The USA in Woodrow Wilson’s Time
AND THE STORY OF WWI
1913-1921
by Mike Donovan
World War One - “Tommy” - Bryn Mawr – 14 Vague Points of Light - The Virginian – “He led us into war.” - #28 - VP Thomas Marshall. – “Stifle it Edith!” - He made the world safe for the Democrats 3373 – Father and Grandfather in Clergy
“Some day the world will catch up with him.”
FDR 1940
“It is not a good thing for our country to have a college president as head of state.”
Teddy Roosevelt 1914
The Democrats campaigned in 1916 on the slogan "He kept us out of war," while Wilson knew full well that he was planning on getting us into one.
Professor Wilson was a big student of British politics and he thought that legislation should originate in the President’s office, ala the UK Prime Minister.
Wilson was a sincere idealist, but the dirt on Wilson is that he was also an old fashioned white supremacist. One of the great liberal Democrat Presidents, Wilson's five-volume History of the United States was so patently racist that one of the quotations from it is used as a video front piece in the pro-Ku Klux Klan movie, The Birth of a Nation. His opinions on race were perhaps no more or less illiberal than the writing of a thousand other white historians of the day, North or South. But there is no disputing that Wilson had a traditional Virginian white mans backward ideas about race.
The biased pro-Democrat historians studiously avoid the subject of Wilson's white supremacist views.
Wilson's cabinet;
Secretary of State---
William Jennings Bryan – 3.5.13 to 6.9.15
Robert Lansing- -----------1915-1919
Bainbridge Colby ---------1920
Sec. of War ---------Lindley M. Garrison -1913-1916
Newton D. Baker ---1916-1920
Sec. $$$$------------William G. McAdoo -1913-1918
Carter Glass------------1918-1920
David F. Houston------1920
Att. General---------J.C. McReynolds-----1913-1914
T.W. Gregory---------1914-1919
Mitchell Palmer---1919-1920
BIO; Thomas Woodrow “Woody” Wilson was born on December 28, 1856 in Staunton Virginia. His father Joseph was Presbyterian minister as was his grandfather on his mother’s side. TW graduated from Princeton in ‘79 and then went on to University of Virginia Law School.
Wilson settled down to become an Atlanta lawyer for a couple of years then went back to school for his Ph D at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. While at Hopkins he wrote his first book. It was a treatise on how Congress can dominate a weak president and it was called Congressional Government. The book was a success.
Wilson was also working hard on writing his five volume History of the American People, volume four of which is at my right shoulder on the sofa. (The writing was a let down, as I was very exited to have bought the set a few years ago.) Wilson received $12,000 19th century dollars for writing these books.
Thomas Woodrow tied the knot with Ellen Axson in 1885, and then became a professor of history at Bryn Mawr College (an exclusive all women’s institution in Pennsylvania) from 1885 to 1888. His teaching days continued at Wesleyan in 89-90. Woody became a professor of history and politics before becoming president of Princeton from 1902 to 1910. Wilson was then elected governor of New Jersey from which position he ran for prez in 1912 and won.
Wilson re-married in 1915 (Edith Bolling).
Electoral vote 1912;
Woodrow Wilson (D)---321
Teddy Roosevelt (P)---88
William H. Taft (R) ---8
Popular vote 1912----------Wilson D)---------6,296,000
Roosevelt Progressive)----4,118,000
Taft R)-----------3,486,000
Debs Socialist)---------900,000
Chafin Prohib.)-----206,000
Popular vote 1916------------------Wilson D)-9,127,000
Hughes R)---8,553,000
Benson S)---585,000
Hanly Proh.)-220,000
SHORT TAKE
World War One was “Mr. Wilson's War.” We got into the Great War because German submarines were killing Americans at sea in the Atlantic.
Neutral American citizens were killed at sea when traveling on belligerent ships. Under international law they were fair game and their deaths were not a valid casus beli, cause for war. Wilson showed great leadership … in leading us needlessly into a world war we had nothing to do with. He gave into Congressional pressure for war, forgetting the lesons of his earlier college thesis.
Wilson went to Versailles France at the end of World War One to organize and promote the League of Nations, (the little UN that couldn't). He sold the idea for his League to Europe but could not sell it to the American Congress. Then on a speaking tour promoting the League to the American people over the heads of the Senate opposing him, he suffered a stroke and spent the rest of his months in office a very sick man. You could make a legitimate argument that Wilson should have resigned in the final months of his second term and let Tommy Marshall take over as our 29th President.
The Congress from 1919-1921 rejected American entry into the League of Nations and has been condemned by historians unanimously for it. Of course Congress was doing its job, to represent the sentiments of the American people, but the historians don't condemn the people, only the Congress. The Congress also rejected the Versailles Treaty that officially settled World War 1 in Europe, so when the next president, Mr. Harding took over in 1921, the USA was still technically at war with Germany!
KEY EVENTS;
ELECTION OF 1912
LUSITANIA
17TH AMENDMENT MAY 1913
JEANETTE RANKIN
JOE HILL
FORD PAYS FIVE A DAY 1914
WWI IN EUROPE 1914-1917
PANCHO VILLA 1916
ELECTION OF 1916
NAVAL CONSTRUCTION PROGRAM 1916
INTERVENTIONS IN CENTRAL AMERICA
WORLD WAR ONE
PALMER RAIDS
SELECTIVE SERVICE ACT
THE FOURTEEN POINTS
ESPIONAGE ACT
THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS
THE TREATY OF VERSAILLES
JOHN ALCOCK 1919
BOSTON POLICE STRIKE 9-1919
VOLSTEAD ACT
CHAOS AND REVOLUTION IN POSTWAR WORLD
ELECTION OF 1912
When Woodrow Wilson was elected in 1912, he became the first Southerner to become either President or Vice President since Andrew Johnson won the VP in 1864. No Southerner had even been the candidate for President or Veep on the losing side.
TR challenged his old pal Taft, the sitting president, for the Republican nomination 1912. Teddy won most of the Republican primaries in the spring of 1912. But Taft controlled most of the delegates at the Republican convention in Chicago. At this moment in time, Taft had more influence in general in the Republican Party. The country loved TR far more than they loved Taft, but the incumbency is a powerful spot to play from. Taft had clout, and he knew he could stand up to Roosevelt if he wanted to, and he wanted to.
When Teddy's supporters realized they could not win, they took their ball and went home. They bolted the Republican convention and went off to another corner of town to form a new Party, the Progressive. A more accurate name would be the ‘Selfish Baby Party’ using the word progressive as an excuse.
By co-opting the word progressive, they were hoping to draw some from the center/left into their camp. Various reform idea movements had long been called ‘progressive,’ but with the forming of a party, the apostate-Republicans of TR were donning the name that was equally or more deserved by Democrats and Socialists. Now progressivism had a capitol P and a leader and the Republicans, the anti-labor party of big business was crowning itself it's leader. And these so-called “Progressives” had a war hawk named Teddy as their emperor. TR was trying to sabotage the Republicans and the Progresives simultaneously. He succeeded on the first count.
The Progressive Party was not exactly a true representation of all the ideals of progressives for the past 15 years. It was really just a party created just so one man could run for prez. It was so much a one-person party that it was popularly known as the ‘Bull Moose’ party, an obvious nod to Roosevelt, who in his acceptance speech said he was “stripped to the buff and fit as a bull moose.” The name stuck, although moose are gentle and peaceful animals and TR had a lot of nerve comparing himself to one. The last moose I saw in Maine outside my cabin at 6 am didn't have to prove he was a tough guy every ten minutes.
As for real progressives, when 1912 opened, their preferred candidate was Senator Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin. LaFollette was a leader of Progressivism, not a follower. “Fighting Bob” had fought long and hard in the vanguard of progressive reforms in Wisconsin and in the US Senate.
Fate intervened in the Election of 1912. On February 2, 1912 Bobby L suffered a physical collapse while giving a speech. Overnight the Progressive torch was passed to Theodore Roosevelt. Or maybe it would be better to say that LaFollette fell, dropped the torch, and then TR picked it up and ran across the last 20 yards to the finish line and took all the medals.
TR wanted the Presidency very much. He staged the mailing of a bunch of letters from Republican governors to his house asking him to run. Then he declared that “my hat is in the ring,” though it is hard to imagine a haberdashery that could make a hat big enough for that swollen head.
Wilson won only 42% of the popular vote in 1912, but took a decisive majority in the Electoral College. In no state outside the old confederacy did Woodrow win a true majority of the votes. The disunity of the opposition helped him with the Electoral College.
Taft took only Utah and Vermont. Poor Taft was left with only maple syrup and polygamy. TR had betrayed his friend, and his Party, and had sent all three of them down to defeat. Taft without Roosevelt’s third party could easily have beaten W.W. Taft was the incumbent, the economy was recovering from the panic of 1907, and there was no war or great crisis.
Could Roosevelt have won if Taft had deferred and handed over the nomination to him by dropping out early? Possibly.
If TR had been elected in 1912, we can only imagine how Roosevelt would have handled the prospect of US participation in World War I. We would have been in the war before the Archduke’s body was cold. He probably would have personally led the first charge at the Battle of the Somme, and it wouldn’t have mattered which side we were fighting on, just as long as we were in the war. That would be the main thing.
The biggest incident in the campaign was the attempted assassination of candidate Theodore Roosevelt. A demented man named Shrank actually shot the Bull Moose in the chest. He shot Roosevelt in the chest because he had a dream in which President McKinley told him to do it! Shrank needed a shrink.
The bullet was slowed down by a speech of 50 pages that Roosevelt had under his jacket. It passed through the paper and lodged inside TR. A trace of blood came flowing out of his clothes. The macho Roosevelt refused to go to the hospital until he delivered his planned speech. He actually showed the blood to the crowd, explained that he had been shot, but refused to go for treatement, as the crowd wondered if the guy was nuts. It would have served him right to die, but God had other plans. The lunatic Roosevelt was allowed to live, while the other lunatic Schrank was committed to an insane asylum for life. They could have traded places.
A movie making company wanted Schrank to re-stage the event for its cameras. The film artists raised the bail money to get Schrank out of jail, pending trial. The judge was properly appalled and denied bail.
INAUGURATION
The victorious Victorian left for his March 1913 Inaugural with domestic agendas spinning in his brilliant head. He remarked to a friend that it would be ironic if somehow his presidency became dominated by foreign affairs. The country had been relatively free of foreign quagmires since the surpression of the insurrection in the Philippines in 1901-2.
The Democrats won control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate in the Election of 1912, so Wilson was loaded and ready to implement his own personal brand of progressivism.
SENATORIAL SUFFRAGE - 17th AMENDMENT RATIFIED
In May of 1913 the 17th Amendment was ratified (Congress had passed it in 1912.) This gave the election of US Senators directly to the people. State legislatures had voted for Washington senators in all or some states until this time.
17 was part of a national progressive trend that had begun at the lower levels. Most states and municipalities were slowly converting to more direct electoral democracy.
The primary was replacing the appointment of candidates by the legislatures. People could now vote in advance for the people they were going to later argue over. Until now they were told who to argue over.
There was also a new thing called the initiative. This gave citizens the right to propose legislation. I'm going to start one in my state to ban back-up beepers, leafblowers, and car alarms.
Also new was the ‘recall’. Recall gave the voters the right to vote a bad office holder out the door, even if he hasn’t done anything criminal. It was the option for the voters to say ‘we made a mistake, we’ve changed our minds.’ This has never been adopted at the national level. The only way that today’s President-haters can have their way is through a resignation or impeachment.
MEXICAN MESS – DOWN WITH HUERTA
Relations with Mexico were problematic to say the least when Wilson took office. In February 1913 a revolution had overthrown the reform regime of Francisco Madero and his VP Omar Suarez. The Madero regime had been quite acceptable to President Taft and the Congress. It was reformist and democratic minded, especially as compared to the previous dictatorial regime of Porfirio Diaz.
The new Mexican ruler was the ultra-illiberal Victoriano Huerta. Taft was horrified by the way the Huerta people had murdered President Madero and his VP too.
Wilson came into office even more upset than Taft at the presence of an anti-idealist on our southern border. As far as Wilson was concerned, the Huerta regime simply had to go. It was only a matter of how to get it done without actually invading Mexico with American troops, and even that was within the realm of possibility. W Wilson was thinking like W Bush.
The US Ambassador to Mexico in these crucial months was Henry Lane Wilson. This is a tale of two Wilsons. Henry Lane was a tough customer. He usually advocated drastic measures to make sure Mexico behaved. Henry Lane believed in overt threats without a hint of negotiation. To be continued...
THE TAX AMENDMENT 1913
In 1913 the nation decided to ratify the Taft-Shaft Amendment, giving the federal government the right to levy income taxes on all working Americans. While the taxes on the rich were higher than those on the poor, the very fact that the even poor now had to pitch in was a big change. The merciless taxing of the poor was part of Wilson's new progressivism
UNDERWOOD & CLAYTON 1913-1914
Under Wilson Progressivism reached into many realms of the economy.
The Underwood Tariff reduced rates to a visible degree for the first time since the end of the Civil War. The Federal Reserve banking system was created, making the nations currency stable by giving every dollar national backing, making its flow flexible, and reducing its concentration from one or two cites on the east coast, especially New York.
Trust-busting continued where it had left off under Roosevelt and Taft, and child labor laws were enforced for the first time.
The Clayton Anti-Trust Act of 1914 was one of the most successful pieces of progressive legislation in US history. It has been called the Magna Charta of labor. It was a multifaceted bill (sponsored by Senator Henry ‘Rolls Royce’ Clayton) aimed at curbing abuses by big business. On the labor front it legalized non-violent strikes, and the boycott. It forbade interlocking directorates among many companies, and enumarated a list of abusive business practices that would have to stop. Clayton targeted the Standard Oil style practice of underselling a market in order to snuff out the competition.
The purpose of the Clayton Act was to pick up where the Sherman Anti-Trust Act left off. It enforced and re-enforced the earlier bill. CATA is still an important part of our national law and was amended with more muckraking laws in the 1930’s.
But the beginning of the Great War put a sudden halt to Wilsonian Progressive legislation, or at least its effective enforcement. The high tide of progressivism was over, and wouldn’t be back till it was ‘over over there.’ And by that time the Republican backlash was coming in. Anti-business Socialist hopes of 1913 were shockingly dashed by 1923. By that time time big business was restored to its old positive place in American popular thinking.
WAR CLOUDS OF WWI 1909-1913
BALKAN WARS PLANT SEEDS OF WWI IN EUROPE
The common perception of World War I is that it erupted after a period of peace, but there was a serious war in Eastern Europe in 1911-12 that has been forgotten, largely because of overwhelming scale of the greater conflict that came in on its heels.
The Balkan Wars were primarily a series of nationalist revolutions in southeastern Europe all at the expense at the Ottoman Empire and Turkey. Layered over this conflict were the great power rivalries of Eurasia.
Turkey got the stuffings beat out of it in the Balkan Wars. Bulgaria went down with the Turkey, siding with the Ottomans in a losing cause and in the settlement losing most of its lands to several ravenous neighboring small powers.
Russia lost out by losing influence, and its dream of Russian led pan-Slav empire in the Balkans. The historic Russia drive towards Constantinople became a road clogged with new unfriendly states.
Germany lost out in the Balkan Wars because the route it wanted for a railroad to Baghdad was now occupied by neutral independent states. Previously the Berlin-Constantinople-Baghdad railway plan was being mapped through friendly Turkish controlled southeastern Europe.
FORD HERO - 1914
In the currency of 1914, a floor-sweeper made about $1.50 a day, and a worker in an automobile factory made about $2.50 a day. There was no need for any factory owner to pay any more than that.
One day out of nowhere in January of 1914 Henry Ford announced that as of now his workers were to receive $5 a day. Henry Ford had doubled the salaries of everyone at his Detroit plants! The pay raise was headline news. Have you ever had a salary doubled in one day? Many wondered why. In a modern world where big corporations are always the focus of evil in all progressive minds, this was a round peg that didn't fit the square hole.
The bonus pay scale made Henry Ford famous overnight. Prior to that date everyone in America knew what a Ford automobile was, but virtually no one could tell you who the man was behind the Ford name. After 1.5.14 everyone was talking about Henry Ford.
If it was a personal play for personal fame it worked but it wasn't. Henry Ford had decided that he wanted to increase the market for his cars by paying his workers so well that they could now afford to buy them! He knew he would get all that money back and then some. It was a courageous and innovative move that changed American history. Henry had introduced a new concept in American business. Our workers are our best customers so lets keep them as well greased as our chassis and they will buy our cars.
The Ford plan worked and other companies soon followed suit on the same principle. Ford's largesse changed the American economy, changed American business principles and changed the way labor felt about capitol. It would be a lot tougher to make a radical left wing speech to a bunch of Ford workers on January 6 1914. “We like it here! Get off the stage you anarchist loser!.” Ford created that mindset with the big pay hike. I love this story.
Rather than starve the workers nearly to death with low pay and then force them to pay high prices at the company store in a closeted company town, Ford felt that a positive infusion of cash into the worker/consumer would more than pay for itself. It would lead to profits.
Newspaper reporters began to follow Ford around like he was Pope Henry the 5th. He shrugged off all the drama by saying that he was simply implementing a little “social justice” something that had been long overdue.
Imagine making minimum wage at a diner and then you show up for work one day and the boss has doubled your salary for no reason. It's nice to read this fairy tale and know it was true. Nowif only Catch a Rising Star would double my salry in Reno this week I'd be all set too. Somebody must have cried with happiness that he or she could take care of the family now. Such a dramatic and unnecessary pay hike hasn't happened in any giant factory in my lifetime, but that's because the gains begun by Ford have been locked in over the decades with the help of general progress and tough unions.
The automobile was hated by many people for a while. The dopes. In Wilson's time the horse and the automobile shared the road and the city streets. It was an integrated society of transportation.
“Get that smelly horse out of my way! Beep beep!” -
“Oh yeah, your automobile is offensively noisy and smells ten times worse than my horse and my horse hasn't broken down in seven years! Move that monstrous contraption over to Europe where it belongs.” A few nitwits actually continued to argue that the car was a temporary phenomenon and would never replace the horse. Even the horses whinnied with laughter at that one.
ON THE EVE OF WAR
Colonel House visited Europe in May of 1914 and reported back to Wilson that the place was all nerves. House said that war seemed inevitable and it was only a matter of time before a spark set off the munitions dump called Europe.
The situation in western Europe was tense but stable. But the situation in eastern Europe and the near East was tense and unstable. Southeastern Europe was the hotspot, the confluence of all the great power rivalries of the time.
The United States was leading a relatively simple life in international relations compared to the great states of Europe.
Two great alliances went to war in Europe in the Great War, a clash which had been brewing for two decades. Since the turn of the century nearly every nation in Europe, large and small, attached itself to one of the large alliances.
The alliance system gave smaller nations the guts to take tough stands against larger states. The alliance system also forced every country to feel it could not back down in any squabble lest it look wimpy to the rest of its allies. Both of these factors brought on the war. Not “helped” bring on the war. These two factors brought it on.
The two fighters;
In this corner, with domination of the seas and exterior lines of communication were France, Great Britain and Russia. They were known as the ‘Entente’ or the “Allied Powers.” Entente is French for understanding. The Entente began with a formal alliance between France and Russia in 1887. Britain came to an entente with France in 1904, and then Russia and Britian reached an entente in 1907. The last two legs of the entente weren't formal alliances like the basic core alliance between France and Russia. But they were serious enough to lead to world war alliance as events would prove.
And over in this corner with the heart of Europe and solid interior trade lines at its disposal stood the Central Powers, also known as the “Triple Alliance.” The Triple-A teams were Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey, plus some remnants of its Ottoman Empire, especially Bulgaria. German culture was militaristic and war was completely worshipped there. Maybe Germany didn't start the war. Maybe it did. But certainly Germany loved war more than any other country in the world in 1913.
ASSASSINATION SETS OFF A WORLD WAR
Everyone in Europe knew the big one was on the way sooner or later. Military schools were planning for the war for many years. This is partly why the insane mass slaughter fell into place so effortlessly. It was long expected and the masses of Europe had already the state of mind to accept it. It had an inevitable quality to it from the outset.
The match that lit the fuse was the assassination in Sarajevo Serbia of the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria on 6.28.14. The perps were a band of Serbian terrorists. Their cause was Bosnian independence and the overthrow of Austrian occupation.
Duke was traveling through the streets of Sarajevo when a conspirator Gavrilo Princip, shot up his car and the people in it.
Below is a map of the route taken by the Archduke to visit Sarajevo and the rout of the assassins from Sarajevo. This was not the act of a lone gunman but political terrorism by a known political organization operating in Serbia, the Black Hand.
Bosnia as you can see on the map, was an autonomous province of Austria, not an independent country. Sarajevo as you can also see, is just inside the Serbian border and so was an ideal place to launch agitation against the Austrian state overlords.
Little Montenegro, which was an independent country at this time, was coveted by both the Serbs and the Austrians especially for its proximity to the Adriatic Sea.
The assassins wanted Bosnia to be part of a greater Serbian empire instead. To let the Austrians know they meant business, they assassinated high Royalty. The conspiracy could be traced back to the Serbian state and it is easy to understand how Austria reacted with threatening diplomacy in the aftermath of the deed.
June 28, 1914 - Sarajevo – The Shots Heard Round the World
The occasion of the Archduke’s visit to Sarajevo was the celebrating of a major Serbian Holiday, St. Vitus Day. The very idea of the leader of the occupying state parading through the occupied capitol on its great national holiday was asking for trouble. This was as arrogant as if the King of England rode through occupied Dublin on St. Patrick’s Day. The assassins (8 in all) stood at several spots on the motorcade route to the Town Hall where Franc was going to stop for a short official visit before continuing on.
There were six cars in the royal motorcade. About three blocks before Town Hall one of the villains asked a police officer which car had the Archduke in it. The dumb bluecoat told him.
