The Illusion of Victory

by Thomas Fleming

  6. Gilbert Parker, “The United States and the War,” Harper’s Monthly, March 1918, 521–531; and H.C. Peterson, Propaganda for War: The Campaign Against American Neutrality (Port Washington, N.Y., 1968), 16.

  7. Peterson, Propaganda for War, 19.

  8. Ibid., 21, 31.

  9. Ross, Propaganda for War, 82, 181–184.

  10. Typical of these Anglo immigrants was Toronto-born George H. Doran, whose publishing house issued a stream of books attacking Germany. His memoir, Chronicles of Barabbas (New York, 1935), candidly recounts his pro-British activities.

  11. Ross, Propaganda for War, 78–79; and Robert Rhodes James, The British Revolution, 1880–1939 (New York, 1977), 365. Northcliffe controlled half the daily newspapers sold in London.

  12. James, The British Revolution, 285.

  13. Nancy Mitchell, The Danger of Dreams: Weltpolitik versus Protective Imperialism, Ph. D. dissertation (Johns Hopkins University, 1993), 315–318.

  14. Michael Balfour, The Kaiser and His Times (New York, 1964), 441–446, offers a wealth of statistics demonstrating that Germany had passed England in virtually every imaginable economic indicator.

  15. James, The British Revolution, 290–292. As late as July 28, ten of the twenty members of Asquith’s cabinet were threatening to resign if England declared war.

  16. Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (New York, 1998), 200–208, 225–234.

  17. Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (New York, 1998), 1–30. No one has done a better job of exploding these half-truths than Ferguson in his opening chapter, “The Myths of Militarism.” See also Stuart D. Brandes, Warhogs: A History of War Profits in America (Lexington, Ky., 1997), 122–123. Brandes notes the popularity of Militarism, a book by Karl Liebknecht, the leader of the radical wing of the Socialist Party in the German Reichstag. It was published in the United States in 1917 and widely reviewed and discussed.

  18. Link, Campaigns for Progressivism and Peace, 276. In 1910, only 28 percent of British adults could vote. Pressure from the Labor Party forced the upper classes to give significant ground during the war. By 1918, 78 percent could vote. It would take another ten years to achieve universal suffrage (James, The British Revolution, 396).

  19. John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven, Conn., 2000), 11–86.

  20. Peterson, Propaganda for War, 55.

  21. Ibid., 69.

  22. Viscount Bryce,“Report of the Committee on Alleged German Outrages” (hereafter cited as Bryce Report), World War I Document Archive, available at http://www.ku.edu/~hisite/ bryce_report/bryce_r.html.

  23. New York Times, May 13, 1915.

  24. Trevor Wilson, “Lord Bryce’s Investigation into Alleged German Atrocities in Belgium, 1914–15,” Journal of Contemporary History 14 (1979): 370.

  25. Angus Mitchell, “James Bryce, Roger Casement and the Amazon,” paper delivered to the Oriel College History Foundation, 1997, 10.

  26. Gary Mead, The Doughboys: America and the First World War (New York, 2000), 39.

  27. Peterson, Propaganda for War, 58.

  28. Horne and Kramer, German Atrocities, 235–236, 255. Horne and Kramer, historians at Trinity College in Dublin, estimate 6,500 civilians, mostly men, were killed by the Germans. An American historian, Larry Zuckerman, at work on a similar book about German behavior in Belgium, has a slightly lower figure, 5,521.

  29. Bryce Report, 31; and Wilson, “Lord Bryce’s Investigation,” 374–375. Bryce’s report included numerous diaries taken from dead or captured Germans. They recounted shooting supposed franc-tireurs, but there was no evidence of mutilation or rape. Trevor Wilson speculates that Bryce left the lurid material in the report because it was what the public wanted to read. More to the point, basing the report only on shooting franctireurs would have gotten the British into a difficult argument with the Germans, given the abundance of civic guards in the Belgian army.

  30. Ross, Propaganda for War, 56.

  31. Harvey A. Deweerd, President Wilson Fights His War: World War I and American Intervention (New York, 1968), 15–16. Diana Preston, “Lusitania”: An Epic Tragedy (New York, 2002), 389–391, 401–403, explores the numerous investigations of the sinking and concludes there was no second torpedo. But there is little evidence that the second explosion was caused by the ammunition aboard the ship. The cartridges and shells were stowed toward the stern, and the torpedo struck near the bow. The second explosion was probably caused by a ruptured boiler. David Ramsay, “Lusitania”: Saga and Myth (New York, 2001), 205–217, strongly endorses this conclusion. He also maintains the liner’s watertight construction was inadequate and the vessel would have sunk almost as swiftly without the second explosion.

