by G. J. Meyer
These things are central to the legacy of the war—a legacy that lives on. It lives on, for example, in the Espionage Act of 1917. Unlike its equally vile offspring, the Sedition Act of 1918, the Espionage Act did not become inoperative with the end of the war and has never been repealed by Congress. It remains on the books today and is used for the punishment less of spies than of whistleblowers, citizens who reveal things that the government wants to keep secret not from enemies or foreign rivals but from the American public via the American news media. The obvious purpose being to deter other citizens from blowing still more whistles.
It is all part of the price that the United States paid for intervention. That cost is not measurable, and if one wants to argue that it was justified because it produced a better result, fair enough. But that it was a high cost cannot be denied.
If something was gained, even if much was gained, much was also lost. Something that is largely intangible and difficult to put into words. Something that manifested itself as deep and long-lasting disillusionment and that Henry Cabot Lodge attempted to express in a letter to Brooks Adams ten months after the war’s end, even before the Senate’s struggle over the League of Nations rose to its climax.
“We were all of us in our youth more or less under the spell of the nineteenth-century doctrines that we were in continual evolution,” Lodge wrote, “always moving on to something better with perfection as the goal….
“Now it is all over.”
Woodrow Wilson’s Program for Peace
_____
The following are the Fourteen Points presented in the president’s address to a joint session of Congress on January 8, 1918.
1. Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.
2. Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas, outside territorial waters, alike in peace and in war, except as the seas may be closed in whole or in part by international action for the enforcement of international covenants.
3. The removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers and the establishment of an equality of trade conditions among all the nations consenting to the peace and associating themselves for its maintenance.
4. Adequate guarantees given and taken that national armaments will be reduced to the lowest points consistent with domestic safety.
5. A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined.
6. The evacuation of all Russian territory and such a settlement of all questions affecting Russia as will secure the best and freest cooperation of the other nations of the world in obtaining for her an unhampered and unembarrassed opportunity for the independent determination of her own political development and national policy and assure her of a sincere welcome into the society of free nations under institutions of her own choosing; and, more than a welcome, assistance also of every kind that she may need and may herself desire. The treatment accorded Russia by her sister nations in the months to come will be the acid test of their good will, of the comprehension of her needs as distinguished from their own interests, and of their intelligent and unselfish sympathy.
7. Belgium, the whole world will agree, must be evacuated and restored, without any attempt to limit the sovereignty which she enjoys in common with all other free nations. No other single act will serve as this will serve to restore confidence among the nations in the laws which they have themselves set and determined for the government of their relations with one another. Without this healing act the whole structure and validity of international law is forever impaired.
8. All French territory should be freed and the invaded portions restored, and the wrong done to France by Prussia in 1871 in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine, which has unsettled the peace of the world for nearly fifty years, should be righted, in order that peace may once more be made secure in the interest of all.
9. A readjustment of the frontiers of Italy should be effected along clearly recognizable lines of nationality.
10. The peoples of Austria-Hungary, whose place among the nations we wish to see safeguarded and assured, should be accorded the freest opportunity of autonomous development.
11. Rumania, Serbia and Montenegro should be evacuated; occupied territories restored; Serbia accorded free and secure access to the sea; and the relations of the several Balkan states to one another determined by friendly counsel along historically established lines of allegiance and nationality; and international guarantees of the political and economic independence and territorial integrity of the several Balkan states should be entered into.
12. The Turkish portions of the present Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty, but the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development, and the Dardanelles should be permanently opened as a free passage to the ships and commerce of all nations under international guarantees.
13. An independent Polish state should be erected which should include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations, which should be assured a free and secure access to the sea, and whose political and economic independence and territorial integrity should be guaranteed by international covenant.
14. 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 president added the following four points in an address to Congress of February 11, 1918:
1. Each part of the final settlement must be based upon the essential justice of that particular case and upon such adjustments as are most likely to bring a peace that will be permanent.
2. People and provinces are not to be bartered about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were mere chattels and pawns in a game, even the great game, now forever discredited, of the balance of power.
3. Every territorial settlement involved in this war must be made in the interest and for the benefit of the populations concerned, and not as a part of any mere adjustment or compromise of claims among rival states.
4. All well-defined national aspirations shall be accorded the utmost satisfaction that can be accorded them without introducing new or perpetuating old elements of discord and antagonism that would be likely in time to break the peace of Europe and consequently of the world.
