1917

by Arthur Herman, PhD

  “Secret diplomacy is a necessary tool for a propertied minority which is compelled to deceive the majority in order to subject it to its interests,” he continued. “Imperialism, with its dark plans of conquest and its robber alliances and deals, developed the system of secret diplomacy to the highest level . . . The Russian people, and the peoples of Europe and the whole world, should learn the documentary truth about the plans forged in secret by the financiers and industrialists together with their parliamentary and diplomatic agents.”

  He added: “The abolition of secret diplomacy is the primary condition for an honest, popular, truly democratic foreign policy . . . The workers’ and peasants’ Government abolishes secret diplomacy and its intrigues, codes, and lies. We have nothing to hide. Our program expresses the ardent wishes of millions of workers, soldiers, and peasants. We want the rule of capital to be overthrown as soon as possible. In exposing to the entire world the work of the ruling classes, as expressed in the secret diplomatic documents, we address the workers with the call which forms the unchangeable foundation of our foreign policy: ‘Proletarians of all countries, unite!’ ”31

  The treaties were published in the pages of the Bolshevik newspaper Izvestia on November 23, 1917, in Russian. The publication of the treaties and coded diplomatic telegrams might not have caused a worldwide sensation if the Manchester Guardian hadn’t gotten wind of what was happening and begun publishing the translations in English starting on December 12. Their exposure to the public set off shock waves across Europe (although French censors kept most of the details under tight wraps) and in the United States.32 Suddenly, the Allies’ high-minded statements about why they were fighting Germany in the “war for civilization,” and their supposed desire to free subject peoples living under tyranny, seemed a hypocritical sham. The inter-Allied conference being held in London at the same time, the very first attended by the United States, was already unable to agree on a new joint statement of war aims.33 Now the release of the secret treaties added to the confusion and the loss of overall direction.

  Three days after the Manchester Guardian’s revelations, Germany and Russia signed an armistice. The entire course of the war was again up in the air. David Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau were hopelessly divided as to what to do next. If anyone was going to find a new direction for joint Allied policy in the wake of these sensational revelations, and define America’s role in determining that policy, it was going to have to be Woodrow Wilson.

  WASHINGTON

  IT WAS NOW up to President Wilson to answer the challenge that Lenin had given to the Allies and, one could say, to the future of the world.

  Contrary to some historians’ views, Wilson’s instinct was not to confront Lenin head-on; to counter the Bolshevik message with an American one, there was no desire to create “a Lenin-Wilson dialectic” that would set the stage for the American-Soviet rivalry of the Cold War.34 On the contrary, Wilson’s feelings toward the Bolshevik leadership were still friendly and hopeful. The glowing vision he had expressed to Congressman Clark earlier that fall, that “Russia, like France in the past century, . . . will in my opinion take [its] proper place in the world,” remained undimmed. He saw Lenin and the Bolsheviks as essentially liberals who had temporarily lost their way and embraced extremism, but who would eventually return to the democratic course charted by the revolution in March. On December 4, he told a joint session of Congress that the Allies should have made clear their opposition to all forms of tyranny and their support for freedom: “I cannot help thinking that if they had been made plain at the very outset the sympathy and enthusiasm of the Russian people might have been once for all enlisted on the side of the allies, suspicion and distrust swept away, and a real and last union of purpose effected.”

  He added that “had they believed these things at the very moment of their revolution . . . the sad reverses which have recently marked the progress of their affairs toward an ordered and stable government of free men might have been avoided.”35

  It was not the last time a well-meaning American Progressive would express the view that if only we made our good intentions plain, the opposition of our foes would melt away. But coming from Wilson, it was an extraordinarily obtuse statement. It was Wilson whom Colonel House had urged to reach out to the Provisional Government back in August, when it might have made a difference, and to talk about the possibility of peace, and Wilson had said no. For his own high-minded reason Wilson had missed the moment, a moment when a western-style parliamentary democracy under Kerensky might have taken root in the Russian political soil. Now he and the rest of the world would have to deal with a dedicated Marxist revolutionary regime, one committed to revolution abroad and political terror at home.

  Yet Wilson was not discouraged. Even the release of the secret treaty documents, maliciously meant to damage the Allied cause, did not deter him. He believed that a rapprochement with Lenin was still possible. What truly worried him was not that the Bolsheviks would spread worldwide revolution, but that they would allow Germany to dominate Russia’s future. “Lenine [sic] and Trotsky sounded like opera bouffe,” he told a Cabinet meeting on November 27, “talking of armistice with Germany when a child would know Germany would control and Dominate and destroy any chance for the democracy they desire.”36 In short, Wilson refused to take the November revolution seriously. He remained convinced that the Bolshevik clique’s ultimate objective was democracy as well as peace. But he did see an opportunity to use the release of the secret documents to formulate his own vision of where victory in this long war would take the world and, in the process, to convince Lenin and his cohort to rejoin the effort for victory.

  On December 18, Wilson told House that he intended to “formulate the war aims of the United States.” If the Allies meeting in London could not agree on what they were fighting for, then Wilson would do it for them. His closest aide was astonished at the speed with which the president reached his decision. House admitted, “I never knew a man who did things so casually. We did not discuss the matter more than ten or fifteen minutes when he decided he would take the action.”

