The Allies and Wilson were further apart than London or Paris imagined, even in their statement of basic principles. Wilson and the Entente, for example, parted company on the issue of self-determination. The British and French evoked “self-determination” for selfish, even cynical reasons, not altruistic ones. The goal was not setting peoples free but, rather, destroying their antagonists from within. They saw Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Armenians, and even Palestinian Jews rising up to claim their sovereign inheritance from the empires that held them down, but not Indians, Malays, or the inhabitants of the Cameroons or French Equatorial Africa.
Once they let loose that principle, it was hard to see where it would stop. If it applied to Italians and Czechs and Jews and Armenians, why not to Arabs and Kampucheans and Ibos? In 1917, there were strong racial reasons for believing it did not. When, two years later, the Paris Peace Conference wrapped itself around the principle of self-determination, it was automatically assumed that the principle posed no threat to the existing colonial empires of the victorious powers—the United States included.
And yet, by planting the self-determination flag, the Entente had unwittingly set the table for the transformation of a world war into a global revolution. Before 1917 was done, that revolution would be unleashed, and Woodrow Wilson would not be the only visionary to seize the slogan to overthrow the existing order—one other would be the revolutionary temporarily in deep freeze in Switzerland, Lenin. In fact, even after Wilson’s speech, he was the only person in Europe thoroughly convinced that America would enter the war—indeed, would be compelled to enter it by the forces of history, German submarines or no German submarines.
Sitting in his Zurich apartment the previous summer, Lenin had been putting the finishing touches on the manuscript for Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism. It would be one of the seminal and original works in the Communist canon, and also deeply revealing of Lenin’s thinking in the midst of the world’s bloodiest war—and his thinking about America.
The theme of Lenin’s slim volume is that concentration of wealth in capitalist countries must inevitably lead to war. That intense concentration—Britain, France, Germany, and the United States together, Lenin noted, controlled nearly 80 percent of the world’s financial capital—had reduced the possibility for fresh profits in capitalist countries themselves, including the United States. With the new century, Western capital required new outlets, and it found them in the proliferation of colonies and imperial possessions around the world. “Capitalism has grown into a world system of colonial oppression and of the financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the people of the world by a handful of ‘advanced’ countries.”38
Lenin’s conclusion: the competition for outlets for capital must lead inevitably to competition for empire itself, which must lead to war. The current conflict was proof that he was right, he believed, and while the United States was a relative latecomer to the imperial feast, with its war against Spain in 1898 and its takeover of the Philippines, Cuba, and Hawaii, the involvement of the world’s mightiest capitalist economy in the larger conflict in Europe would be only a matter of time.
From Lenin’s perspective, which side the United States chose didn’t really matter because, in the end, the war would bring about the end of capitalism itself, and the collapse of all the powers that had participated in its cataclysm. Imperialism, and the “striving to violence and reaction” it unleashed, was not only the highest stage of capitalism but also its last stage. The war would send the entire capitalist system and its political offshoots, including bourgeois democracy, crashing to the ground. Out of the rubble would emerge the international working-class movement, ready to take power in the name of the proletariat and to complete the destruction that the world war had started.39
By the logic of history, then, America would inevitably declare war on Germany and join the Armageddon that spelled the end of capitalism.
In a strange way, Lenin foresaw “peace without victory” like Wilson, but in very different terms. No one was going to win this war except the working classes; the peace they would bring would be built on the rubble of capitalism. The speech Lenin gave to young socialists in Zurich on January 22 (the same day as Wilson’s speech to Congress) predicted as much, with the added proviso that this transformation would certainly take place in their lifetimes, though perhaps not in his.
So, as 1917 began, both men saw the world as a stage set for a massive upheaval, with each imagining himself at the center of it.
Who were these two extraordinary men, so different, so far apart, yet so much alike? And how had their very different lives led them to this point, when they would both transform world history forever?
3
TOMMY AND VOLODYA
The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire.
—GENERAL FERDINAND FOCH
THOMAS WOODROW WILSON—“TOMMY” to his family—did not learn to read until he was ten years old. This seems shocking for a man who would spend his life at his desk and typewriter writing important books and memorable speeches, for a man who personified the Progressive American intellectual for his generation. Biographer H. W. Brands speculates that Wilson’s reading problems may have been a form of dyslexia. Certainly, the problems Tommy had in school were pronounced enough that his father had to find him a special tutor.1
Eventually, Wilson conquered his dyslexia, but the long struggle with reading may have given him an excessive awe for the power of words and language, a belief that they could shape reality and even formed their own reality. If so, it’s a conviction he shared with Lenin—Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, “Volodya” to his family.
