The Deluge
Page 9
As a conservative Southern liberal, Wilson’s view of history was shaped by two great events: the disaster of the Civil War, and the drama of the eighteenth-century revolutions as interpreted by the writings of the Anglo-Irish conservative, Edmund Burke.44 In 1896 Wilson contributed a glowing preface to one of Burke’s most famous speeches on ‘Conciliation with the Colonies’. Originally delivered in 1775, Burke’s oration became for Wilson a statement of a fundamental distinction. Whereas Burke showered praise on the freedom-loving American colonist, he ‘hated the French revolutionary philosophy and deemed it unfit for free men’. Wilson heartily agreed. Looking back over a century of revolution, he denounced the legacy of that philosophy as ‘radically evil and corrupting. No state can ever be conducted on its principles. For it holds that government is a matter of contract and deliberate arrangement, whereas in fact it is an institute of habit, bound together by innumerable threads of association, scarcely one of which has been deliberately placed . . .’ Contrary to the delusional idea that self-determination could be realized in a single revolutionary spasm, Wilson insisted that ‘governments have never been successfully and permanently changed, except by slow modification operating from generation to generation’.45 With the French experiences of 1789, 1830, 1848 and 1870 in mind, Wilson in an earlier essay had opined that: ‘democracy in Europe has acted always in rebellion, as a destructive force . . . It has built such temporary governments as it has had opportunity to erect . . . out of the discredited materials of centralized rule, elevating the people’s representatives for a season . . . but securing almost as little as ever of that everyday local self-government which lies so near to the heart of liberty’.46 Even in 1900 he saw in the French Third Republic a dangerously unsteady descendant of absolute monarchy, the ‘eccentric influence’ of which had brought the entire project of democracy in the modern world into disrepute.47
True freedom was for Wilson indelibly rooted in the deep-seated qualities of a particular national and racial way of life. Failure to recognize this was the source of a profound confusion about American identity itself. Americans of the gilded age, Wilson remarked, were apt to think of themselves as having lost the revolutionary ardour which they imagined to have propelled the founding fathers. They thought of themselves as inoculated by ‘experience . . . against the infections of hopeful revolution’. But this sense was based on an ‘old self-deception’. ‘If we are suffering disappointment, it is the disappointment of an awakening’. Those who romanticized America’s eighteenth-century revolution ‘were dreaming’. In truth, ‘The government which we founded one hundred years ago was no type of an experiment in advanced democracy . . .’ Americans ‘never had any business harkening to Rousseau or consorting with Europe in revolutionary sentiment’. The strength of democratic self-determination, American-style, was precisely that it was not revolutionary. It had inherited all its strengths from its forebears. ‘It had not to overthrow other polities; it had only to organize itself. It had not to create, but only to expand self-government . . . It needed nothing but to methodize its way of living.’48 In words that were to echo through his views about World War I, Wilson insisted: ‘there is almost nothing in common between popular outbreaks such as took place in France at her great Revolution and the establishment of a government like our own . . . We manifested one hundred years ago what Europe lost . . . self-command, self-possession.’49 He thus gave his peculiar personal inflection to the general sense of alienation with which many Americans regarded the ‘old world’. What Wilson was determined to demonstrate amidst the crisis of the world war was that America had not lost the ‘self-possession’ he prized above all else.
Wilson was no doubt more comfortable with the British than the French and wrote eloquently about the merits of the British constitution. But precisely because Britain was the nation from which America’s own political culture had historically derived, it was essential for Wilson that Britain itself must remain fixed in the past. The thought that it might be advancing along the path of democratic progress, alongside rather than behind America, was deeply unsettling. The fact that the Prime Minister who took office weeks after Wilson’s re-election, Lloyd George, was perhaps the greatest pioneer of democracy in early twentieth-century Europe, was lost on the White House. Wilson was only too happy to fall in with radical critics who denounced the Prime Minister as a reactionary warmonger.50 Colonel House, when he visited London, much preferred dealing with Tory patricians, such as Lord Balfour and old-school Liberal Grandees like Sir Edward Grey, who fitted Wilson’s aspic image of British politics far better than the populist Lloyd George.
IV
Faced with this wall of stereotypes, it was tempting for the Europeans to respond with their own version of the stylized transatlantic difference. At Versailles, Georges Clemenceau was to remark that he found Wilson’s sanctimoniousness easier to stomach when he reminded himself that the American had never ‘lived in a world where it was good form to shoot a Democrat’.51 But Clemenceau, perhaps out of politeness, perhaps from sheer forgetfulness of his long career, failed to note that he and Wilson did in fact share a common point of reference in a truly violent period of political struggle not in Europe, but in America itself. Though half a century in the past, the Civil War spoke directly to the deepest source of Wilson’s discomfort with the rhetoric of just war so eagerly taken up in the spring of 1917 by both the Entente and their cheerleaders in America.
