed instead in carrying the war to the enemy.

  As soon as America entered the war, President Wilson learned the seriousness of the threat that German submarines might cut off the British Isles from all supplies. Using a convoy system to increase the defensive power of Allied ships was an innovative approach pushed by British prime minister David Lloyd George and approved by the Americans. The President’s instinct was not to stop there, but to hunt the U-boats down and destroy them. Wilson’s idea, which was carried into effect, was to build vessels with sound equipment to locate the U-boats, and to use those vessels to chase and kill subs.

  Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt championed another valuable approach to ending the U-boat menace. He urged stringing a mine barrage across the mouth of the North Sea bay from which German submarines put out to sea—effectively fencing them in. There was some substance to his view that only bureaucratic foot-dragging kept the Roosevelt program from becoming effective before the war’s end.

  Robert Lovett, who had dropped out of Yale in his junior year to serve as an aviator, discovered another successful way to go after the U-boats. Lovett, who had trained with the air arm of the British navy, found that at any given time about 85 percent of Germany’s submarine fleet was in dock. Rather than searching the oceans for them, therefore, Lovett urged attacking and destroying them at their bases. He developed the aerial tactics to carry out such bombing attacks, and led death-defying raids that won him promotions and the Navy Cross. Risks were run with eyes open; his friend Kenneth MacLeish, Archibald’s younger brother, lost his life in one of the sorties after refusing a promotion that would have taken him out of combat.

  Another American who became fascinated by aviation was William Mitchell, a Signal Corps officer in his late thirties. Billy Mitchell, like his friend Douglas MacArthur, was from a politically prominent Wisconsin family; MacArthur’s grandfather was a judge, Mitchell’s
father a U.S. senator. Mitchell had enlisted in the army at eighteen to serve in the Spanish-American War, and when he came back to Milwaukee a hero at the age of twenty, had invited MacArthur to his parties. Like MacArthur, Mitchell had been appointed to the small Army General Staff in Washington in 1913. In April 1917 he was sent to Paris in advance of Pershing, Marshall, MacArthur, Patton, and the others, and served as the senior U.S. officer in France until Pershing arrived. In Europe he became intrigued by military aviation—his only avenue, as a Signal Corps officer, to combat service. He took flying lessons from the Allies.

  “The only interest and romance in this war,” he decided, was “in the air.” He studied and then created aerial tactics for fighters and bombers. He suggested dropping troops by parachute behind enemy lines: paratroops were his idea.

  Mitchell found a great deal being done wrong (to his way of thinking) in the air war, and pioneered ways of doing things right. He complained of the wastefulness of maintaining separate army and navy air arms. He discovered that none of the American military aircraft were fit for combat. To prepare for the first AEF campaign, the long-planned assault on the Saint-Mihiel salient, Mitchell begged and borrowed military aircraft from Britain, France, and Italy to ensure the air superiority that he believed would be essential.

  CAPTAIN GEORGE S. PATTON, JR., was another American career soldier who, in Europe during the First World War, found the weapon in which he came to believe. In a sense he went looking for it, for he was someone in quest of a cause. Though he was from a socially prominent, wealthy, cultured, and loving family, he was awkward in personal relations, and crude in expressing himself to or about women. Incapable of friendship, he made toughness his cult. Biographers have blamed it on the undiagnosed dyslexia that afflicted him—all the more frustrating and humiliating for being inexplicable.