American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  The German spring offensive of 1918 may have been a blessing in disguise for the novice American troops. Pershing had originally believed that he could break the German lines with attacks by “stalking, stealthy” riflemen—the kind of tough, individualistic fighters he had commanded on the western plains, in Cuba, in Mexico. But against German artillery and machine guns, Pershing’s expert riflemen would have been slaughtered en masse, just as similar French and British assaults had failed from 1914 to 1917. Even at Belleau Wood, where the Germans had had little time to fortify their positions, that sort of impromptu attack had cost the Americans enormous casualties. In the open field, however, against German columns thinned from breaking through the Allied trenches, Pershing’s aggressive infantry tactics paid off.

  The AEF also benefited from the “Iron Commander’s” emphasis on drill and discipline. “The standards of the American Army will be those of West Point,” Pershing declared in an early order. He put particular pressure on the junior officers, weeding out scores of volunteer and National Guard commanders who failed to measure up. As a result, the AEF was left with a cadre of superlative tactical leaders, young men of the caliber of Douglas MacArthur, George Patton, and George Marshall.

  More than from marksmanship or discipline, the Americans drew strength from their brash self-confidence. These fresh divisions of doughboys—each twice as large as the war-worn Allied and German units—marched to battle bedecked with flowers by the dazzled French. When one frightened peasant shouted to the Marines that the war was lost, a college linguist turned leatherneck shot back, “Pas finie,” thereby giving the Marne front its name.

  The Americans lost their freshness, if not their insouciance, in the fighting at Château-Thierry and Belleau Wood. Ludendorff himself was forced to acknowledge the toughness of his new foes. On the Marne, five platoons of the 38th U.S. were all but annihilated in hand-to-hand fighting with rifle butts, grenades, pistols; still the regiment held, and broke up the German attack. When the first American division had marched through Paris the previous summer, Colonel Charles Stanton had stopped to salute Lafayette’s tomb with the cry, “Nous voilà, Lafayette!”—“Lafayette, we are here!” Now the hardened survivors of Ludendorff’s attacks quipped, “We’ve paid our debt to Lafayette; who the hell do we owe now?”

  As late as January 1918, Wilson had not given up his hopes for a compromise peace based on the principles of democracy and international cooperation. He instructed Colonel House to assemble a panel of experts to advise him on peace terms. In consultation with Felix Frankfurter, House brought together a team of researchers and intellectuals that included Dr. Isaiah Bowman of the American Geographical Society and Walter Lippmann. This informal body, dubbed “The Inquiry” by the newspapers, assembled memos, testimony, maps—in all, more than 2,000 documents—on questions that might be discussed at a peace conference.

  More than intellectuals, events in far-off Russia affected the lives of American soldiers, scholars, and President alike in 1918. Even before they made peace with the Germans, the Bolsheviks denounced and published the czarist regime’s wartime treaties with the Allies. As Lenin intended, these secret agreements, which contemplated the division of territories of the Central Powers among Russia and its war partners, seriously embarrassed the efforts of the British and French to depict their side in the war as just and nonimperialistic.

  The publication of the secret treaties reinforced Wilson’s determination to stand aloof from the British and French, as an “associated” power rather than as a formal member of their alliance. It also put pressure on him to clarify America’s own terms for peace. The American people, he wrote House, had to be reassured that they were not fighting “for any selfish aim on the part of any belligerent … least of all for divisions of territory such as have been contemplated in Asia Minor.” With preliminary reports from the Inquiry in hand, Wilson outlined the fourteen points of his tentative peace terms in an address to Congress.

  Wilson took the Congress and the audience of Allied diplomats by surprise with his Fourteen Points speech. About half of the points were concrete terms for the territorial settlement of the war: evacuation of Belgium, Russia, France, and the Balkans; return of Alsace-Lorraine to France; self-determination for the peoples of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires; independence for Poland; adjustment of the borders of Italy. Six points, however, reached beyond the immediate conflict to address the problems that had troubled Europe over the past decades.