  32. Peterson, Propaganda for War, 62–63.

  33. Ross, Propaganda for War, 70–71.

  34. William Jannen, Jr., The Lions of July: Prelude to War, 1914 (Novato, Calif., 1996), 27–28.

  35. Haste, Keep the Home Fires Burning, 114–115; Ross, Propaganda for War, 43–44; and Horne and Kramer, German Atrocities, 297–301.

  36. David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York, 1980), 74.

  37. New York Times, June 8, 1913.

  38. Dennis E. Showalter,“Salonika,” Quarterly Journal of Military History 10, no. 2 (winter 1990): 44–55.

  39. Nicholas P. Canny,“The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 30 (October 1973): 575–598, demonstrates how the same manipulation of ideas enabled the English to slaughter the Irish in the sixteenth century and the American Indians in the seventeenth century without a qualm of conscience. For an excellent historical analysis of the Black Legend, see Philip Wayne Powell,Tree of Hate (Vallecito, Calif., 1985).

  40. Peterson, Propaganda for War, 123; and Ross, Propaganda for War, 110.

  41. Ross, Propaganda for War, 115–116.

  42. John Bernard Duff, The Politics of Revenge: The Ethnic Opposition to the Peace Policies of Woodrow Wilson, Ph. D. dissertation (Columbia University, 1964), 24.

  43. Ibid., 27.

  44. Ibid., 24–25.

  45. Ross, Propaganda for War, 103.

  46. Ibid., 112–113.

  47. Ibid., 124–127.

  48. James, The British Revolution, 260. The Dublin death rate was 27.6 per 1,000, the highest of any capital in Europe.

  49. John Patrick Buckley, The New York Irish: Their View of American Foreign Policy, 1914–21 (New York, 1976), 10–11; and Jeremiah O’Leary, The Conquest of the United States: A Book of Facts (New York, 1915), 28.

  50. Buckley, The New York Irish, 29.

  51. Gaelic American, February 3, 1917; and Buckley, The New York Irish, 37.

  52. Buckley, The New York Irish, 23, 37.

  53. Ibid., 52.

  54. Ibid., 53, 91.

  55. Duff, The Politics of Revenge, 34.

  56. Buckley, The New York Irish, 96; and Nancy Gentile Ford, Americans All: Foreign Born Soldiers in World War I (College Station, Tex., 2001), 21–22. O’Leary responded with a twenty-three-page public letter to Wilson, in which he angrily denied the slur of disloyalty. He had served in New York’s “Fighting 69th” regiment during the Civil War.

  57. Haste, Keep the Home Fires Burning, 99.

  58. Ibid., 100.

  59. Ross, Propaganda for War, 64.

  60. Haste, Keep the Home Fires Burning, 99.

  61. Horne and Kramer, German Atrocities, 259–260; and Ross, Propaganda for War, 113.

  62. Haste, Keep the Home Fires Burning, 100.

  63. Ross, Propaganda for War, 158–160.

  64. Petersen, Propaganda for War, 84.

  65. Ibid., 86.

  66. Louis W. Koenig, Bryan: A Political Biography of William Jennings Bryan (New York, 1971), 535.

  67. Ibid., 536.

  68. Ibid., 538.

  69. Matthew Ware Coulter, The Senate Munitions Inquiry
of the 1930s: Beyond the Merchants of Death (Westport, Conn., 1997), 109–111. See also John E. Wiltz, In Search of Peace: The Senate Munitions Inquiry, 1934–36 (Baton Rouge, La., 1963), 197.

  70. Ross, Propaganda for War, 156; and Preston, “Lusitania,” 389–390.

  71. Ibid., 156–157.

  72. Ibid., 155.

  73. Devlin, Too Proud to Fight, 303–304.

  74. Mead, The Doughboys, 5–6.

  75. Millis, Road to War, 114; and Coulter, Senate Munitions Inquiry, 115.

  76. Ross, Propaganda for War, 146.

  77. Ibid., 146–147.

  78. Mark Sullivan, Our Times: The United States, 1900–1925, vol. 5, Over Here (New York, 1923), 184–196.

  79. Ross, Propaganda for War, 206–207.

  80. Ferguson, The Pity of War, 294–303, demonstrates that throughout the war, Allied casualties exceeded German losses by as much as 35 percent.

  81. Link, Campaigns for Progessivism and Peace, 381; Baker,Woodrow Wilson, vol. 6, Facing War, 496; and Devlin,Too Proud to Fight, 661. On February 22, 1917, economist John Maynard Keynes told the British government that bankruptcy would occur “four weeks from today.”

  82. Arthur S. Link, Wilson: The Road to the White House (Princeton, 1947), 24.

  83. Seymour, Intimate Papers of Colonel House, 2:278–280.

  84. John Milton Cooper, Jr., “The British Response to the House-Grey Memorandum: New Evidence and New Questions,” Journal of American History 14, no. 4 (March 1973): 961–965.