“Thanks,” he said and then came off the sidewalk and hurled a big round hand grenade at the Archduke’s car. The bomb went into the vehicle, then someone in the party, (one source claims it was the Archduke) threw the bomb back out of the carriage just in time for it to explode on the street doing no harm to the royal couple. But the explosion wounded several people in the car behind then, one seriously.
The bomb-thrower was quickly apprehended but the depth and width of the assassination conspiracy was not properly appreciated. The Duke naively said the guy was just insane and insisted that the parade move on, as if attempted assassination was no big deal. Maybe he had read about Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 and didn't want to look like a wimp.
Franz made his call at Town Hall. He kept it short and asked that the motorcade change its route and go to the nearest hospital where he might visit the wounded civilians. The driver was so instructed, but when the Archduke’s car reached the original route’s scheduled right-turn the driver took it anyway, forgetting that the route had been changed. Realizing his error he began to slowly back the vehicle up. All of this was happening right before the eyes of one of the conspirators, a Mr. Princip and he couldn’t believe his luck. The rebel Serb ran up to the car and jumped on to the sideboard. From there he fired two shots, each of them fatal, into the Archduke and his wife.
The assassin was quickly apprehended. Gavril Princip was proud of his deed and boasted of his political motives right up to the time of his execution. At first he tried to claim he had acted alone but the conspiracy was soon revealed. From then on he bragged he and his group had done a great thing for Greater Serbia.
The Austrian government made a list of retaliatory demands that were harsh by any standards. Austria declared for starters that the Serbian government apologize and pay a fine. The Serbs would also have to to let the Austrians take over some of Serbia’s internal security. The assassins were to be tried in an Austrian, not a Serbian court.
The Serbs agreed to these three biggies.
But more the Serbians capitulated, the more the Austrians increased their demands. In fact, they wanted the Serbians to reject the ultimatums so they could use the denial as a pretext for invading and annexing Serbia, something Austria had wanted to do for some time anyway. (Its like when I have a gig that I hate doing, so I ask for a ridiculous sum. Then the agent calls and says, “sure, they'll pay you $900 to do Quigley's Hell Bar” and I am horrified.)
Austria began to mobilize for war at the same time that Russia warned Austria not to do that. Russia told Austria-Hungary that if you mobilize for war, we will have to do the same and that can't possibly be a good thing. Germany in turn warned Russia not to do that, or else Germany would have to mobilize for war. France warned Germany not to do that or else France would have to mobilize for war. So Austria ignored the warning from Russia, Russia ignored the warning from Germany and Germany ignored the warning from France.
Britain had warned Germany too. The UK managed to stay out of it at first but when Germany invaded Belgium later on, Britain was drawn in..
Declarations of war followed mobilization in early August 1914. Even distant Japan jumped in, declaring war on Germany too in order to cash in on Germany’s Asian colonial possessions. The world was at war.
Turkey declared neutrality and Italy held off, waiting to see what developed first before choosing a side.
In the United States there was grave concern about the 100,000 US citizens trapped behind European war lines. There was also panic on Wall Street. The New York Stock Exchange was closed in mid-day on July 31 to stop the mad selling by European stockholders anticipating catastrophe in all markets. The NY Times immediately and accurately tabbed the war now breaking out as “the least justified of all wars since man emerged from barbarism.”
Austria invaded Serbia and the game was on. The insane chain of mobilization then raised the curtain on the Great War that had long been feared and anticipated. It would be bloody hell for five years. The war would be so bloody that it would give war itself a bad name after all these centuries of glory.
The American press was decidedly on the side of Serbia and the Entente. But that didn't mean intervention. In the United States a reporter asked Wilson if he were contemplating American intervention on the side of Serbia. Wilson removed his glasses and stared him down.
Analysts began to condemn royalty as the root cause of the fire. This made the US feel good about itself as it watched from the sidelines. After all, we had outlawed royalty in the 1787 Constitution. Now we could point our fingers overseas and say “that's the bad guys.”
The War in American minds became one of democracy versus autocracy, ignoring the fact that Russia was perhaps the biggest and worst autocracy in the world and was part of the Serbian-French-UK alliance that we supported, and was a charter member of this Entente.
THE WAR BEGINS
Germany hoped and expected to achieve a quick breakthrough to Paris and victory. The pre-war “Schleiffen Plan” envisioned a route around the French defenses close to the sea in the Low Countries and enveloping Paris from behind. When Germany opened World War I with an attack through Belgium it was a modified version of the Schleiffen Plan and it worked well during the trip through Belgium.
The Kaiser’s invasion of neutral Belgium was a military success but a political failure. The violation of Belgian neutrality brought Great Britain into the war and spelled long term doom for the German war effort.
The invasion of Belgium also brought American public, political and press opinion heavily onto the side of the Entente.
Arousing the moral indignation of the United States created a giant warehouse of war supplies for the Entente and paved the road for America's entry on its side in 1917. The Irish issue notwithstanding, US-UK relations had been steadily improving since about 1815 and with Britain’s entry into the war, the chance of true US neutrality went out the window. For all our pot-shots at the island kingdom, we admired the British Empire more than we cared to admit. Great Britain had been the only major power to give the USA overt support during the Spanish-American War and there was leftover beneficent capital from that. The entire Spanish-American War of 1898-99 may have been an idolized imitation of the principles of the British Empire.
The leftover good-will from 1899 reached into the pens of many political leaders in both lands in the form of a vision; a two-man league of nations between the USA and the UK. Important writers and politicians began preaching about a new world ruled by the US and the UK. Peace would rule only when USUK ruled the world.
Today this concept is called “condominium.” Condo is what the second tier of powers always fear because it disconnects them from the power of important alliances with superpowers. In the 1970's through the 1990’s there was great fear of a ‘condominium’ between the Soviet Union and the United States. The only thing many nations feared more than the US and the USSR going to war was these same two nations becoming allies and dividing up the world peacefully but forcefully. The thing about this sort of political dream is that it is completely achievable. It hasn’t really happened on this planet yet, the world condominium, but the fear of it has been around for some time.
Between the end of the Spanish-American War and the beginning of the First World War there as much talking and writing here about this dream, the new world order of USUK. This idea wasn’t taken so seriously that any political action had been taken on it, but the dual hegemony idea became such an acceptable theory that falling in with Great Britain when World War I broke out was made that much easier. Short of war, we should now help Britain because we shared it’s destiny to rule the world.
For Germany there was far less good will over here. There had been near military confrontations in the Pacific between the US and the German navy in Samoa in the 1880’s, and at Manila during the Spanish-American War. German-American immigrants had a language barrier to overcome that British Islanders did not, and this hindered their social and political influence in America.
So the invasion of Belgium brought Britain into the war which eventually brought us into the war. It is very possible that Great Britain would have stayed out of World War One if not for the German route through and conquest of neutral Belgium. The UK could have honored it’s alliance terms with France with limited defensive military help short of a declaration of war against Germany. Belgium, not France tipped the scales. Britain had a signed treaty to come to Belgium’s aid in case of invasion, but the Kaiser didn't take this seriously. Wilhelm honestly thought that the English would not suffer a hundred thousand casualties just to defend “a scrap of paper.” Wilhelm should have recalled that Britain had once gone to war over a guy's ear. A scrap of paper was certainly a plausible trip-wire by those standards.
What was also lost on the German was British geo-politics in Europe and it’s historical context. Britain for hundreds of years had a foreign policy that absolutely forbade allowing any one European power to dominate continental Europe.
Also, Like American in the 1990 Kuwait crisis, Britain had noble feelings in 1914 about helping out a smaller nation being swallowed up by a giant greedy aggressor, and genuine compassion for the citizens being killed or kidnapped. The UK also wanted to honor its commitment to the Entente alliance, over and above Belgium.
But of course, as in 1990 for the US, the motivation for intervention in 1914 for the UK was primarily self-interest. Belgium and Holland had only been allowed to exist for the past few hundred years because the 3 larger states around it did not allow the others to swallow it up lest they gain an overall supremacy in Europe unacceptable to the other two. France could not take Holland or Belgium because Germany and Britain would have combined to prevent it. The same principle could be applied for the other scenarios. Britain could not swallow Belgium or Holland because France and Germany would have combined to stop it.
So in addition to being an aggressor per se, Germany was also thus challenging a long accepted principle in western Europe. That principle was three cats making a circle and allowing the two mice to live in the center because any cat that jumped for the mice would be attacked by the other two cats. This had been the system in place since about 1500 and Germany had to know it, but the Kaiser simply thought that when faced with a major war, the principle would be discarded for the expedience of peace. Germany was a martial state and the soft Brits were not. Germany grabbed the mice and the British jumped in. The cat-fight would stop only after the cats were hairless skeletons barely breathing.
Germany was miscalculating just as surely as Sadaam did in 1990 when thought that the United States would not go to war merely to stop a maverick Arab regime from winning a controlling interest in the oil supply in the Persian Gulf.
On August 4, 1914 the German army invaded Belgium. The Belgian Army resisted the German invasion and in taking these casualties may have slowed down the German army just enough to save Paris and enable the French to hold the line at the Marne River. “Brave little Belgium” bought the Entente just enough time.
But this analysis is dismissed as false by some military historians and was scoffed at after the war by several German generals. In any case the Belgian army was quickly defeated and Belgium occupied.
Our ambassador at Brussels, Poindexter Whitlock IV, had to decide whether to join the retreating Belgian government or remain in the capital he was assigned to. Whitlock chose to remain in Brussels where he became a pain in the neck for the Germans throughout America entered the war until April of 1917. Germany was forced by the rules of intrnational relations to tolerate a hostile reporter behind its lines with diplomatic immunity.
PROPAGANDA
The word 'propaganda' was originally a positive word. To work hard to 'propagate' the Christian faith was a noble task to do with pride and honor, and one working for the Lord in this was engaged in disseminating propaganda.
But writers and common people began in the first decade of the 20th century use the word in a negative sense. A debater would scoff at his opponents positions as “mere propaganda.” Now one could stand “accused” of 'propaganda.' What once stood for righteous face-value efforts at persuasion became so commonly used in a sarcastic tenor that the twisted version became the new definition. Propaganda now meant the selling a bunch of jive on a mass level for selfish purpose.
From the start of WWI Britain launched a major propaganda campaign in the United States, starting by making the most of the German violation of Belgian neutrality.
The publicity campaign worked. Although Irish-Americans and German-Americans were not supportive of Britain, the majority of Americans saw Germany as the aggressor from the start to the finish, and much more so at the finish.
It wasn't difficult for Britain to make effective propaganda, since Germany was in the wrong. To be sure, there were exaggerated and even invented stories of German atrocities in Belgium, and that was wrong. But Germany did indeed invade, occupy and pillage of a neutral country that had engaged in no alliances against Germany or anyone else. Liberal historians like to bash Britain for its propaganda exxagertions in WWI, while minimizing the evil deed of invading Belgium in the first place.
Its part of the liberal tradition of retro-self-flagellation. Everyone knows and understands things that have to be done at the time they are hapening. Don't worry, we can always just bash ourselves in history books for three hundred years, but at for now least we'll get this done. Just like Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Allies of 1914-18 did something low to win a higher goal. They probably knew they were exaggerating and lying when they designed these shameful posters that web sites and textbooks are so today fond of reproducing for our enlightenment. Now embarrassing Allied Great War posters of satanic-looking German soldiers committing smiling atrocities are a sure print job for the high school senior history book.
Germany tried to fight back but it was always on the d, blocking punches at best. It got an occasional message to America that “We are not the bad guys,” but its hard to score much from their position. They were too far away in geography, language and culture to make a proganda score over here.
It didn't help that the Entente cut the underwater cable from Germany to the United States about eight days into the war, so that German propaganda lost wht little chance it ever had to make it into the USA. Kaiser had picked up a phone to protest to a New York newspaper and give his side of the story. Wilhelm was in the middle of starting to explain the German position to the editor who was starting to write it all down. Then there was a click on the wire... then nothing. The Kaiser reportedly said, “Why you..........” Then he hurled the phone through a large and expensive window.
The British were clever enough blokes to not come to America and make fire-eating speeches on their own behalf. That would have almost surely backfired. Americans weren't nationally naturally warm to cockney accents. The British used behind the scenes influence to control the American media into doing the talking for it. Powerful American authors, cartoonists, journalists, politicians, orators, and editors were out on the stump, pitching the cause for brother John Bull, who watched approvingly from behind the Atlantic wall.
The British concentrated on Belgium and the German submarine atrocities. As the war months unfolded the German sea captains were easy pickings for Allied PR. “The Huns” in their U-boats were sinking Allied ships. Lot's of em. 'More than you're thinking.' Civilians were getting a burial at sea, taking down with them any chance for good German-American relations.
Of course the Allied blockade of the continent was forcing mass hunger in Hungary and Germany, probably causing as many tragic civilian deaths as the U-boats, but that story line didn't make it to the ENN network storyboards. (ENN, The Entente News Network - “All Biased, All the Time, Stay with ENN.” ) America went through the war without a single embedded reporter in the Triple Alliance bread lines.
TAXICABS SAVE PARIS FROM THE HUNS
The German offensive pressed on but French defense held its ground on the outskirts of Paris with the help of an army of Parisian taxicab drivers transporting troops to the front lines. The Germans were pushed back a safer distance from beloved Paris and the lines of combat stabilized on a long jagged line from the North Sea to Switzerland. The cabbies were bitter for years because most of them didn't get tipped.
THE RUSSIAN FRONT 1914-1915
In the east the Russians attacked and gained much ground in Poland against the Germans and in Galicia against the Austrians.
But the Germans won a decisive 11-day battle at Tannenberg in August 1914, stopping the Russian machine cold. From here on, it would be Russia, not Germany on the defensive. Russia between September 1914 and November 1918 would launch only one marginally successful offensive against Germany on the eastern front. To the south, against Austria, Russia had a slightly better record but even in this theatre the military tale was not glorious for the Tsar’s armies.
Russia suffered its way through the war as much as fought its way, and it only got worse at the end when it withdrew from the War in 1917 with revolution and civil war, followed by mass starvation. Germany was not the only one to lose the First World War. No member of a winning alliance ever absorbed such a defeat as did Russia in WWI.
Countless millions of innocent Russians died. Russian history weeps for the noble martyrs of oth world wars. But the bear was not completely innocent in World War I any more than it was in WWII. Russia played a major part in starting the war. Russian imperial ambitions to be the leader of a pan-slav empire motivated its mobilization for war in defense of Serbia. It was love of the Slavic race, not the human race that mobilized the Tsar's Armies for war and forced the Germans to counter-mobilize.
At least Germany put up a spectacular fight for five years. Russia got in a few early punches and then just got kicked all over the ring for four plus years.
Russia regained its military pride in WWII and beyond, but its demonstrably poor performance throughout the First World War was one of the reasons Hitler was later confident he could invade and conquer Russia in 1941. Hitler was a German soldier in WWI and read the story of Russia's poor performance often enough that he never forgot.
US NEUTRALITY AND TENSIONS WITH ENGLAND 1914
The first two years of the war were trying ones for US-British relations. The US traded heavily with the UK trade was but America also depended on the enemies of the Entente as major trade partners.
Of course the USA wanted to help the Entente and was decidedly in favor of it in the conflict (in spite of some general histories that suggest that ‘Wilson found little to choose between the two alliances’). But that didn’t meant we wanted to end our Triple Alliance income. No one here wanted the fresh crops of Southern cotton and rice intended for Central Europe to sit on the wharves of Charleston like it did in 1809 or 1864. Germany bought 13% of US cotton sold overseas.
The Entente wanted to stop US trade of any kind from reaching Germany, Austria-Hungary or Bulgaria. It was a politcal conflict.
Friction between the US and UK arose over the search and seizure of UA merchant ships. The US was willing to accept stop and searching at sea for contraband by a belligerent. That was within the accepted rules of naval warfare. But her majesties warship were escorting US merchant ships into British ports for searches and that was beyond the call of duties. American crews were being detained for days, and would-be profitable voyages were ending up with net losses from the delays.
The controversial question now became what was “contraband” and what was not. “Contraband” could be seized and requisitioned without compensation. It was anything that helped the enemy directly to win the war. Wilson and Lansing did not question the Entente’s right to intercept merchant chips and prevent such “contraband” from entering central Europe. Guns and ammo were obviously contraband. A ship full of helmets and bayonets and trucks was also clearly intended to help prosecute the war.
But what about food? The enemy civilians and enemy military both needed food. Dual use products was considered “conditional contraband” and allowed. That had been agreed in peacetime as proper rules in time of war. The question now was whether the Allies and their all-powerful navies would respect their own agreements and allow this “conditional contraband” into central Europe. According to the London naval treaty of 1909, a treaty signed by many nations including Great Britain, “conditional contraband” was not subject to seizure on the high seas if carried in neutral bottoms.
But guess what? When push came to shove and the UK was actually at war it simply laughed off the agreements of 1909 as irrelevant. Survival and winning the war was primary. It was the Elihu Root 'neighbor's firewood' clause (Secretary of State Root said in 1903 that there is a common law that says if your family is freezing to death it is legal to cut down trees on your neighbor's acres, even though its illegal.) The UK could care less what it had agreed to in 1909.
The number one loser in Great Britain’s reneging on 1909 was the United States. We were the ones with the lion’s share of the trans-Atlantic trade to the Central Powers.
Britain from the get-go was seizing American merchant ships bound for Germany or Austria. Soon US freighters were a freight to leave the United States. There was a lot of US public anger against Britain. Lansing drafted an angry letter of protest demanding better treatment from our so-called “ally” Great Britain.
But there were many men close to Wilson who were total Anglophiles. They supported Britain completely in her fight with Germany.
While some historians suggest that there was danger of a US-UK war in these pre-Lusitania months, its doubtlful that this was ever serious. There was too many positive things connecting the two nations by now to let even as serious a negative issue as search and seizure sever it all and return things to the spirit of 1812.
Nevertheless, Bob Lansing penned a defiant and threatening note to London and, had it been sent, things might have been more difficult in US-UK relations. Fortunately Britain's American friends, led by Colonel Eddie House conspired with the British Foreign office to re-write Lansing’s angry note and tone it down to the point of changing it in substance. Wilson never even read the note as it was originally intended. It was dummied down behind the scenes in Washington before it got to Wilson's desk.
The hijacking and rewriting of the truculent Lansing note was justifiable because the President had never been close to Lansing’s angry point of view on this. Wilson never really became enraged at the English violations of our merchant rights, at least not as much as many thought he should have been. Lansing was writing his own emotions, and not respecting his job as the spokesman for his president's emotions. Lansing's memoir, by the way is a shockingly selfish and egotistcal work, so I am a little biased against him.
WORLD WAR ONE IN AFRICA 1914
When war broke out, German overseas possession were especially vulnerable in Africa. French and British colonies surrounded the German colonies and this made invasion a simple matter. There were enough native forces led by French and British officers available in place. No Entente forces would have to be diverted from the European theatre to fight in Africa. In fact, it was just the opposite. Two brigades of British South African troops late in the war served on the western front.
In August of 1914, within days of the declarations of war, France and Britian went on the assault against the German African colonies of Togo, Southwest Africa (today's Angola), Kenya, and Cameroon (at the inner elbow of the African continent.)
The battles for Togo, Angola, and Cameroon went great for the Entente in this contest between colonial vultures. By the end of September 1914 these three German territories had lowered their flag and raised the Union Jack or the Tricolors. Less than 400 Entente troops died in the fighting on these three fronts.
The story of the Kenyan front in World War One was a different story. Here the Germans and their colonial troops put up a protracted and ultimately successful defense of German Kenya. At the end of World War One the Entente had still not captured control of Kenya. Entente casualties were high. The British chased a famous German General all over the place and never caught him.
THE WAR IN THE MIDDLE EAST 1914-1915
TURKEY
Turkey (the Ottoman Empire which included Turkey at the center) tried to stay out of the war on the outside while helping the Central Powers on the inside. Turkey closed the Straights to Entente ships. The Entente protested one Turkish action after another in the fall of 1914. Finally, after a Turkish fleet of warships bombarded several Russian towns and cities on the Black Sea the French and British declared war on Turkey and the size of World War I jumped a notch.
Once Turkey entered the war, the British encouraged the Arab peoples under Ottoman rule to rebel against their masters.
The British even promised independence to many small Arab provinces, if they helped the Entente win the war by fighting Turkey from behind.
DOMESTIC NEWS - KILL HILL 11.19.15
In 1915 ‘they’ killed Joe Hill.” “They”, are the bad guys, the police, the authorities in general. Joe Hill was a beautiful man, a laborer and a hero to the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World, or as they are more popullarly known and remembered, the ‘Wobblies’.
Hill worked in mines in Utah and other territories in the west, writing poems, organizing for the IWW and being one of the most admirable hoboes of all time. And what was his reward? The reactionaries drummed up a false murder charge against Joe Hill and he was sent to the gallows for his ‘labors.’ A firing squad sent him downhill on the 19th of November. His last words were, “fire!”
Hill was the hero and the martyr for labor. On death row he wrote to ‘Ironhead’ Heywood the president of the IWW, “Don’t mourn for me, organize.”
Wow. How do ya top that? For the next 90 years of so, Joe Hill has become the crucified Jesus Christ of the left labor wing of the nation, especially the Bohemian element of that group. The hippies of the 1960’s worshipped Joe Hill. Joan Baez sang a moving ballad to him at the famous Woodstock Music Festival in 1969. The crowd of 300,000 (299,999 lefties and one centrist who begged not to be identified) was hypnotized into a noble caring trance. I know the song by heart, but will spare you the writer’s sin of quoting song lyrics in a book. It’s based on a labor poem (which was probably based on a play.)
Phillip Foner has written a book claiming that Hill was not guilty. But Foner is always incredibly prejudiced for the left so he isn’t even worth hearing out.
I have a more balanced and equally scholarly book on the IWW called The Wobblies, and it has a different take. The author concedes that Hill may or may not have committed the murder he was executed for. But the idea of him as this folksy writer and labor-crusader is way off. Hill had a long low-life criminal past that slick left scholars know about and never mention. When he got in trouble with the law in Salt Lake City and labor came to his defense, Hill all of a sudden became a passionate laborite.
