Penguin History of the United States of America (90 page)

Having committed themselves, the Americans began to work with their usual enormous energy. Their view was that having entered the war they had better do all they could to bring it to an early end. Their fleet, in conjunction with the Royal Navy, rid the Atlantic of the submarine menace. General Pershing set to work to raise and train an army for Europe. President Wilson, bypassing the regular Cabinet, appointed talented outsiders, businessmen of proved capacity working for a dollar a year, to oversee the war effort. Bernard Baruch, a Wall Street financier, headed the War Industries Board: in effect he was economic dictator, controlling the whole vast field of American manufacturing in the interest of the war-effort. Herbert Hoover, who had made a fortune as a mining engineer and earned international fame by his work to relieve the starving people of Belgium and occupied France, was made Food Administrator: he boosted American farm production to unheard-of heights and tripled exports to the Allied countries, which might otherwise have failed from hunger. The American Federation of Labor pledged its support to the war-effort and was eventually rewarded by a huge increase of numbers and influence. The standard rate of income tax was raised to 6 per cent, while a surtax of up to 77 per cent was imposed on incomes of more than a million dollars a year. The railroads were nationalized for the duration of the war; fuel use was as strictly regulated as industrial production; labour relations were supervised by the administration. For the second time the US government showed what it could do in a crisis.

Less happy were some other expressions of the wartime spirit. Hostility to the Germans was so intense that it led to a campaign of persecution against the whole German-American community, which was supposed to consist largely of traitors and spies, although the President had expressed his confidence in its patriotism. Unfortunately he had at the same time remarked that ‘a few’ might be disloyal, and had promised that disloyalty would be dealt with ‘with a firm hand of stern repression’. That was excuse
enough. German music, German literature, German philosophy and the German language were all denounced; German books were removed from libraries, German-language newspapers were suppressed and German-American citizens were vindictively hounded. At least this hostility gave the other ‘hyphenated Americans’ a welcome breathing-space (during the period of neutrality they had been much attacked); and hatred of the Kaiser blotted out hatred of the Pope. But the radical and pacifist opposition to the war which soon announced itself was stigmatized as pro-German and persecuted accordingly. When the October Revolution brought the Bolsheviks to power and they made peace with Germany they were immediately tagged as agents of Prussian imperialism, and so were their sympathizers: 105 Wobblies were sent to prison for impeding the war-effort. Eugene V. Debs, bitterly opposed to what he thought was a bloody war of the plutocracies, appalled by the campaign against freedom of speech which had shut down the socialist as well as the German-language press, and determined to demonstrate what was happening to the Constitutional guarantee of free speech, made a speech denouncing the war and was sent to prison for ‘wilfully and knowingly’ trying to obstruct the operation of the Conscription Act. To make sure that such wickedness would never go unpunished the administration pushed through an Espionage Act and a Sedition Act. Wilson did not seem to remember the outrage that an earlier Sedition Act had caused; or to care about the illiberal consequences of the new one. No one who weakened support for ‘the boys’ in uniform deserved any mercy. Debs was to stay in prison until Wilson left office.

Brewers, it was discovered, were commonly of German origin; King George of England had given up alcohol to help the cause; and anyway the manufacturers of beer and whisky used up corn which might otherwise have been sent to feed the Allies. It was a heaven-sent chance for the prohibitionists. They whipped up hostility to the brewing interests, and by banging the patriotic drum induced Congress not only to pass a law enforcing prohibition while the war lasted, but actually to pass a Constitutional amendment (the Eighteenth) forbidding the export, import, ‘manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors’, for ever. The patriotic cry was so noisy that no effective opposition could be organized, and the amendment became law on 29 January 1919, to come into effect a year later. This reform was to cause great trouble in the future, but in the long run it proved less important than the other wartime amendment, the Nineteenth, which at last gave all American women the vote and became law on 26 August 1920.