  Wilson acknowledged the challenge posed by the Bolsheviks. “There is ... a voice calling for these definitions of principle and of purpose which is, it seems to me, more thrilling and more compelling than any of the many moving voices with which the troubled air of the world is filled. It is the voice of the Russian people….” The President then outlined a sweeping series of reforms: open diplomacy; freedom of the seas; an end to trade barriers between nations; international arms reductions; adjustment of colonial disputes in the interests of the native populations. In the fourteenth point he declared, “A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”

  The Fourteen Points formed the basis of what historians would later call the “liberal” peace program, the general set of ideals that progressives throughout Western Europe and America were agreed upon. The German government, however, responded with a sneer at the “demagogic artifices” of “this American busybody.” In the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk the Germans demonstrated their own idea of fair peace terms, stripping Russia of 34 percent of its population, 32 percent of its farmland, half of its factories, and virtually all its coal mines. The final German answer to the Fourteen Points was Ludendorff’s spring offensive in the West.

  The ferocious German attacks in France sapped some of Wilson’s idealism. He targeted the German government as the enemy; the war had to bring the “destruction of every arbitrary power anywhere that can … disturb the peace of the world.” Otherwise, he warned a cheering crowd in Baltimore, “Everything that America has lived for and loved and grown great to vindicate ... will have fallen in utter ruin.” Wilson offered but one response to the German breakthroughs on the western front: “Force, Force to the utmost, Force without stint or limit, the righteous and triumphant Force which shall make Right the law of the world.”

  By July, more than a million American soldiers had been sent to France. In August, the Allies turned to attack all along the front. At Amiens the British broke through with four hundred tanks, the mechanical “land battleships” that Churchill had sired for the Royal Navy. The Americans too had tanks—a single brigade of borrowed French Renaults, led by a young cavalry major named Patton. With this handful of lightly armored vehicles Patton spearheaded an assault on the German salient at St. Mihiel. The Germans were already beginning to withdraw, so the Americans advanced with ease, clearing the enemy positions in just two days.

  The tanks of the First World War were unromantic offspring of the industrial revolution. Slow, squat, underarmed, almost unbearably hot, they nonetheless accomplished their purpose of cutting through enemy trench lines. The same could not be said, however, of the other grand technical innovation of the war, the airplane.

  Aviation was the one genuinely romantic service in this otherwise businesslike, butcherous war. René Fonck of France, Canada’s William Bishop, the von Richthofen brothers of Germany, Raoul Lufberry in the Lafayette Escadrille—these were the conflict’s truly glamorous figures, the handful of men who could literally rise above the mass carnage of the trenches and engage each other in single combat. To be sure, the march of military technology injected more and more prosaic elements into the lives of flyers: their planes began to mount more and better weapons with which to kill their fellow aviators from “the other side of the hill”; photo reconnaissance gave way to bombing missions against enemy troops and, for German zeppelin pilots, against enem
y cities; ground artillery began to take its toll on the flyers, supposedly killing even the legendary Red Baron, young Manfred von Richthofen. The wartime public, however, and many of the flyers too, chose not to look beyond the knightly façade. Winston Churchill was learning to fly during the war. Theodore Roosevelt, too, might have given it a try if Wilson had not explicitly barred him from military service. Roosevelt’s son Quentin did join the army’s Aviation Section (still officially part of the Signal Corps) and died in his second week of action over the Marne.

  For all the attention they received, however, the aviators had relatively little impact on the war’s course. When the Americans mounted their first independent bombing mission of the war, they could muster only eight borrowed British planes, six of which were downed and none of which bombed its assigned target. Later raids had many more planes and proportionally fewer casualties, but the results of air bombardment remained disappointing.

  In the end, Pershing’s riflemen carried the brunt of the fighting for the Americans. After the relatively easy conquest of St. Mihiel, Pershing massed almost his entire force before the Argonne Forest, a tangle of fortified ridges and woods that formed the hinge of Germany’s Hindenburg Line. The Americans jumped off on September 26, quickly gained three miles, and then ran into the main line of the Germans’ defenses. Thereafter the battle degenerated into a welter of individual fights, with small units on each side lunging through the smoke-filled woods, trading grenades and machine-gun bursts, attacking and defending individual strong points. Once again the freshness and numbers of the doughboys outweighed their relative inexperience. Slowly the Germans were driven back toward the vital rail center of Sedan.