But what good is the truth in the face of a maudlin folk song sung to a crowd full of pure of heart lefty emotions at the height of the Vietnam War?
THE WORLD WAR IN 1915
UNRESTRICTED SUBMARINE WARFARE
The big issue of 1915 was the threat of Germany to employ “unrestricted submarine warfare.” This was the threat of Germany to use its subs to sink anything it wanted, at any time, anywhere, for any reason, and without warning.
Britain was declaring everything except kazoos to be “contraband” or “conditional contraband” and intercepted and inspected every merchant ship on the European seas. But when Germany decided that everything on the high seas was fair game it became the evil empire in Entente propaganda.
The Entente was trying to starve the people of the Central Powers to death by stopping all merchant shipping from reaching Germany or Austria. Yet the idea that the Germans might sink unarmed freighters filled with munitions and food destined for The UK or France was considered a war crime by the British and French. The US had a few fans of the Central Powers but most of the politicians here favored the Entente and shared its double-standard on civilian casualties.
GRAVEN DAY AT GRAVENSTAFEL 4.22.15
Gravenstafel is significant for three reasons. One it is the most difficult battle to pronounce for those not fluent in foreign languages; two, it was the battle that saw the first large-scale use of poison gas in the war, and three; 4.22 marked first time gas was decisive on the battlefield.
Gravenstafel is also known as the third Battle of Ypres, that forsaken Belgian town where four major battles took place in a three week period in 1915. On April 22 the Germans fired poison gas shells into the British/French positions. The bad gas was heavier than air and sank into the trenches forcing the soldiers out of their protective positions. Bullets were the least of their worries for 15 horrible minutes that day. An unthinkable 6,000 soldiers died in that amount of time on the battlefield at Gravenstafel.
Poison gas had already been used on the eastern front and as early as 1914. In the west French troops had a few times chucked grenades filled with tear gas into the German lines. But Ypres 3 was gas on a scale and a terror that made gas almost a strategic weapon. The defense would catch up to gas later, but on this day the Germans made the enemy pay at a two to one ratio thanks to natural gas. Ypres overall was a big tie but the third Battle of Ypres went to the Central Powers and poison gas was the deciding factor.
There were three types of poison gas used in WWI. The first was ‘tear gas’ a non-lethal dose of eye and lung irritant that I experienced first hand at the Newport Jazz festival in 1971.
The next level of poison was ‘mustard gas’. Newport cops did not use mustard gas, thank God. Mustard gas irritated the skin and damaged the lungs, often permanently. Mustard gas also kills. Blindness often resulted and the immune system damage led to many cases of fatal secondary infections. Some victims spent the rest of their life as invalids. Thousands died from mustard gas. A famous war painting by Singer Sergeant Carter called Blinded shows a line of American soldiers being treated for mustard blindness.
The high-test poison gas, ‘phosgene’ was a different mix of chemicals about as deadly as mustard perhaps a bit more.
Three percent of the military dead in World War I died from poison gas.
The USA lost 1,400 KIA to chemical attack in WWI. As wasusual in all ofther casualty stats, the United States had the smallest amount of gas casualties among the major powers in the war. Russia as usual, had the most casualties, almost 50,000 chemically induced deaths.
One German soldier who was blinded by the poison gas shells in WWI was a corporal in the List Regiment by the name of Hitler. Adolph was awarded the Iron Cross for his bravery in racing across dangerous territory as a courier. When the war ended in November 1918, Adolph Hitler was in a hospital in Pasewalk Germany, recovering from poison gas attack. There is little doubt that all gas attack victims suffer mental trauma. The gas attack on young Hitler was history playing with matches.
One of the few treaties Hitler ever honored in the next war (the one he started) was the international prohibition against poison gas as a military weapon. AH owned a selfish compassion on the subject. He did use poison gas on civilians in the concentration camps, just not on the battlefield.
Hitler found his true identity in World War I. He now had a cause and a mission in life, and would never change the mission to the end of his wicked life. In the German flag he forgot his personal status of homeless failed-artist hobo and joined what was in his sick mind, a noble cause, German nationalsim and revenge for the ignominous defeat of WWI.
STALEMATE
1915 was the year in which both sides came to the horrible realization that neither side could win. The defense had gained too much ground on the offense on both fronts, but especially in northern France.
ITALY
Italy remained neutral for the first year of the war but in 1915 joined the Allies.
Italy changed its mind because the Austro-Hungarian empire had not lived up to it’s treaty obligations to Italy under the Triple Alliance terms. When Austria invaded Serbia in 1915 there was no compensation for Italy in the Adriatic region. Italy contended that there was supposed to be.
The Entente saw it’s chance to court a pouting Italy. The Entente promised Italy freedom to expand in North Africa and a prize of the city of Trieste after the war. The Entente was offering Italy everything the other two members of the Triple alliance had not. If Austria had just coughed up a slice of its conquests in the early months of the war, the Central Powers might have won the First World War. With Italy in the Triple-Axis the Central Powers would never be landlocked, and a nation (or a Senator) that switches sides is worth two points, not one; it is one point for each direction. Italy made a big difference for the Entente, and made the cause for intervention that much more appealing to the USA with it's millions of Italian-Americans..
During the prelude to the Second World War, England and France were hoping to recruit Italy into the old team. It was a shock of sorts when Italy, our former friend in the Great War, untied with Hitler in the second great war..
STALEMATE
The battlefront in Europe did not change much during 1915, but the graveyards changed a great deal. They got bigger. Countless thousands died fighting for a few yards of territory. “No man’s land” and “over the top” were two scary terms for soldiers in the fight. Once a man went over the top out of the trenches into no man’s land, the territory between the lines, it was only a matter of luck to even hope get back to one’s own lines alive.
There were new rules in this war. In 1915 the German sent Zeppelins over London and other targets in Eastern England, killing many innocent civilians. This was the first real attempt in history at strategic terror bombing.
TENSIONS WITH GERMANY 1915
On February 4, 1915 Germany made a momentous decision, accompanied by a momentous announcement. The huns on this date declared that Germany was now going to begin “unrestricted submarine warfare.” The operative word here is “unrestricted.”
Germany took out a map and drew a big circle around the waters of the British Isles. From now on, all enemy ships in the circle would be sunk on sight by the U-boats. This included merchant ships as well as warships. As for what constituted an “enemy” ship, neutral merchant ships were as enemy to the U-boats from now as the finest British dreadnaught. This was received in Washington as a direct warning that American merchant ships would be sunk without warning.
This blanket German threat obviously included passenger ships, vessels that were protected by international law, by all previous conventions, and even having been respected deliberately by German U-Boats up until 2-4-15. Some of Wilson's advisors wanted him to issue an order to Americans not to travel on any ships headed for the German forbidden zone. Secretary of State Bryan was particularly adamant about it. WJB was no great friend of Great Britian and thought we should avoid the war from a safe, and if necessary, passive, distance.
“I am not going to ask Americans not to go home to visit their relatives because I have been intimidated by the Kaiser,” Wilson replied. “Very well, sir,” replied the always proper Bryan. The Secretary of State left the room without a word but slammed the door very loud.
Bryan was justly mad a England for escorting our ships to British ports for inspection. But Germany was taking American lives whereas England was taking American ships.
The U-boat was the best weapon Germany had. It's mass use in the Atlantic won a great deal for the Germans, but at a heavy price. The U-boat dragged the United States into World War One. If Germany had never brought America into the War it might have won a negotiated peace with honor in the end.
But what else could Germany do? The war on the ground was an infinite stalemate and the idea of winning by conquering England by invasion was a hopeless fantasy.
Germany's surface navy was not capable of competing with the Royal. The German merchant marine was tiny compared to England's and it could not be protected. The Kaiser was forced to turn to his excellent submarine fleet as the only winning car in his hand.
Germany worried about provoking the Americans to war, so it began to pay for advertisements in American newspapers, warning that all belligerent ships were eligible for sinking and that Americans who traveled on these ships, did so at their own great peril. Don't say we didn't warn ya'.
LUSITANIA 5.1.15
On a sunny day, May 7 1915 a lone Irish farmer stood on a cliff and watched a great luxury liner take on a list a few miles out to sea. He then saw it turn straight up and sink beneath the waves. This was the only land witness to the sinking of the Lusitania, one of the largest and most luxurious ocean liners in the world. Lusitania also just happened to have in its cargo hold some four thousand cases of rifle ammunition.
Wilhelm was getting fed up with American military supplies being shipped to Germany's enemies. A French POW officer revealed that the Entente had “unlimited quantities of American ammunition.” This was broadcast in an official German communiqué on April 16, 1915.
The German government next took out an ad in the New York papers warning Americans not to travel on belligerent ships or risk life and limb. The ads were placed right next to the ads for the Cunard Liner Lusitania. But no one took the warning seriously. It was dismissed by passengers and crew as German bluff. The Captain of the Lusitania, a Mr. Turner ignored several reports of submarine activity in the area approaching the British Isles. At the time he was hit he should have been zigzagging when he instead was slowing down and offering an easy target.
Just as the Lusitania was approaching dangerous waters, Colonel House was at Buckingham Palace strolling through the gardens with the British Ambassador and the King of England. At the very hour when U-Tube was lining up the liner in the periscope, King George asked our ambassador what he thought would be the US reaction if the Germans sank the Lusitania with the loss of many American lives.
The King would not have to wait long for his answer. It came at a moment or two after 2 p.m. on May 7, 1915. Captain Schwieger of the U-20 ordered the launch a single obsolete second-rate torpedo (all of his best ones were used up) in to the unlucky liner.
The explosion rocked the ship, but a second explosion that followed up close behind that did more damage than the first. Most passengers thought the ship had been hit by two torpedoes. The second explosion was fatal, and the ship sunk sank ten times faster than the Titanic had when the latter ship had been ripped open by an iceberg over a far larger area of the vessel. Lusitania sank in an incredible 18 minutes. No one would have imagined such a rapid demise for the top notch luxury liner. The attempts to lower the lifeboats and save the people on board were as tragic as the explosions.
Lusitania went down and more than 900 people died. More than 100 of the drowned pawns were American citizens. This was only three years after the Titanic disaster but this was a far more titanic disaster.
REACTION TO THE SINKING OF THE LUSITANIA
The United States was inflamed with rage overnight and there was talk of immediate war with Germany. Wilson could have had war right then and there if he was lobbied hard for it but he did not want that.
Nevertheless the sinking of the Lusitania was the single most important event in drawing the United States into World War I. It is the closest thing to a WWI Pearl Harbor.
Our Ambassador to England Mr. Page was so pro-England that it is safe to say that he helped get the USA into the war. After the Lusitania sank Page wrote a letter to Wilson from London in which said that it was the duty of the United States to enter the war right then and there on the side of the Entente.
Wilson did not agree but he knew he had to act tough for the public. Wilson put the USA in a bind when he sent Germany a note saying that if anything like this ever happened again it would mean serious consequences. There was a definite threat of war in Wilson’s note if Germany did not watch its step.
Secretary of State Bryan decided that he had had enough. In William’s mind, Germany had done no more wrong than England and France had when these so-called friends had seized American merchant shipping illegally. America was claiming to be neutral but Bryan saw this as a joke. The United States was becoming more and more a genuine ally of the Entente and Bryan was offended. He decided he could not in good conscience continue on as Secretary of State.
Bryan resigned officially on June 8 1915. Wilson’s image as a sincere neutral was damaged. Bryan’s resignation put a big spotlight on the fact that the United States was not neutral at all.
Fortunately for Wilson, the American public and press came down hard on Bryan for his act of personal faith. The yellow press and most common folk condemned Willlie B as disloyal.
Who would replace Bryan as Secretary of State? There was talk of bringing the absurdly Anglophile Ambassador Page home from London for the job. Wilson instead chose his wise associate Rob Lansing who was pro-Ally but with a reasoned and judicial mind.
Wilson confided to his pal McAdoo that in reality, the choice of Lansing meant that he had decided to become his own Secretary of State. Lansing would have little true freedom of action in his high post. Lansing’s memoirs show that he was not unaware that Wilson had indeed become the real Secretary of State in the World War I era. Lansing was bitter about his lack of power and voice in foreig policy in a crucial time.
MUNTER VERSUS MORGAN JULY 1915
One fine summer day in July of 1915, the millionaire banker JP Morgan was having a quiet time at home with his wife and a distinguished guest, the famous British diplomat Cecil Spring Rice.
Suddenly the butler came running into the room in a panic begging the Morgans to go upstairs at once. They did. But curiosity got the best of them and they went back down the staircase to see what the heck was going on. At the foot of the stairs they ran into a man with a pistol in each hand pointed straight at them. JP lunged at the home invader and the two wrestled around like a scene in an action movie. The pistol went off in the fight and struck the butler with a non-life threatening wound.
Morgan with the help of Rice who jumped in to help like Rosie Greer, bested the punk while Mrs. M called the cops. The man was arrested and eventually killed himself in prison.
The hunter was a German by the name of Munter. The deed was political.
In the mind of historian Walter Mills, this Munter guy was something of a hero. He wasn't trying to kill JP Morgan, but rather to make a compassionate humanitarian political point about the evil of war. Morgan was sending all these weapons to Europe to kill people with. Why not give him a scare that would teach him a lesson? Here is how Mills describes the incident in 1935, giving the perp the floor in the middle of it.
[begin excerpt]
“So you are Mr. Morgan,' the man said; the weapons rose, and for an instant the great financier was faced, in his own peaceful country home, by that death which he had been exporting in such quantity.
... The man was taken. He said afterwards:
I went to the Morgan home in order to force him
to use his great influence to stop the shipment of
explosives [to Europe]. That is why I took some
explosives with me, in order to be able to demon-
strate to him, ad oculos, what the use of machines
of murder means but I did not wish to hurt anyone.
I wanted him to be in the same danger (him and his
family) that we are imposing on Europe ... I tried
to shoot in the air, but some one grabbed my hand.”
The man was identified as bearing the name of Erich Munter. Was it
impossible, perhaps, for America to munition one side in a world conflict
without being brushed by the struggle? That the banker should suffer a few minutes of peril and some days of discomfort as his share of the titanic suffering which he was helping to promote seemed quite dreadful at the time. ... The perhaps equally awful business on the European battle lines had claimed that day its average of some five thousand lives, more or less, with its countless others hurt or mutilated or ruined; and it was to claim one more when Munter committed suicide in prison. [end excerpt]
Mills admires Munter to a degree that is a bit disturbing, even if Munter's story is true. Mills believes that Munter had explosives with him when he went into JP's house because he wanted to make a point about the explosives that were being sold overseas. Right. I stole three albums from a department store when I was 16 because I wanted to make a point about the evils of capitalism in the music industry.
Mills simply did not have the facts straight about Munter and he makes a fool of himself defending him. Mills is too caught up in his left-wing rage to even try to see the truth. How on earth does one bring explosives to a home for demonstration purposes? In fact, Munter was going to blow up Morgan's mansion after he shot him and his wife too. Rice and the butler made it four against one and he couldn't pull it off.
Erich Munter was a professor of German language at Harvard University. Eric had recently married a healthy young woman who died suddenly. Her autopsy revealed traces of arsenic.
On July, 1915 a bomb exploded in the United States capitol building at 2 am. No one was hurt but there was some damage and the press suspected German terrorism. The police received a letter from a man named “John Lashua” who said he had done it to protest the United States sending all those weapons to Europe.
When Erich Munter was in police custody it was determined beyond any doubt that he was the same man who had written that letter.
This political hero had killed his wife and set a bomb off in the US Capitol, and Mills writes him up like some noble martyr for a liberal cause who just happens to carry dynamite in his overcoat when he goes off to make a political point. Mills also thinks that its ok to point two guns at a man and his wife after breaking into their homes, as long as he is making a worthy point about munitions. Its a classic example of the left advocating violence against those whom they accuse of violence.
1916
ERZERUM AND THE EASTERN FRONT JAN TO MARCH 1916
The Russian made a rebound on the eastern front in the opening months of 1916. They launched a major offensive in the middle of January against Turkic positions in Armenia. The ostensible purpose was to conquer and defeat the Turks, but no one in Russia really believed that the Russian Army was going to march its way across mountainous Anatolia and capture the Sultan in his palace at Constantinople.
No, the real purpose of the Russian offensive was Iraq. The British were pinned down and losing in Iraq and the idea was to rescue the Iraqi front by forcing the Ottomans to move divisions from Iraq over to Armenia to stop the leak there. By these terms the offensive and the mission was a tremendous success for the Entente. If not for the Armenian offensive of 1916, the British might never have taken Iraq and the entire history of the war and terms of the post-war settlement in the Middle East might have been different. The US might never have been to war with Iraq twice within the next century.
The goal for the Tsar's army on the Armenian front was the fortress city of Erzerum. I vacation there.
The broad front attack was launched on January 16 (16/16), compromising many divisions. The winter was a terrible enemy for both sides. Not only was it January, but the two months clash for Erzerum was conducted in the high mountains of the land of Noah.
A series of forts defended the suburbs of Erzerum. Most of the fighting was in the area of these forts. Turkish troops dug-in on a line of trenches, much like those on the French western front. But there was a big difference. The Turkish soldiers were dug in and sleeping in trenches made of sheer ice and snow. Many on both sides were suffering from frostbite, and hunger was a plague in both armies.
On the Russian side, the Armies under the command of General Yudenich marched in brutal winter conditions over mountains more than 10,000 feet high. They marched in blizzards. Soldiers marched in snow so deep that the only way to advance was to use the trench coat as a tractor. Their coats would flatten the snow ahead of them, usually about five feet deep. Then they would advance over their coats and repeat the process a few thousand times. Once they reached the highest points and had to continue downhill towards Erzerum they turned their coats into winter play-sleds. Entire brigades of Russian soldiers slid down the side of Armenian mountains on their trench-coats in order to continue the “march” on Erzerum.
When the Russians captured Erzerum in March of 1916 it was big news all over the world. It was the first positive report to come out of the eastern front in over a year, and the Entente propaganda departments made the most of it.
In a large strategic way World War I was fought similarly to the American Civil War. The western front was where the bulk of the fighting forces were deadlocked in stalemate, while in the peripheral areas (Africa, Russia, Middle East, Far East, distant oceans,) the Entente snipped away at the Triple Axis. The exterior theatres extracted an attrition on the Triple A that it could ill afford to absorb. The west had the USA to replenish supplies and later on, provide significant numbers of fresh troops too. In the Civil War, the bulk of the fighting forces were stalemated in Virginia for four years while the North whittled away the Confederacy from the outer theatres, wearing the Rebels down from the outside until the inside weakened to the point of collapse in 1865.
The Armenian genocide relates to this segment and will be addressed separately.
3 24 1916 THE SUSSEX AND THE SUSSEX PLEDGE
One of the most famous composers and painters of the world in Wilson's time was a Spaniard named Enrique “Ricky” Granados. One of the Rickster's operas was so renowned that he was paid good money to come to America in February 1916 and lead its performance in New York City's famous Blemenreich Theatre. That performance was so well received that Granados was invited to perform it in March at the White House for the President and Edith Bolling Wilson. After the private screening, Wilson shook Enrique's hand warmly and said, “That was fabulous. Have a pleasant journey, sir, and do write me when you get back to Spain.”
Granados missed his non-stop ship back to Spain because he had to step into a New York City studio to cut a vinyl copy on 78rpm of the great opus. The detour put him instead on a ship to England, where he then transferred to a ferry across the channel bound for Dieppe France. From there he would catch a train across the plain to Spain.
The ferry Sussex made this run from Fokkaker England to Dieppe on a daily basis and the weather on the afternoon of March 24, 1916 was not densely foggy. The explanation of the stalking German U-boat captain was much foggier.
Enrique was in the front portion of the ship talking with a Greek naval officer on leave named Spiro Sitontopothis, whose account of the event about to unfold was published in newspapers worldwide. Spiro had just convinced Enrique to break his cello out of its case and give a free little concert for his many admirers traveling in boredom on the mundane ferry ride.
Just as Granados was about to strike up the first note for the little circle of lucky fans, a German submarine torpedo exploded into the side of the front portion of the ship. The entire bow was blown sky high. Spiro went spiraling into the sky. Enrique, his wife, and the rest of the audience was hurled through the cold spring air and landed in the water. Some were dead, some were suddenly swimming for their lives. Lifeboats were dropped. Enrique and Spiro managed to climb into one. Enrique heard the calls of his wife in the water and dove in from the lifeboat to try to rescue her and lead her to the lifeboat. But his heroic deed was for naught in this life. They both drowned. Spiro told (and sold) their sad story to the world.
U-29 had torpedoed what it thought was a minelayer. But the Sussex only had civilians on board. Almost 50 people were killed. 25 Americans were reportedly injured. Two were seriously hurt. Its odd that not one of the fatalities was American.
What was even more seriously hurt were America's feelings. Wilson was insulted and enraged. The poindexter President went before Congress on April 19, 1916 and in an emotional speech (he had to hold back tears when he mentioned “my good friend Enrique Grandos”) demanded that Germany stop sinking passenger ships, and show more restraint when sinking merchant ships of neutral nations. If Germany would not behave, the United States would break diplomatic relations. Wilson didn't threaten any actual military retaliation, just a pledge that “we won't talk to you ever again.”
Germany wanted to keep the US out of the war, and besides, the Kaiser was no more proun that the U-boat captain for the tragedy. There was a code of honor that even the Huns respected, like Tony Montana who won't go through with the hit because there are kids in the car. The Kaiser was never in favor of sinking ferryboats full of little kids and old ladies.
The Germans made an official announcement that it would cease its famous “unrestricted submarine warfare” policy. Wilson's threat that America would merely stop talking to Germany had done the trick. By not technically threatening force in response, Wilson was now still able to campaign in the fall for re-election as the man “who kept up out of war.” He could run on two tracks, both as the candidate for preparedness, but also as a candidate for peace. He nevr mentioned that his belligerent threat to break diplomatic realtions might well have led the United States into war in 1916.
