Empires Apart

by Brian Landers

  Wilson had far more sympathy with women than with the descendants of slaves whose emancipation his family had firmly resisted. In an early demonstration of corporate political power, women’s suffrage had been blocked largely by a business lobby of the brewers and distillers, who feared female support for Prohibition, and corporations in industries like textiles, mining and railways who feared that women would throw their weight behind campaigns for greater social benefits. Under Wilson this opposition was overcome, and women in the United States received the right to vote in 1920, two years after women’s suffrage was achieved, at least in theory, in Russia.

  In 1916 Wilson was re-elected by the last all-male presidential electorate. He campaigned as the man who had kept America out of the First World War, despite pro-war sentiments voiced by the likes of Theodore Roosevelt, but made clear that he was no pacifist. Just as Taft had invaded Nicaragua and installed a puppet regime immediately before the previous election, Wilson invaded the Dominican Republic just before this one.

  Because the United States had remained neutral through most of the war, American corporations were able to trade with both sides. By 1917 US trade with the allies had grown sevenfold and with Germany somewhat less. Increasing quantities of military equipment and civilian supplies were bought by the British government and its allies, much of it on credit. American banks and corporations made enormous profits from the conflict, but the cost of the war effort and the disruption of the war itself were making it increasingly difficult for the combatants to fund their purchases. There comes a point where even the largest banks want to see their loans repaid. At the same time Germany’s attempts to win the war became ever more extreme, and German submarine attacks claimed more and more American lives. With Russia in turmoil following the tsar’s abdication, on 6 April 1917 Wilson signed the declaration of war against the Central Powers. To bring America round to supporting the war he set up a massive propaganda ministry: the US Committee for Public Information. The CPI determined that public opinion was something to be ‘manufactured not reasoned with’ and recruited thousands of volunteers to spread its message. Americans were told that their nation would become an alien land named New Prussia if Germany won. Hollywood was instructed to ensure that all foreign showings of its movies were accompanied by suitable US propaganda films. It was the first application of modern PR and marketing for foreign policy objectives, and would have enormous implications for the way subsequent generations of American policy-makers sought to guide the democratic process at home and abroad. Wilson thought the war was almost over, and his main objective was to be in a position to influence the peace settlement. He was wrong, and eventually more than 4 million American troops sailed to face the enemy from Flanders to Siberia.

  The war changed the balance of power in the world for ever. The role of the United States as effectively the allies’ banker fundamentally changed the rules of the game. Three years after the war ended the British ambassador in Washington wrote in despair to his superiors in London that the US intended ‘to treat us as a vassal state so long as our debt remains unpaid’. Wilson was determined to use this power to change the world and make it reflect his own vision of a global family of nations working together in a League of Nations. He believed that the empires of the nineteenth century would eventually wither away, much as Lenin expected the state itself to eventually disappear, when people everywhere had reached the right level of development. To this end Wilson supported the determination of General Graves not to get involved in an imperial carve-up in Siberia. But it would be wrong to say that Wilson was anti-imperialist; rather he represented the new corporate imperialism that saw the future in terms of marketing, not marines.

  In 1907, in a lecture at Columbia University, Wilson had said: ‘Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process … the doors of the nations which are closed must be battered down.’ And after he became president, Wilson continued to advocate ‘the righteous conquest of foreign markets’. US interests would be best satisfied, he believed, by creating the sort of conditions under which US corporations could trade profitably with the rest of the world. The dangers for the rest of the world were often obvious. F.A. Mackenzie’s The American Invaders, published in 1902, is an impassioned attack on the activities of American corporations in Britain; it had absolutely no lasting impact. (One of Mackenzie’s complaints was that Americans bought up British government bonds so that British tax revenues had to be sent abroad in the form of interest payments, nowadays more of a problem for American taxpayers.)

  Wilson became the first sitting American president to visit Europe when he attended the peace conference at the end of the war to present his famous Fourteen Points, which formed the basis for the Treaty of Versailles. (As the French leader Clemenceau is reported to have cried in exasperation, ‘Even almighty God only had ten’.) Two of the points were harmless generalities about openly arrived at treaties and freedom of the seas, and one tackled the thorny issue of disarmament; nine related to various territorial issues; the remaining two were the most significant. Point XIV set up the League of Nations. The far less famous Point III embodied the crux of Wilson’s vision of the twentieth-century world: the abolition of economic barriers. Through his sheer obstinacy Wilson moulded the treaty as he wished and then sailed home to sell it to the American Congress. The only major allied power not to sign the treaty was Russia, for the simple reason that the Bolsheviks were not invited, although Wilson and the British prime minister, Lloyd George, put out secret feelers to Lenin in March 1919. A ragbag of monarchist and socialist émigrés floated around the conference, purporting to represent the real Russia.