He next added the following in a 1918 Fourth of July speech:
1. The destruction of every arbitrary power anywhere that can separately, secretly, and of its single choice disturb the peace of the world; or, if it cannot be presently destroyed, at the least its reduction to virtual impotence.
2. The settlement of every question, whether of territory, of sovereignty, of economic arrangement or of political relationship, upon the basis of free acceptance of that settlement by the people immediately concerned, and not upon the basis of the material interest or advantage of any other nation or people which may desire a different settlement for the sake of its own exterior influence or mastery.
3. The consent of all nations to be governed in their conduct towards each other by the same principles of honor and of respect for the common law of civilized society that govern the individual citizens of all modern states in their relations with one another; to the end that all promises and covenants may be sacredly observed, no private plots or conspiracies hatched, no selfish injuries wrought with impunity, and a mutual trust established upon the handsome foundation of a mutual respect fo
r right.
4. The establishment of an organization of peace which shall make it certain that combined power of free nations will check every invasion of right and serve to make peace and justice the more secure by affording a definite tribunal of opinion to which all must submit and by which every international readjustment that cannot be amicably agreed upon by the peoples directly concerned shall be sanctioned.
Finally, in a speech opening a Liberty Loan campaign on September 27, 1918, the president offered the following “particulars” representing, he said, “this Government’s interpretation of its own duty with regard to peace”:
1. The impartial justice meted out must involve no discrimination between those to whom we wish to be just and those to whom we do not wish to be just. It must be a justice that plays no favorites and knows no standard but the equal rights of the several peoples concerned.
2. No special or separate interest of any single nation or any group of nations can be made the basis of any part of the settlement which is not consistent with the common interest of all.
3. There can be no leagues or alliances or special covenants and understandings within the general and common family of the League of Nations.
4. There can be no special, selfish economic combinations within the League and no employment of any form of economic boycott or exclusion except as the power of economic penalty by exclusion from the markets of the world may be vested in the League of Nations itself as a means of discipline and control.
5. All international agreements and treaties of every kind must be made known in their entirety to the rest of the world.
For Emily, Damien, and Matias
Gifts who arrived in that order
Sources and Notes
The author of the present work finds himself, not for the first time, faced with the question of how many source notes are appropriate in a historical study aimed at a general readership rather than a community of professional scholars, and with the nonexistence of an incontrovertibly satisfactory answer. To omit such notes would be inexcusable. At the other extreme, to give a documentary source for every fact, opinion, and quotation could require almost as many pages as the book proper—and to no worthwhile purpose.
As with his previous historical works, the author has attempted to find an acceptable middle ground. This means giving no sources for items that are commonly found in earlier books and about which there is no serious disagreement, and providing sources for items that contribute significantly to telling the story and are either controversial or sufficiently obscure that a reader seeking confirmation or further information might have difficulty tracing them. Particular attention is given to direct quotes, which often are exceptionally revealing of what significant figures believed or wanted to be seen as believing.
Abbreviations are used, in the following pages, for the three most used and arguably most authoritative sources:
PWW for the sixty-nine volumes of The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Arthur S. Link, editor.
IPH for the four volumes of The Intimate Papers of Colonel House, Charles Seymour, editor.
And MPWW for The Messages and Papers of Woodrow Wilson, in two volumes.
In all three cases, the first number following the abbreviation indicates the volume in which the relevant information appears, and the second number gives the page.
The Story Overall
Few one-volume works have ever dealt in any depth with all the major aspects of American involvement in the First World War: how the United States came to be involved, the effects of intervention on the nation and the world, the building of a vast army and that army’s experiences in Europe, the world-changing peace conference that followed the defeat of Germany, and the American struggle over the peace treaty. An exception is Thomas Fleming’s The Illusion of Victory, which is rich in interesting detail but unbalanced by the author’s contempt for Woodrow Wilson and almost everything he ever did or said.
Unsurpassed on the domestic side of the story—the tale of what intervention in the war did to the United States within her own borders—is David M. Kennedy’s 1980 Over Here: The First World War and American Society.
Outstanding among studies of the story’s central figures are:
Woodrow Wilson: A Medical and Psychological Biography by Edwin A. Weinstein;
Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House: A Personality Study by Alexander L. and Juliette L. George; and
The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, by John Milton Cooper, Jr.