VERDUN AND THE SOMME - 1916
The realization that the war was a ‘stuck-in-the-mud’ stalemate could be summed up in two words, Verdun and the Somme.
Both the Entente and the Central Powers planned great offensives in 1916 that would win the war with a major breakthrough. They were both schedules for about the same time frame, an irrestible force and an immovable object, neither realizing that the big offesive was coming their way at they same time they were going to deliver it in the other direction.
The Germans planned a full-scale assault on the fortress town of Verdun. Because the position of Verdun was on a salient into the German lines, the Germans felt that they could attack it on three sides, giving the offense an advantage it did not find elsewhere on the map.
At the same time, the British Expeditionaries and their French brothers were planning a decisive strategic attack at the Somme River, about 100 miles to the northwest of Verdun. By sheer coincidence both offensives opened at about the same time. In both cases there was some initial success but then the defense solidified and the lines held. It was becoming painfully clear that in general, infantry on the attack was no match for nests of machine guns in trenches behind barbed wire. The defense was just way too ahead of the offense. The tank had not been deployed in combat yet – it would reinvent the battlefield when finally deployed on some scale in 1918. But for now nothing like this sort of bloody military futility had ever happened in war before. Verdun and the Somme were mass slaughters unprecedented in style as well as scope.
To the poor soldier, going ‘over the top’ meant leaping out of the trench to face murderous fire all the way to the enemy line and then, if lucky enough to get that far, crash into a wall of death at the end. Those poor boys. Who wouldn’t dodge a draft to get out of that sort of combat? These were the saps of history. Both sides just kept throwing their finest young men to their death to gain a hundred yards of territory only to lose it back the next week. “Johnny got his gun.”
From Verdun and the Somme on, the so-called ‘Great War, at least in the West became nothing more than the great waste, a battle of attrition for four more long years. If not for this protracted stalemate the United States would never have entered the war. If these guys had settled it in a normal time span as wars went, Americans could have kept going to the silent films and ballparks, and argued about local politics and the rights of labor. But instead the United States became the makeweight and decided the war in 1918, while committing two and a half million men to military service.
WAR MAP
Rumania joined the Entente powers in 1916 and was promptly defeated on the battlefield by the Central Powers in decisive fashion. Way to go, Romania. (both spellings are acceptable – Rumnaia was more common in 1916 – Romania today) - Both the Entente and the Triple-A had been courting the Rumanians, promising slices of territory from Rumania’s neighbors in exchange for military committment. When the Entente made the Rumanians an offer they couldn’t refuse, the leaders in Bucharest took the bait.
The ‘war map’ at the end of 1916 in fact looked so favorable to the Central Powers that they even made an offer of peace to the Entente (reeee-jected.) Both sides knew that the war map was deceiving. While 1916 had not gone well for the Entente in terms of famous battles and territory won and lost, both sides knew that the backstory was a different story. In the battle of attrition, the Entente was still emerging steadily as the stronger force. The supply situation of material and manpower was favorable to the English/French alliance from the start. The “Arsenal of Democracy, ”United States was on their side to pour in the supplies.
But once again both sides planned a big victory on the field in the spring. So while the western front 1916 was another year of stalemate and slaughter, both sides rubbed their hands eagerly at the military conference tables, planning a big breakthrough victory in the spring campaigning season of 1917.
PANCHO VILLA INVADES THE USA 1916
A Mexican outlaw named Pancho Villa created sensational headlines and a crisis for Wilson in 1916 by attacking and invading the US town of Columbus New Mexico. 19 US citizens died in the attack.
There is still some argument among historians as to what exactly was Villa’s motive. It might have involved some protest against Wilson’s political position in Mexico’s internal power struggles of which Villa was an active participant. Maybe Villa just needed to steal some food and other supplies. Perhaps it was just a bad guy doing his job.
For whatever reason, Villa and 500 men struck the sleeping town of Columbus New Mexico at 4:11 a.m. on March 7 1916. Villa and his thugs shot first and didn’t bother to ask questions later. A Mr. Jimmy Dean, for example walked out of his house to see what was going on and was turned into sausage, being shot 17 times. A woman named Besse James and her unborn child were shot down for no reason, unless human sport killing counts as a reason.
A nearby militia unit was notified and hurried to the scene. When they reached Columbus, they engaged the enemy. It was full-scale war on US soil, the first since April of 1865, and the most serious homeland fight with a foreign army between 1815 and the present day. 8 US Army troops were KIA. The Mexicans murdered 11 New Mexican civilians. Villa’s losses were heavy. 324 dead Mexican bodies were counted after the fight. The rogue bandit force had been no match for the machine guns of the US Army.
Wilson and his gringo republic reacted with sensational emotion. General Pershing headed a search-and-destroy expedition into Mexico to find the perp army and its jerky boy leader. Pershing scoured the dry mountains and harsh brush of Mexico for nine months and came home with nothing for his troubles but a tan and a souvenir watch he bought in Cancun.
The nation was frustrated and humiliated by the Pershing's failure to capture Villa. We never did snag this elusive and mysterious bastardo, but he who lives by the sword will you-know-what. In 1923 a political rival shot Villa to death in Mexico, saving the US government a lot of time and money.
The American history textbooks almost never mention the Mexican casualties at all, never mind their severity. They describe the raid on Columbus as a one-way killing spree by Francisco and his banditos.
Like the Schrank case, the Villa episode attracted moviemakers who wanted him to re-stage his bandito escapades.
A recent movie was made about Pancho Villa making this movie back then. The film glossed over Villa's crimes against humanity and made him look like a cool guy for having hammed it up for a movie crew. Its called And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself (2003). It is an offensive distortion of American history, but what else is new in the movie version of any history?
Pancho was a Mestizo who hated the Spaniards who ruled Mexico as much as he hated those other Euros who ruled the USA. Villa was a revolutionary without a country. Pancho was no hero. He was a mass murderer, an abject terrorist. On his deathbed Paul Anka sang to him, “Do you remember the crimes of your life.”? I’m sure sheriff Grover Cleveland could have pulled the trap door on this dude without blinking an eye. The Blame America First tone of US history books are so busy condemning Wilson's intervening imperialism in Mexico under Pershing's militaristic boot, it is forgotten that even most of Mexico wanted Villa caught and squashed like an Atlantic City motel cockroach.
BRANDEIS 1916
Death opened up a spot on the Supreme Court for Wilson to fill in 1916. Wilson nominated his good friend, judge Louis Brandeis. Judge Louis had worked prominently on Wilson's the 1912 election campaign.
However, Aa wide assortment of political people opposed the Brandeis choice.
Big business hated Louis because he hated them. Much of Wilson’s trust-busting proclivities were inspired by the intellectual whisperings in his ear from this close friend and jurist. Brandeis was considered far too liberal even for the New York Times, which came out against him in an official editorial.
Then there was race. Louis' Jewish heritage unleashed the dogs of hate. This was an era when the Klan was the unmistakable hero of the big box office film of the era, Birth of a Nation. It wasn't in hushed voices in dark basements that people said they “didn't want that Jew on the Supreme Court.” Some referred to him as “LBJ.” But after a few rounds of wrestling, the Brandeis nomination was secured by a close margin in the Senate.
Wilson chose Brandeis partly with an eye to the next election. He didn’t want any Republican candidate to steal his progressive thunder, as they tried to do in 1912. Woody felt that the choice of this dynamic liberal Jewish leader to the Supreme Court would help maintain for the Democratic Party the Progressive initiative and the Progressive voting block foundation.
BLACK TOM EXPLOSION 7 30 1916
One of the worst terrorist attacks ever to take place on United States soil occurred on July 30 1916 less than one mile from the location of the World Trade Center tragedy of 2001.
The munitions dump at Bayonne New Jersey went up in an explosion that was equivalent to an earthquake of 5.2 on the Richter Scale.
The Germans did it. It was sabotage. We had been supplying their enemies with munitions, and they paid us back. It happened at 2:08 a.m. The shock from the blast was felt in Philadelphia! Windows all over Manhattan were shattered. People came out of their buildings in New York staggering amongst the smoke and the broken glass trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Pieces of shrapnel were embedded into the Statue of Liberty.
The national reaction was cautious. The USA was still at peace and wanted to stay that way. So the tendency was to presume that it was an accident until proven otherwise. The Germans got the Bayonne benefit of the doubt that the Spaniards could have used when the USS Maine exploded in Havana 18 years previously.
It wasn't until 1953 that the Germans finally admitted that they blew up the Bayonne munitions dump and agreed to pay an indemnity. It was a token gesture considering the billions we had already poured into the rebuilding of Germany by 1953.
ELECTION OF 1916
Wilson was re-nominated by acclamation at the 1916 Democratic Convention.
in 1916 Teddy Roosevelt was the center of attention throughout yet another election campaign year, 1916, and this time he did not even decide to run.
But even in deciding not to run, TR was the biggest story of the campaign. The Progressive TR decision not to run in 1916 shocked, angered and extinguished his own Bull Moose party. The Progressive Convention broke up and went home to die after Roosevelt told them he was not a candidate. They had nothing to live for.
Then a stampede for Roosevelt at the Republican Convention was not effective in either changing Teddy's mind or in changing the minds of the old guard Republicans who were still mad at Ted for ruining ther chances in 1912. Roosevelt did not wish to be the goat again for splitting the party.
The Republicans looked to the bench instead and drafted a justice of the Supreme Court to run for president, the honorable Charles Evans Hughes. CEH had been the CEO of new York State, and a popular progressive one. Charlie had been publicly critical of Wilson’s weak stance against German aggressions.
Hughes had more money to campaign on than Wilson, but ran into trouble on the trail by making contradictory promises to different groups. Stand-up comics on the late night vaudeville curcuit began to refer to him as “Charles Evasive Hughes.”
President Wilson kept to his business, declining to tour the nation making campaign speeches. He would let this unknown opponent make his imperfections known while he sat back and watched. Wilson wrote to a friend that is was wise to remember the aphorism, ‘never murder a man who is committing suicide.’
1916 – Battle of the Brains – The Judge vs. the Professor
The election results were very close. It was two days later before the tally was figured for California. Whichever man took California would win it all. It was Wilson in the west by only 3,373 votes. The issue was not decided until the 3,900 votes from South Lake Tahoe came it at 11 p.m. on Wednesday. They were 94% for Wilson because he vacationed there and was a big tipper.
Republican Hughes lost California in 1916 party because of a political blunder. This was the infamous ”forgotten handshake” for California Governor Hiram Johnson.
Late in the campaign Hughes stayed overnight at a hotel where Johnson, a popular progressive known to the entire country was also staying. In ignoring the chance to visit Johnson two flights down, Hughes created a negative story the press could run with. The progressives in California got mad at Hughes, and a few thousand votes went out the window with the pipe tobacco smike. This social snub probably changed the entire course of world history. The years 1916-1921 were crucial ones for the entire world and America’s role was crucial. What would Hughes have done with the challenges that later faced Wilson?
US CAPITAL SHIP BUILDING PROGRAM 1916-17
The situation in the Atlantic was a threat to our security and the world’s. Wilson wanted to keep us out of war but certainly recognized the need for naval rebuilding and quality improvement. Work was soon begun on 16 battleships and heavy cruisers, the so-called ‘capital ships’. But when America entered the Great War in April of 1917 these ships were not completed and there was little need for them. Britain had already established naval supremacy against Wilhelm’s water wagons.
The need was for smaller ships such as destroyers. For just as it would be in the Second World War, the German naval threat to the allies was the submarine. Battleships were of little use against the subs. Battleships were more of a tempting target than a deterrent terror to a Prussian sub captain. Work ceased on many these American dreadnoughts. Some finished out the war unfinished. The money saved went into smaller ships to chase subs with. After the war the stranded capital ships were completed and were upgraded with advanced information and technology learned the hard way.
The UK by the way was displeased with US for finishing the big ships after the war. She was accustomed to being the queen of the high seas and did not like the idea of being number two. England’s economy was still shell shocked from the war and the money to keep up with the Jones’s across the ocean simply wasn’t there. Their diplomats flat out asked us not to finish the ships. Wilson, and then Harding just stared at them. They got the hnt. The ships were completed.
FIRST WOMAN IN CONGRESS 1917
On April 2 1917 Jeanette Rankin of Montana, a Republican, was elected to the US Congress, the first woman to reach that plateau. Some western states had granted the vote to women but the nation as a whole was a chauvinist pig. nd here was Montana sending a woman to clean up the House. In fact, for Rankin the female suffrage was not the number one issue. Jeanette was not a suffragette first. She was a firstly a devoted dove. Rankin rose to top rank in history not because she was the first or the only woman in Congress, but because she twice courageously voting against war at moments of war fever. Why didn’t JFK have a chapter on her in his book Profiles in Courage? JR was the one merciful voice in the mob saying, ‘lets not lynch the guy.’ Rankin was the only Congressperson to not vote for war on December 8, 1941!
MEXICAN RELATIONS SOILED 1917-1920
In early January of 1917 an intercepted telegram revealed that Germany was negotiating an alliance with Mexico and was promising that if Germany and the USA went to war and Mexico entered the war on the side of Germany, then Germany would assure Mexico of the return of Texas and the U.S southwest. Mexico had ceded these lands to the United States as part of the settlement of the Mexican War of 1845. This "Zimmerman Telegram." was a national and international sensation and helped to stir up war fever in the hawk spirit of Clay, Grundy, Calhoun, and Wolfowitz.
Mexico also stirred up trouble with confiscation of subsoil mineral resources. Prior to 1878 only topsoil rights were sold to foreign corporations. Whatever oil or other produce was under there still belonged to Mexico. After 1878 the subsoil product was sold to foreign companies, mostly American ones.
In 1917 the new Constitution nationalized the subsoil and the foreign companies were faced with a choice between confiscation and expropriation. With expropriation the companies are at least paid some compensation.
Secretary of State Hughes negotiated an agreement from Mexico that US oil companies would be exempted from subsoil expropriations, but after a change in Governments, the new one under Obregon refused to put this agreement in writing. So in 1920 the US refused to recognize the Obregon government.
THE WAR IN 1917
In late January of 1917, Germany announced that it was going to once again resume "unrestricted submarine warfare", meaning that any ship of any nation that it chose to sink, it was going to sink. Germany knew that this would probably mean that the USA would enter the war. But the submarine campaign was a part of a great overall offensive that the German high command believed would achieve ultimate strategic victory. Germany thought that by the time the US mobilized for war, the offensive on the Western Front would be won. By the time the US was mobilized there would be no allied front for the Yanks to even go to "over there."
On the ground, the morale in the French Army by 1917 was at a low point. Mutinies were so frequent that an example had to be made. 50 French soldiers were executed for desertion or mutiny.
RUSSIA 1917-18
In March of 1917 a Revolution swept Tsarist Russia. Nicholas II had to step down from the throne and a temporary democracy was set up under Kerensky, the leader of the Social-Democratic Party. This democracy fell in November 1917 when Lenin and Trotsky (among others) led a counterrevolution, which installed a Communist dictatorship. In the course of 8 months Russia had taken two steps forward and three steps back.
The issue for the United States was one of Democracy versus hypocrisy. In February of 1917 Teddy Roosevelt and the US hawks were clamoring for our entry into this war on the side of democracy and goodness as opposed to the Huns with their autocracy and evil. Wilson himself was falling for this propaganda. Yet here was the Allied cause linked arm and arm with the most autocratic state in the world, the Russians under the Czars.
The March Revolution of 1917 saved us just in time from being allied with that nation in an oxymoronic struggle both for and against liberty. This was just an accident. We had been fully prepared to enter the First World War to unwittingly help save the Russian autocracy. The new March 17 regime was recognized almost immediately by the United States. Now Wilson would have a much easier time with his home legislators if he wanted war. The nation would no longer have to feel like a hypocrite if it joined the Entente.
The Kerensky interlude was complicated for the war effort both in Russia and in the west. One of the inspirations of the March revolt was national Russian anger with the war and the war effort. Ill-equipped Russian army troops were dying by the tens of thousands in what seemed like a futile effort to achieve vague goals for rich faraway western states.
What was Kerensky going to do? As a social democrat, didn’t he have some obligation to take Russia out of this unpopular war? When Kerensky decided to honor the Russian commitment to continue to prosecute the war with its allies, his fate was sealed. He was doomed. The Russian people, left right and cneter, hated the war.
Few Russian citizens knew of the real war aim of Russia, because the deals made to win these goals were negotiated in secret before the fighting started. The UK and France had agreed to give Russia a free hand in the direction of Constantinople and the Dardanelles in exchange for full Russian participation in the war and an agreement to accept a pro-western solution of other Western colonial situations elsewhere. Russia had long sought a warm water port on the Mediterranean and had gone to war with Turkey unsuccessfully several times to achieve this end. Now it had a chance to win it all as part of an alliance.
In November a second Revolution swept Russia. This time democracy was defeated and a leftist autocracy replaced it. The tyranny of the right had come full circle and now re-appeared as the tyranny of the left. Kerensky was out and the new Russian Communist leaders were in. Russia had enjoyed its six months of democracy, but the party was over when the Red party came in.
The first order of business for the Bolos (as Churchill called them) was to get Russia out of this futile war. The Bolshevik Communists had made no secret of their antagonism to Russian participation in this conflict. The Bolos openly advocated the defeat of their own country. They liked defeat if that’s what it took to stimulate the world wide socialist revolution these Communists both predicted and desired. The worse the war went for Russia and the world the better their chances of taking over first Russia then the world.
The Bolsheviks were true to their promises. The German Army was on the march in Russia when Trotsky met with the Germans at the Russian town of Brest-Litovsk to negotiate a settlement and take Russia out of the war. The Germans had already begun withdrawing their divisions from the east and sending them to the western front. Trotsky thought he could exploit this situation and balk at German territorial demands. The Germans told him they would resume their attack immediately if Trotsky hesitated to take the deal on the table. Trotsky stood firm and left the negotiating table in a huff. The next morning the German Army resumed the war against Russia. Trotsky got the message and returned to the bargaining table with a new attitude. The Reds would take the deal the Germans demanded. Bronstein (his real name) had learned that just because the new Russian leaders professed no hostility for Germany and no interest in the war, did not mean that Germany considered itself no longer at war with Russia. Germany knew better. It knew that if Russia had been winning the war they would not be professing to disown it and slip out of the consequences. Trotsky and Lenin were fully responsible for the Tsar’s military baggage whether they liked it or not. The Bolsheviks were naïve to think otherwise.
The settlement of Brest-Litovsk awarded a large chunk of Russia to Germany. Russia was admitting defeat on its western front, the Allies eastern front.
November 17 was a low point in the war for the Allies. Brest-Litovsk was bad news, especially coming at the same time that the German-Austrian armies had inflicted a disastrous defeat on the Italians at the battle of Caporetto, taking 300,000 casualties. USA troops had not even been trained and transported overseas yet, and Germany had won half of its war. The Kaiser could now shift its entire fighting machine from the east into the western front. The German high command now had an exiting and practical goal. To attack and win in the west before the United States could deploy its massive industrial and troop force there. It was a real threat and in a sense, the USA arrived in the nick of time.
The Russian withdrawal was problematic enough without the threat of worldwide revolution that came with it. The Bolsheviks called on the workers of the entire world to unite and overthrow all capitalist governments. These threats might have been ludicrous boasting and dreaming but how was a capitalist nation to know better? The global unrest between capital and labor was unsettled and violent before the war started. Now in war’s chaos the threats seemed that much more disturbing from the perspective of Washington or Paris and even Berlin. The recipients of the Bolshevik threats took them more seriously than the Bolos themselves probably ever did. That syndrome went on until 1989.
When Germany ultimately lost the war she had to return most of the territory from the Brest-Litovsk grab back to Communist Russia. The Russians in 1919 were handed most (but not all) their lost land back through no courageous effort of their own.
There was one major advantage to the Russian Communist takeover for the west. A secret treaty had been made in 1915 between Russia and the allies of France and the UK whereby Russia was to receive the object of her dreams for 500 years, Constantinople. The Tsar was also to receive the northern half of Persia (Iran). Britain held the southern half. There would be a buffer zone between the two big cats. If Russia had stuck it out until the US came in and won the war in the west, these temrs might well have had to have been honored. If this deal had went down it would have had far reaching implications for world history and the Cold War of the future.
Russia and Britain had been intense rivals before WWI made them buddies. The two powers had already waged their own cold war in the 19th century. The two became the odd couple in WW1 just as Russia and the United States became strange allies in WWII. The Cold War was a 200-year-old struggle when it ended (hopefully) in the early 1990’s. It did not begin with Harry Truman’s time.
The US, UK and France could point to the Communist Revolution and the threat to take over all western capitalist nations with exported revolution and say ‘we do not have to honor the secret treaties because they were made with the Tsar’s government, not this one that is violently hostile to us.’ If the Leninists could renounce the debts Russia owed because they were contracted under the Tsarist government then the west could apply the same logic to the secret treaties. If not for the Bolos, Russia might have received the Dardanelles and the oil fields of northern Iran after WWI, even if they had withdrawn from the war! The hostile professed intent to destroy all capitalist countries denied them quite a heap of capial gains. Constantinople and northern Persia were saved from pan-Slavism, by the childish threats by the Bolos.
Later, after World War II Stalin would occupy Northern Persia anyway. It took some serious Cold War threatening by Truman to finally get the Russian forces to leave.
WWI IN THE FAR EAST
Japan entered the First World War on the side of the Allies/Entente.
The Entente did not initiate requests for offensive Japanese operations in the Pacific against German possessions. But Japan knew this would be easy pickings and made the moves. Japan was not motivated by any desire to make the world safe for Democracy. Japan was no democracy. But Japan knew it had a formal alliance with England, and attacked Germany in Asia on the basis of this odd aliance and on the philosphhical justification that 'the enemy of my friend is my enemy, and I can steal the stuff in his garage while you're fighting him on the front lawn.” The Entente found it hard to say no to Japan seizing German colonial possessions in Asia. It helped attrit German capabilities.
