In the Time of the Americans

by David Fromkin

  To those who believed in the benefits of competition, the growth of a monopolistic warfare state foreshadowed questions that were to arise repeatedly and in different guises throughout the century: whether, in order to crusade for American ideals of government abroad, the country paradoxically was being untrue to its political and economic ideals at home.

  Another and immediate criticism leveled against the Wilson administration was that the American economy did not produce the ships and airplanes that were needed in 1917 and 1918; that not until 1919 did American production come into its own. Among the Allies, there were suspicions that this was intentional. It appeared that the American government really was gearing up its economy not to wage war, but to take over markets from others after the fighting was over, before the European countries had a chance to convert their war industries to peacetime uses.

  The British newspaper magnate George Riddell, an intimate of David Lloyd George’s, told the prime minister in December 1917, “I don’t trust the Americans. Naturally they desire to make America the first nation in the world; they will have a huge mercantile fleet, which they have never had before; and they will have opened new markets all over the world, markets which they have been developing while we have been fighting.”

  Lord Riddell’s suspicions were not entirely unfounded. On entering the war the United States embarked on an economic warfare program against Germany with a view not merely to winning the war, but to improving America’s competitive position after the war. The American Alien Property Custodian took German ships into service, seized German ownership interests in U.S. industry, and transferred the ownership of German patents to Americans, particularly in the chemical industry, where Germany had been dominant before the war.

  The U.S. War Trade Board, established in the autumn of 1917, focused on Latin America, where it succeeded in forcing the sale of German interests to Americans. But the Americans went ahead to supplant British as well as German interests. Britain’s exports to Argentina, for example, declined 30 percent between 1914 and 1917, while those from the United States soared 300 percent and came to exceed Britain’s.

  The Latin American countries accounted for about 25 percent of Britain’s investment abroad in 1918, and Britain relied on exploiting her position in the markets of those countries to bring about her economic recovery after the war. But as the British Chamber of Commerce in Argentina pointed out in guarded language in 1918, “The chief danger threatening our rapid and complete postwar recuperation is the extent to which American trade and general penetration may prove to have passed from the transient to the permanent stage.”

  The only limit to the U.S. export drive appeared to be the lack of American ships in which to carry goods. When America entered the war, the British merchant fleet was 800 percent larger than hers, but as the war ended, that was down to only 250 percent larger. What gave cause for suspicion in London was that the American shipbuilding program was only just getting under way as hostilities in the Great War seemed to be approaching their final phase.

  THAT THE CLASH OF IDEALS and interests between the United States and Great Britain did not produce even more harmful consequences than they did was due to the fortuitous friendship of Edward House and Captain Sir William Wiseman, a British intelligence officer, who happened to meet in December 1916. An instant professional intimacy developed between the two men, and soon they were transacting political business together. A few months after the United States entered the war, Wiseman moved into an apartment in the building in which House lived, at 115 East Fifty-third Street in New York City, and the two men coordinated policy, Wiseman acting for the Lloyd George government and House for Wilson.

  Wiseman’s greatest virtue was his cards-on-the-table candor. He understood the thinking of both governments, and could spot areas of potential accommodation of one to the other. He was also frank in explaining that there were areas in which disagreements could not be resolved, although his policy was to get differences out into the open. He recognized that Wilson’s aim was to instill democracy in Germany, while Britain’s goal was to reestablish a balance of power in Europe; and he knew that neither could bring the other to a change of mind.

  In the course of meetings in Europe in the autumn of 1917, House and Wiseman arranged American participation in a Supreme War Council on an observer basis—which was as far as Wilson was prepared to go at the time, as American differences with the Allies about war goals continued to fester. While waiting for his armies to fully materialize, the President turned his attention to the war of ideologies that in some senses paralleled the war of armed forces.

  16

  THE BATTLE OF IDEAS

  EVER SINCE THE SPRING OF 1917, Woodrow Wilson had held the moral high ground by the terms in which he defined America’s quarrel with Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany. In denying that the United States was at war with the German people, and in asserting that the country’s purpose was to make the world safe for democracy, the American President portrayed his government as one, unlike others, that pursued no selfish goals.

  In doing so, Wilson expressed a worldview quite different from that of the Republican who planned to run for the presidency in the next election. TR argued in the autumn of 1917 that the United States “did not go to war to make democracy safe.” According to the former President, “… first and foremost we are to make the world safe for ourselves. This is our war, America’s war. If we do not win it we shall some day have to reckon with Germany single-handed. Therefore, for our own sake let us strike down Germany.”

  Whatever its other virtues, this was not the spiritually uplifting message that America wanted to hear in the first flush of enthusiasm for the crusade in Europe. Wilson had taken the measure of his domestic audience, and in 1917’s battle of words, he emerged triumphant.

  Now, in the winter of 1917–18, during the seemingly endless waiting period while the American armies were getting themselves set to launch their campaign and the United States was contributing, for the most part, only the financing that enabled the Allies to keep on fighting until the AEF was ready, Wilson continued to wage his and America’s campaign on the battlefield he found most congenial: that of ideas.