  85. Link, Campaigns for Progressivism and Peace, 28–38.

  86. Seymour, Intimate Papers of Colonel House, 2:278; and Devlin, Too Proud to Fight, 613. As early as June 1916, the German foreign minister wrote to Ambassador Bernstorff:“We entertain but little hope for the result of the exercise of good offices by one whose instincts are all favorable to the English point of view” (Link, Campaigns for Progressivism and Peace, 30–31).

  87. Devlin, Too Proud to Fight, 381–382. When Wilson bluntly asked Lansing if he agreed with his policies, the secretary lied and said he was “unswervedly in support” of the president.

  88. Ibid., 646–647. The idea was not original with Lloyd George. Ross, Propaganda for War, 37, notes H.G. Wells floated it in his 1914 book, The War That Will End War. A few weeks after Lloyd George’s message arrived, Secretary of State Lansing wrote the president a memo, saying almost exactly the same thing. Only by going to war would Wilson be able to guarantee a defeated Germany “a merciful and unselfish foe”(Devlin, Too Proud to Fight, 665).

  89. Link, Campaigns for Progressivism and Peace, 414.

  90. Robert A. Kraig,Woodrow Wilson and the Lost World of the Oratorical Statesman, Ph. D. dissertation (University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1999), vi–vii.

  91. Ross, Propaganda for War, 261.

  92. “U.S. Merchant Ships, Sailing Vessels and Fishing Craft Lost from All Causes during World War I,” available at American Merchant Marine at War Web site [http/www/usmm.org]; and U.S. Navy, Historical Section, American Ship Casualties of the World War, including Naval Vessels, Merchant Ships, Sailing Vessels and Fishing Craft (Washington, D.C., 1923).

  93. John Morton Blum, Joe Tumulty and the Wilson Era (Boston, 1951), 99; and Sullivan, Our Times, vol. 5, Over Here, 143–144.

  94. Lloyd C. Gardner, Safe for Democracy: The Anglo-American Response to Revolution (New York, 1984), 108.

  95. Devlin, Too Proud to Fight, 595–607.

  96. Sir Cecil Spring Rice, The Letters and Friendships of Sir Cecil Spring Rice: A Record (New York, 1929), 387.

  97. W.B. Fowler, British-American Relations 1917–1918: The Role of Sir William Wiseman (Princeton, 1969), 22–23.

  98. William C. Widenor, Henry Cabot Lodge and the Search for an American Foreign Policy (Los Angeles, 1980), 264–265. Soon after the declaration of war, Lodge mused in his diary: “I wonder if the future historian will find him [Wilson] out?”

  Chapter 3: Enlisting Volunteers and Other Unlikely Events

  1. Ray Stannard Baker,Woodrow Wilson: Life and Letters, vol. 7,War Leader (New York, 1939), 24.

  2. Kennedy, Over Here, 144.

  3. Donald Smythe, Pershing: General of the Armies (Bloomington, Ind., 1986), 8–9.

  4. John Whiteclay Chambers II, To Raise an Army: The Draft Comes to Modern America (New York, 1987), 165.

  5. Blum, Joe Tumulty and the Wilson Era, 139; Livermore, Politics Is Adjourned, 17–18; and Chambers, To Raise an Army, 161–162, 327 (note 31).

  6. John Milton Cooper, Jr., The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), 324.

  7. Tumulty,Woodrow Wilson As I Know Him, 288. Chambers, To Raise An Army, 135–138, notes that Wilson had repeatedly rejected Army Chief of Staff Scott’s call for conscription. But late in March, when Roosevelt announced his plan for a volunteer division, Wilson switched to the draft.

  8. Tumulty,Woodrow Wilson As I Know Him, 288.

  9. Kennedy, Over Here, 149.

  10. Peterson, Propaganda for War, 324. The author’s father-in-law, Albert Mulcahey, confirmed this assumption in a personal interview before his death. A football star in his native Yonkers, he was eager to see action and joined the navy in 1917. To his dismay, he never had a shot fired at him.

  11. Livermore, Politics Is Adjourned, 24.

  12. Ibid., 25–28.

  13. Ibid., 28–30.

  14. Baker, Woodrow Wilson, vol. 7, War Leader, 71–72; Herman Hagedorn, Leonard Wood (New York, 1931), 219–222.

  15. Geoffrey Hodgson, The Colonel: The Life and Wars of Henry Stimson, 1867–1950 (New York, 1990), 83–84.

  16. PWW, 42:324–325. Wilson also claimed that regular army officers who would serve with the volunteers were needed to train the draftees and insisted he was acting “under expert and professional advice from both sides of the water.”