If Wilson’s Southern childhood was marked by the Civil War, Clemenceau was defined by his inheritance of the French revolutionary tradition.52 His father had been arrested for resisting the Bonapartist usurpation of the 1848 revolution and narrowly escaped deportation to Algeria. In 1862 Clemenceau himself served time in the infamous Mazas jail for seditious activity. In 1865, broken hearted and with nothing to hope for in Napoleon III’s France, Clemenceau shipped out to that great battleground of nineteenth-century democratic politics, Civil War America. With his recently minted medical degree he meant to volunteer as a medic in the service of Lincoln’s Union Army, or to make a life for himself as a frontiersman in the American West. Instead, he settled in Connecticut and New York and over the following years produced for the liberal newspaper Le Temps a remarkable series of reports on the bitter struggle over the effort to complete the defeat of the South by means of comprehensive reconstruction. True to his convictions, Clemenceau saw Reconstruction as a heroic effort to complete a victorious just war with a ‘second revolution’. It was a battle that concluded, to Clemenceau’s delight, with the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in February 1869, promising voting rights for African Americans. For Clemenceau, the radical Republican abolitionists were the ‘noblest and finest men of the nation’, inspired by ‘all the wrath of a Robespierre’.53 Coming from Clemenceau, this was the highest compliment. The partisans of Reconstruction were fighting to save the United States from ‘moral ruin’ and ‘misfortune’ in the face of abusive, self-interested heckling from Southern Democrats.
Amongst that crowd was to be found Woodrow Wilson, who as a young man impressed all his acquaintances with his dogged adherence to the Southern cause. As the author of best-selling popular histories in the 1880s and 1890s, Professor Wilson concluded his triumphant narrative of the American nation state with a celebration of the reconciliation between North and South, which had condemned Reconstruction and consigned the black population to a disenfranchised underclass. For Wilson, the heroes of Clemenceau’s reports were the architects of a ‘perfect work of fear, demoralization, disgust and social revolution’. In their determination to ‘put the white South under the heel of the black South’, the advocates of Reconstruction had inflicted on the Southern states a policy ‘of rule or ruin’.54 One cannot help wondering what the future American President might have thought if during his adolescence as a young Southerner he had happened to stumble across the following lines dispatched to Paris in January 1867 by the future leader of wartime France: ‘If the Northern majorit
y weakens and the nation’s representatives let themselves be persuaded in the interests of conciliation or of States’ Rights to let the Southerners reenter Congress easily, there will be no more internal peace for a quarter of a century. The slavery party of the South combined with the Democrats of the North will be strong enough to defeat all the efforts of the abolitionists, and the final and complete emancipation of the coloured people will be deferred indefinitely.’55 As the first Southerner to be elected President since the Civil War, Wilson owed his career to that postponement of justice.
If Clemenceau was too distracted in 1917 to spend much time dredging up memories half a century old, for Wilson’s American opponents the historic resonances of ‘peace without victory’ were too strong to resist. The German declaration of U-boat warfare on 30 January 1917 overshadowed not just Wilson’s Senate speech but also one of the most savage attacks upon it by Teddy Roosevelt.56 He was quick to identify the conservative historical lineage of Wilson’s stance on the war. In the colonial era, it had been the ‘Tories of 1776’, Roosevelt reminded his listeners, who had wanted compromise with Britain, who had ‘demanded peace without victory’. In the agonizing final stages of America’s own civil war, in 1864 it had been the so-called ‘Copperheads’ who ‘demanded peace without victory . . .’57 Now ‘Mr Wilson’ was asking ‘the world to accept a Copperhead peace of dishonor; a peace without victory for the right; a peace designed to let wrong triumph; a peace championed in neutral countries by the apostles of timidity and greed.’58 The Copperheads were the faction of the pro-slavery Democratic Party that clung to political survival in the North during the Civil War, notably in Lincoln’s home state of Illinois. At the climax of the struggle in 1864 they had advocated a compromise peace with the rebellious slaveocracy of the South. The partisans of a total Northern victory had named them after a venomous snake.
V
As March began in 1917, America was not yet at war. To the frustration of much of his entourage, the President still insisted that it would be a ‘crime’ for America to allow itself to be sucked into the conflict, since it would ‘make it impossible to save Europe afterwards’.59 In front of the entire cabinet he rejected Secretary of State Lansing’s contention that ‘an essential of permanent peace was that all nations should be politically liberalized’.60 Wilson wanted the world pacified, for sure. A peace without victory would see to that, but a country’s political complexion was a different matter. It was an expression of its inner life. To think that a country could be ‘liberalized’ at a stroke from without was to fall into the fallacy of French revolutionary thought. A nation must be given time and the protection of a new international order to develop of its own accord. Under the ideological cloak of a liberal crusade Wilson feared that the old-world vice of militarism would find fertile new soil in America. ‘Junkerthum . . . would creep in under cover of . . . patriotic feeling’.61 He continued to insist that ‘probably greater justice would be done if the conflict ended in a draw’.62 It was only as the full extent of Germany’s disastrously ill-timed lurch into aggression became clear that Wilson was finally forced to abandon his position of moral equivalence. The U-boats were not the last word.
