Woodrow Wilson’s War

Even in our “don’t know much about history” era, most people could give you the elevator pitch on why the Civil War and World War II were fought and, at the very worst, could come up with good one-word answers. “Slavery” and “Hitler.”

For Mr. Wilson’s War .  .  . not so much.

The best-remembered argument made by the man himself was that America was going to war to make the world “safe for democracy.” The poignant thing is he seems to have sincerely meant it.

Wilson was, after all, an idealist. Before he ran for governor of New Jersey in 1910, he had been uncorrupted by any political office. He had been a writer of dense and scholarly books, a college professor, and the president of Princeton University. He was an intellectual and a “progressive,” and he thought big. His ideas would today be called “disruptive.”

For instance: “All that Progressives ask or desire is permission .  .  . to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle.”

Nor was he especially fond of the other great founding document, the Declaration of Independence: “No doubt a lot of nonsense has been talked about the inalienable rights of the individual, and a great deal that was mere vague sentiment and pleasing speculation has been put forward as fundamental principle.”

He was, then, a believer in the power of the state as long as that power was in the right hands. He was especially fond of the power of the presidency and wrote,

Like his rival Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson came early and fervently to the cult of the president and reverence for the state. His progressive legacy includes the Federal Reserve banking system, the Federal Trade Commission, and the federal income tax, for which we cannot possibly thank him enough.

He could also bring down the hammer. Once the nation had gone to war to make the world safe for democracy, he signed a sedition law. Under its provisions, people who would today be called “dissidents,” or perhaps “the resist-ance,” were arrested and put in jail. These unfortunates included notable political opponents like Eugene Debs, who was the leader of the Socialist party and had run against Wilson in 1912. When the war was over and he could have pardoned Debs, Wilson declined to do so, even though his attorney general favored the pardon. His sentence was commuted by Wilson’s successor, Warren Harding, a more charitable man. As H. L. Mencken wrote of Wilson in 1921, “Magnanimity was simply beyond him.”

After war was declared, it became illegal for Americans to “utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the government or the military. The postmaster general became an enforcer with power to revoke the mailing privileges of periodicals that got out of line. Some 75 were shut down. Enough, certainly, pour encourager les autres.

Wilson’s Department of Justice arrested tens of thousands without just cause. But the attorney general still insisted no citizen need fear. Just “Obey the law. Keep your mouth shut.” The department also formed something called the American Protective League, which encouraged people to inform on their fellow citizens for draft dodging and other seditious behavior.

The Wilson administration established a War Industries Board that was meant to centralize economic planning and decision-making and, in fact, served to validate Randolph Bourne’s famous line “War is the health of the state.” (This side of the Wilson era is detailed mercilessly and, strange to say, delightfully, in Jonah Goldberg’s indispensable Liberal Fascism.)

The war that the United States was being called upon to fight in order to make the world “safe for democracy” seems to have been a serious threat to democracy in America. So was it a war worth fighting? And, for that matter, did we even win?

When war broke out in Europe, in August 1914, Wilson—who had been president for two years—took the high road. With armies on the march and the greatest, bloodiest battles in history about to be fought, Wilson warned Americans not to let themselves be divided into “camps of hostile opinion, hot against each other.” The country must, he said, “be neutral in fact as well and in name during these times that are to try men’s souls. We must be impartial in thought as well as in action, must put a curb upon our sentiments.”

Easier said than done, of course, in a nation of immigrants. Those who’d come from England and Germany knew exactly whose side they took. And if you weren’t among those whose loyalties were with the Germans then it was hard to deny the brutality of that nation’s invasion of Belgium, during which civilian hostages were rounded up and executed by firing squad as a way to keep the populace terrified and docile. Germany was, from the beginning of the war, the aggressor.

But neutrality was the Wilson cause, even after a German submarine torpedoed the liner Lusitania on May 7, 1915. The ship sank in 18 minutes, and of the 1,198 passengers who drowned, 128 were Americans.

It was a provocation but not sufficient to change Wilson’s convictions about neutrality. He declared, in a speech shortly after the sinking, that there is “such a thing as a man being too proud to fight. There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.”

Thinking, perhaps, that there was surely a limit to even Wilson’s idealism and patience, Germany’s leaders backed off from their campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare and as John Milton Cooper, a historian of Wilson’s presidency, wrote, “the threat of war was in remission.” Campaigning on the slogan “He kept us out of war,” Wilson was reelected in 1916.

