American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Wilson hoped that the United States could continue to exercise “the self-restraint of a really great nation, which realizes its own strength and scorns to misuse it.” Slowly, however, the country edged toward war. In February 1914 the President allowed arms to be shipped to the rebel Constitutionalists in Mexico. Still, Huerta seemed to be growing stronger; only military intervention, wrote Wilson’s personal envoy in Mexico City, could bring to an end the dictator’s “saturnalia of crime and oppression.” When U.S. sailors and Mexican police clashed in Tampico, Wilson went before Congress and requested authority to use force. The next day, April 21, American troops seized the port of Veracruz after overcoming stiff Mexican resistance.

  The occupation of Veracruz helped bring about the downfall of Huerta and the elevation of Venustiano Carranza, chief among the Constitutionalist rebels. But Carranza was no more legitimate a ruler than Huerta; Francisco “Pancho” Villa and others kept revolt brewing in the northern provinces, while Carranza took a harshly anti-American position. Wilson was rescued from this embarrassing impasse by the diplomats of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, who offered to mediate between Washington and Mexico City. With the help of the ABC powers, Wilson was able to evacuate Veracruz in November, and a year later he grudgingly extended recognition to Carranza.

  Were Wilson’s moral pronouncements merely a smokescreen for a policy of economic imperialism? Holding up Veracruz and the Caribbean interventions as examples, some observers—and some historians later— charged that Wilson “outraged the sovereignty of unwilling nations” in the interests of American business, and that his actions were indistinguishable from those of his Republican predecessors. Actually, Wilson displayed considerable restraint in dealing with Mexico. American property, and even American lives, continued to be lost in that country, yet Wilson resisted pressures to launch an all-out war. Presented with a stark choice between economic and ideological interests, Wilson used limited means and pursued democratic ends.

  When he could, Wilson did try to reconcile material interests with morality, and he achieved some success. The Philippines gained limited self-government under his Administration, and the inhabitants of Puerto Rico were granted the rights of American citizenship. In the Caribbean, intervention by the United States brought democratic reforms to several states, at least on paper. Yet it is questionable whether Wilson achieved his stated goal, to “teach the South American republics to elect good men.” Certainly in China, where there were no U.S. Marines to back up his edicts, Wilson’s policy drifted toward failure as Yuan’s regime degenerated into despotism and Sun Yat-sen was forced to flee the country. The practical question, of how ideas and force should be mixed in a single consistent approach to foreign affairs, remained unresolved. At the very least for Wilson—and for all twentieth-century Presidents—Latin America was an early schooling in the complex and powerful autonomous forces operating in what would come to be known as the Third World.

  Events in Mexico continued to frustrate Wilson. There Pancho Villa, the illiterate but wily peasant leader, had emerged as an even greater threat than the hostility of Carranza. Villa’s men lent a nationalist tincture to their banditry by killing Americans, blackmailing U.S. firms, and even raiding into the United States. Henry Cabot Lodge rose in the Senate to denounce Villa as a murderous peon, although to other Americans he seemed a Latin Robin Hood on horseback.

  Wilson finally was forced to act when Villa shot up the border town of Columbus, New Mexico, in February 1916. The President dispatched a cavalry force under General John Pershing across the border to track down the bandit chief. Pershing’s men crisscrossed northern Mexico on horseback, in automobiles, and with airplanes; they had a few colorful gunfights with the Mexicans, but Villa and his main force eluded a showdown. The main effect of the expedition was further to poison relations with Carranza. At last, in early 1917, Wilson was forced to withdraw his men—they were needed elsewhere.