Both men were unlikely world leaders in a time of action, as both made their lives about words and ideas. This commitment was combined with a compelling physical presence that moved and at times frightened friends and contemporaries. In Lenin’s case, “there was above all his enormous capacity to see to the root of things,” one of his fellow revolutionaries, Mikhail Pokrovsky, later wrote, “a capacity which finally awakened in me a sort of superstitious feeling . . . He understood things better and was master of the power denied to me, of seeing about ten feet down into the earth.”2 In Wilson’s case, there was his acceptance speech as Democratic nominee for governor of New Jersey, a speech that so moved his audience that they refused to let him stop and sit down, shouting, “Go on! Go on!”3
If the overused word charisma has any meaning, it applies to both Lenin and Wilson. But their almost magical effect on those who saw or worked with them didn’t spring from larger-than-life warmth or a passionate personality. It sprang from the opposite: a chilly, almost icy intensity reinforced by a sense of the utter rightness of their vision and ideas. That sense of rightness made opposition virtually an immoral act of betrayal. Someone once said of Lenin that he insisted on imposing his will on others “not because power is sweet to him, but because he is certain he is right and cannot tolerate anyone spoiling his work.”4 The same was true of Wilson, who was willing to hurl hundreds of thousands of Americans into the carnage of the First World War in order to fulfill the vision he spelled out for the first time to those enraptured New Jersey delegates six years before the war began: “America is not distinguished so much by its wealth and material power as by the fact that it was born with an ideal, a purpose to serve mankind.”
He went on: “When I look upon the American flag before me, I think sometimes it is made of parchment and blood. The white in it stands for parchment, the red in it signifies blood—and blood that was spilled to make those rights real.”
Just how much blood both men, Wilson and Lenin, were willing to spill in order to move the world on their respective revolutionary courses would be the overriding narrative of 1917.
THOMAS WOODROW WILSON was the son of a Presbyterian minister, Joseph Wilson, who gave his son a respect for the power of the greatest words of all, the Word of God. All Woodrow Wilson’s life, the Presbyterian faith, and its b
elief that God and Providence watched over every aspect of American life as well as his own, never wavered. Even when Wilson was president, his God was a demanding taskmaster, one who insisted that man’s highest duties in life, and highest destinies, had to be fulfilled without question. His father’s faith gave Wilson a sense of moral rectitude that, to others, bordered (or more than bordered) on self-righteousness. Watching the American president during the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, John Maynard Keynes would remark that “he would do nothing that was not honorable; he would do nothing that was not just and right”—that is, Keynes cynically concluded, unless Wilson could justify an action as a way to serve some higher moral purpose.5
Likewise, Wilson’s friend and biographer Ray Stannard Baker wrote that Wilson’s greatest ideal, “the League of Nations[,] was a matter of faith, and the President is first of all a man of faith. He believes in the L. of N. as an organization that will save the world.” While others strongly supported the League, the president “sees it, grasps it, feels it, with the mighty tenacity of faith.”
Baker added, “He is willing even to compromise desperately for it, suffer the charge of inconsistency for it,” a charge that would haunt Wilson all through his political life, the charge of hypocrisy.6
If the Word and continuous presence of a Presbyterian God were one decisive influence on Wilson’s life, the other was the American Civil War.
Born in 1856, Wilson was nine when the War Between the States ended. His father served briefly in a Confederate regiment before returning to his life as a man of the cloth. Tommy Wilson experienced the 1861–65 conflict not as an epic struggle to reaffirm the principle that “government by the people, of the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth” or to free an enslaved people, as Northerners did and as most Americans do today. To Wilson, it was a war of unwarranted destruction, of occupation and degradation of his beloved South. When he was fourteen, the Wilson family moved to a devastated Columbia, South Carolina, which Yankee soldiers had all but burned to the ground five years earlier.
The sense that the Civil War and Reconstruction were undiluted tragedies for the South and the nation—perhaps, even, that the wrong side had won—had a profound effect on Wilson’s views of domestic policies. That included his support for segregation, then justified under the rubric of separate but equal, including segregating the U.S. armed forces. It also included endorsing the idea that the civilization he and America needed to protect was above all a white one, led by the “progressive” Caucasian race. As we’ll see, this view affected his policy toward China and Japan both before and after the Paris Peace Conference in ways that would sow the seeds of trouble long after.
But the Civil War also left him with a deep, abiding horror of war itself. Wilson worried that if America were dragged into war for the wrong reasons, it would ignite an enthusiasm for war and violence like the emotion that had swept the North during the Civil War. This was why it was important in the days following the Lusitania’s sinking to keep America cool and levelheaded.7
There was also a deeper, racialist component to his fear of war. That fateful January of 1917, Wilson met with his Cabinet to discuss the war raging in Europe. One listener wrote that Wilson was “more and more impressed with the idea that ‘white civilization’ and its domination in the world rested largely on our ability to keep this country [i.e., America] intact . . . He had come to the feeling that he was willing to go to any lengths rather than to have the nation actually involved in the conflict.”