  When he got home Woodrow Wilson discovered that lofty ideals did not translate into votes in Congress. He had met his match in Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, a representative of a dynasty that has represented the evolving values of American imperialism for centuries. The Cabots arrived in Massachusetts from the Channel Island of Jersey in 1700 and acquired enormous wealth first from the slave trade and smuggling, then in the nineteenth century from cotton mills and later still from heavy industry. They were staunch federalists in the early days of the republic; George Cabot was the first secretary of the navy and sat in the US Senate from 1791 to 1796. Like many New England merchants whose livelihoods depended on trade with Britain, he bitterly opposed the War of 1812; grabbing the Canadian colonies seemed far less important to him than maintaining the sinews of commerce. In 1814 he was named president of the convention held in Hartford, Connecticut, which might, had the war not ended when it did, have led to the dissolution of the Union and the creation of an independent New England.

  A hundred years later America’s place in the world was far more secure. In the Spanish-American War the United States could grab territory without worrying about the impact on their commercial empire. George’s great-grandson, Henry Cabot Lodge, occupied the same Senate seat and was a passionate supporter of the annexation of the Philippines and Puerto Rico. (In the 1916 election he had defeated the head of a very different Massachusetts dynasty, John Fitzgerald, grandfather of future president John Fitzgerald Kennedy.) Henry Cabot Lodge actively supported the war with Spain, spoke out vehemently against the despotic imperialism of tsarist Russia, campaigned for high protective tariffs and led the fight against the Treaty of Versailles. He was an ardent imperialist, who proclaimed that American imperialism was altogether more pure than what he called the ‘sordid’ imperialism of Britain and Russia. One fellow senator compared his acerbic character to the countryside of his native New England – naturally barren but highly cultivated. He epitomised the imperial values of his age as his grandson, also named Henry Cabot Lodge, was to do half a century later.

  In one of the dirtiest political campaigns since Andrew Jackson, the younger Cabot Lodge lost the family Senate seat in 1952 to John F. Kennedy, who eight years later became president – defeating a Republican tic
ket that included Henry Cabot Lodge as vice-presidential candidate. Despite their history of opposition the two Massachusetts dynasties were close enough for Kennedy to make his former opponent ambassador to the United Nations. Later, as ambassador to South Vietnam, Cabot Lodge was a principal architect of the Vietnam War and helped organise Operation Bravo Two, the military coup that led to the overthrow and murder of the Vietnamese dictator Ngo Dinh Diem (Cabot Lodge always insisted that he had instructed the conspirators to allow Diem to go into exile).

  The irony of a Cabot Lodge becoming ambassador to the UN was that his grandfather had prevented America joining its predecessor organisation, the League of Nations. When Wilson returned from Versailles the Republicans, led by Cabot Lodge the elder, saw the chance to gain electoral advantage and whipped up opposition from every quarter: Italian-Americans were told the treaty unfairly rejected Italian claims to parts of the old Austro-Hungarian empire, German-Americans that it demanded unjust reparations from Germany, Irish-Americans that it represented an evil alliance with the British who were fighting to maintain their colony in Ireland. The opposition was almost entirely without principle. Cabot Lodge himself had argued for a League to Enforce Peace while the war was still on, and insisted that he supported the principles of the treaty; his virulent opposition was merely to the details.

  There were those who did object in principle. They refused to accept that the United States could ever be bound in any way by a higher international forum. This was to become a common refrain in American foreign policy debate, and it is interesting that Wilson’s response was not to argue for the primacy of international law but to plead that the treaty would not involve any diminution of America’s traditional prerogatives. He assured his detractors that the Monroe Doctrine, which guaranteed the United States exclusive rights to intervene in the affairs of the other nations of the western hemisphere, would still be honoured. He was fighting the wrong cause: it was not to be the swirling currents of foreign policy debate that sank the treaty but the immediate pressures of electoral politics. The Senate refused to ratify the treaty, and the League of Nations went ahead without its architect.

  The stage was now set for a new international order. Just about every part of the globe that could be colonised had been, and the nations of the world sat down to enjoy the fruits of peace. The First World War had been ‘the war to end all wars’, and from now on conflicts were to be settled around the table through debate and negotiation. Unfortunately such rosy sentiments did not anticipate the likes of Mussolini and Hitler; and missing from the table altogether were the two great imperial powers of the twentieth century, America and Russia.

  CHAPTAR 12

  EMPIRES OLD AND NEW

  For centuries Russia and America pushed out their frontiers, and pride in their increasing greatness bound together the myriad peoples of the two nations. By the time of the First World War the spirit of empire helped define what it was to be American or Russian. After the war the architects of the League of Nations promised a new international order in which all nations would be equal, and the Bolsheviks vehemently denounced the old imperial order, but the values that had determined nations’ actions for centuries do not change overnight. An end to imperialism could be proclaimed but empires crumble because they lack the power to withstand external foes or to suppress internal ones, not because the cause of empire has become politically incorrect. A belief in imperial destiny – whether acknowledged, as had been the case in Russia, or largely unacknowledged, as in America – infused the souls of both nations.

  As far as its neighbours were concerned Russia emerged from the First World War with its mix of autocracy and imperialism painted a new colour – red – but fundamentally unchanged. America’s neighbours, on the other hand, who had suffered numerous invasions during the nineteenth century, found that in the twentieth century their frontiers were finally protected. The imperial passions of neither country had gone away, but their souls had evolved, and in so doing they had found radically new ways of channelling the yearning for empire.