  CHAPTER 12

  Over There

  LIÈGE, BELGIUM, AUGUST 12, 1914: From concealed bunkers cut into the hillside, machine-gun bullets spray out at the advancing German soldiers. The attackers hit the dirt, their freshly issued uniforms soiled with blood and grime. The Germans continue to crawl forward, only to be checked by a Belgian counterattack. Suddenly the attack halts; the battlefield is gripped by silence. Then the German siege guns, the largest in the world, come into play. Shrilling like speeding express trains, their shells arch over the crouched men in feldgrau and smash into the Belgian forts. The cannon, with their yard-long shells and barrels the length of a freight car, easily dwarf the two hundred men that service each of them. They are the “guns of August,” the heralds of Europe’s twentieth-century holocaust of total war.

  The German emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, had inspected the guns in their Krupp factories and approved their destructive purpose. But back in his palace outside Berlin, as the assassination of Austria’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand pushed Europe toward the continental war that Wilhelm had often blustered about fighting, the Kaiser’s nerve failed. Although Austria had already attacked Serbia, and Russia was mobilizing, Wilhelm summoned his army chief of staff to the royal chambers. Tall, gloomy Helmuth von Moltke informed the agitated monarch that there was no alternative: Germany’s Schlieffen Plan, for a two-front war against Russia and France, was under way and could not be stopped. Eleven thousand trains, half a million railroad cars, and nearly 2 million men were moving with meticulous precision across Central Europe. Five German columns thrust into neutral Belgium, aiming to reach Paris and destroy the French army before Russia could act. Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg announced to the German people that their fate now rested on the “iron dice” of war.

  In Paris, the leaders of the French government also met in a palace—the beautiful gilded Elysée, which seemed to embrace the diverse glories of France’s democrats, kings, and despots. Here too the political leaders found themselves at the mercy of the soldiers’ long-drafted plans. General Joseph Joffre, the stolid commander of the French army, brushed aside President Raymond Poincaré’s suggestion that a force be detached to help the Belgians. Instead, the entire army was launched against Alsace-Lorraine with the aim of wresting those two provinces back from Germany. But within days—hours in some places—the spirited French attack was bloodily repulsed. Gallic élan proved no match for German barbed wire and machine guns.

  As the French army recoiled in defeat from the German frontier, Britain’s Cabinet met in the modest row house at 10 Downing Street. Prime Minister Herbert Asquith and Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey had led their country into the war over Germany’s attack on Belgium, despite the opposition of much of their own party. Now they watched in consternation as staff officers sketched out on a large-scale map how the Germans were sweeping with unexpected strength and strategic effectiveness across the Belgian plain, heading straight for France’s unguarded northern frontier and Channel ports. Britain itself seemed suddenly in danger.

  Only one minister appeared undaunted by the Germans’ quick success. Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, at thirty-nine was regarded as a reckless soldier, a melodramatic author, and a political jackanapes of considerable flair but little reliability. Less obvious was his passion for the fleet that he had built under the tutelage of crusty Admiral Lord John Fisher, and his cool efficiency in directing it. When the Cabinet voted for war, it found that Churchill already had the navy assembled and at battle stations, ready to block any further German surprises. In Churchill’s fleet—their answer to the Germans’ cannon—the British possessed the second-strongest piece on the European chessboard.

  The most awesome piece, the 6-million-man Russian army, was commanded by the weakest player. Nicholas II, “Czar of All the Russias,” was not even master in his dreary palace on the gray Baltic seashore. Dominated by a jealous and superstitious wife; manipulated by fawning, reactionary ministers; gulled by the vicious yet mesmerizing monk Rasputin— still Nicholas himself believed the
myth of his own absolute power. Honoring a pledge to come to France’s aid at the earliest possible moment, the Czar ordered the first mobilized units of his ponderous force to make an immediate attack on Germany.