So Japan took the opportunity to seize the Shantung peninsula from the Germans along with the important port of Tientsin. It was a case of one oppressor of the Chinese people supplanting the other. It had similarities to the exchange of American for Spanish rule in the Philippines in 1900.
Japan also captured an important string of German held Marshall and Caroline Islands in the deep Pacific. These insincere contributions to the war effort produced only small gains for the Western powers and contributed large towards the outbreak of WWII in the Pacific 20 some odd years later.
Britain, France, Russia and Italy were not thrilled with this Japanese cherry picking around in the Far East but were not in a position to stop it. These Euros were allies of China in the same way the a Chicago mobster is an ally of the baker who pays protection on time.
But Japan had trump card to play by threatening to join the Central powers if it did not get it’s way. So Japan got it’s way. Japan got to keep all the spoils of fake war, and the western Entente formally recognized in March of 1917 Japan's ‘special position’ in China. Special means predatory.
The United States entered the War a month later. The timing was not favorable to standing up to Japan over China, and China was too far away for the United States to project any military force. Secretary of State Lansing signed an agreement with Mr. Ishii giving American acquiescence to a situation that the USA had long claimed to be against. McKinley must have been rolling in his grave as the open door was shut and locked on Japan’s behalf.
“HE GOT US INTO THE WAR”
By April of 1917, German submarine attacks on US ships had reached the breaking point. Not only was Germany unapologetic, she boldly said “too bad about ya, we’re going to sink everything in sight.” Maybe not in those exact words but that was the situation. Both the Democrats and the Republicans began to hound Wilson to seek a declaration fo War against germany. Wilson tried to resist, but he caved in when the crowd sang God Bless America whenever he tried to explain his objections. he said later, “ I couldn't compete with the moving line, 'white with foam.' ”
The time had come to put the pens away and break out the guns. Tommy went before Congress on April 2, 1917 and asked for a declaration of war. Two days later the Senate gave him war by a vote of 82-6. Two days after that the House gave him war by a vote of 373-50. America was at war. Now Teddy Roosevelt could sleep at night.
Eight Latin American nations joined the fight with a formal declaration of war before the end of July 1917, including military juggernauts Haiti, Costa Rica and Honduras. Most of our southern neighbors at least broke diplomatic relations with Germany.
DRAFT
Wilson did not mess around with a volunteer army. The Selective Service Act was passed in May and more than 2.8 million men between the ages of 18 and 45 were drafted for service in WWI. Of these, 116,000 never came home alive. The draft initially was limited to males between the ages of 21 and 30, but then it was extended to males between 18 and 45. More than 2 million of the 2.8 drafted were sent “over there” before all was quiet on the western front. TR wanted the draft to include all men between 17 and 70, but Wilson resisted this proposal.
Wilson was the best type of liberal, a sincere one. He never really wanted to play both sides to the voters. He kept the US out of the war as long as he could while critics, especially Republican critics, wanted him to get us in.
When the USA declared war, Wilson’s motorcade passed throngs of cheering Americans applauding him as he went by. Wilson was appalled at this. “Don’t they realize what they are applauding for?” he told Lansing. “This is a terrible thing. People are going to die and these fools are clapping.”
A week after the Congress had declared war he was talking to his close friend and personal secretary Joseph Tumulty. He showed Tum a letter from a New Hampshire editor. The editor's letter had deeply touched the president. Wilson believed that this guy had understood the real reasons that Wilson had held off from seeking a declaration of war as long as he did.
As he spoke to Tumulty, Woodrow began to tear up and then broke down and sobbed openly, burying his head in his hands and his tears. Wilson was no blackheart.
The United States had become allied with the ‘Allies’ but he wanted to make a clear distinction between our goals and that of the old Entente. Wilson carefully avoided using the term “Allies” even if he couldn't stop the newwspapers from doing so. He preferered Allied Powers” and often corrected those who said “Allies” with a little lecture. Wilson snapped at his secretary of State one day for saying “Allies.”
“ ‘Allies,’ Wilson corrected him brusquely. “No, not Allies.
‘Make sure in all your dispatches from now on, you refer to them as the ‘Associated Powers.’ Our goals are not the same as theirs and we had nothing to do with the outbreak of this conflict. We are in this war because our citizens have been murdered on the high seas in spite of our repeated warnings to Germany to desist in unrestricted submarine warfare. The term ‘Allies’ implies a concert of interests that does not in fact exist. I do not wish to convey the wrong impression to our enemies. And I do not want to convey the wrong impression to our allies or our own citizens.”
History books now refer without blinking to the US, France and the UK in WWI as ‘The Allies’ but it is a malapropism based on a comfort with this term left over more recently from World War II when it was embraced by FDR. It was not in such common usage during World War One.
One thing Wilson neglected to ever say was that Wall Street had some influence in getting us involved in the fighting. More than two billion private dollars had been loaned to our associated powers prior to 1917. If our associates lost the war we would obviously never get our loans back, and the integrated money world of the US-UK-France would be shaken up with unpredictable fallout. The charge that munitions makers instigated our entry into the war is unfair and wrong. The charge that it was partly a war to save Wall Street loan sharks is more legitimate.
The US government also lent large sums of money to the associates before entering the war, competing with private loan sharks.
In his famous 4.2.17 speech Wilson claimed that the US wanted “no compensation for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make.” What he didn’t mention was that we certainly expected to make some interest. The United states expected Europe to pay back the loans plus interest. The Associates never did pay up, causing bitter resentment among great and average Americans alike.
Europe's failure to pay back these loans helped bring on World War II by turning the United States against Europe. Failing to repay these loans made it difficult for the USA to find the morale to rescue the European countries from the threat of Hitler in the late 1930’s. If Europe had paid back the loans, the United States might have been quicker to make military commitments to European Alliance systems, and Mussolini and Hitler might never have made war.
TRUSTBUSTING REVERSED AS WAR MEASURE
The United States had to maximize its national industrial capacity in order to win the war. To do this, Wilson and the Congress had to look the other way on anti-trust violations. Wilson went one further and actively promoted the active reversal of the trust busting trend that had been fought for bhy Democrats and republicans alike since the days of Cleveland. Now the nation’s leadership openly encouraged big business combinations as a way of maximizing war industrial output. “Mergeritis” swept the country along with influenza.
Later on during the Great Depression of the 1930’s, the pro-business interference of the government during the Great War was cited as legal precedent to justify government interference with business in the FDR era. But this time the government was trying to hurt big business, not help it. It used the earlier example to prove that government could do it in general principle.
WE WILL DARKEN THE SKIES OVER GERMANY
As soon as the United States entered the war, France and England pleaded with Sam to build up a giant aerial army of fighter and bomber planes for Europe. Newt Baker encouraged this goal with statements about the amazing power of American industry and how Germany was going to get it good one the American military industry got going.
No less of a pair of figure than Balfour and Joffre travelled to Washington in the middle of the war in May of 1917 to plead with the Wilson Administration on behalf of England and France. They wanted a lot of things but they were especially fixated on the fantasy that American strategic air power could win the first world war for the allies. They were about 25 years too soon.
Some people think that the strategic air power concept only originated with the second world war. but it was dreamed of in WWI.
Billy Mitchell was in France working on it in WWI. They asked the USA to produce 2,000 combat aircraft a month for delivery to Europe. Newton Baker vaguely pledged that we could and would do this. The jingo American newspapers were all over it. We Will Darken the Skies Over Germany, pledged one headline.
When Wilson read these headlines he spit out his coffee. "What?"
Baker and the newspapers had promised the impossible. The United States did not have a single airplane factory in existence. Europe had many and its total production did not exceed 2,000 combat aircraft a month! These clowns really thought that the USA could in a matter of a few months could produce 2,000 combat aircraft a month.
The Americans couldn't even get a good airplane design off the ground. The Army finally decided to copy three or four Allied Planes (The Spad "Humptus" B-3R for one) and just manufacture them here. The Army designed and contracted out its own big "Liberty" engine for mass production in all the planes, but they proved too big for fighters.
Many things went wrong and there was delay after delay with each new miscue. The leaves of 1917 were turning brown and not a single American combat aircraft had been delivered to Europe. But the public and the Congress didn't know this. They were being led to believe that American industry was producing and delivering planes. One Congressman got especially nosy and started to demand some answers. How many planes were actually in Europe.
The Army and the War department scrambled for damage control. They held off the Congressman for a few days until they could rush one single passable plane to the east coast and ship it off to Europe. One AAA DEXTER-J-99 (A Spad-4 replica) left on a freighter in Philly and straight away the Congressman got a visit from the war Department. "Yes," he was told, "We have delivered planes to Europe but the number is secret right now." It wasn't a lie but it was a lie. The Congressman backed-off.
It was simply about 50 times more difficult than anticipated for factories to switch over from producing automobiles and sewing machines to warplanes. There were serious and persistent problems with design flaws alone and with political interference. New designs under production would be cancelled out because a new and better design should be used. Fine and well, but another two months lost before any planes get to the front.
At the end of World War One the United States had delivered less than one thousand planes to operational areas. 698 US made combat plans were on duty on the last day of the war. Most of the American planes were DeHavilland-4's, not the best plane of the war by any means. The only thing that had darkened the skies of Europe was American bull.
Having said that, the Americans did deliver on one promise. America provided pilots. We never delivered the planes but we delivered a lot of pilots. By November of 1918, 10,000 American men were certified trained pilots in the Army air corps. It was dangerous work. Of the first 200 sent to Europe, more than 50 died in aerial combat and still more form other causes.
CHANGING LEADERS IN EUROPE
By the end of 1917, most of the men that had led their nations to war were no longer in charge. A new group was trying to win and end the war that others had started.
In Great Britain the new man was Lloyd-George.
In Germany von Hindenburg and Ludendorff had taken over the country by taking control of the Army. Even a pretense of civilian leadership was now eliminated. The Allies weren't even at war with Germany any more. They were at war with the German Army.
Emperor Joseph of Austria-Hungary died in 1917 at the age of 453.
In France the new garçon was Mr. Briand. His name would later become famous as part of the Kellogg-Briand pact of 1927.
In Russia the new guy was Alexander Kerensky. He led the provisional government that overthrew the Romanov Dynasty in March 1917. Then in November this Provisional government was overthrown by the Bolsheviks. Now the new man was Nick Lenin.
IN OTHER NEWS 1917
RACE RIOT IN EAST ST LOUIS
The four worst outbursts of racial rioting in America (prior to 1992) all took place during war periods. There were the NYC riots of 1863. There were a serious of race riots during World War I. There was another outburst of race rioting during world war II. And there was a heck of a lot of race rioting during the Vietnam War.
The biggest race riot of the 20th century was not Detroit, Watts or Harlem in the 60’s but East St Louis in the teens. On July 2 1917 39 blacks and nine whites were killed in street fighting in the town of East St. Louis.
Riots of this intensity do not happen overnight. There has to be some kind of buildup to this kind of murderous hatred. Even a serial murderer has to have a period of psychological disturbed development before he acts, and so with a mob of rioters.
The roots were found in the so-called “Colonization conspiracy.” Blacks in this era were migrating in large numbers from South to North in search of jobs. Not just better jobs, but just jobs. It was only a secondary motive to escape the racism of the South. Blacks wanted to work. The economy wasn’t horrible but it wasn’t the roaring 20’s either.
But the Democratic Party began to spread the great story that the blacks were being imported to the North by the tens of thousands in order to swing the local, state and national elections against the Dems. The bad guys were of course the Republicans. The charge was absurd. Blacks were going to migrate North for better jobs whether they could vote or not and regardless of which they Party they would vote for. But it just so happened that the party of racism in this time was the Democratic party. Blacks with any clue at all regarded Wilson and his team as patently racist and clearly against them. Wilson for all his professorial image and humanitarian historical image was an over the top Southern racist.
Democratic newspapers began printing dirty stories about how the Republicans were shipping thousands upon thousands of blacks North to carpetbag the elections. East St Louis was one of the prime targets for the colonization conspiracy. People on the streets were buying it and resenting the blacks. Republican newspapers were shouting “You gots ta be kiddin me” but few were listening. The colonization lie became gospel truth to most whites. Not only were the blacks only showing up to swing elections, they were undercutting jobs at the same time and reducing property values.
East St. Louis was in Illinois, not Missouri and Wilson was worried about carrying that state. He had won ‘noise’ in 1912 but only because Taft and Teddy had split up the Republican vote. A united R might well whip him in 1916. It was time to call out every dirty Dem trick in the book to win in 16 and the colonization conspiracy was as good a gag as any.
Wilson personally made statements about this alleged crime against democracy going on, and even singled out several key Midwestern states (that he was worried about carrying) as prime centers of the CC. United States Attorney General Thomas Gregory was assigned to the case. Gregory broke out his tommy gun and went to work. Assistant attorney general Frank Dailey was put in charge of an investigation and he soon announced that over 300,000 blacks had been imported into Midwestern states for political purposes.
The Wilson Department of injustice team made threats that prosecutions could be expected, if not now, then certainly after the election. Of course nothing came of these threats because it was the Democrats that were abusing the national democracy for partisan political purposes, not the Republicans. There was no great colonization conspiracy going on. Even if there was, what would have been so illegal and anti-American about taking blacks out of the South where they had no voting rights worth a nickel and helping them move north where there were more jobs and they could vote fairly and freely? Not that this happened because it didn’t. But even if it had, what would have been the criminal charges, unless it were by registering the black voters illegally, say for example before they had lived long enough in these areas to legally qualify to vote?
After the election, Republican newspapers mocked the Democrats for the lack of promised prosecutions for “colonization.” The chairman of the RNC, William “Wild Bill” Willcox sniped that it was noble that the Democrats had taken so much care to make sure that the rights of blacks to vote in the north were guaranteed to be legal. Now of only the Democrats would pay a little bit of the same concern to the rights of blacks to vote fairly in the South we might have us a better country.
In 1916 there was trouble at the meatpacking plants in East St Louis (ESL). It was a classic case of workers trying to unionize and organize for rights and improvements while the big business managers crushed them with a ruthless iron fist.
Strikebreakers were imported to replace workers who were fired when they walked out. Some of the strikebreakers were white and some were black. But the racist press made it seem as though almost all of the strikebreakers were blacks. Soon the talk on the street was that the n words were taking all of our jobs away.
In 1917 the pattern was repeated in a more serious strike at the Aluminum Ore Corporation in the spring. This time the management end could exploit the war that was under way to charge the strikers with national disloyalty. They were going on strike in an industry essential to the war effort. The Aluminum goliaths hired their own police force with guns to intimidate the strikers and they did so effectively.
On May 28 the first riot broke out in East St Louis, just a hint of the big one to come in July. A meeting of angry whites was held ostensibly to discuss legitimate grievances against imported Negroes. Speeches were given including one by ESL Mayor Mollman who told the people that governors in many southern states had been asked in writing to stop sending Negroes to East St Louis.
A local politician named Flanagan at one point shouted that “There is no law against mob violence!.” The crowd went wild.
Just as the hate meeting broke up a false story spread that a black guy had just robbed and shot a white guy. By the time the story got passed around it had been exaggerated as these stories do. By the time the mob hit the street the guy had set 8 kids on fire, raped three white women and sank the Maine. You know what happened next.
White mobs roamed the streets of ESL beating up black people at random. The Mayor of East St Louis contacted the Illinois National Guard. There was a force already in the city to maintain order at the Aluminum Ore Company. ING commander Cavanaugh told Mayor Mollman that he had no authority to order the guard out into the streets to quell rioting. He was there to maintain order at the Ore Company and could not exceed that authority on the word of a mere mayor.
At the corner of 3rd and Missouri some rioters were fixing to set fire to several Negro homes. Two white detectives, Coppedge and Wadley stood tall and prevented this. Both of these men died in the later riot of July 2. No good deed goes unpunished and no good deed doers either.
The next day, May 30 the Governor, Frankie Pace Lowden finally sent out the National Guard to restore order in riotous ESL. Not the national Guard already there to guard “the man”(’s) factory, but another detail shipped there from Vandalia. The National Guard unites assigned to the Aluminum Ore Factory stayed there during the May 1917 riots.
Whites continued to attack blacks throughout the day. At one factory a mob of whites waited for black workers to finish work and as they exited with their empty lunch pails they were beaten one at a time.
Many blacks were armed and dangerous too. Light skinned blacks that could pass for white were reported dashing back and forth across the Mississippi during the night to procure guns for self-defense. But the odds were stack on the white chips. Several National Guardsmen were arrested by ESL police for assisting in beating up the very black people they had been dispatched to protect.
By 11 p.m. on May 30 order had been restored. Six people had been shot, none fatally. White mobs were not shooting to kill. They just wanted the colonizing blacks to leave and stay out of East St. Louis. Revenge wasn’t their goal. A Black free ESL was.
The United States Army was training to fight the racist Prussians of Germany while the whites of St. Louis were having gunfights with American black workers while fending off the National Guard. Many black homes of the poorest kind were destroyed in the May riots of ESL in 1917.
When the city of ESL slowly returned to law and order, reasonable people of both races asked the governor to keep the National Guard on active duty. No, the Guard would be removed soon, just in time for the summer heat wave. What could possibly go wrong. Well, at the very least the units stationed at the Aluminum Ore Company that did nothing during the riot when they were desperately needed; perhaps their standing orders could be redrafted so they would be free to fall out and help preserve the peace if another riot breaks out. No, the guard units at AOC were there to preserve order at that one place and their orders would not be changed.
The press blamed the blacks for the riots, a few exceptions proving that the exception proves the rule. There was considerable evidence that many police officers helped the racist rioters, as opposed to arresting them. East St. Louis in the summer of 1917 made Sparta Mississippi In the Heat of the Night look like Harvard square in 1977.
By May 20 the last of the National Guard units had left the city. Rumors were spreading that the whites (to celebrate the flag of freedom) planned to attack the blacks on the Fourth of July. In the white areas, rumors spread that the blacks were planning on an armed retaliation on July 4. They were going to fire on the crackers. The Fourth of July was going to turn red black and blue.
The big one did finally erupt two days before the holiday. East St Louis went up like a Roman candle and with all the savagery of the Roman Coliseum. Nero himself would have turned his eyes away in horror at some of the deeds.
The incident that sparked the riot (actually a pogrom against blacks not worthy of the term ‘riot’) was the murder of two white police detectives. There is no doubt that blacks did kill these two detectives, but there were a few extenuating circumstances. As fate would have it, the slain police officers were the same two men who had helped rescue blacks in the warm-up riot of May 20.
For two nights white aggressors had driven through the streets of East St. Louis indiscriminately shooting into the homes of black people, trying to kill them. Then the ESL police department came up with the not so bright idea of sending undercover detectives through the same neighborhood to keep an eye on things in an unmarked vehicle. When the detectives cruised through the streets in the poorly lit ghetto there was a posse of angry armed blacks waiting for them. They opened up on the poor detectives and shot up their car like the end game for Bonnie and Clyde some years later. Both of these detectives had been heroes to black people in the earlier disturbances and now they were mistakenly slain by the same black people they had tried to protect.
The bullet riddled car was on display for whites to see for several days after the killing. Something had to be done to avenge this murder of two of the finest whites of ESL's finest. This was the root cause of the massacre to come. At least the outward root cause. The inward cause went back hundreds of years and would require eight dozen books to explain.
THE WAR IN 1918
THE 14 POINTS
On January 8, 1918 Wilson made the most important speech of his life.
In an address to the US Congress he outlined the war aims of America and hopefully those of his allies. They were embodied in 14 talking points. The most important was the denial of any territorial aggrandizement by the United States or its Allies.
Because it was written in Wilson’s typical morally assertive but vague in practice style, the 14 points would lead to 14 endless elastic interpretations by both sides. Many historians give Wilson sainthood for the 14 points, but in terms of actual results, the 14 points were 14 unsolved problems and led directly to the Second World War. The 14 Points would later form the basis of the settlement of Versailles. The German government later in the year made the request for an armistice on the basis of the 14 points.
The 14 points were;
One -Open covenants. In other words no secret treaty provisions. By the turn of the century international politics had become so poisoned that secret deals within international treaties were becoming generally more important than the outward terms of the treaty itself.
Two -Complete freedom of the seas.
Three -All nations must construct a large sign for their capital building that says ‘Wilson is the coolest.”
Four -Strategic arms reductions by all nations. Peace through weakness.
Five- In Colonial populations, equal concern for the people’s rights as for the rights of the ruling nation, a scientific impossibility.
Six - Point Russia – The occupied territories of Russia must be returned. The terms of the settlement at Brest-Litovsk reversed. What the eastern front gaveth, the western front tooketh away.
Seven - No waffling on Belgium. It must be evacuated completely and its
sovereignty restored.
Eight - The land taken from France both in the Great War and in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 was to be returned to Pierre.
Nine - The borders of Italy were to be adjusted along ‘lines of nationality’. There were many complex national and racial factors involved here. In other words, in a chaotic situation, arbitrary declarations from across the ocean would solve the unsolvable.
Ten – Trust-busting for the AH Empire. The empire of Austro-Hungary was to be divided up and dished out to several national groups that had long wanted independence or, at least, autonomy. Lame lip service would be paid to respecting the integrity of Austria-Hungary as it was exploded.
Eleven – The Balkan complex solved by the professor. - A thousand years of European history had not begun to clear up the mess of interests in the Balkans, but WW had the solution: “The relations of the Balkan states to one another to be determined by friendly counsel along historically established lines of allegiance and nationality.” Oh. Well. That settles everything.
Twelve – Big Otto had to let go of the conquests of the past 1200 years. The Ottoman Empire in Turkey proper could remain as a nation, but the large peripheral empire was to be distributed as the victors saw fit. This would later create several new nations in the Middle East, including (of special interest to the US later) Iraq. This was in part a reward to the Arab states for its support in the fighting, and in larger part a chest of pirate’s gold for the Allies. They would not only create these nations, they would control them.