  The new and unexpected challenge to which he responded was the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power in Russia. In ideological terms it foreshadowed a meeting of armies at the river Elbe nearly three decades later. Lenin called for a revolution in world politics and so did Wilson; in 1917 as in 1945, the question was whether the forces of the American revolution and of the Russian revolution encountered one another as allies or as rivals.

  The communist coup was a central event in Wilson’s presidency and tested his concept of America’s new role in world affairs. Appeals to public opinion were his chosen weapons; and in trying to reach out to the Russian people, Wilson composed and delivered his most famous foreign policy statement: the Fourteen Points.

  IN THE RUSSIAN CITY OF PETROGRAD—the former St. Petersburg—the Bolsheviks, an underground communist faction led by Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (“Lenin”) and a handful of fellow conspirators, seized control of the Russian government on the night of November 7, 1917. One of the reasons they were able to do so was that they had received, and continued to receive, large sums of money from the German government.

  Another reason that the Bolsheviks were able to take power—and perhaps the only reason that they had a chance to hold on to it—was that they were the only political party in Russia led by someone who proposed to end the war. War had reduced Russia to chaos; the weary peasant conscripts who were the Russian soldiery were in no mood to go on fighting, and Lenin’s appeal was that he, and he alone, offered a way out.

  On November 8 the revolutionary regime in Petrograd adopted a “decree on peace,” calling on all parties in the European war to make peace without annexations or indemnities: the peace without victory that Wilson had pleaded with the belligerents to accept eleven months before. But in seeking a separate peace, the new leaders of the
Russian government were breaching a pledge that their country had given the Allies.

  Implicitly defending themselves by denouncing the alliance whose terms they were violating, the Bolsheviks published to the world in the newspaper Izvestia the hitherto secret treaties between tsarist Russia and her allies, Britain, France, Japan, and Italy, outlining the rewards they would divide among themselves if they won the war. Whole empires were to be shared between the Allies in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the Pacific.

  This was the very opposite of the kind of peace settlement President Wilson had led Americans to suppose they were fighting to achieve. Leftist and isolationist critics seemed vindicated in their claim that Wilson had led the country into what was basically an imperialist venture. The President, who had known and worried about the secret treaties for many months, at first denied knowledge of them. He also tried to suppress publication of the treaties in the United States, but failed.

  America was not a party to the treaties and therefore was not bound by them. Nonetheless, Wilson feared that he and his administration might be tainted by them. It transpired after they were published that he had no cause for alarm: in 1917–18 the revelations—for whatever reason—did not strike a responsive chord in the United States. Almost nobody in America seemed to care.

  The real question, as Wilson and his associates came to see it, was whether the sordidness of the secret treaties would have an effect on public opinion in Europe, especially among liberals, labor unions, and socialists. On the Allied side, these were groups to whom Wilson looked for support in persuading their governments to moderate their war goals; and inside the Central Powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary, these were the groups that Wilson hoped might bring pressure on their governments to make peace. For in appealing to the peoples of the belligerent countries over the heads of their governments, the Bolsheviks were not being original; they were following a path pioneered by Woodrow Wilson.

  Much more even than Wilsonians, the Bolsheviks had deluded themselves into believing that the European masses would rise at their call. Events would disappoint them. Nearly three weeks elapsed after they broadcast their call for peace, but the Bolsheviks received no response from the citizens, let alone the governments, of Europe or the Americas. There were no acceptances, no counterproposals, no uprisings, no revolutions. So, to the surprise of the Bolsheviks, the war continued.

  This caused an intellectual crisis for the Soviet leaders. Communist ideology called on Lenin to continue pursuing a suicidal policy of focusing on a world revolution that showed no signs of occurring, while taking no part in the imperialist war in which Germany was about to seize his territory and crush his regime. But Lenin chose not to do that; instead he threw his ideological baggage overboard in order to keep the ship afloat. Doing what he had to do if he and his movement were to survive, he sued for an armistice with Germany on November 26. Germany agreed on the following day to armistice negotiations commencing December 2 in Brest Litovsk, an old Polish river town that had belonged to tsarist Russia for more than a century.* The Bolsheviks asked the Allies to attend the conference, too, but they refused; so the Russian delegates had to face the Germans (joined later by Germany’s allies) alone. The delegations signed an armistice December 15, leaving the armies in place and providing for peace negotiations to begin a week later.

  The Bolsheviks were of divided mind about the negotiations, with only Lenin and his faction prepared to accept peace at any price. To gain a majority on the Bolshevik Central Committee, Lenin had to enter into a temporary alliance with Lev Davidovich Bronstein (“Leon Trotsky”), newly appointed commissar for foreign affairs, who believed (in a sort of caricature of Wilsonianism) that the peace negotiations would be rather like a public trial: the Russians would cross-examine the Germans so effectively that the German case would collapse before the court of world opinion.

  So the Brest Litovsk negotiations began. Meanwhile, to encourage the Russians to defy the Germans, as well as to meet the challenge posed by the Bolshevik appeals for peace, Colonel House decided (as did other Americans, independently) that Woodrow Wilson had to respond in public—for Americans, like the Bolsheviks at that time, held an unwavering faith in the power of words and ideas.