In late February 1917 British intelligence plucked a top-secret telegram from the transatlantic wires. In it the German Foreign Office authorized its embassy in Mexico City to propose an anti-American alliance to the Mexican government of General Carranza in conjunction with Japan. In exchange for military assistance from Germany, Mexico would launch an immediate attack on Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.63 By 26 February, Washington was informed. The news became public a day later. Amongst pro-German circles in the US, the initial response was one of disbelief. As the American-German activist George Sylvester Viereck protested to the newspaper proprietor William Randolph Hearst at the end of February 1917, ‘the alleged letter . . . is obviously a fake; it is impossible to believe that the German Foreign Secretary would place his name under such a preposterous document . . . the Realpolitiker of the Wilhelmstrasse would never offer an alliance based on such ludicrous propositions as the conquest by Mexico of American territory . . .’64 In Germany too there was astonishment. For the Reich to be offering Texas and Arizona to Mexican ‘brigands’ whilst simultaneously angling for an alliance with Japan, the leading German industrialist Walther Rathenau wrote to General Hans von Seeckt, was ‘too sad even to laugh about’.65 But however hallucinogenic these associations may have appeared, the bizarre German scheme to seize the military initiative in the western hemisphere was the logical extension of Berlin’s idée fixe that America was already committed to the Entente and that a declaration of war was under any circumstances inevitable. Despite Wilson’s obvious unwillingness to go to war, on Saturday 3 March 1917 the German Secretary of State, Arthur Zimmermann, publicly acknowledged the authenticity of the reports.
Added to the now-routine sinking of American ships by German U-boats, the refusal of Berlin even to deny this unprovoked aggression left Wilson with no option. On 2 April 1917 he went before the Senate to demand a declaration of war. For men like Roosevelt and Lansing the declaration of war was simply a relief. Germany had demonstrated once and for all its true, aggressive character. For Wilson, by contrast, to be forced to abandon his vision of ‘peace without victory’ and to throw his country’s weight onto the side of the Entente was a stomach-churning reversal. As one of his most insightful biographers puts it, in characteristically exalted terms, Wilson’s declaration of war was his ‘Gethsemane’.66 Certainly, there were tones of Lutheran heroics in the final lines of his address to the Congress: ‘America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other.’ But what was Wilson committing himself to? Even as he entered the war, he held back.
America was joining the war to ‘vindicate the principles of peace and justice in the life of the world as against selfish and autocratic power and to set up amongst the really free and self-governed peoples of the world such a concert of purpose and of action as will henceforth insure the observance of those principles . . .’ ‘A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations,’ Wilson continued. ‘No autocratic government could be trusted to keep faith within it or observe its covenants.’ In such a struggle, it was ‘no longer feasible or desirable’ for America to remain neutral. This appeared to concede the argument to Lansing and Roosevelt, who had always insisted that it was impossible for America to uphold a position of equivalence between the two sides. But examined closely, there was a remarkable selectivity in Wilson’s declaration. He did not include Germany’s main allies, the Ottomans or Habsburgs, in his declaration of war or his denunciation of autocracy. Nor did he squarely endorse the Entente powers as representatives of democracy or examples of self-government. His objectives were stated in abstract and prospective terms. Having failed in his effort to force an end to the war from without, Wilson was determined to shape the order of a new world from within. But to do so he had to preserve his distance. Rather than formally allying America with the Entente, Wilson insisted on his detached status as an ‘associate’.67 At the crucial moment, this would give him the freedom he needed to throw his weight onto the scales, not behind London and Paris, but so as to restore America’s role as the arbiter of global power.
3
The War Grave of Russian Democracy
On 6 April 1917 America entered the war, swinging the balance of force decisively in favour of the Entente. It retrospect it would come to seem a foreordained turn in world history. But at that very moment, it became obvious what extraordinary risks the Entente had been running in escalating the war in the face of American opposition. It became clear how finely balanced the war had been and how much traction Woodrow Wilson’s January appeal for a ‘peace without victory’ might have acquired, if only he had been able to keep America out of the war a few months
longer. On 20 March 1917, the same day that Wilson reluctantly agreed with his cabinet to ask Congress for a declaration of war, Washington instructed its embassy in Petrograd to recognize the new Provisional Government of Russia.1
After a week of strikes and demonstrations and the refusal of the Petrograd garrison to follow orders, on 15 March the Tsar had abdicated. With the authority of the Romanov dynasty in tatters, the Tsar’s brothers refused to take the throne.2 As America moved toward war, Russia was not yet officially a Republic, but the Provisional Government that had constituted itself from progressive elements of the Duma, the Tsar’s rump of a parliament, announced that a Constituent Assembly, elected on a ‘universal basis’, would meet within the year. Following the example of its illustrious American and French precursors, this revolutionary Convention would decide the most fundamental and contentious questions bequeathed by the old regime – the political constitution of the country, the land question, and future relations between Russia and the tens of millions of non-Russians gathered under the oppressive rule of the Tsars. In the meantime the chief new sources of revolutionary legitimacy were the assemblies known as Soviets, which constituted themselves on the initiative of radical soldiers, workers and peasants in every city, town and village. By the early summer these Soviets would hold their own national congress and enter into a coalition with the Provisional Government.