The practical outcome was a contradiction of Wilson’s theoretical terms. The victor nations would keep the spoils of war in the Middle East for a while before deciding if, when, and how the Arabs would be genuinely rewarded as promised. Under the guise of ending colonialism, the western colonial powers would acquire new colonial territories.
Thirteen – Poland. - Unlucky thirteen. Polish independence to be restored and guaranteed, with access to the North Sea. To fulfill the last part, a ‘Polish Corridor’ would be set up, consisting of predominantly German speaking territory carved out of Eastern Germany. This racial and geographical anomaly was arguably the single biggest mistake of the settlement of Versailles and in the opinion of at least one venerable historian, the primary cause of World War II. Germany could and would never concede the reality of the Polish Corridor. East Prussia was isolated from the fatherland.
Fourteen – A world organization of nations must be formed to prevent war in the future. The small states of the world must be protected from the big. The big countries must be prevented from fighting each other also.
These 14 points were delivered in January with much fanfare. But two other speeches by Wilson later in the year were just as important. They added more points, repeated some of the originals and developed some points further. When the Germans sought peace in October 1918 they sought it on the conditions that said peace would be based on Wilson’s 14 Points speech and subsequent addresses.
Wilson delivered the three other speeches that would form the basis of the November armistice. The first was on February 11 before Congress, the next on July 4 at Mt. Vernon Virginia, and the third on September 27, 1918 in New York City. In fact it was the September 27 speech that was the focus of the Germans when they were negotiating surrender and/or armistice.
TIME OUT – 3.18
In March of 1918 the time twisting tradition of daylight savings time was instituted for the first time. DST was a war measure designed to save fuel by extending the daylight hours into the early evening. It always confuses me when the clocks are moved. ‘Spring forward, fall back’ is the only memory device that works for me. Ben Franklin, (the most overrated American of all time by the way) had originally proposed the idea back in the early days of the republic.
WWI IN THE MIDDLE EAST
The Ottoman Turkish Empire controlled Iraq in 1914. So when Britian went to war against Turkey all Turk possessions became fair game. Britain couldn't take the Dardanelles, but it could snip off the Ottoman satellites, their more vulnerable possessions. The UK launched an offensive against Basra at the headwaters of the Persian Gulf. This would secure the oil supplies there and open a second front to help Russia. The assault on Basra was so successful that the expeditionary force decided to move on up into the heart of old Mesopotamia. The Brits advanced but were halted in the area of Kut. There the Turks counterattacked and laid siege to Kut. The garrison at Kut was starved into surrender. It wasn't until near the end of the war three years later that the British could resume offensive operations in Iraq. By the end of the war the Turk forces collapsed and Britain found itself in virtual possession of Iraq.
US ARMY IN EUROPE 1918
Germany still hoped for victory in 1918 but knew it had to achieve it before the United States forces arrived in force.
After sitting off to the side for the first months of America’s commitment while the soldiers were trained and mobilized, American units entered the fight up to their leathernecks for the last eight months of the Great War. The arrival at the front of an endless supply of fresh American troops (with fresh mouths) was demoralizing to the Kaiser’s legions. They were reduced to the old position of the Confederacy. Even if we can and do fight better, we can’t win against these numbers. In a war of attrition, we lose.
The entry of Black Jack Pershing and the Americans broke the stalemate and saved the day for the Entente. The doughboys enabled the weary Allied European command to rest its veterans, train more patiently its new recruits and replenish its equipment.
Americans were not integrated into depleted European units. This had been requested and denied. General Pershing wanted no part of seeing any of his men serving under anyone named Jacque or Chillingsworth. It was take us as an independent fighting unit or we’ll just read about the results of your fight in the papers. Europe took our help on our terms, not theirs.
The doughboys got their first action when the Germans made a break for Paris in the spring. They were within 50 miles of the city of wallet snatchers when they met up with the Second American division. The German advance was stopped at Chateau Thierry. As May turned to June the Americans launched a slow and successful counterattack, sending the Germans back past Belleau Wood.
In the meantime, in June, the Austrians were virtually knocked out of the war when an offensive in Northeast Italy was repulsed near the Piave River on the outskirts of Venice. The drive, which was supposed to restore Austrian morale and momentum had the opposite effect. The Austrians suffered 150,000 casualties. Mutiny became the order of the day in the ranks. What had begun with a punishment of Serbia ended with the decimation of the Austrian empire. Germany no longer had to fight the Russians but it no longer had any help from its allies either.
In July 1918 the Germans planned a breakthrough assault that would win the war. It was called the “Peace offensive” because the victory would lead to peace, I guess. On July 14 the citizens of Paris could hear the artillery barrage heralding another assault on the city. But the offensive only gained six miles. It was stopped with the help of Italian, British, French and 85,000 American troops.
This was the continental divide moment in the war. From here on in it was downhill for the Central Powers.
Now it was the Allies turn to launch the offensive. On July 18, 1918 the final assault on Kaiserland began with an artillery barrage the length of the western front. The Americans were active in several sectors. The US Army knocked down a German salient in the St. Mihiel/Meuse River area.
US Troops in World War One
In the great Meuse-Argonne campaign in France, just under one million Americans were in active combat for 40 days. It was the turning point of the war. American forces captured more than 25,000 German prisoners.
The USA had actually decided the World War. Uncle Sam the big arbitrator had arbitrated with military power.
America could never have defeated any one of the Great Powers one-on-one and certainly was not the military equal of France, Germany, or Great Britain. But the doughboys entered the fight in the 14th round, when both big heavyweights were exhausted and throwing phantom punches. America was the makeweight in World War One but not because we had any super military might. We just came along at the right moment to decide a close one. The Central Powers were starving, tired, and falling back. That’s when we kicked in the door and said, ”Lafayette, we are here!” We didn’t slay a giant, we rolled a drunk.
THE WAR IN THE AIR
Less than 40 warplanes were manufactured in the United States during the First World War. American pilots were more prominent than American planes. US volunteers went to France in 1916 and served in the French air arm with distinction under the name of the Lafayette Escadrille. This combat volunteerism set a precedent that would later be followed in World War II both in Europe and in Asia.
At the beginning of World War One the planes on both sides were unarmed and the pilots actually waved respectfully to each other as they passed on their way to reconnaissance positions. A few weeks into the war they began firing pistols at each other. Then came hand-held bombs being dropped on targets by the back member of a two-man crew, an interesting job to say the least. The turning point came with the invention of the machine gun that fired straight through the propeller at coordinated safe intervals. From this point on it was dog fighting in the skies over Europe. The life expectancy of a WWI fighter pilot was six weeks in active service.
Germany used heavy Zeppelin airships to cruise over London and bomb the city at random.
In 1917 Kaiser’s crew escalated the air terror war against the Brits. Beginning in 1917, formations of new German ‘Gotha’ bombers crossed the channel and rained death on London and other cities. The Gotha could carry a 500-pound bomb, and the British had nothing to match it. More than 50 concentrated air raids were carried out, most of them against London. 2,000 British people were killed or wounded, most of them civilians of course.
The sciences of air attack and air defense advanced at shocking speed throughout the war. It is a sad fact, but a fact nevertheless, that war stimulates progress in the field of invention. Necessity is the mother of invention. War is the father of necessity. The warplane, the tank, the submarine and the poison gas artillery shell were just some of the tragic new products and inventions of the Great War.
The World War convinced the British to convert its fleet from coal to oil, a decision that changed the world. Other navies followed suit. From now on, the oil fields of the world would be more important than the coal.
LUKE AND QUENTIN – TALE OF TWO US PILOTS
In July of 1918 a 23 year old pilot named Quentin from New York was stationed at Tool France, where he was recovering from pneumonia. On the 10th Quentin got his first kill, bagging a no-good German Fokker biplane. On July 14 Captain Quent with three other American planes ran into a 'gaggle of Fokkers' It was seven Fokkers against four Yanks.
Quentin was jumped by three Fokkers and took one through the head. Quentin Roosevelt, the son of former President Theodore Roosevelt was dead.
When the Germans identified the dead pilot they gave his body the royal treatment. Quentin Roosevelt was given a burial worthy of a German general, and this in the middle of an active war front. One thousand German troops stood at attention as his coffin was lowered into a grave at Toul. A proclamation was read and a band played a sad tune.
An American POW witnessed the Roosevelt funeral.
The Germans explained to the curious American POW that they were honoring Quentin because he was gallant pilot and because he was the son of a great man. The first part probably meant little on its own, but the Germans really did think of TR as a great man.
For one thing TR stood for the same set of macho-martial values as the Germany of the Kaiser, his Junkers and the spiked helmet.
It didn't matter much to the Germans that TR was, from August 1914, one of the leading advocates of American intervention against Germany. It didn't faze the Germans that TR had sided against German interests in every pre-war crisis, such as Morocco or the Balkan Wars. The Kaiser had long deluded himself into thinking he had a good personal friendship with Teddy Roosevelt. TR always found the Kaiser's letters curious and he more or less indulged the Kaiser's delusions. Now the German reaction the shooting down Quentin is very telling about German perceptions of America from 1901-1908.
To the Germans, the world would be a better place if all Americans had the same attitude as Teddy Roosevelt. TR was a world famous celebrity admired by millions. Now they had killed his son, and felt rather bad about it. They didn't feel quite as bad about shooting down Frank Luke.
Lt Frank Luke, 'The Arizona Balloon Buster' was the first airman in American history to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor. Luke Jr. was killed in action wile piloting a British Spad. He died on September 29, 1918 at Murvaux on the Meuse-Argonne front. At the time of his death Frank Luke was the reigning ace of the USA in WWI.
Lieutenant Luke's specialty was shooting up German dirigibles. A pilot who shot up five balloons could make Ace just as if he had shot down five Fokkers. But it isn't as wimpy a way to make ace as it may sound. The zeppelins were heavily guarded both in the air and on the ground. Taking out balloons was, in fact, especially risky work. They blew up with a fury and the flames and gasses could take the attacking pilot down with it to the grave.
Luke was an eccentric athletic blonde introvert form Arizona. He didn't say much and when he spoke it was usually an irritating brag. The guy was a great pilot but he knew it and he kept to himself. Most of the other air-heads didn't like him much. FL was an enigma, a former bare-knuckles boxer who wrote to his mom, “you should not worry about me because the air corps was the safest place on the entire battlefront.
Luke would be on the ground and see a German fighter fly overhead and then say to anyone nearby, “It would be a piece of cake for me to take that guy out.” It was irritating. But he meant it and he planned on backing it up. The guy was nuts.
For two weeks in mid-September 1918 Lt. Luke went on attack missions against zeppelins at anchor in German held French territory. Luke shot down ten balloons in two weeks and returned home several times with his Spad-25 shot to ribbons. Luke became famous. Ten balloons was big time stuff. He had a few other kills from regular dogfights too.
But Luke's luck ran out on 9-29-28. There is a post-war sworn affidavit from seven townspeople from the town of Murvaux who witnessed the last battle of the Arizona Balloon Buster.
Luke was attacking one anchored zeppelin with an entire squadron of German Fokkers on his tail and shooting at him. He went into a loop, straightened out and made a run for a second balloon. With the Germans still on his tail he shot up a second balloon. Luke pulled up and turned towards another target but caught a round in the shoulder and went into a twirling spin towards the ground.
Halfway to heaven, Luke got a hold of himself, straightened out the plane and made a line for the town of Murvaux. There were no balloons there so he strafed German infantry positions, killing six soldiers and wounding at least 20 others.
Luke landed in a field (it is not clear if the plane was malfunctioning), got out of the cockpit and walked briskly towards a nearby stream apparently to treat his wound and get a drink. About 200 feet from the plane he spotted a German patrol heading his way with hostile intentions. Lt Luke immediately went for his pistol and began shooting at the Germans before they had even taken their first shot at him. The Germans returned fire as a unit and in a moment Luke took one square in the chest. It was better than a movie. Luke done us proud.
The body of the American Top Gun was stripped by the poverty-stricken German soldiers. His body was tossed on a wagon where it at for an afternoon. Several French townspeople tried to at least get a blanket to cover up his body but were blocked by German officers.
Lt. Luke won the Medal of Honor. Edie Rickenbacker went on to pass him and finish as the number one Ace in World War I.
ACES
The whole game of aces in the air is really a product of the unique conditions of World War and the world it happened in. The planes of WWII were better suited for the competition of individual pilots going one on one to the death. It was a death sport the world followed with much interest. Aces counted a little in WWII but the public didn't make WWII aces into famous household names. WW1 it was the craze of the time. Who had five victories and became an ace was a big deal in Europe and in America. It was like the spots section following which pilot needed one more kill to make ace and which top ace added one or two more to his big bag.
Most Americans can name the top US Ace in WWI. Less than one per cent could name the top ace in WWII (he had 40 kills.)
Eddie Rickenbacker's fame has lasted essentially forever, yet aces of WWII who sank more planes aren't even famous. Sure there was Pappy Boynon and Adolph Gallant in WWII, but are they really famous today to ten people walking down Main Street? Combined they aren't half as famous as the Red Baron of Germany from WW1.
It may have something to do with the new thinking on war in the between war period. In the 1919-1939 period war went from something that had been considered glorious for 3,000 years, to something that became the a horror that should never ever be glorified. This took most of the fun out of counting aces in WWII. In 1918 air to air combat was new, exiting and there had never been a situation like this before. By WWII is was improved but it wasn't new and war had been shamed by WW1.
We simply didn't make super-heroes out of our killer-pilots as celebrity individuals after WWI. Who can name a fighter ace from Nam except military historians?
THE ALLIED INTERVENTION IN RUSSIA 1918
Now we come to the most fascinating episode of the entire Wilson era, the Allied attempt to overthrow the Russian Revolution through active military intervention in the closing stages o WW1.
The failed intervention had a major negative influence on US-Soviet relations for many decades. The Soviets resented the interference and it became a standard part of Soviet history that the west had launched a war of aggression against the new Soviet state at the moment of its glorious birth.
The intervention was a key cause of the ‘Cold War.’ For decades the Russians used the Intervention to counter any criticism.
“You invaded Hungary!”
“Oh yeah? Well what makes you so perfect? What about the Allied Intervention?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Se, you ignorant Americans don't even know what you did to us!.”
True; hardly anyone in the west even knows about the AI. The Intervention is one of the most obscure incidents in American history and unjustly so. It was a major event with heavy casualties and profound implications for international relations, yet somehow the average America has no idea it even happened. The average Russian has no such ignorance.
The charge is that the USA and the western Allies saw that the Soviets were constructing a new socialist-communist society in Russia. They couldn't stand to see socialism triumph. These capitalists had to strangle the child in the crib. The western capitalist powers requisitioned the grand armies that had been fighting in central europe and shipped them east to attack Russia. Russian Royalists, Social Democrats, Cossack independence movements, Capitalist quislings, Ukrainian adventurers and even the real James Bond, all combined to overthrow the Socialist experiment. They had at their back the armies of the Entente including the United States. The capitalist had to kill the revolution and they would embrace any rogue forces to help achieve this. Typical immoral capitalists.
There are no complete lies in here, just sins of omission, the most common sins of the planet.
The Allies most certainly did launch a military expedition into Soviet Russia in 1918-1919, but was it an attempt to overthrow the new Soviet state? To an extent yes, but there were other reasons for the intervention that the Soviet history books do not tell their schoolchildren. It is fair to tell both sides of the story.
The Russians forget to write that they had been our Allies throughout the war and now were packing it in because they were losing too much on the eastern front. We wanted to overthrow the Socialist experiment because the socialist experiment had pulled Russia out of the War. The Entente had physical reasons for needing to overthrow the Red State in Russia. The political philosophy was not so important really. Not compared to the physical need to win the war with the help of our Russian allies making a comeback. The Russian historians don't even try to understand that perspective. Its just evil USA trying to intervene in the internal affairs of innocent Red Russia.
The bottom line is that the United States, France and England were in the middle of a World War and winning that conflict was naturally the first factor in all strategic decision making.
Russia had left the war. The eastern front was half the war and the Communist leadership were using regime change as an excuse to escape a commitment, leaving her allied friends holding the bag. The Russians could hardly have stabbed the Allies in the back more if it had joined the Central Powers and tried to invade London. How was the west supposed to feel under the circumstances? Were they supposed to wish the new Communist regime the best of luck in it’s new home while Germany shifted 40 divisions from the eastern to the western front?
There were a few other reasons beyond political philosophy why the
West intervened in Russia. The Entente had lent Tsarist Russia millions of dollars in military equipment to prosecute the war. Now the Reds wanted to leave the war and keep the military supplies. The Russian Communists would use the American, British, and French weapons to win its civil war. This was unacceptable to England France and Wilson’s USA. This was a major reason for the intervention, one that is usually omitted by Russian historians.
Also there was the strange case of the Czech legion trapped inside Russia. These divisions of Czech soldiers, a force of 40,000 able soldiers had been fighting on our side deep inside the eastern front when Russia pulled out of the war.
Now they were trapped between an enemy and a hostile neutral while sitting inside the latter’s territory. To rejoin the fight the Czech divisions would either have to destroy overwhelmingly superior German forces or circle the globe. They could either drive through Berlin on the way to Paris or retreat eastward across the length of Russia, leave Asia by way of the back door of Siberia, then cross America and the Atlantic to join the fight in the western front. This was the course decided upon and at first the Leninist regime agreed to allow this provided that the Czech legions handed over most of their heavy weapons to the Bolos. It was a form of blackmail. The Reds needed the military equipment to win their civil war. The Czechs needed the Russia railway.
The Czechs embarked on the Siberian railway in broken pieces, having little choice. The price of their train ticket kept going up on the way.
GERMANY FALLING
By the fall of 1918 the Germans knew they were defeated but there was a lot of fighting left to do before the Allies could march into Berlin. On September 27, 1918 Wilson made a key speech, second only in importance to his speech of January 8. Though filled with his usual high-flying vagaries, the speech convinced the German leaders that Wilson was the only hope for a negotiated peace through armistice. Outside of Father Wilson, the clergyman of international relations, the Germans could only expect a harsh and vindictive peace. France and Germany had been smacking each other around since the 900's. There was too much emotional baggage between the fighters for a mature peace.
Wilson, on the other hand, could stand above the emotional flames and see things with reason. The Central Powers hoped that Wilson could enforce his moral pronouncements and keep the other Allies from being too cruel to a prostrate Germany. They would be profoundly disappointed in the end.
The new Chancellor, Prince Baden sent a note (October 6, 1918) to Secretary of State Lansing requesting that “to avoid further bloodshed, the German Government requests the President of the United States of America to bring about the immediate conclusion of a general armistice on land, on water, and in the air.”
Some of the President’s advisors insisted that this was not a starting point for concluding the war because PB was a member of the Royal family that had helped start the war. To even treat with these people would be to sanction their murderous aggression that started it all. (At this point in time there was no question over here of which side was guilty of starting the war over there. After the war the story would be re-written to say that both sides were equally guilty in starting the conflict, but in the live action arena of 1918, there was no such analysis going on.)
Wilson denied the arguments of his advisors. He would negotiate with Baden. He was flattered that he was personally chosen to be the arbitrator of peace.
Germany was not defeated yet. It still had formidable forces in the field and, not an acre of the Fatherland was under the occupation of a foreign platoon. It was an odd situation militarily, the weak state in the position of the aggressor on the board. But the German navy was mostly sunk, and its air force was depleted. The German army was deteriorating subtly and had weak spots in its defensive line that had not existed for the first five years of the war. Virtually all enlisted men were very hungry.
So during preliminary negotiations for a cease-fire both sides knew at the military intelligence level what the general public did not; That after five years of stalemate, a complete Entente breakthrough on the Western front was imminent.
The Entente was exited about the prospect of victory after having suffered millions of casualties chasing it. Many Entente leaders and military men did not want to see a negotiated peace of any kind. Victory was within sight, and now some pen-pusher-poindexters are going to come along and ruin everything?
Yes.
Wilson did not want the war to continue for one day longer than it had to.
He said to a close advisor,
“The gentlemen in the Army who talk about going to Berlin and taking it by force are foolish. It would cost a million American lives to accomplish it.”
Wilson's 1918 situation had some similarities to Truman’s in July of 1945 and George H.W. Bush in March of 1991. They had to decide whether to take an army on the winning march to go on and occupy the enemy nation to the last square foot, or, find a way to end the war without doing that. The A-bomb spared Truman the decision. Bush made a controversial decision to not march into Baghdad. Wilson chose not to march on Berlin. And he talked the others out of it who wanted to. Nice goin. We could have prevented WWII.
Wilson’s situation was unique, and he had no crystal ball in which to see the next war he was actually helping to brew up. He could not foresee that by promoting a non-military ending to the war, he gave German militarist revisionists a reason to later claim (falsely) that Germany had not in fact been defeated on the battlefield but had simply been ‘sold out” by a few despicable politicians, the so-called ‘traitors of 1918,’ especially the Jewish ones.
Before he could expect the Germans to surrender on the basis of his 14 plus points, Wilson had to first obtain the agreement of the associated powers.
France and England told Wilson’s representative in Europe, Colonel House that there were several points that were not acceptable. House responded with shocking toughness.
‘No problem,’ House replied to the protestant ambassadors. ‘I’ll go back to Washington and tell Wilson what you said. Then Wilson will address the Congress and tell of the real motives driving France and England in this war, and then he will ask the Congress to reconsider the entire war effort and they will vote on it.’ The French and British plenipotentiaries looked at each other in astonishment and then backtracked.
But there was one point on which England would not budge. Point 2 of the 14; freedom of the seas. Britain had dominated the ocean for 200 years and was not about to throw away this permanent security advantage in the name of some pencil-necked Princeton professor’s high fallutin’ idealism. John Bull was not going to give up the right to blockade.
England was stubborn on this point. In theory Wilson never had a chance for his 14 Points, since one of the big ones was completely impossible.