  Even before that city fell, the will of the German leadership broke. Ludendorff, meeting with Kaiser Wilhelm on September 29, was forced to admit that his armies were in retreat all along the western front. Caught between a starving civilian population and a collapsing army, abandoned by the generals who had frog-marched him through the war, unnerved by Bolshevik agitators in his fleet and desperate calls for peace from his formerly docile Reichstag, Wilhelm gave up. On October 6, Wilson received a telegram, relayed from Berlin, requesting an immediate armistice.

  The Germans had directed their appeal to Wilson in the hope of securing peace on the relatively generous terms of the Fourteen Points. The British, French, and Italian leaders gave their general consent to a settlement along those lines, with a few reservations designed to protect their special interests, only after House had rushed to Europe to threaten them with the prospect of a separate American peace. However, Foch and the other Allied military commanders—including Pershing—were agreed that the Germans had to be prevented from using a truce to regroup for further resistance. Foch persuaded the Allied governments that, as a precondition to negotiations, the German army had to evacuate Belgium, France, and the Rhineland, and that it must turn over to the Allies vast stores of military equipment. The generals would leave the Germans with enough arms to put down any Bolshevik-inspired uprising at home, but not enough to continue the war.

  When the end finally came, it was quick. October 30: The Turks surrender to the British. November 3: Sailors of the German fleet mutiny over orders to sortie for a final suicide battle; they kill a number of their officers and refuse to leave port. On the same day, Austria accedes to terms laid down by Italy. November 7: Foch dictates his terms to the German peace commissioners. November 9: The Reichstag proclaims a republic in Germany, overthrowing the Kaiser. November 10: Wilhelm flees to the Netherlands, Ludendorff to Sweden.

  On the morning of November 11, the armistice was signed at Foch’s headquarters, a converted railroad car near Compiègne. Just before noon, the guns fell silent from the English Channel to the Swiss border; it was the first moment of calm in over four years. In, the tangle of the Meuse-Argonne, corpses of German and American boys continued to rot side by side. Gas still wisped from shell craters along the Somme. Trench scars still defaced the landscape around shattered Verdun; they would still be there decades later.

  There was no quiet in New York City on November 11. News of the armistice reached the city at 3 A.M. and within minutes the air-raid sirens were blaring. Ships in the harbor replied with their foghorns. Factory whistles added to the cacophony. Throughout the day, people swarmed in the streets, slapping each other on the back and echoing cheers. Impromptu parades snarled traffic. Society matrons, news vendors, shipwrights, and stenographers all rubbed elbows in the joyous throngs. There were cheers for Wilson and for the doughboys, catcalls for the Kaiser, good-natured denunciations of food rationing. Underlying the immediate relief over the war’s end was a dim realization that while America was untouched, or even stronger, because of the conflict, Europe lay on the edge of—as one paper put it—“Disaster … Exhaustion … Revolution.”

  Over Here: Liberty and Democracy

  War has its own trajectory and momentum. It gorges on heavy industrial goods and starves others; accelerates certain economic trends and diverts or suppresses others; levels some class barriers and creates new ones; sharpens national loyalties and stifles diversity; summons new leadership and bypasses old. In early 1917, America lay slack, loose-jointed, divided in loyalty, hazy in ideology amid the mobilized great powers. Some eighty years earlier, Tocqueville had observed that an “aristocratic nation” that did not succeed quickly in “ruining” a democratic one ran the risk of being conquered by it. He also warned that a protracted war would “endanger the freedom of a democratic country.” Would Americans conquer autocracy only to be conquered by it?