  As two hastily assembled armies of white-uniformed peasants advanced slowly over sandy roads into East Prussia, the limitations of czarist fiat became clear. Nicholas could not will into being the supplies of telegraph wire, shells, horses—even the black bread and tea of the men’s rations—that ran short in the very first days of the offensive. Nor could he overcome the years of neglect by a war minister who denounced machine guns and rifled cannon as “vicious innovations” and insisted that the Russian army continue its reliance on the bayonet. Most of all, there was an unfillable void of leadership. Men of ability—including the Czar’s own cousin—had been systematically barred from power as threats to the regime’s sclerotic stability. Even the cunning Rasputin was incapacitated at this crucial moment, hospitalized with a knife wound inflicted by an outraged woman. And Russia’s finest strategic mind was a thousand miles away, in exile and bitter opposition.

  In neutral Switzerland, a small group of Russian émigrés watched with a wild surmise as Europe disintegrated around them. Most of these assorted literati and revolutionaries had their eyes fixed on Russia, where the czarist regime began to crumble beneath the hammer blows of 1914 and 1915. A few, however, looked farther, and among these was a balding, Tatar-eyed Marxist named Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov.

  Ulyanov, a brilliant lawyer turned revolutionary, had for more than two decades cut a swath through Russia’s underground politics. Under the nom de révolution of Lenin he had led the Bolsheviks, the most extreme faction of the Marxist Social Democratic Party. Now exiled in Zurich, Lenin was at low ebb politically. He was cut off from Russia, bereft of all but a few diehard supporters, earning a meager living with occasional library work. Sharing an apartment with the family of a shoemaker, he and his wife Krupskaya took their meals at a dilapidated boardinghouse that Krupskaya suspected of being frequented by criminals.

  Yet if Lenin was almost barren of political resources, he was powerful in intellectual ones. In his Zurich rooms, he drafted his most devastating attack on the international political-economic order, in a pamphlet entitled Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, which laid the blame for the holocaust of World War I squarely on the system of industrial monopolies that had transformed Europe and America over the preceding decades. The war was caused not by faulty leadership or rising nationalism or uncontrolled militarism; rather it was “an annexationist, predatory, plunderous war” being fought “for the division of the world, for the partition and reparation of colonies, ‘spheres of influence’ of finance capital.” The strains and contradictions of monopoly capitalism had reached out to engulf the entire world, and now they were grinding to their inevitable bloody conclusion in the trenches of Europe.

  Drawing on the work of J. A. Hobson, Lenin documented the growth of industrial capitalism into a global system of investment and control, especially the concentration of industrial holdings into giant monopolistic holdings throughout Europe and America. In the United States, for example, 1 percent of the firms in the country employed 30 percent of the workers, used more than 75 percent of the electric and steam power generated, and produced 43 percent of all output. These huge combines, Lenin concluded, were forced to look abroad for further growth. Thus Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company, the Anglo-Dutch Shell trust, and a consortium of German banks divided up control of wells in Russia, Romania, and the East Indies, as did the House of Morgan and German shipping cartels of world steamship lines. “Today,” he summarized the world situation, “monopoly has become a fact.”

  Railroads in particular seemed to fascinate Lenin. Railroad construction, he claimed, seemed a “simple, natural, democratic, cultural and civilising enterprise…. But as a matter of fact the capitalist threads, which in thousands of different intercrossings bind these enterprises with private property in the means of production in general, have converted this work of construction into an instrument for oppressing a thousand million people (in the colonies and semi-colonies), that is, more than half the population of the globe.”

  As the economic struggle for division of the world continued, Lenin claimed, it increasingly took the form of violence and political domination. By the early 1900s, the world was completely divided; only a redivision was possible. Since the industrial nations, in Lenin’s analysis, were buying off their working classes with the profits squeezed from colonies, that redivision was imperative. Since each of those nations had built great military machines, the redivision would be by force. The result, he concluded, was the World War.

  In 1914 events appeared to be marching to Lenin’s arguments. One by one, the nations touched by the industrial revolution were drawn into the European war: Japan, Turkey, Italy, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece. Armies clashed in eastern Africa and the Arabian deserts; fleets battled off South America; men came from Saskatoon, Pretoria, and Auckland to fight in Flanders. Only one industrial power was still uninvolved—and for it too time might run out.