Another point that the associated powers insisted upon was disarmament as a pre-condition of armistice, not post armistice. The logic was sound. If the Germans were allowed to agree to an armistice without a confirmed treaty, they could use the interlude to organize an efficient retreat to tighter, more defensible battle lines with all equipment preserved and removed from the exposed and crumbling exterior lines. Then they could reject the terms of the treaty and resume the war in a better position than when they had agreed to the armistice. In such a case the 'trust and don't verify' diplomacy would have cost many more Allied lives.
There were some Allied thinkers in Europe who were strongly opposed to major disarmament of post-war Germany. They wanted a native military force in place to block the Bolo virus, and did not want to have to supply the troops.
This fear of the spread of the Russian Revolution at the end of the First World War had a later parallel at the end of the Second World War. In the second case of 1945-46 is was more a fear of simple Soviet military aggression forcibly spreading Communism at the end of spear. Truman and the Brits wanted a strong West Germany to block Stalin.
In this case in 1918 it was a fear of the spread of political revolution. The Cold Warriors of 1918 were worried that a stripped germany would end up a Bolshevik Germany. The prostrate German state could give a militant minority of Communists the chance to seize power, just as they had in Russia (Bolsheviks were always a minority in Russia.) With the German Army smaller but intact and strong, this would be less likely to happen.
Germany was told at the last minute that yes, we had all agreed to a peace on the basis of Wilson’s 14 points, but that point 2 would have to be left open for further negotiation. The German forces in the field would also have to disarm and surrender their heavy weaponry.
The terms seemed unfair since theoretically, the Allies had negotiated on 14, not 13 points, and point 2 was a biggie. But Germany knew that if it refused, and hostilities were resumed, there could be only one outcome. A complete breakthrough on some front and eventual defeat on the battlefield. It could not be prevented. As insulting as were many of the Allied terms, the alternative was worse.
There was more and more bad news on the warfront for the Triple A.
The Entente armies made a breakthrough in the Balkans in September 1918 and soon Bulgaria was forced to sue for peace at any price. On September 30, 1918 Bulgaria dropped out of WWI. The writing was on the wall for the Central Powers.
Turkey went chicken on October 30, making a separate peace with the Entente. Germany was not going to be able to negotiate from strength with it’s allies dropping out left and right before they even got to the table for an armistice. For the Germans, the eastern front was land of good news in January, but land of bad tidings in the fall. The stalemate in the west was largely settled in the east. British and rebel forces in the Balkans had opened up a new eastern front to supplant the Russian front which had closed down. The First World War was on the verge of actually displaying fluid battlefronts. It wasn't good for Germany.
In the middle of all the political and military conflict, new nations were breaking out of their eggshells, taking advantage of the chaos to do so.
A special case was the Ukraine. There has been long standing desire for an independent Ukraine, a goal achieved in the early 1990’s. This area became embroiled in the Russian Civil War and lived independently for many months in the middle of it.
Czechoslovakia was born in this chaos. On October 19th President Wilson sent a note informing the Austro-Hungarian leadership that America considered the Czechs and Slovaks to be legitimate belligerent nations fighting against their old masters. In other words, Czechoslovakia was no longer even in rebellion against the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but was a nation in fact. We were playing the French role of 1778, but only of course on the diplomatic front. The US had no access to the Czech or Jugo-Slav military front.
The Wilson Administration also validated the aspiration of the Jugo-Slavs (later spelled Yugoslavia) for nationhood, although with a less specific support than the case of Czechoslovakia. The Croats, Serbs and Slovenes had declared for independence at Corfu on July 20, 1917. Now their dream was looking good. The new nation would be a parliamentary monarchy. No one imagined that we would become militarily embroiled in one of it’s civil wars before the end of the century.
So the new nations that grew to stand tall in Eastern Europe after the Versailles Treaty in 1920 were sprouting while the guns were still booming. Having American support in this critical hour was vital to their validity at the Versailles conference, even if we did end up rejecting the treaty formally.
On November 5, 1918 Poland declared its independence. The new Polish state had been formed during the war in Paris under the leadership of a famous Polish piano player, of all things.
In the late months of the war all of these independence movements were of direct and indirect assistance to the Allied cause. The political implications were obvious but more than that, the eastern Europe independence movements were a fifth column behind the Central Power lines. Yugoslav and Polish rebels blew up Austrian ammo dumps and destroyed railroad tracks. Some even formed active combat units on the Entente side of the battle lines.
With all hope collapsing for the German army, their navy stepped in to make a major blunder. The German Navy was probably going to be turned over to the British and French after the war so the naval command Berlin decided it was better to use it than lose it. The entire navy was sent out to make a Custer’s last stand on the sea. What the hell, they had nothing to lose.
The German sailors didn’t share this cold strategic thinking. They knew what life was and what death was and at this point in the war had no vested interest in German naval pride or glory. On November 3-4 1918 the sailors at Kiel mutinied and refused to go to sea. The ‘sailor’s revolt’ as it was called spread from Kiel to many other ports such and then into the interior.
Rather than salvage a little pride in a hopeless war, the orders to send the fleet to sea only weakened the German negotiating position for an armistice by leaps and bounds.
The sleazy opportunists running the German state now began to grant concessions to liberals, democrats and socialists, as if it mattered anymore. At last the German people could have representative government! Gee, thanks a lot. The Entente armies were closing in, Germany’s allies were deserting the cause, starvation revolution and mutiny were sweeping the country and at this point the Hohenzollern dynasty makes a proclamation that it was time for a liberal democratic government with representative government, and this time even the socialist were invited to participate.
The dynasty, it was proposed, would continue with the crown prince in place instead of Kaiser Wilhelm. But don't worry, the crown prince would only represent a symbolic leadership, as in England. The captain of the sinking Titanic was offering free champagne and two for one passes on the next voyage.
At this point Wilson’s words sealed the Kaiser’s fate. He changed his mind about talking with the Baden Bunch. The US Prez made it clear in key speeches that the Allies would not even negotiate for an armistice with the German leaders who had started the war. The dynasty was doomed. The Entente had made total abdication a required basis for negotiations to stop the fighting.
On the 9th of November 1918 the Kaiser fled to Holland.
On the 11th the Germans, with much complaining about the terms, signed the armistice. The war was over, at least on the battlefield.
THE WAR ON FREEDOM
Warsec Newt Baker aptly called the First World War a “Conflict of smokestacks.” Government regulations would make certain that this war we would win.
In March of 1918 the Congress passed the Railroad Control Act, putting the entire rail transportation system under the absolute control and ownership of the US government. A clause was included that promised that the measure was only temporary and that the railroads would be returned to their used to be free enterprise owners within 21 months after the war ended. There would be no financial compensation for the patriotic sacrifice of these capitalists, but it was guaranteed that the railroads would be in the same condition that they were in when Sam took them over. Any wear and tear would be repaired before they were returned (at the end of the war the Railroad Brotherhood tried to make the arrangement permanent. RB attorney Glenn Plumb proposed a plan for Government and labor co-owning the railroads and co-sharing the profits.
The idea was rejected the “Plumb plan” because it was socialistic and it was political theft.)
By the middle of 1918 the entire American nation had been turned into a complete war machine. The USA turned over its economy to war. Factories were converted from peacetime products to war materials. Americans were asked to give up certain things on certain days to help the cause. There were "meatless Tuesdays", "wheatless Mondays", and “no oxygen Thursdays.” The other thing Americans had to give up was trustbusting.
It's been said that ‘the first casualty in war is the truth.’ It could also be said that freedom falls next, especially economic.
Democracy and freedom were defended in Europe while being assaulted in America. It was the same controversy that faced Lincoln in the Civil War and W. Bush in the post 911 invasions.
The threat to 'home security' was valid but how far should the country go to protect itself before it reaches the limits of reason?
German saboteurs were manifestly busy in the USA, so fear of internal subversion was healthy and understandable. A major ammunition storage facility in New Jersey was attacked and destroyed by German spies. In Halifax Nova Scotia a ship full of bombs was blown sky high in what might be the most violent man-made explosion on earth prior to the A-bomb. The Halifax horror was never proven to be the work of German saboteurs but it probably was.
Few scholars today can examine all that happened during the First World War in America and not conclude that in suppressing freedom at home, Wilson was guilty of some betrayal of his professed liberal and democratic principles. Anyone who dared to speak out against the war for any logical reason was branded a traitor. That is, if they were lucky. Some were actually attacked by patriotic mobs in the same spirit that cost Mr. Lovejoy his life in 1837.
The intolerance of war-supporters culminated in the Espionage Act of June 1917. It was shades of the Alien and Sedition Act under President Adams. The corollary was even worse. The Sedition Amendment to the Espionage Act made it a crime to speak against the war in any way shape or form. It is a black stain on our history. “Profane scurrilous or abusive language” against the war, the government, the flag or the President (to name just a few) was now a crime. (When this law was passed, Russia under the Provisional Government of Kerensky can easily be seen as a more democratic nation than the USA.) Many great leaders and writers were arrested and jailed under this sick fascist law.
ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT 11-11-1918
When the German delegation met the Allied one in Compiegne forest on November 8 1918 to begin negotiations it was not certain that this meant the war would certainly end. The Germans sat down and asked what were the terms being offered. They were told there were no terms available at all until they formally asked for an armistice. It was pride, protocol, political gamesmanship and psychological warfare. The Germans looked at each other and broke the impasse and formally asked for an armistice.
The terms were not those of two sides who had fought to a draw. An armistice on its face is not in essence a surrender or an admission of defeat. It is simply an agreement to stop the shooting until the details can be worked out in a treaty settlement. The terms offered the Germans had the practical effect of forcing the Germans to admit defeat on the battlefield and to make massive concessions. But formally there was no outward surrender. The lack of formal admission of guilt and defeat would lead directly to the next war in 1939.
The Germans dallied for three days hoping to gain some mitigation of the terms but to no avail. They postured that they might walk out and resume the war, but the Entente called their bluff and in the end the Germans signed on the dotted line. They got a taste of their own Brest-Litovsk medicine. They knew that the resumption of the war would mean the physical conquest of fatherland Germany.
The German position on the battlefield looked decent on a map but there were weak spots all about just waiting for a smashing breakthrough from the Allies. Both sides knew it, but the general public did not. This would prove significant.
The German reps at Compiegne were in a vise. On paper in front of them was a humiliating armistice tantamount to surrender. Behind them was the chaos of a political revolution growing worse by the hour plus certain military defeat. They signed. When the news was brought to Clemenceau, the tiger of France broke down and cried.
At 11 a.m. on November 11 (11.11.11) 1918 after 31 million casualties it finally stopped. An American fighter pilot flew a pattern to match the foreword trench lines at 11:01 and literally watched the war end, the huge guns falling silent as thousands of troops on both sides crept out of their trenches and approached each other in no-man’s land, this time to shake the other men’s hands instead of maiming them.
There was celebrating all over Europe, but this time the party was a little more subdued than the great clambake that had accompanied the outbreak of the war in 1914.
Now artillery captain Harry Truman could go home to the states, and Hitler could leave the hospital where he was being treated for being blinded in poison gas attack. These two soldiers would face each other again in May of 1945.
America celebrated the loudest because America had suffered the least. The USA lost 49k KIA. Most of the other combatants lost a million plus. American towns were not turned to waste and American cities were not devoid of young men for the 1920’s.
For some years, the end of the Great War was marked as a national holiday called Armistice Day. It was later changed to Veterans Day, and is still one of the national holidays when there is no mail service and ailing veterans have to wait an extra day to get their desperately needed government checks.
NOVEMBER CONGRESSIONAL ELECTIONS 1918
The Republican leadership had supported Wilson admirably throughout the war. Partisanship had stopped at the water’s edge. So it was a shock to many in both parties when on the eve of the November Congressional elections, Wilson published a letter in which he demonized the Republicans and stated in no uncertain terms that the last thing we could afford in this hour of crisis is to allow those disloyal Republicans to dominate the Congress.
Many Democrats spit out their morning coffee when they read this in the newspaper. They knew what it meant. It was the stupidest thing Wilson ever did in his life. There was a tremendous backlash against Wilson for this letter, and of course the Republicans won a great victory at the polls. Both Houses were now in control of the Republicans. The pundits were in agreement that the culprit was Wilson and his open letter.
Wilson now would have to go to Paris without any certainty of his decisions being validated back home. The Republican Congress was still feeling hurt by this letter. What was worse, all of the European negotiators knew of this newfound weakness at home. They concretely could not longer trust the validity of his airy proclamations, which they had already rolled their eyes at in the first place. The French and British diplomats felt a little bolder about standing up to the insistent desires of the Yankee messiah.
Another factor which helped the Republicans win in 1918 was the black vote of migrant southern workers who had moved north for industrial jobs during the war. Thousands of formerly disenfranchised blacks from the cotton belt could have their say at the polls when they moved to Cleveland or Milwaukee. And they usually voted for Republicans. I wonder why.
New female voters in the west helped too. Western ladies generally voted Republican because of the famously vehement opposition to female voting rights among political giants of the Southern Democrats.
But the loose lipped Wilson letter was the make-weight of the campaign. It can be argued that without this letter, Wilson’s entire presidency would have been an unbounded success. With full Congressional backing he probably would have won ratification of the Versailles Treaty and the US would have become a member of the League of Nations, and to finish the syllogism, there might not have even been a World War II if not for that stupid letter!
The Republicans gained 24 seats in 1918 to gain a majority there, and gained five seats in the US Senate to take over there. The war over there wasn't all that-popular over here.
One Congressman was denied admission to the House, that was Viv Berber the Socialist.
Another Congressman won a seat in Massachusetts but was expelled a year later when it was revealed that mass voter fraud had won the contest for him. You don't read about this one very often, and the records of the expelling were kept secret for 50 years. The kick-out of Congressman was Honey Fitzgerald, the grandfather of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
SOCIALISM AND WWI
Socialist politician Eugene Debs was arrested under the Espionage Act and spent the last months of the Wilson Administration in the can. He ran for President from prison in 1920 and won 3 million votes!
Socialist Congressman Vic Berger was arrested under the Sedition Amendment. While still under indictment, Berger was re-elected to his Wisconsin Congressional seat. But Congress after some debate refused to seat him because of his pending criminal status. In January of 1920 Berger was found guilty and sentenced to twenty years in prison for his stands against the World War. Wilson’s war had not made the world safe from democracy.
Howard Zinn believes that wars like WWI are created by capitalists, not so much to make profits on munitions, although that is a part of it, but more to stop all class struggle in its tracks. Uniting the nation by war is the anti-dote to allowing divisions along class lines in times of peace. The socialists wanted the kind of war that only comes with peace so that's why they were against war.
Socialists were of course splintered by the WW1. The left socialists the Marxists and the communists hated the war, and actively urged their own countrymen not to support it. But the moderate socialists often fell under the spell of their respective flags and tossed away their Marxist pamphlets on the way to the battlefields.
RACE AND WAR
A quarter of a million black Americans volunteered or were drafted during WWI. 50,000 went to France where most were given menial jobs, although one all black regiment, the 92nd, served with honor in the Meuse-Argonne campaign. German leaflets were dropped on these men describing the racism in the United States and urging them to move over to the German team. None did, nor did any of them need leaflet instructions on racism in America. They already knew.
The highest-ranking officer in the US military at the time of our entry into the conflict was Charlie Young. Colonel Young was discharged for medical reasons when he reported for duty, but there was nothing wrong with him besides his skin color. Young even rode a horse to Washington all the way from his home in Ohio to prove his fitness. The stunt made the newspapers but Colonel Charles Young was not reinstated.
The need for labor in northern factory cities created an exodus from the South of blacks looking for better pay and less overt racism. The Democrats accused the Republicans of importing blacks into the North just to help their party win elections. The blacks got the jobs but didn’t escape the racism. The race riot in East St. Louis resurrected memories of NYC 1863. White gangs set fire to black homes and shot the residents as they fled the fires. [see sidebar on ESL]
Racism in the USA was directed mightily against another race, a Caucasian one. Allied propagandists sold an image of the German soldier that was thoroughly out of proportion of the facts, some incidents notwithstanding. The average soldier in the Kaiser’s army was depicted as a depraved rapist. The backlash hurt German-Americans. Americans with German accents were likely to be physically attacked if they drank peaceably in a bar. Sauerkraut was sold in diners under a new name, “liberty cabbage” (‘french fries’ were changed to ‘freedom fries’ in US diners in 2001.)
The fact that General Pershing was of German descent himself was of no importance (the original spelling had been Pfoersching.) The Germans were the baddies. It’s a good thing my all-German grandmother married a Boston Irishman from Nova Scotia in 1907 or she might have been forced to flee the country in 1918. Americans of German or Serbian descent were being stigmatized as “hyphenated-Americans” but those racially akin to the Allies were not ridiculed as such.
The Japanese were both victims and perpetrators of racism. In Asia they had a superiority complex over the other races. But the Europeans were decidedly racist against Mongolian Asians and it didn’t matter to the average Entente racist whether the inferior was Chinese or Japanese. Inferior was inferior.
So in sum, the whites were racists against all Asians, while the Japanese were racists towards all Asians except themselves.
Race came up by proxy in February of 1919 at the Versailles Conference. Wilson the moralist proposed an clause in the Covenant of the League of Nations promoting and demanding freedom of religion in all member states. The Japanese, one of the big five powers at Versailles, jumped on this and suggested that the wording of this clause should be extended to include the great fight against racial discrimination.
Japan needed emigration. Japan was overcrowded and growing while the United States was allowing fewer and fewer Asian immigrants into the land of opportunity. Australia and New Zealand forbade non-white Asian immigration completely! Maybe Versailles could open the closed door policy of the United States.
This Japanese proposal to ban racism embarrassed the leaders of the other Big Four Euro powers (UK, US, France, and Italy.) The big four wanted no part of this racial equality corollary to the Wilson religious freedom doctrine, but what could they do? Japan was one of the “Big Five” powers at the Conference.
One of the Italian leaders came up with a solution and it was adopted at once. The conference decided to postpone both issues. The matters of justice in religion and race would be settled after the Versailles Treaty and after the League Covenant had been finalized. They swept it under he rug.
The white supremacy mentality of the documents of the Versailles Peace Conference is obvious. One official paper is discussing the issue of the French wanting permission to raise army troops in the Ottoman and German lands inherited under their new ‘mandates.’ The document used the N word with a capital letter in the middle of a sentence to describe one of these imaginary new French armies out of Africa.
PARIS IN THE FALL
Wilson decided to lead the US delegation to the Paris Peace Conference. Many thought that this was an error in judgment. Many historians still agree with those of the time that it was.
Most of Woody's personal friends not only advised him not to go, they begged him. The leaders of both parties said please don’t go. The men in his cabinet said please don’t go. The US diplomats already in place in Europe especially pleaded with him not to go.
Wilson went before Congress to explain his reasons for going to Paris and personally represent the USA in this crucial hour. His speech was received with deliberate silence. A presidential speech before Congress is usually dotted with a sickening amount of applause. The Prez can cough into the microphone and the Congress will applaud. But on this day they were sending a message.
The arms-folded silence in the hall had no effect on Tommy’s messiah complex. He was going in person to Paris no matter how many people advised him otherwise.
Why the objections?
Primarily, most advisors believed that from a distance, Wilson represented a powerful force of higher idealism, but in person his moral clout would be rendered useless because now he was just another negotiator. There were already enough negotiators. What was needed was a great referee and Wilson had clearly become that man.
In person the President could be criticized and browbeaten by European diplomats who had been in the lion pit fighting the dirty-fights of Euro-squabbling for decades. Realpoilitk was a European term that was foreign both literally and figuratively to the average American politician, a piece-nez rube like Professor Wilson.
With Wilson in Washington, the US diplomats could always imply the threat of what Wilson might say or do if he hears of this or that development not to his liking. His shadowy priest-like presence would haunt the proceedings, and his influence could increase. But for Wilson to show up in person would leave him and us with no clout beyond his immediate negotiating position at a given moment. No European need fear what Wilson might say or do because he was there in the flesh and reduced to the status of a mere mortal. Aesop said that acquaintance softens prejudice. True, but it also destroys hype.
No US acting president had ever been to Europe before, not even for a soccer match.
Wilson’s personal leadership on this matter was a subtle disrespect to his own party leadership, the State Department, and most and worst of all, to the Republican opposition. The GOP was virtually excluded from the delegation. Wilson was asking for trouble on this point and he would get it. And fast. The November 1918 Congressional elections returned the Republicans to the majority in both Houses. The vote was a reaction to this highhanded approach to the Paris Peace Conference, as well as to the stupid letter mentioned earlier.
Woody left on the USS George Washington for his European vacation on December 4, 1918. Wilson came ashore to Brest, France on December 14.
He was greeted throughout Europe by adoring throngs of well wishers. Paris, Brussels, Rome! It was like a New York City ticker-tape parade in one capitol after another. Unfortunately the cheering crowds would not be negotiating the Treaty behind closed doors nor would they be voting on it back in the states. The cheering crowds lifted his ego but not his practical influence. It is quite possible that to this time no person in the history of the planet had ever been cheered as much as Wilson was when he arrived in Europe. He was called the ‘new messiah’, which was perfect since he had a messiah complex the size of Lake Ontario.
When he went to Rome, Wilson was appalled to find the Italian police dispersing a crowd of fans waiting to hear a speech. It seems the government didn’t want to hear him promoting his 14 Points for the simple reason that a few of these points might get in the way of Italian goals of territorial aggrandizement, especially in the direction of the Balkans.
The Wilson party went to Milan where a gala theatre event was planned to honor his high and mightiness. A popular but hardly puritan play called Aida was to be presented for his and Mrs. Wilson’s pleasure. The hosts were informed that since the show as scheduled for a Sunday and was not pure and holy, the religious President could not in good conscience attend.