  17. Kennedy, Over Here, 151.

  18. Baker, Wilson, vol. 7,War Leader, 73.

  19. Widenor, Henry Cabot Lodge, 228.

  20. Ibid., 83–85, 212–214.

  21. Stephen Vaughn, Holding Fast the Inner Lines: Democracy, Nationalism and the Committee on Public Information (Chapel Hill, N. C., 1980), 14–19.

  22. Tebbel and Watts, The Press and the Presidency, 375.

  23. Sullivan, Our Times, vol. 5, Over Here, 427.

  24. George Creel, How We Advertised America (New York, 1920), 5.

  25. Hagedorn, Leonard Wood, 217.

  26. Peterson, Propaganda for War, 323–324.

  27. James R. Mock and Cedric Larson, Words That Won the War: The Story of the Committee on Public Information (Princeton, 1939), 114–115.

  28. Ibid., 118.

  29. Kennedy, Over Here, 152–153.

  30. H.C. Peterson and Gilbert C. Fite, Opponents of War, 1917–1918 (Seattle, 1968), 25–26. See also Chambers, To Raise an Army, 205ff.

  31. Peterson and Fite, Opponents of War, 28; Sullivan, Our Times, vol. 5, Over Here, 309;Washington Star, June 5, 1917.

  32. Sullivan, Our Times, vol. 5, Over Here, 309; and Peterson and Fite, Opponents of War, 24.

  33. New York Times, April 15, 1917; and Washington Post, May 3 and 6, 1917.

  34. Livermore, Politics Is Adjourned, 33–34.

  35. Peterson and Fite, Opponents of War, 17.

  36. Robert H. Ferrell,Woodrow Wilson and World War I, 1917–1921 (New York, 1995), 120.

  37. Smythe, Pershing: General of the Armies, 8.

  38. Ibid.; and Kennedy, Over Here, 170.

  39. Weinstein,Woodrow Wilson: A Medical and Psychological Biography, 316.

  40. Ibid., 317.

  41. Hagedorn, Leonard Wood, 217; and Smythe, Pershing: General of the Armies, 3.

  42. Frank E. Vandiver, Black Jack: The Life and Times of John J. Pershing (College Station, Tex., 1977), 595–598.

  43. Smythe, Pershing: General of the Armies, 4.

  44. John J. Pershing, My Experiences in the World War (New York, 1931), 1; and Vandiver, Black Jack, 675–676.

&
nbsp; 45. Pershing, My Experiences, 2.

  46. Hagedorn, Leonard Wood, 213; and Pershing, My Experiences, 16, 26.

  47. Smythe, Pershing: General of the Armies, 9–10.

  48. Pershing, My Experiences, 23; and Smythe, Pershing: General of the Armies, 11.

  49. Edward M. Coffman, The War to End Wars: The American Military Experience in World War I (Madison, Wis., 1966), 48–49.

  50. Pershing, My Experiences, 42.

  51. Kennedy, Over Here, 74.

  52. Joan M. Jensen, The Price of Vigilance (New York, 1968), 15–16.

  53. Ibid., 24–25.

  54. Ibid., 43–45.

  55. Peterson and Fite, Opponents of War, 45–46, 74.

  56. Ibid., 30–33.

  57. Ibid., 34–35.

  58. Paul L. Murphy,World War I and the Origin of Civil Liberties in the United States (New York, 1979), 130–132.

  59. Buckley, The New York Irish, 181–182.

  60. Baker,Woodrow Wilson, vol. 7,War Leader, 197; Kennedy, Over Here, 88.

  61. Mark Ellis, Race, War and Surveillance: African Americans and the United States Government During World War I (Bloomington, Ind., 2001), 15–17, 26.

  62. Ibid., 31ff; and Peterson and Fite, Opponents of War, 87–88.

  63. Ellis, Race War and Surveillance, 42.

  64. Ibid., 46; and Peterson and Fite, Opponents of War, 89–90.

  65. Peterson and Fite, Opponents of War, 90.

  66. Smythe, Pershing: General of the Armies, 15.

  67. Ibid., 16.

  68. Ibid., 17.

  69. James G. Harbord, The American Army in France, 1917–19 (Boston, 1936), 79.

  70. Smythe, Pershing: General of the Armies, 30; Harbord, The American Army in France, 79–80; and Pershing, My Experiences, 59–60.

  71. Vandiver, Black Jack, 718–719.

  72. Pershing, My Experiences, 78.

  73. Smythe, Pershing: General of the Armies, 21–22.

  74. Richard M. Watt, Dare Call It Treason (New York, 1963), 251–252.

  75. Pershing, My Experiences, 75; Coffman, The War to End All Wars, 124.