  For a time after the April 1917 declaration, Americans had appeared to remain passive, as though confused or even disgruntled. Even the leadership seemed uncertain; when a senator was told that $3 billion was needed to send an army to France, he reportedly exclaimed, “Good Lord! You aren’t going to send soldiers over there, are you?” Fighting a war 3,000 miles away seemed almost incomprehensible.

  Then the momentum of war took over. Americans rallied around their flag, their soldiers, their commander-in-chief. They burst into patriotic song; people who had been singing the pacifist song “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier,” six months later, as Ernest May remarked, were singing George M. Cohan’s stirring “Over There.” Americans knit sweaters for soldiers overseas, volunteered their services to hospitals, the Red Cross, the YMCA, the Salvation Army. Children collected peach stones to be converted into charcoal for gas masks. Hosts of people came out of retirement for war work. Families observed meatless and even wheatless days. Fidgety boys were told, “Chew your food.”

  Above all, Americans seemed ready to part with their money for the cause. War bonds, sold at immense rallies sparked by celebrities like Douglas Fairbanks, Geraldine Farrar, and Ignace Jan Paderewski, went by the hundreds of millions of dollars. Voluntary purchases of Liberty and Victory bonds, war savings certificates, and “thrift stamps” reached $23 billion, according to May, from a population with an average annual income of less than $70 billion. Americans accepted a jump in the federal personal income tax from a 1-to-7 percent to a 4-to-67 percent graduation, on all incomes over $1,000. It was a time for patriotic self-discipline.

  Under Wilson’s direction a young California newspaperman, George Creel, established the most powerful propaganda agency the nation had known. His Committee on Public Information mobilized artists like Howard Chandler Christie and James Montgomery Flagg to design war posters for liberty loans and recruiting, including Flagg’s famous “I Want You for the U.S. Army.” Creel organized the nation’s orators into a 75,000-strong army, the “Four Minute Men,” who carried the Administration’s messages to millions of Americans in grange halls, lodge meetings, schools, synagogues, churches, movie theaters, and he drafted novelists such as Mary Roberts Rinehart and hosts of historians and other scholars. Creel not only mobilized the mind of America; he opened offices in world capitals to relay his war news and Wilson’s war messages to millions of Europeans and Asians, especially Chi
nese.

  As the voices of war were piped out of Washington and amplified by the media, the attitudes of millions of Americans focused and hardened and fortified one another in an orgy of Americanism and chauvinism. Before the war, the United States had developed a “crazy quilt anti-radical pattern,” in William Preston’s words, that closed the nation to aliens if they advocated certain radical doctrines, and provided for the deportation of aliens within five years of entry if they were guilty of certain “wrong” beliefs. At this time, while the repression had not touched great numbers of persons, it had ominous potentials. “The vague terminology of deportation legislation, the removal of time limits, the withering away of due process in immigration procedure, the bureaucratic ignorance of radical ideology, and the administrative mind conditioned by its dealings with defenseless undesirables” had come to characterize Washington’s practices by 1917.

  As war hysteria mounted during that year, the people and their leaders turned their jingoism and their fear against the more defenseless targets—immigrants, aliens, radicals, pacifists, German-Americans. In the rising paranoia, local epidemics were blamed on German spies contaminating the local water supply. A high Red Cross official warned that hospital bandages were being poisoned by plotters. Armed uprisings were rumored in Milwaukee and other German-American centers. Violinist Fritz Kreisler was barred from playing a concert in East Orange, New Jersey. Brown University revoked a degree given earlier to the German ambassador to the United States.

  The juiciest target of all was the IWW, which had publicly and provocatively stuck to its stand against “war and capitalism” following America’s entrance. In the popular mind, the Wobblies stood for radicalism, aliens, strikes, industrial sabotage, threats to private property, and everything else that was opposed to 100 percent Americanism. Vigilantes in Arizona mining towns shipped hundreds of Wobblies and suspected sympathizers out into the desert. Western governors, reflecting logging, mining, and farm interests, petitioned the Wilson Administration to intern in remote camps Wobblies suspected of treason or of hindering “the operation of industries, or the harvesting of crops necessary to the prosecution of the war.”