  Wilson and the Road to War

  The outbreak of fighting in Europe came as a sudden shock to most Americans—“like lightning out of a clear sky,” one congressman wrote. Even Edward House, who from Berlin had warned Wilson in May that “an awful cataclysm” was in store, returned to the United States on July 21 confident that the situation in Europe was improving. Seven days later, Austria attacked Serbia; within another week eight countries were in the war.

  In contrast to the galvanized chancelleries of Europe, the military and diplomatic establishments in Washington hardly stirred in the August heat. The State, Navy, and War departments—all housed in a massive granite and iron pile that Henry Adams had dubbed the “architectural infant asylum”—responded but feebly to the distant crisis. Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt, after rushing back to his office from Cape Cod on July 30, was appalled to find that “nobody seemed the least bit excited” about the war. In Theodore Roosevelt style, the young Roosevelt struggled for several days to get the American fleet mobilized and concentrated for possible action, but he sparked little response from the officers and bureaucrats around him. The War Department, meanwhile—with its bare rudiments of a general staff and a peacetime army of just 100,000 men—was even more somnolent.

  Over in the State wing of the building, Secretary Bryan tried to intervene on the side of peace. Roosevelt thought him hopelessly naive. “These dear good people like W.J.B.,” FDR wrote to his wife Eleanor, “… have as much conception of what a general European war means” as his four-year-old son had of higher mathematics. But it was neither naïveté nor unpreparedness that was frustrating Bryan; rather, it was the lack of direction from across the street, at the White House.

  Wilson, who had never shown a strong interest in European affairs, now seemed to turn his back on the Continent. When reporters asked whether he would tender his good offices to the warring powers, Wilson snapped that tradition, forbade America to “take part” in Europe’s quarrels. Likewise he spurned repeated suggestions from Bryan that the President offer himself as a mediator. Wilson met with the Cabinet on August 4, approved a plan to evacuate Americans stranded in Europe by the war, and agreed to an immediate declaration of neutrality accompanied by a statement urging Americans to remain “neutral in fact as well as in name, impartial in thought as well as in action.” Then he hurried back to the sickbed of his wife, whose worsening health had preoccupied him throughout the crisis. Later that night he wrote to a friend, “The more I read about the conflict across the seas, the more open it seems to me to utter condemnation. The outcome no man can even conjecture.” Two days later Mrs. Wilson died, and the President briefly seemed on the verge of collapse.

  Emotion shaped Wilson’s initial response to the war: contempt toward the Europeans for allowing it to occur, outrage at the German violation of Belgium, and most of all his personal sorro
w. But underlying his emotional rejection of the war was a moral vision, and as the months passed and Wilson more dispassionately studied the deadlock in Europe, that vision came to dominate his thinking. America would redeem warring Europe (just as she sought to uplift Asia and Latin America) by holding aloft the beacon of liberty and peace. By January 1915, he was calling on his countrymen to exult in their neutral stance. “Look abroad upon the troubled world. Only America at peace!

  “Think of the deep-wrought destruction of economic resources, of life and of hope that is taking place in some parts of the world, and think of the reservoir of hope, the reservoir of energy, the reservoir of sustenance that there is in this great land of plenty. May we not look forward to the time when we shall be called blessed among the nations because we succored the nations of the world in their time of distress and dismay?”

  For Woodrow Wilson the World War offered both horror and hope. Like Lenin, Wilson believed that a radically different world order could be built from the international system that the war was smashing to pieces. Both men, from their neutral sanctuaries, saw the holocaust engulfing Europe as the product of fundamental flaws in the old order. Beyond that, however, their agreement ended. For Lenin, Europe’s crime was capitalism; for Wilson it was selfish power politics. Lenin took his blueprint for change from Das Kapital, Wilson from the New Testament and his father’s Presbyterian sermons. And while Lenin commanded only a dispirited handful of revolutionaries, Wilson led one of the most powerful nations on earth.