  The peoples of both nations yearned to make their nations greater, and previously that had always meant making the nation physically greater. In the first half of the twentieth century that physical expansion came to an abrupt halt. In America the dominant ideology was changing: in 1894 Hawaii was annexed in a spirit of blatant imperialism; twenty-five years later an American president was championing a League of Nations designed to ensure that such things never happened again. In Russia the ideology moved on more dramatically. Cataclysmic change consumed the Russian empire and the new autocrats in Moscow were unable to maintain their borders, let alone expand them. The bloody transition from the divine right of the Romanov tsars to the historical inevitability of the Communist party left little energy for imperial adventures.

  For half a century it seemed that Russian and American imperialism had died and a new golden age had arrived. Both nations proclaimed their support for the world’s poor and oppressed. Both ridiculed the creaking empires of western Europeans still locked in the past. Both turned their eyes inwards. And as both downplayed the imperial yearnings of their own people they underestimated the imperial yearnings of others. The passions that had driven Russians and Americans to the Pacific now fired imaginations in Rome, Berlin and Tokyo. The coming of the Second World War would rouse both nations to fury and the war’s aftermath showed that their imperial pretensions, which had seemed to vanish with the First World War, had been not dead but dormant.

  The New Tsars: Lenin and Stalin the Terrible

  The civil war in Russia was won because the Reds were more popular than the Whites. However tiny the Bolshevik faction may have been when they seized power by the end of the civil war, they had made themselves into a genuinely popular force; not least by their control of the media. In that respect the parallels with the American Revolution are striking, but the Bolsheviks’ popularity was not to last. While the Red Army was retaking the Trans-Siberian railway and chasing to and fro in Poland the economy collapsed. The resultant famine claimed 5 million lives. Protests against the Bolsheviks increased in the very places where support had once been strongest, particularly in the great naval base at Kronstadt. The Bolshevik reaction showed dramatically the road Russia was destined to follow.

  The Kronstadt mutineers and their anarchist leaders had been at the forefront of the revolution, and thought that this loyalty would protect them. They were wrong; the Red Army, under orders from Trotsky, launched a ferocious attack across the ice and the mutineers who survived were rounded up and shot. The crushing of the Kronstadt soviet not only demonstrated that Russian autocracy had lost none of its steel in the transfer from tsar to commissar but also illustrated for the first time another feature that would become a commonplace of Russian life: the deliberate fabrication of ‘history’. Lenin and Trotsky immediately announced that the Kronstadt protesters had been part of a White plot, something they knew to be absolute nonsense. American presidents have lied, and occasionally, as with the Watergate coterie around Richard Nixon, mendacity has been central to the governing culture, but never has an American regime set out with a conscious intent to achieve its ends by the deliberate and massive rewriting of events. The Bolsheviks could never concede that any other revolutionary group might legitimately represent the workers and peasants, and so by definition all dissent must be fomented from outside. Even when everyone involved knew this not to be the case, truth had to be subverted in the interests of the party and its historic destiny.

  What many left-wingers outside Russia found hard to accept was that the Bolshevik leaders reserve their bitterest contempt for those on the left who refused to toe the party line. The case of Ukraine is a classic example. Anarchists under Nestor Mhakno fought pitched battles with both Ukrainian nationalists and Russian White Army troops, and in doing so they might have expected active support from their fellow revolutionaries in Russia; indeed the anarchist regime signed a series of co-operation treaties with the
Bolsheviks. However, the promised Red Army support never materialised; Trotsky was determined that only his party would have the final victory. Eventually the Bolsheviks arranged a joint military commission at which the Makhnovist delegates were seized and murdered. It was a pattern to be followed by Stalin’s followers again eighteen years later, during the Spanish Civil War.

  Lenin died in January 1924 after a long illness and the struggle for succession had all the bitterness, confusion and intrigue that had characterised the successions of so many tsars. Lenin’s courtiers manoeuvred for power while publicly proclaiming the virtues of collective leadership. In June seven men, including Stalin, were elected full members of the politburo: only Stalin would survive.

  A year before his death Lenin, already largely confined to bed, had written a ‘Testament’ that was to become infamous. In it he warned the party of the dangers in the feud between Trotsky and Stalin, and in a devastating postscript urged that Stalin be removed from his post as secretary general of the Communist party. Only Lenin’s illness allowed Stalin to retain any sort of powerbase, and yet six years later Stalin’s position was unassailable. Painting a picture of the great Lenin reduced to incoherent ramblings, Stalin persuaded the party to ignore the Testament and then, by playing one faction against another, succeeded in removing everyone who had ever touched the levers of power. In this Stalin was totally ruthless: he eventually had all the other six politburo members killed (although one may have committed suicide). First Trotsky was forced into exile. Then Stalin and the ‘right’ purged the ‘left’, and when that was complete Stalin and his own followers purged the right. Finally Trotsky was hunted down and murdered in Mexico.