Part One: The Crooked Road to War
Christopher Clark’s 2012 The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 has no rival among studies of how the Great War began. An older, shorter, but nonetheless meticulously detailed account is The Lions of July by William Jannen, Jr. The same story is distilled to eighty-four pages in the first section of A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914–1918 by the author of the present work. Recent versions are The War That Ended Peace by Margaret MacMillan and Catastrophe 1914 by Max Hastings.
Among studies of the two and a half years of American neutrality, and of the complications arising out of German submarine warfare and the Allies’ starvation blockade, Patrick Devlin’s seven-hundred-page Too Proud to Fight: Woodrow Wilson’s Neutrality stands supreme both in thoroughness and in its well-balanced perspective.
Interesting and informative accounts of how the United States moved from neutrality to intervention are The Politics of War by Walter Karp and Road to War: America 1914–1917 by Walter Millis, though both works (Karp’s most extremely) are weakened by a hostility to President Wilson that is so relentless as to undermine their credibility.
A thorough and informative study of the manipulation of public opinion during the neutrality period is Stewart Halsey Ross’s Propaganda for War: How the United States Was Conditioned to Fight the Great War of 1914–1918.
For information about the Lusitania and her sinking, the author is particularly indebted to Erik Larson’s Dead Wake.
Part One
“Have you ever heard”: PWW, 38:531.
Chapter 1: December 1918: Apotheosis
France had suffered: MacMillan, Peacemakers, 36; Broadberry and Harrison, Economics, 27.
“My second personality”: IPH, 1:118.
“acquire knowledge that we might”: George and George, Wilson and House, 16.
“played a part in the fate”: Churchill, World Crisis, 3:229.
“high-minded things”: George and George, Wilson and House, 22.
He had no way of knowing how much: Bailey, Wilson and Lost Peace, 78.
“Our allies and our enemies”: Ibid., 72.
Background: How It Happened
France certainly did: Nicolson, Longman Companion, 63.
It was, over the next three: Herrmann, Arming of Europe, 205.
The empire was a disjointed hodgepodge: Nicolson, Longman Companion, 43.
“The emperor is like”: Ponsonby, Letters of Empress, 363.
“Think of the thousands”: Fay, After Sarajevo, 265.
“for us there would be”: Geiss, July 1914, 200.
“What a joke!”: Fromkin, Last Summer, 229.
“If the peace of Europe can be”: Geiss, July 1914, 315.
“every measure against Austria-Hungary”: Jannen, Lions of July, 256.
“would be a disgrace”: Geiss, July 1914, 315.
Chapter 2: Neutrality the Wilson Way
“The cutting of that cable”: Ross, Propaganda, 28.
As early as August 6: Mead, Doughboys, 20.
A hundred thousand German: Stevenson, Cataclysm, 75.
Awesome as this total was: Nicolson, Longman Companion, 63.
It was true of most of America’s: Kazin, Godly Hero, 216.
“international law was regarded”: Devlin, Too Proud, 463.
“in order to strengthen”: George and George, Wilson and House, 125.
“you have more than fu
lfilled”: PWW, 30:242.
“It has fallen to your lot”: PWW, 30:359.
“In my opinion you have”: PWW, 30:385.
“Men often destroy themselves”: Weinstein, Medical and Psychological, 271.
“Beg you will come here”: PWW, 31:541.
“evidence their good intentions”: Devlin, Too Proud, 221.
“extravagant”: Ross, Propaganda, 17; Herrmann, Arming of Europe, 2.
“is perhaps the only noble”: IPH, 1:254.
“jingoism run stark mad”: IPH, 1:255.
From 1900 to 1913: Herrmann, Arming of Europe, 237; Stevenson, Armaments, 3.
“unless some one acting”: PWW, 30:109.
“Germany’s success”: IPH, 1:291.
“wholly unacceptable”: Devlin, Too Proud, 201.
“informally and confidentially”: Karp, Politics of War, 179.
That they would have done: Link, Wilson: Revolution, 31.
“starve the whole population”: Karp, Politics of War, 176.
“England is not exercising”: PWW, 31:6.
Her hereditary aristocracy still: Ferguson, Pity of War, 29.
In the first half of 1914, Germany’s: Fleming, Illusion of Victory, 49.
The American economy was hit: Kennedy, Over Here, 301.
“I shall follow the best practice”: PWW, 28:270; Tansill, America Goes, 64.
“loans by American bankers”: PWW, 30:372.
“We are the one great nation”: PWW, 30:372.
Over the next four years it would: Ross, Propaganda, 161.
Background: Coming of Age
In 1870 the United States produced: Nicolson, Longman Companion, 56.