Immigration from Europe was cut off at the same time that a huge market for unskilled labour arose in the North. The opportunity was seized by the African-Americans, who now began to leave the South in large numbers to fill the war-built factories. This great migration stimulated hostility in the North among white workers facing this new competition. There was a race riot at East St Louis, Illinois, on 2 July 1917, in which some thirty-nine
blacks and nine whites were killed. Two months later, at Houston, Texas, black soldiers were provoked into an uprising in which seventeen whites were killed, for which outrage thirteen blacks were later hanged and forty-one sent to prison for life. Lynching revived in the South on such a scale and with such special horror (burning to death was quite common) that President Wilson was at last moved to denounce it: ‘We are at the moment fighting lawless passions. Germany has outlawed herself… and has made lynchers of her armies. Lynchers emulate her disgraceful conduct.’ But it did no good. Some 454 persons were lynched between 1918 and 1927, 416 being blacks, and forty-two being burned.

The actual fighting of the war went well. All the German calculations proved faulty. Britain did not surrender, nor was she starved (though it was a near thing). The great spring offensive of 1918 failed: its last thrust was decisively checked in the Second Battle of the Marne (15 – 18 July), in which American troops played an honourable part and Pershing showed himself to be a highly competent commander. Marshal Foch ordered a counter-attack, and the long-awaited Allied advance began. By September more than a million American troops were engaged, and in the Battle of the Argonne (26 September-11 November) they inflicted one of the great defeats on the Germans which soon brought an end to the war. But even more important to that end was their mere presence on the field, which proved that the Allies now had inexhaustible manpower reserves while the Germans no longer had any.

Meanwhile, from the moment that the struggle began, Woodrow Wilson, delegating his administrative duties with great skill, devoted most of his thought to the problem of ending it decently and giving the world new hope, as he had promised. He had no doubt of his countrymen’s support; the difficulty, he supposed, would lie in imposing America’s will (really, his own) on Europe. He manoeuvred to overcome this impediment with all the skill that he had shown in the earlier rough-houses of New Jersey and Washington politics.

Wilson was to be much maligned, especially by J. M. Keynes, and most of the criticisms were unfair. Yet one of Keynes’s observations went to the heart of the matter. At his core, this son of the manse was a Presbyterian preacher still. Profoundly sensitive to words and ideas, expert at using them, ambitious, yet moved, in the end, by moral visions as by nothing else, Wilson seems never to have lost his feeling that eloquence would finally govern the world: as if Lincoln’s second inaugural had prevailed over Booth’s bullet. It was to prove his last illusion; during the war it was his strength. He reflected on the causes of the conflict, and on proposals to end it and prevent its recurrence; in the fullness of time he laid out his conclusions in a series of orations, the first of which contained the famous Fourteen Points that gave their name to the whole series.

Heir to both North and South, Wilson combined Jefferson Davis’s faith in the letter of the law with Abraham Lincoln’s earnest moralism. Both traits
emerged in his grand strategy for the peace. He saw that the international law in which he had believed so deeply and which he had tried so hard to enforce between 1914 and 1917 was a fiction; force, fear and ambition ruled the world. For remedy he turned, as we have seen, to the English liberals’ idea of a League of Peace, or of Nations, which, committed to liberal principles, would resolve international disputes by legal processes – if necessary, by legal sanctions – instead of by the brutal means of war. The League Covenant (which he drew up himself) would replace international anarchy as the Constitution of the United States had replaced the quarrelsome independence of the former colonies. It was a noble dream, but it clearly exhibited Wilson’s resïdual naivety. It had the same weakness as the old idea of the Social Contract, from which in part it derived: it depended on the goodwill of the nations to work, though it was the absence of international goodwill that made it necessary. If goodwill existed, it would not be needed. It was an ideal to work for, not a means to an end. It was not sufficient to realize Wilson’s hopes, nor have succeeding generations brought it much closer; yet they have clung to the ideal, for without it the long-term prospects of mankind are black. Wilson’s reputation has risen or fallen with men’s attachment to the idea of a league of peace and their belief in its practicability.

