The Illusion of Victory

by Thomas Fleming

  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. ” 9

  V

  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.10

  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.11

  VI

  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.12

  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.13

  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.

  VII

  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.14

  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.15

  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.16

  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.

  By the time FDR took the oath of office for a third term in 1941, this malevolent dictator had achieved power beyond the kaiser’s wildest dreams. He had destroyed the French army and driven the British army back to England, a shattered remnant. On the other side of the world, he had allied Germany with a Japan that sought to dominate Asia. Still Roosevelt feared that a call for intervention would have been defeated in Congress. Instead, he adopted a strategy of provoking Germany and Japan into attacking the United States. He finally succeeded with Japan, though he never imagined that it had the daring or skill to devastate the American fleet at Pearl Harbor.17

  VIII

  During World War II, Woodrow Wilson enjoyed a renaissance of sorts. Numerous writers told Americans that there would have been no Hitler, no Mussolini and no Stalin if Americans had taken Wilson’s advice and joined the League of Nations. The Democratic Party campaigned on this proposition in the Congressional elections of 1942—and suffered a ruinous defeat that left Roosevelt on the political defensive for the rest of the war. It would have been more accurate to argue that a genuine peace of reconciliation on the basis of the Fourteen Points might have created a liberal Germany that would have forsworn war and transformed Europe.

  The climax of this spate of Wilsonian adulation was the 1944 Darryl Zanuck film Wilson, which cost more than Gone with the Wind to produce. Portraying Wilson as a prophet tormented by evil isolationists, the movie’s climax was the president’s final speech at Pueblo, Colorado, in which the movie Wilson predicts a second world war. When the U.S. Senate approved the Charter of the United Nations in 1945, President Harry S. Truman declared that Woodrow Wilson was vindicated.18

  These belated compliments were another Wilsonian illusion. A close look at Franklin D. Roosevelt’s conduct of World War II reveals a man who spent a good deal of time and effort avoiding Wilson’s blunders. In 1940, before he ran for a third term, FDR invited two leading Republicans, Henry L. Stimson and Frank Knox, to join his cabinet as secretaries of war and the navy. When the utopian idealism of vice president Henry Wallace, who called for a “New Deal for the World,” disturbed voters, FDR jettisoned him and accepted realistic Harry S. Truman as his vice presidential candidate in 1944.

  When Roosevelt sought a name for the new international organization he envisioned at the end of World War II, he chose United Nations, the term Henry Cabot Lodge had used in 1915, when he had been a bold proponent of international cooperation. Roosevelt was almost certainly unaware of its origin. But the unintentional conjunction proved to be prophetic. As Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., noted, the new organization was modeled on Lodge’s philosophy, not Wilson’s. FDR made this even clearer when he spoke of the postwar world being patrolled by the “Four Policemen,” England, the United States, Soviet Russia and China—the concert of great powers that Wilson abhorred. There was very little idealism in this global vision.

  Soviet Russia, the problem Wilson had failed to solve, soon disrupted Roosevelt’s precarious peace. Within two years of FDR’s death, President Harry Truman’s joint chiefs of staff and his secretary of state, General George C. Marshall, were telling him that “the ability of the United Nations . . . to protect, now, or hereafter, the security of the United States” was virtually nil. George C. Kennan, the deepest foreign policy thinker of the era, suggested that “the whole idea of world peace has been a premature, unworkable, grandiose form of daydreaming.” In short, the realist side of the great American dichotomy had reasserted itself, as the UN’s weaknesses turned into virtual paralysis throughout the long decades of the Cold War.19

  IX

  On July 15, 1959, the one hundredth anniversary of the kaiser’s birth, the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) produced a film about Wilhelm II. Five days before it was broadcast, its producer, Christopher Sykes, published an article about it in Radio Times. He admitted that in his boyhood, even the mention of the kaiser sent “tremors of appalled horror through my nerves.” this was not unusual for any Briton who grew up during the era of World War I. The myth of the wicked kaiser had been propagated so relentlessly by British newspapers, even otherwise intelligent political leaders reacted with revulsion when they heard Wilhelm’s name.

  The film was remarkable as much for what it did not say as for what it said. There was no attempt to explain how the myth of the wicked kaiser came into being. Wellington House got a free pass as usual. The myth was merely stated as a fact that endured for at least ten years after World War I. Meanwhile, a parade of distinguished Britons such as Sir Harold Nicolson exonerated the kaiser from the charge of starting the war. The German ruler’s responsibility was described as small compared to leaders in Russia and Austria-Hungary.

  The VIPs described meetings with the kaiser before the war and in his postwar years of exile in Holland. Everyone burbled about his amiability and sincerity. There was much talk about his love of England and his devotion to his grandmother, Queen Victoria. The film closed with discussions of Wilhelm’s old age and death in 1941, with flattering comments on the way he displayed no bitterness toward those who had slandered him so viciously.

  Some pundits speculated that the explanation for the film was the Cold War. Some of the British press were still Germanophobic heirs of Lord Northcliffe. They continued to slander the Germans at every opportunity. Not a few Germans suspected these attacks reflected British government policy. The BBC film may have been sponsored by Lo
ndon to strengthen the British-American alliance with Germany against Soviet Communism. Whatever the motive, the film achieved at least an approximation of the historical truth. One commentator said it also demonstrated what little reliance can be placed on contemporary opinion.20

  X

  In 1962, Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., circulated a poll among historians, asking them to rate the presidents in categories from greatness to failure. One of the recipients was John F. Kennedy, partly because he was a published historian and partly because Schlesinger’s son, Arthur, Jr., was working in the administration.

  Kennedy wrote the senior Schlesinger that a year ago he would have responded with confidence to the poll. But after twelve months in the White House, he was not so sure. To make a judgment on all but the obvious big names, he would have to subject them to “a long scrutiny after I left this office.” Later, talking to the younger Schlesinger, Kennedy added, “How the hell can you tell? Only the President himself can know what his real pressures and his real alternatives are.”

  Nevertheless, Kennedy was intensely interested in the results of the poll. He was delighted that Harry Truman made the “near great” class and wryly amused that Dwight Eisenhower, whose administration he had fiercely criticized in the 1960 campaign, was near the bottom of the “average” list. But he was shocked that the poll gave such a high rating to Woodrow Wilson—fourth in the list of greats, ahead of Andrew Jackson. Kennedy strenuously pointed out that Wilson had made a botch of his Mexican intervention in 1914, edged the United States into World War I for “narrow legalistic reasons” and catastrophically messed up the fight for the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations. This was not the record of a great president.21