If America slipped over the edge and into war, Wilson felt, the result would be “a crime against civilization,” meaning white civilization.8 The young Woodrow Wilson matriculated at Princeton in 1875, and was soon in the thick of organizing the Liberal Debating Club and competing in public speaking contests. It was his fascination with oratory, particularly political oratory, that led to his discovery of his first heroes, the great British statesmen of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, men such as William Pitt, Edmund Burke, and John Bright. His enthusiasm for all things British led him to compose his first serious essay, published in the International Review in 1879, arguing that it was time to make the American Cabinet responsible to Congress in the same way British Cabinets were responsible to Parliament. The article made a minor splash; by an irony of ironies, the editor at International Review who accepted Wilson’s piece would be his future antagonist Henry Cabot Lodge.9
Thanks to the article, Wilson was launched on his career as a scholar and intellectual, and as a leading expert on the American political system and the role of Congress. After an unhappy year and a half at law school at the University of Virginia, and an equally unhappy stint hanging out his shingle in Atlanta, Woodrow Wilson decided to embrace his scholarly side by heading off to Baltimore and the graduate school at Johns Hopkins University.
Published in 1885, his Hopkins dissertation was Congressional Government, a penetrating analysis of the central role of the legislative branch in American government—an ironic choice of subject for the man who would come to symbolize the executive branch at its most self-assertive, even dictatorial.
Yet there is important conceptual overlap between Wilson the dedicated student of the importance of Congress in 1885 and the later Progressive author of works such as The State and Constitutional Government. First of all, both the early and the later Wilson thought it a mistake to see the U.S. Constitution as a rigid set of rules or mechanisms that set limits on future expressions of the will of the American people. What the men of 1787 saw as the role of government was not the role of government in the twentieth century; nor should it be, Wilson concluded. Today, he would be an enthusiastic supporter of the idea of the “living Constitution.” He was also a biting critic of the doctrine of separation of powers—indeed, his early 1879 essay on Cabinet government was an implicit rejection of the idea of a wall of separation between the executive and legislative branches. Instead, he insisted that this outdated notion was the trace of an “older liberalism,” as Wilson termed it, one that worried about the possibility of government tyrannizing the individual, and so it used separation of powers as a way to limit that possibility. Wilson’s view was that this worry no longer applied to the modern age. Instead, the threat now was that separation of powers would be a permanent brake on the ability of government to address the most pressing issues of the age. In fact, Wilson expressed amazement that American democracy had survived at all, given the self-mutilations imposed by the separation of powers.10 Even more, the separation of powers prevented the sovereign will of the people from being expressed through the system originally devised by the Constitution.
The bespectacled son of the Presbyterian preacher was now an academic star. One reviewer called Congressional Government the best study of the American Constitution since The Federalist Papers.11 Teaching jobs came quickly, first at Bryn Mawr College and then at Wesleyan. His next book, The State, appeared in print in 1889 and became an instant classic in comparative government studies and then a standard textbook in the field. In 1890, his alma mater Princeton beckoned him back to teach. By now, the thirty-four-year-old Wilson had dropped his first name, “Thomas,” and signed his name and his books simply as “Woodrow Wilson.” At Princeton, students flocked to his classes; colleges and universities around the country asked him to speak. In just twelve years he would be Princeton’s highest-paid professor, and Princeton’s board of trustees would unanimously vote to make him president of the college.
It was 1890, the same year Bismarck was dismissed as German chancellor and Wyoming and Idaho became states. That same year, on the other side of the world, a twenty-year-old Lenin was busy translating the works of Karl Marx into Russian.
ALTHOUGH LENIN WOULD see himself as a lifelong champion of the proletariat and an enemy of the bourgeoisie, his background was solid Russian middle class: his father, Ilya Ulyanov, was a school inspector, and his mother, Maria Alexandrovna Blank, the daughter of a successful lawyer and landowner.
His hometown also was in many ways illustrative of the “other” Russia, the one far away from Europeanized urban centers such as Moscow and St. Petersburg. When he was born, for example, more than one-third of Simbirsk’s population were not ethnic Russians. These inhabitants included Jews, one of whom was Lenin’s maternal grandfather, Alexander Blank (a convert to Russian Orthodoxy); Germans; Tatars; and Kalmucks, a Mongol people whose number included Lenin’s paternal grandmother. A distance of about two hundred miles north of Simbirsk lay Kazan, once the capital of the Muslim Tatars; this was where Lenin would attend university. Throughout his life, people noted that there was something “Asian” about Lenin, with his slanting eyes and broad, high cheekbones. That un-Russian something went beyond genetics, however. It was rooted in the world in which he grew up, where the mark of galloping Cossacks and rampaging Mongols was still real; where Russian rule, like Russian Orthodoxy, had been imposed by force; where civilization was a thin veneer—and where a young man growing up could well conclude that all power came from the barrel of a gun or the swing of a scimitar.
Lenin’s parents, it must be said, were entirely untouched by these turbulent cultural crosscurrents. They saw themselves first and foremost as good Russians. They raised their six children (three girls and three boys, including Vladimir, one of the two middle children) in the Russian Orthodox faith and sent the boys to Russian schools. Ilya Ulyanov was also a loyal civil servant under the czar, becoming a state inspector of schools after building a successful career as a teacher of physics and mathematics. As such, he held a rank in the Russian civil service equal to that of major general in the army.12
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