  It was also a strange time for doing this. The war mobilization effort was at its nadir. The War Industries Board was in a state of helpless confusion; the railways crisis was at its height, prompting Wilson to nationalize the railroads the day after Christmas (see chapter 10). Congress was still looking for ways to displace the president from his war-making powers altogether, and to install “three distinguished citizens” to run the war instead (two of them, without doubt, would be his adversaries Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge). Nonetheless, for the next two weeks, his mind was entirely focused on “remaking the map of the world, as we would have it”—or, rather, as Woodrow Wilson would have it. His ideas took the form of a speech to a joint session of Congress set for January 8.

  To help in this mammoth mental undertaking, Wilson had a memorandum prepared by a trio of young Progressive intellectuals—Walter Lippmann, David Hunter Miller, and Sidney Edward Mezes—who were tasked back in September with examining the various possible final peace arrangements, based on the facts on the ground but also on the broader principles that Wilson had already articulated going back to his “Peace Without Victory” speech of nearly a year ago, on January 22, 1917. He had asked Colonel House to coordinate the effort, and offered to pay for the work of “the Inquiry,” as the study group came to be known, out of his own presidential budget. House gave him the final memorandum on December 23, and Wilson immediately set to work.37

  Certain unshakable principles were uppermost in his mind. One was freedom of the seas; democracy was a second; a third was “self-determination”—according to House’s diary, the president became quite crestfallen when he learned that British prime minister Lloyd George had given a speech the previous year using the term, which Wilson feared had stolen his thunder. Yet now another principle for the list of principles, or points, Wilson was compiling would come shining through: open diplomacy
. Interestingly, it was Colonel House who argued most strongly for including this point. “I told [Wilson] there was nothing he could do that would better please the American people and the democracies of the world, and that it was right and must be the diplomacy of the future.”38

  The inclusion of “open diplomacy” would also be a stinging rebuke to the Bolsheviks. They would not be the only government to abolish “secret diplomacy and its intrigues, codes, and lies” or that had “nothing to hide.” Now the rest of the world, led by the United States, would follow the same path: “open covenants openly arrived at” was the way Wilson would ultimately frame it when he finished his speech—a comprehensive list of the principles the civilized world must adhere to in order to end this war and avoid all similar wars in the future, summarized in fourteen points.

  The speech, delivered to Congress on January 8, 1918, is one of the classics of American foreign policy and the climax of the Wilsonian vision of the future. In Wilson’s mind, it finally closed the book on a discredited international past and pointed the way to a new world in which war, injustice, and tyranny would wither away and die. It embodied a utopianism at least as soaring and far-reaching as Lenin’s, one that reached out to the Bolsheviks as possible future partners in establishing peace, freedom, and democracy throughout the world.

  Certainly, Russia was very much on Wilson’s mind when he wrote the speech. In the waning days of 1917, his personal emissary to Russia, Edgar Sisson, had sent a telegram to Washington that read in part: “If the President will restate anti-imperialist war aims and democratic peace requirements of America, I can get it fed into Germany in great quantities . . . and can utilize Russian version potently in army and elsewhere”—in order, it was hoped, to derail continuing negotiations in Brest-Litovsk.39

  That was exactly what Wilson proceeded to do. He began by referring to the peace negotiations in Brest, noting that the “Russian representatives” had “insisted, very justly, very wisely, and in the true spirit of modern democracy, that the conferences they have been holding with the Teutonic and Turkish statesmen should be held within open, not closed doors.”

  So, Lenin, Trotsky, and the Bolsheviks were still, in Wilson’s mind, genuine but misguided democrats. In laying “our whole thought and purpose before the world, not in general terms only, but each time with sufficient definition to make it clear what sort of definitive terms of settlement must necessarily spring out of them,” he hoped that they would come around to the Allied side, as would the rest of the peoples of the world, leaving only Germany and the Central powers out in the cold.

  With that, he laid out the principles on which the future was to be built.

  The first was “open covenants of peace, openly arrived at”—in other words, no more secret diplomacy or treaties. The second was “absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas,” a rebuke to Britain’s naval blockade as well as to Germany’s submarine warfare.

  The third was “the removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers and the establishment of an equality of trade conditions among all the nations”—a commitment to the universal principle, if not to the empirical reality, of international free trade.

  The fourth pushed for a reduction in world armaments, while the fifth stressed “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 claims of the governments in question: a rather watered-down version of the right of self-determination—the term appears nowhere in the entire speech—especially since colonies in Africa and Asia were the last place Wilson or anyone else envisaged self-determination applying.

  The sixth returned to Russia, calling for “the evacuation of all Russian territory,” meaning a total German withdrawal, “and such a settlement of all questions affecting Russia” in ways that would get Russia “an unhampered and unembarrassed opportunity for the independent determination of her own political development.” Here Wilson took the opportunity for a fresh digression in praise of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, calling them “the true spirit of democracy” and lauding their statement “of what is right, of what is humane, and honorable for them to accept . . . with frankness, a largeness of view, a generosity of spirit, and a universal human sympathy, which must challenge the admiration of every friend of mankind.”