  EDWARD HOUSE WAS IN EUROPE conferring with the Allies when the events described above occurred. His immediate reaction, seconded from afar by the President, was to seek a common public statement of war goals by the Allies that might strengthen the hand of those in Russia who favored fighting on.

  It should be remembered that House and the other Allied leaders knew little of the Bolsheviks or of their situation, other than that it was precarious. Lenin and his associates, though they ruled Petrograd and Moscow, held only one section of what had been the tsarist empire; in the rest of it, rival governments took hold, some of which proposed to march on the capital to overthrow Bolshevism. It was a widely held opinion that communist rule, even in the corner of the former empire where it had been imposed, would prove brief.

  There was a question, too—which would be debated for decades to come—of who the Bolsheviks really were. The revolutionary slogans that they chanted convinced some observers that the Bolsheviks were men of the Left: liberals, only more so. If that were the case, it might be possible to persuade them to moderate their views so as to meet those of the Wilson administration. On the other hand, there were those who believed the Bolsheviks were German agents, for they had been financed by Berlin in subverting the pro-Ally government of Russia; others thought they were terrorists who aimed at one extreme or the other, anarchism or dictatorship.

  In trying to achieve consensus with the Allies on a statement of war goals that might appeal to Russians of the Left, House was allowing for the possibility that the Bolsheviks could be won over, and if not, that pro-Wilson Russians could be inspired to push Lenin and his colleagues aside. He also had in mind public opinion within the Allied countries themselves. He told their representatives in Europe in December 1917 that a statement was needed “because of the Bolshevik peace proposals and the increasing demand on the part of liberal and labor elements in Allied countries for an assurance that the war was not being continued for imperialistic ends.” House agreed with Aristide Briand, a leading figure of the French Left, that such a statement could also help induce the peoples of the Central Powers to urge or even compel their governments to make peace.

  Woodrow Wilson cabled his agreement from Washington, urging the Allies to offer terms on the basis that he himself had outlined to Congress on January 22, 1917, in his peace-without-victory speech. “Our people and Congress will not fight for any selfish aims,” he warned, adding that “it would be a fatal mistake to cool the ardor of America.” But House could not bring the Allies to agree on the sort of terms that he and Wilson regarded as unselfish.

  It seemed clear what House therefore had to propose to the President. Before the United States entered the war, Wilson had focused his foreign policy on obtaining public statements of war goals from the belligerents. In the eight months since America declared war, House from time to time had suggested that the President should issue a statement of liberal war goals of his own. Now in Paris in December 1917, confronted with the challenge thrown down by Russian communism but unable to reach agreement with the Allies on a common response, House fell back on the idea of issuing a statement of American war goals unilaterally; he cabled Wilson, asking him to hold off making any foreign policy pronouncements until the two of them could discuss the matter in person.

  Wilson replied by cable: “Sorry impossible to omit foreign affairs from address to Congress.”

  House left Paris December 6, boarded the USS Mount Vernon December 7, and on December 14 cabled Wilson that he would debark the afternoon of December 15. He added that he would catch the 11.08 train from New York to Washington Monday morning, December 17, and would arrive in Washington at 4:40 that afternoon. House and the President conferred from five to seven o’clock. The Wilsons and House dined alon
e and then went to the theater.

  In a diary entry for December 18, House wrote that “an important decision the President and I made was to formulate the war aims of the United States. I never knew a man who did things so casually. We did not discuss this matter more than ten or fifteen minutes.…” This was, in the view of the editor of House’s papers, the “moral turning point of the war.”

  House noted that “the President asked me to have Mezes”—the head of the Inquiry team in New York—“give a memorandum of the different questions which a peace conference must necessarily take up for solution. I told him I already had this data in my head. He told me that he also had it, but he would like a more complete and definite statement such, for instance (as) a proper solution of the Balkan question.”

  House suggested cabling Sir William Wiseman to return from Europe at once; Wiseman could be of help by telling them “the way England would receive what we had to say.” Wilson said: “No, we shouldn’t consult with anybody or we have to consult everybody.”

  Returning to New York, House “intimated” to three members of the Inquiry—Sidney Mezes, Walter Lippmann, and attorney David Hunter Miller—that the President planned to make the major speech of his life. He did not tell them at that point what it was to be about, but he did ask them for a memorandum and must have told them that it should deal with international issues that had to be resolved.

  Lippmann drafted such a memorandum for the three of them, dated December 22, entitled “The Present Situation, the War Aims, and Peace Terms It Suggests.” Much of it would be of little help to the President in his endeavor. It began by analyzing the current military situation of the various countries at war, the challenges faced by them, and their strengths, weaknesses, and goals. It then discussed what America’s objectives ought to be, and the assets and liabilities the country brought with it in pursuing them. It suggested themes that the United States might employ in propaganda campaigns. It urged Wilson to formulate a public program of liberal war goals. And, in a concluding section (Part III), it offered a brief list of war goals the President might proclaim.