His other proposals were much more down-to-earth and so roused much more opposition. The second of the Fourteen Points was an assertion, against Great Britain, of the freedom of the seas, a last relic of the doctrines of America’s neutrality: ‘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.’ It was inconsistent of Wilson to advocate this doctrine, for at the very time of its delivery the United States, that former champion of neutral rights, was harrying neutral commerce assiduously; it was also unwise, for it opened a rift with Britain; but the pride and pocket of America had been too badly hurt by the blockade for this opportunity for a slap at ‘navalism’ to be forgone. For the rest, the Fourteen Points denounced secret treaties and insisted on the old nineteenth-century mixture of nationalism and liberal institutions: self-determination and democracy. Adopt these panaceas, link them with a League of Nations and secure peace for all time. Such was Wilson’s message to his allies and his enemies.

The details of the Fourteen Points (and of the various ‘principles’, ‘particulars’ and ‘declarations’ which he added to them in public addresses before the armistice) were to be greatly modified at the peace conference; but it was the attitudes underlying them which first created trouble. British politicians were comparatively sympathetic, but they rejected ‘freedom of the seas’ and continued to believe, as always, in the principle of the balance of power (which, according to Wilson, was a great game, immoral and ‘now forever discredited’). The French were total unbelievers in the utility or effectiveness of such pronouncements: as always, they stuck to
realpolitik
.
The Germans, while they were winning, had no use for such sentimental aspirations; they believed only in force. The Russians were by now out of the war; their new Bolshevik rulers could see nothing in the Fourteen Points but a conscious challenge to their own programme for the world – and they were quite right.

But it is the peculiar genius of American statesmen to combine lofty visions with effective politics. Underlying Wilson’s preaching was the hard fact that the Allies were increasingly dependent on American strength; they had at least to pretend to take the Points seriously, and their publication in January 1918, bringing the hope that there was a way in which this terrible experience of war could be put behind mankind for ever, made Wilson for a moment supremely popular with the peoples of Europe. Merely as an ideologue, he could not be ignored, since he was also President of the United States. When the German front began to crumble, it was to him that the enemy turned. They hoped to get better terms than they would get from France and Britain; probably they hoped to split the alliance. They offered to surrender on the basis of the Fourteen Points. To their surprise they found Wilson a hard bargainer. He exacted a German revolution (so they overthrew the Kaiser); the evacuation of all occupied territory; the laying-down of arms; acceptance of the Fourteen Points and the President’s subsequent addresses. There were objections to many of the American conditions from both the Allies and the enemy, but Wilson held firm and, thanks to the undrained strength of the United States, was able to impose his will. British, French and Germans, politicians and generals, were forced into line; and on 11 November 1918 an armistice took place. The Great War was over (though many little wars, its offspring, continued to rage) and Woodrow Wilson deserved much of the credit for ending it. It was a great moment – the real high point of his career – and was greeted with wild joy, and tears, and dancing in the streets in all the cities of the West.

Years later someone asked Lloyd George why he had not retired at this supreme hour, with his credit intact. He answered that it had been impossible, looking down from the balcony of Buckingham Palace on the rejoicing crowds, not to believe that he could still do the people service. It may be that similar feelings clouded the vision of Wilson and Clemenceau. Yet forces were now set in motion that would end in the destruction, not only of these three great men, but of their great achievements, victory and peace. As Wilson stood highest, he fell the farthest.

Almost since the beginning of the war he had aspired to use American power to bring about a just and secure peace through the application of democratic principles. Now his moment had come. He determined to go to Paris as head of the American delegation to the peace conference.

This decision, given Wilson’s character and ambitions, was inevitable. The task of peacemaking was too delicate and too important to be left to anyone else; it is impossible to name a substitute who could have performed more effectively than Wilson. All the same, his participation had some most
unfortunate consequences. In the end it wrecked his health and thus his hopes; from the beginning it weakened his political position. He stayed in Europe, with one brief interruption, for over six months, and during that time lost control of the American government. He never regained it, and the painfully difficult process of adjusting American society to the return of peace had to be carried out without the guidance or even, it seemed, the notice of the President. Neither Congress nor the mediocre Cabinet could fill the gap; and thus the leaderless country went through a crisis which finally brought about a profound reaction against Wilson and all he stood for. Progressivism had had a very long run, anyway; a reaction was due; but Wilson’s abdication of so much of his responsibility made it more violent than was necessary. The seeds of much future trouble, then, were sown by this action of the President.