In his second inaugural address, Wilson said of the war, “We have been conscious that we were not part of it. In that consciousness, despite many divisions, we have drawn closer together. We have been deeply wronged upon the seas, but we have not wished to wrong or injure in return; have retained throughout the consciousness of standing in some sort apart, intent upon an interest that transcended the immediate issues of the war itself.”

Our virtue, in short, was our armor. The war, by then, had become unimaginably savage. The French and Germans fought for months at Verdun, where some 700,000 were killed and wounded. Then the fighting moved to the Somme, where the British Army lost 20,000 in the first day of fighting. By the time that battle ended, four months later, there were more than a million casualties, dead and wounded, on both sides. To the normal horrors of combat—shot and shell—had been added the use of poison gas. And there was no end in sight. Some people actually believed the war might never end.

The Royal Navy ruled the seas—the surface of them, anyway. And its blockade threatened to starve Germany. Then Russia quit the fight. The German troops fighting on that front could be sent to fight the French and the British. It was, the Germans believed, an opportunity to win the war in early 1918. So they decided to resume unrestricted submarine warfare and, being punctilious about these things, announced it, more or less, in the press.

This action, the German high command realized, risked bringing the Americans into the war. But if the offensive on the Western Front succeeded—and those reinforcements from the Russian front made that likely, if not certain—American troops wouldn’t arrive in time to make a difference.

Besides, there was another plan for dealing with the Americans. This one involved provoking a fight between Mexico and the United States. And for good measure, stirring up trouble between the United States and Japan as well.

The plan was outlined in a cable sent by the German foreign secretary, Arthur Zimmermann, to the German embassy in Mexico City. British cryptographers intercepted and decrypted it, then found a way to release it without compromising their code-breaking operations. The Germans did not even bother to deny the authenticity of the message or back away from it, and there was no diplomatic ambiguity in its wording:

The resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare and the exposure of the Zimmermann telegram in all its effrontery made it impossible, even for Wilson, to believe that neutrality was any longer possible.

So just a month after his second inaugural, having run as the man who “kept us out of war,” he was asking Congress for authority to get in. All in.

There was no naïveté in Wilson about what this meant. A few days before war was declared, he had said to a journalist, “Once lead this people into war and they’ll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. To fight, you must be brutal .  .  . and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fiber of our national life, infecting Congress, the courts, the policeman on the beat, the man in the street. Conformity will be the only virtue. And every man who refuses to conform will have to pay the penalty.”

One wonders if he saw his own future in these bleak thoughts. And also how he reconciled those thoughts with that business about making the world “safe for democracy.”

But the flame of idealism still burned hot within him. If democracy and individual freedoms were to take a hit at home, there was still a world to redeem.

The war, however, went on according to its own logic. Parts of the French Army, having been bled white and disastrously and nearly criminally led, mutinied. With France just holding on, the British stubbornly and disastrously attempted their own offensive, in Belgium. It lasted weeks and almost ruined the army. The British were running out of men and, in Winston Churchill’s words, sending out “to the shambles by stern laws the remaining manhood of the nation. Lads of 18 and 19, elderly men up to 45, the last surviving brother, the only son of his mother (and she a widow), the father, the sole support of the family, the weak, the consumptive, the thrice wounded—all must now prepare themselves for the scythe.”

If the coming German offensive were to succeed before the Americans arrived in sufficient numbers, then the war would be lost. And it did, in fact, turn out to be a close run thing. But the British held, barely, as did the French, with help from the Americans in, among other battles, the one at Belleau Wood. And then the Allies—with the Americans—attacked and turned back the Germans whose countrymen at home were starving, as they had meant for the British Isles to be starved by the U-boat campaign.

The desperate Germans asked for an armistice to be based on terms drawn up by Wilson, in what he called the Fourteen Points. The first of these famously called for “Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at.” Another asserted, “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 .  .  . should be righted, in order that peace may once more be made secure in the interest of all.”

German acceptance of this condition was a far cry from its stated aims, put to paper when the war began: “The general aim of the war is security for the German Reich in west and east for all imaginable time. For this purpose France must be so weakened as to make her revival as a great power impossible for all time. Russia must be thrust back as far as possible from Germany’s eastern frontier and her domination over the non-Russian vassal peoples broken.” After that, it got tougher.