  Indeed, Wilson’s enthusiastic words led one New York columnist to conclude that the administration was about to extend diplomatic recognition to the Bolshevik regime.40 Not quite: Wilson’s worry that Lenin might still strike a unilateral peace settlement with Berlin that would leave Russia’s erstwhile allies in the lurch and turn Russia into a permanent German satellite stayed his hand from that ultimate gesture. But if any country came out of his Fourteen Points speech with its reputation burnished and enhanced, it was Russia, specifically Lenin’s Russia—even as it was on the verge of dashing every one of Wilson’s hopes.

  After that dramatic celebration of the Bolshevik Revolution, Wilson’s next seven points were rather anticlimactic. Each was a nod to the stated war aims and interests of his other allies; they absorbed little of his own attention. Belgium had to be restored to independence (point seven); all French territory had to be restored and Alsace-Lorraine given back to France (point eight); the borders of Italy needed to be adjusted along lines of ethnic nationality (point nine).

  Point ten stated that the peoples of Austria-Hungary should be given “the freest opportunity of autonomous development,” a sure sign that Wilson was endorsing the breakup of the Habsburg monarchy. Eleven touched on the fate of Romania, Serbia, Montenegro, and other Balkan states; point twelve ensured the continued sovereignty of Turkey but also the breakup of its Middle East empire; point thirteen endorsed the creation of an independent Poland.

  But point fourteen saved the best, and biggest, for last. It was a rousing call for “a general association of nations” created by “specific covenants”—Wilson’s use of the term covenants, borrowed from the Presbyterian Church, is striking—in order to guarantee the “political independence and territorial integrity of great and small nations alike.” This was his beloved League of Nations, now inserted as one of the goals for which the war was being fought, and part of the foundation on which a lasting peace would be made. Nothing was said about preventing future wars or guaranteeing collective security; those tasks for the League of Nations would occur to Wilson later. For now, in the opening days of 1918, it was enough that the League represented as fundamental a part of a future world order as national self-determination (as noted above, a term that appears nowhere in the speech) or transparency in diplomacy.

  Then Wilson summed up his vision. “An evident principle runs through the whole program I have outlined. It is the principle of justice to all peoples and nationalities, and their right to live on equal terms of liberty and safety with one another.” He closed on an even more sublime note: “The people of the United States could act upon no other principle; and to the vindication of this principle they are ready to devote their lives, their honor, and everything they possess. The moral climax of this the culminating and final war for human liberty has come.”

  In Wilson’s mind, he had retaken the moral high ground that he had temporarily lost by allowing the United States to become involved in the war—a high ground that had nearly been captured by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Certainly, the reaction to the speech was overwhelmingly positive, in both Allied and neutral quarters. British prime minister Lloyd George dubbed it “a magnificent pronouncement,” and the Times of London called Wilson “the greatest American president since Abraham Lincoln.”41 In the avalanche of praise, those who may have felt the Fourteen Points reflected more starry-eyed idealism than grounded good sense, including Senate Republicans, chose to remain largely silent—as did the Germans.

  The time when such a speech could have moved a majority in the Reichstag (for exa
mple, during the summer) was long past. Ludendorff and the generals were now firmly in charge, and racing toward their own deadline. This was a peace to be imposed on the Bolsheviks that would have nothing to do with the ideals in the Fourteen Points, and then the wholesale transfer of German armies from east to west, for a final, Götterdämmerung-like push.

  By contrast, nowhere was the reception to Wilson’s speech more favorable than in Russia and among members of the Bolshevik government. Lenin immediately took it as an endorsement for the Bolshevik regime, and ordered it translated into Russian and posted all over Petrograd. He also sent it off to Trotsky, now in Brest-Litovsk, as a token of their success in getting the imperialists to quarrel with one another.42

  Still, Lenin was mistaken if he thought he had successfully pulled the revolutionary wool over Wilson’s eyes. In early December, Wilson had a series of meetings with Secretary of State Lansing, a man who saw the world through a lens very different from that represented by the Fourteen Points. Lansing had convinced Wilson that recognition of the Bolshevik regime had to be out of the question: a government that had imposed itself by force, including the shooting of political opponents, as American observers in Petrograd and Moscow had reported, could not have normal diplomatic relations with an America dedicated “to the supremacy of the popular will operating through liberal institutions.” Lansing had also encouraged Wilson to think about alternatives to the Bolsheviks; there were already armies taking shape in the interior of Russia ready to fight the Leninists for control, armies to which secret aid could be sent—and which could bring Russia back into the fight against Germany.43

  In short, already at the end of 1917, an alternative American policy was taking shape, one of intervention against the Leninist regime. Its goal wasn’t to crush Bolshevism; it was to prevent a German hegemony in eastern Europe. In the context of 1917 and how the war was going, it was sound thinking. The Fourteen Points may have expressed naive, pie-in-the-sky idealism, but they did not mean Wilson had taken complete leave of geopolitical reality. In regard to Russia, he would be coming back to that reality in less than six months—with fateful consequences both for Russia and for his own presidency.