So the Germans got some of their own when they accepted the harsh terms. It was an armistice, though, and not a surrender. The fighting stopped and the statesmen took over. Wilson went to Europe and played his part in the negotiations that led to the Treaty of Versailles.

The enlightened view of that treaty, spelled out most persuasively and eloquently by John Maynard Keynes in his book The Economic Consequences of the Peace, was that it was a disaster; that it was harsh and punitive as regards Germany and would lead, inevitably, to another war.

The Germans, unsurprisingly, agreed. They had not surrendered. Merely put down their arms as a way to an honorable peace. Then they had been “stabbed in the back.”

Wilson, according to this view, had capitulated too easily to David Lloyd George and, especially, Georges Clemenceau, who wanted vengeance for France for all it had suffered at the hands of the Germans, going back to 1870.

According to his critics, Wilson had gone along because he was too weak and too idealistic and believed that whatever the flaws coming out of Versailles, they could be repaired by the proposed League of Nations, a world governing body that would, in the future, settle conflicts between nations bloodlessly and rationally. If the league could be achieved then the war would, indeed, have been fought to end war—something Wilson was supposed to have said. He never did, but he surely could have.

He did say, though, that he hoped to achieve “peace without victory.” It was as if he believed that the war had, in some sense, been a terrible misunderstanding. And that if the warring nations would just sit down and talk and settle their differences like good Christian men, then the world could be made right.

So he went home and tried to persuade the Senate to ratify the treaty that would make the United States a member of the league. In his mind, it was either the league or more war. There was no other way. Reason and idealism were the instruments of peace.

The United States never joined the League of Nations, which proved ineffectual at best, unwilling to stand up even to Mussolini when he invaded Ethiopia. This, it has been argued, was the reason the world slipped back into war. The pressures and stress of his effort to convince the country and the Senate that America needed to be in the league—done in the whistle-stop fashion of a political campaign—brought on the stroke that nearly killed Wilson and made his wife de facto president for the last year he was in office.

So the league failed to prevent—and perhaps even helped to provoke—the next war, which was even worse. But that war, which began a mere 20 years after the end of the “war to end war,” was not a result of America and its allies being too tough. They—and especially Wilson—had been too idealistic, too naïve. Wilson seems to have believed his own high-minded rhetoric and denied the evidence in front of his face.

Germany had been the aggressor nation in 1914. Had invaded Belgium and murdered that country’s citizens for committing war crimes when they resisted. Had imposed ruthlessly tough terms on Russia in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Was ready to ally itself with Mexico in a war with the United States. Whatever it took to win Germany’s place in the sun—that was what the German rulers were willing to do.

Though they were forced to accept harsh terms in the end, they somehow made that into an honorable truce, and the troops were welcomed home almost as victors. The kaiser fled into exile, and when Lloyd George and Clemenceau argued that he should be brought home and tried and possibly executed, Wilson resisted and prevailed. Before long there was agitation in Germany to avenge the Versailles doublecross.

Could there have been a “peace without victory”? One that would have made the world “safe for democracy”? Pretty to think so. But a persuasive case can be made that if Wilson had been more ruthless at any point, the first war might have been won sooner and another one prevented. Only two of America’s wars have been bloodier than Wilson’s. Both the Civil War and World War II ended with total defeat and more or less unconditional surrender. And things were settled pretty much once and for all.

After 1945, Japan would never invade Manchuria again. In Europe, when a victorious United States considered the Morgenthau Plan that would have deindustrialized their country, the Germans seemed, at last, to have gotten the message. Today, Germany cannot even be persuaded to spend the 2 percent of GDP on its military that NATO agreements call for.

Wilson, because he was a rationalist and an enlightened man, believed that after the war, what everyone would desire above all was peace. In fact, what more than enough Germans wanted, above all, was revenge.

He was, perhaps, a brilliant man. But too refined to appreciate the wisdom of his countryman William Tecumseh Sherman: War is cruelty. You cannot refine it.

A war to end war, like peace without victory, is an intellectual chimera. The sort of thing idealists find seductive, but not of this world.

Geoffrey Norman, a writer in Vermont, is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.