Later they found a solution. They would put on a short religious hymnal show before the Aida staging and invite him to this. Once he was there they could spring Aida on him and he could hardly make a scene and storm out of the building. So they set the Aida the spida web and he fell into it. The Wilson’s saw the entire gay show including the edgy scene where the leading lady called the Pope a “sordid squid” as the audience gasped and then laughed, many glancing up at the box to check Wilson’s reaction (of which there was none.)
The French press was often critical of Woodrow for not taking tours of the devastated regions of France. Edith Wilson visited many hospitals and Wilson pleaded that he was busy with his work and had a pretty good idea of what had happened out in the trenches. He tried to fend these criticisms off but finally gave in and visited a few rotten spots. In the Cathedral of Rheims he interviewed a brave priest who had used the church to shelter his congregations during several artillery attacks. The last one had destroyed the roof. Snow fell through the open top making a fluid tapestry before the stained glass as he heard the sad story told from the one holy man to the other.
At Soissons he saw a typical desolate battlefield that had once been a place of simple beauty and life. Soissons was a ghost town. But when the Wilson party spontaneously came back into Soissons after leaving for a while they found it packed with wall to wall French troops surrounding his vehicle eager to talk, ask questions, or in one or two cases say something unpleasant about the American goals in the peace being inimical to those of the French. The Wilsons asked why the soldiers had not been around when he had stopped by earlier. They told him they had been ordered into their barracks until he had come and gone. It seems that the French authorities were wary of giving Wilson too much authority and glory. Coupled with the experience in Rome it demonstrated that there was a flip side to the coin of his triumphant parade of praise in 1919 Europe.
Wilson’s two closest advisors and political teammates on the trip were Secretary of State Bobby Lansing and his intimate personal counsel Colonel Eddie House. Lansing did not personally support the League of Nations or the Versailles Treaty but went through the motions of supporting it because that was his job. House meanwhile was too much of a ‘yes man’ ( A $3 million dollar reward was once offered by Washington newspaper editor for a photograph of House and Wilson in the middle of an argument.) The Prez was stuck between a marshmallow and a hard place. Mrs. Wilson thought that Lansing should be asked to resign. One night in Paris House met with the Wilson’s to discuss this and when Wilson said that it would cause more trouble than it would solve, House agreed wholeheartedly.
Lansing is not a likable person in my reading eyes but his anger is reasonable. He was the Secretary of State and his opinions were far less important to the President than those of House, an un-elected friend of FOW (friend of Woody) and a man who had never even been confirmed by the Senate as a cabinet official.
This jealousy between the Secretary of State and the intimate advisor would be a running plot-line of 20th century American politics. Just ask Al Haig (Reagan) or William Rogers (Nixon) both of whom left the Secretary of State position because they felt it had become an insulting hoax. Harry Hopkins, FDR’s fishing buddy, had more power in foreign policy than Secretary of State Hull. The other side of the argument is that foreign policy is the president’s prerogative and how he arrives at decisions is up to him with or without consultation from State or his personal friends. Many Secretaries of State are enraged when they find they are not making foreign policy but instead are merely implementing and enforcing the presidents decisions. These people should resign.
FOOD FOR POLITICAL THOUGHT 1918-1919
US relief for the starving, sick and homeless at the end of World War One is a record that speaks for itself. We instigated a reverse holocaust. We saved millions of lives.
A complicated political situation faced the victors in the fields of boundaries, race, reparations and colonial questions. But the most urgent and immediate crisis was the massive starvation facing Europe, particularly the east-central areas of the losing side. Death by starvation confronted an estimated 215 million Europeans in November of 1918. The Entente blockade had much to do with this sad situation. Also, the German and Austro-Hungarian armies had requisitioned most of the homegrown food that ordinarily went to civilians. Fertilizer that had been used to grow crops had been switched to the production of explosives. Millions of farmers were in the army. The continental European harvest of 1918 was very weak indeed. Inflation and chaos reigned supreme in every corner of the old empires. The citizens of nations such as Hungary were hungry, humiliated and helpless.
The British, French and Italians recommended a council of food relief headed by a panel from several countries. There would be a pooling of all available resources in money and food and the kitty would then be disbursed at the panel saw fit.
Wilson and his top aide Colonel House were defiantly unwilling to go along with this. First of all the relief effort should be directed by one person. Too many cooks spoil the broth. Secondly the idea that the United States while supplying 85% of the money and 60% of the food should allow the stock to be allotted by a panel beyond its control was absurd. An American would head the relief organization, and the USA would decide unilaterally what use would be made of its donations. Wilson told the associates that this was the way it would be. He did not ask. The pool idea could go jump in a pool .. of acid.
One of the first moves was to requisition all of the shipping of the defeated powers and employ this tonnage in humanitarian relief. Austrian Turkish, and German ships would be used to ship food to all parts of Europe where the need required, and even served to later ship American troops back to the states. All but one of associate powers also agreed to donate their ships for food relief from the USA to Europe. France did not agree, and would not even consent to allow its freighters to be requisitioned by a foreign power to relieve the starvation in its own country.
Trieste on the Adriatic was the key port for handling food relief for the eastern European interior. But Trieste was in the middle of a political tug-of war between Italy and the infant nation of Jugo-Slavia. There was talk of making this an international city, but that was yet to be decided in February of 1919, at which time it became clear to American officials that the Italians were deliberately hindering the relief effort in deference to its selfish political goals. Non-Italian workers were being driven out of the city by Italian troops when their labor was desperately needed to man the infrastructures of shipping and rail transport. Food stocks were piling up undelivered in Trieste while thousands of children starved to death in the heartland. The Italian government was sabotaging the relief effort of the rest of the world so it could conquer Trieste. Wilson and Lansing sent notes to the Italian government that the United States would cut off all financial aid to Italy. As usual, only the language of force did any good. Within a couple of weeks after the threat of no more money, 12 times as much food was flowing to the starving areas per day as was moving before the threat.
It should never be forgotten that we had our selfish political motives mixed in too. American officials on the scene warned Wilson that starvation leads to Communist revolution. We had to save these people from starvation and revolution in order to save the democratic but conservative political structure on which the new League of Nations would depend.
Pestilence was another threat. In the east the Russian Army was no longer in the field but a larger army and an even more dangerous one was on the march in March, 1919. It was an army of lice, the carrier or typhus, a deadly disease. An epidemic of typhus was marching west from the Russian frontier. If it were not contained, there were forecasts of 100,000 deaths per week.
The ARA (The American Relied Administration under Herbert Hoover) drew a line north to south across east central Europe where no person could travel west across that line without being detained and deloused. It was like firefighters burning down a cordon of the forest ahead of the fire to stop the fire. One American doctor crossed the lines east to help out and when he tried to return, the sergeant at the border would not listen to any excuses. The doc had to undress, get his head shaved, and his clothes burned. The effort cost the US taxpayer millions of dollars and a million lives were saved. The typhus army was stopped cold.
THE VPC 1919
The Versailles Peace Conference opened on January 18, 1919.
The Big Four powers were the big winners of WWI, France, the UK, the USA and Italy. Lesser powers on the main committees included China, Japan, Serbia, Romania and Ecuador. Who could forget the 12 Ecuadorian divisions storming the barbed wire at the Somme?
Lloyd George of England had just won a mandate in the British elections. He had insisted on the elections to be sure of his authority at the conference. The ruler of France, Clemenceau had just won a vote of confidence from the French Parliament. Wilson on the other hand was just coming off a drubbing in the November Congressional elections. So Tommy Wilson had the love and the support of Europe without the confirmed backing of the United States. The other European prelates were well aware of this and were prepared to play a slick double-game with Wilson. They would indulge and ostensibly support his lofty rhetoric in order to appease the common people, while they would still work for the low goals the war had been fought for in the first place, such as the expansion of their colonial empires and secret deals behind civilizations’ back.
The two players for the US in 1919 Paris were House and Wilson and they disagreed on speed. House wanted a treaty of peace drafted signed and verified ASAP because he felt that the longer the delay, the more political problems would develop especially among the smaller and the newer nations. Wilson disagreed with his close pal because Wilson felt that his dream of a pact of states to preserve the future of peace would be ruined by a Peace that raced ahead of it. If peace came formally and too soon, the entire reason for being would be gone, speed thus constituting a rug pulled out from under the League. Wilson and others believed that the treaty marking the new Peace of Europe and the League of Nations for preventing future war had to be created and approved simultaneously and with direct linkage.
There was much debate and haggling over the next few months. European leaders scoffed at the sainthood being granted Wilson. The French Premiere cracked that the Ten Commandments have never been effectively enforced, lets see how the big-shot American will do with his 14 points.
Wilson’s 14 Points were super-vague and subject to about as much selfish polemic interpretation as the Bible. The very vagueness that had made them so acceptable to everyone in the first place made them almost impossible arbiters at the moment of real decision making affecting complex problems at ground level. Multiple problems that had not been solved in a hundred years and were made more complex by the war were not going to solved with slogans and moral proclamations.
27 victor nations took part in the negotiations. Nine newly independent states of Europe and a few small neutrals sat off to the side with observatory status. The losing states sat off in corner with a dunce hat on and no say in anything except how much salt they wanted on their crow.
The winning players at the table could be divided into three categories. The great powers who fought the war, the lesser powers who declared was and made some military and diplomatic contributions, and the little red hens who came along to eat the cake and severed relations with Germany without waging war.
The Big Four were nations and people. France and Clemenceau, Wilson and America, Lloyd George and the UK, and Italy and Orlando.
Orlando at one point in the spring of 1919 became very mad at the United States.
Italy had been promised territorial concession in the Adriatic region. This was the carrot that convinced Rome to join the Entente and forsake it’s pre-war alliance with the Central Powers. These concessions were known as the London agreement. Now at the VPC Italy was asking for even more territory in the Balkans than had been agreed on in the London bargain.
Wilson at this point intervened and said that he not only did not support Italy’s extended claims, he also believed that the increase in Italian territory in either case was a clear violation of the principles embodied in his 14 Points. Wilson was not even going to support Italy in its original claims from the London agreement in 1915, the very agreement upon which Italy entered the war. Wilson was on the side of the new underdogs, the Yugoslavians.
The Italian argument was that the creation of this vibrant new united Yugoslavia across the Adriatic was unfair to Italy as a victor nation. Italy, with dreams of an extended empire in the Adriatic had been dealing with a number a small weak rivals on the other side of the bay before the war when Italy still had sides to choose. Now that Italy had won the war it was ‘rewarded’ by having it’s so-called allies set up an even stronger rival (Yugoslavia) in the place of the old disunited provinces of Montenegro, Bosnia, Herzegovina and Albania.
Orlando and the Italian delegation actually left Paris in a huff and went back to Rome. House and Sonnino exchanged terse notes. When Orlando threatened to cut off the export of beautiful women to the United States, Wilson, with the full support of the all-male US Congress, agreed to at least recognize the Adriatic acquisitions in the original 1915 London agreement.
The dream of Italo-Balkan empire was stopped for now but was revived later when Italy conquered Albania and tried to conquer Greece in the glory days of Mussolini.
THE TREATY OF VERSAILLES 6.28.19
The warring states signed the finalized Versailles Treaty on June 28, 1919, the anniversary of the assassination of the Archduke that started the stupid war back in 1914. The Versailles Treaty settled the war for the Entente Allies only with Germany. Other treaties still had to be concluded with the other members of the Central Powers. They would come later.
The VT terms were harsh, considering that Germany was never occupied, nor had it formally surrendered. Germany lost one eighth of its land, and a tenth of its population, but worst of all, lost about half of its industrial strength. The regions taken by France and the victors were consistently the areas of the fatherland richest in resources.
Germany had to admit that it was the guilty party in starting the war (Austria, Serbia and Russia were certainly guilty also, but took little or no blame), and was hit with a stinging reparations penalty of multiple billions of dollars. This was a moral invoice of questionable justification.
Wasn't Germany being punished enough without the vicious add-on of a super-fine? The Rhineland was to be demilitarized and occupied, and the German armed forces reduced to only the force strength required for internal policing. Germany had been forced to admit to a war guilt that virtually no one in Germany really believed to be fair of true. The seeds of the next war were already sown. It was fall for the Hohenzollerns, but it was springtime for Hitler.
Germany was held responsible financially for all war damages to the Allies, including the estimated value of lost human lives. So for every bomb that landed somewhere successfully Germany would have to pay for the damages. There was also an attempt to add the costs of the war to the allies to the bill due to Germany, which would have added significantly to the total. Germany would have then to pay three ways, a)for its own effort to begin with, b) for its damages when the stuff worked, and c) for the operating costs of the Allies. Germany held this one off except in the case of Belgium where Germany had to reimburse the Belgian government for all Belgian expenditures due to the war.
Germany lost her overseas colonies in Africa and Asia. England and France wanted to collect these spoils of war, but there was resistance to a swap of one oppressor for another in places like Angola and Togo. These were to be placed under a league of Nations ‘mandate’ which is a limbo for new countries that aren’t capable (supposedly) of handling their independence yet. The mandate system was either a benevolent gradualism working for progressive political structure, or a blatant attempt to be a wolfy colonial power with a phony moralist veneer.
In the far east the Allies capitulated to Japan on China. Here was China and Japan, both signatories to the winning treaty. Inside the very treaty Japan is recognized as the new exploiter of the Chinese city of Tsingtao, replacing Germany. China was so offended by this that it never signed the Versailles Treaty.
The controversial territories of Alsace and Lorraine were to be returned to France. Re-claiming these two provinces was one of the historic missions of the French Army so I guess France won World War I. The million dead died for something. They died so France could win back Alsace and Lorraine.
A special neutral zone was created on both banks of the Rhine River. German military forces were not allowed into this zone of clearly German territory. This made the krauts sour. This Rhinestone insult to German pride was one of the simmering embers from the First War that led directly to the Second.
The final war debt that Germany was initially ordered to pay for reparations was 26 trillion dollars.
Wilson intervened and whittled it down to 56 billion.
Germany would never be capable of paying the reparations and in the end would abrogate the debt unilaterally. In 1932 Germany just said no to its war debts after paying off on 9 of the 56-bil due.
EASTERN POST-WAR FRONT
The settling up of affairs in eastern Europe were so complex on racial and political grounds that the Versailles Peace Conference kept a close eye on trying to make sure a new war didn’t break out somewhere between rivals in that region. Italy and Yugoslavia, Russia and Poland, Rumania and Hungary, to name three were conflicts waiting to happen. To the victors go the spoils but the victors sometimes scrap with each other for those spoils.
The victors wanted to draw up boundaries that matched both political and racial lines but they were dreaming. There were too many crossovers on both subjects to manage to satisfy everybody or even anybody. The fair and pacifying solution was never found. The plenipotentiaries worked hard and did their best and in the end they got a lot of abuse and criticism.
AUSTRIA
Like Germany, Austria threw out the old government when the walls were caving in. This new government tried to claim that by being a new government, Austria was thereby in fact a new nation just like Czechoslovakia or Yugoslavia and as such not liable for war reparations or punitive territorial concessions. But it was a case of ‘nice try, Hans.’ The Allies did not buy the argument that the new Austria had never been at war with anyone.
The new Austria was a small landlocked country with a tiny army. The old Austria had been an empire with outlets to the Mediterranean and a great military machine. The terms of the treaty were clearly punitive. New nations would be created all over eastern Europe, and to some degree all at the expense of Austria. Every one of Austria’s neighbors got a slice of her territory. The empire was a stalled car getting stripped by vandals by a dark highway. Poland, Yugoslavia, Greece, Italy, and Czechoslovakia all gained significant land at the expense of Austria.
Austria very much wanted to remain united with Germany. It submitted to the VPC its new name of “German-Austria.” But the VPC rejected this name and this idea. It demanded that Austria agree not to unite with Germany if it wanted a Peace treaty ending the war. In the end Austria signed an agreement not to ever unite with Germany again. The exact wording was that Austria could not ever “compromise her independence.”
The US delegation in Paris was willing to allow this union of Germany and Austria but the other members of the big four or five objected strongly and won the point.
Hitler later invaded Austria in 1938 so it should be remembered that Austria always wanted this. That is part of why the west acquiesced in the deed of 1938.
Austria assumed the responsibility of war guilt when it signed the treaty of St. Germain on September 10, 1919 ending the war. Reparations had to be paid and the Austrian Army was limited to 30,000 men. The Austrian Navy was limited to three police speed boats on the Danube River. Liberia had a better navy than Austria.
SEVRES 8.10.20
A treaty of Peace between the Allies and Turkey was signed at Sevres on August 10. 1920.
Large areas of the Ottoman possessions had been promised to Russia in the case of victory. But the Allies did not feel obliged to keep their word when Russia hadn’t. Russia had dropped out of the war and left it’s old allies to fend for themselves against the German army. Then Russia added insult and hostility towards its old friends with a political system and propaganda both designed to bring these capitalists governments down.
If Russia had not dropped out of World War I it would probably have been rewarded the complete water route through the straights to the City of Constantinople and beyond to the Mediterranean, and history would have been changed in immeasurable ways. Lenin’s Reds destroyed Russia’s best chance for a warm water port in the heart of Eurasia.
The Ottoman Middle East was divided up. Britian was given the mandate over Mesopotamia, later to become the new nation of Iraq. France got Syria and Jordan. An Arabian state was set up, initially called the Kingdom of Hejaz. This was the beginning of today’s Saudi Arabia.
US WAR GUILT?
The Blame America First historians (both foreign and domestic) give the US a pretty good smack-down for making evil money off the dead young men hanging on the barbed wire of Europe in WWI.
The USA certainly made a lot of money on World War I. Like World War II the War rescued the American economy, but was it all part of a conspiracy by big business to get us into the war? I doubt it. The charge has been on the table for almost a hundred years and is still in many a southpaw book today. Lib glib talk show hosts will still drop this fake fact into a conversation or monologue at the drop of a pamphlet.
It doesn’t make sense to say that big business in America conspired to help spawn the European war or to say that big business was elated when it broke out. The first months of the war in Europe in 1914 were a disaster for the American economy! It was a time of stock market collapse and runaway recession. Who would conspire and connive to create that?
It was only at the gunpoint of British navalism that the United States in 1915 and 1916 began to come around to the idea of abandoning it’s free-trade policy with all the warring states and chose to fall in with the temporary mercantilism of the Entente side in the Great War. 1915-16 was a clear simple case of ‘if you can’t beat em, join ‘em.’ Like a mobster that will actually help out the businesses they are shaking down as long as they fall in line, the USA gave up fighting John Bully navalism and took the protection rather than go to the cops. There were no cops to go to. There was only the Entente mob, so we cut the best deal available. In exchange for giving up the idea of continuing our profitable trade with the CP, we were given the chance to make millions and millions in becoming the bread, guns and ammo store for the Allies. Expedience, not greed led to our acquiescence. US Steel, General Motors, Singer Sewing, Standard Oil and Pets.com may well have made a lot of money off of World War One but that doesn’t mean they planned it that way.
The Open Door may have been there in China but it was locked and bolted in Central Europe. No John Hay flowery phrases or TR podium thumping was going to open it.
Western Europe claimed then and sometimes even now that in 1916 they were fighting our fight for us. Nonsense. In fact it was we who in 1918 were fighting their fight for them. Sarajevo and the Serbian crisis had nothing to do with events on the Missouri River or in Times Square.
Our neutrals were killed when traveling on belligerent ships and under all historical understandings of international laws they were fair game and their deaths not a valid casus beli. But we are a proud nation and damn the legalities of it all if our people die. Wilson showed great leadership … in leading us needlessly into a world war. Without our help, Britain and France could never have won the war and in fact might have even lost to the Huns, who had defeated Russia in the east just one month before we entered the conflagration.
A HOME IN ZION?
Off to the side of the Versailles Peace Conference sat the Jews. In exchange for their support during the war, the Zionist Jews had been promised British help (in the famous Balfour Declaration) in finding a home in the Middle East. Now that it was time to pay up the British realized they had promised independence to Arab groups in exchange for their help. They had cut two deals for the same diamond.
The impossible problem of pleasing the Jews and their Arab enemies has plagued diplomatic relations between Great Britain and the nations of the Middle East since the Versailles Conference. America faced the same dilemma from World War II to the present time.
There was talk at the Conference of creating a Jewish homeland in Uganda Africa, and in the late 1920’s Stalin offered them a home in Siberia. But the George Washington and John Adams of Israeli history, Chaim Weitzmann and Teddy Herzl wanted a homeland in Palestine and as the leaders of the Zionist movement they turned these offers down.
BELA KUN
Because of the special situation in Hungary after the war it was the last CP nation to settle up with the Entente in a formal treaty.
Hungary went through a series of revolutions in 1918-1919. First it declared itself an independent nation in the aftermath of the German surrender.
The next revolution had much more significance for the USA and the VPC. In the second Hungarian post war revolution a Communist dictator took over the new nation and hi-jacked the food relief that was destined to travel through the hub of Budapest. A former POW of the Reds, a Hungarian named Bela Kun became so converted to the cause of his captors that they returned him to Hungary backed by looted Tsarist gold to start a Communist revolution there.
On March 22, 1919 Hungary became a Communist nation. Bela Kun executed more than 2,000 of his political opponents. He then bought the necessary arms from some Italian officers and began an invasion of Czechoslovakia. That this invasion was of a revolutionary nature was clear enough. Kun was using Tsarist gold to foment a Communist revolution in Vienna.
The danger of world revolution against the capitalist nations was no longer a silly dream amongst a few bearded intellectuals in college pubs. It was a real threat that hung over the Paris Peace Conference and influenced profoundly, all of the political decisions made there and all of the events of the time. The paranoia in the United States over the ‘Red Menace’, so mocked by historians today from the safety of this time zone, must be considered against this real time background. The threat rolling in from the east was not a cloud of debating society members. It was a concrete threat with a track record.
Herbert Hoover was steamed at Kun for taking the food relief destined for the starving children of Europe and using it to help his Communist world revolution. He contacted President Wilson who instructed his diplomats to inform the Hungarian government that no more food relief would be sent to or through Hungary as long as its government did not have the support of the people and was only in power through the force of terrorism. These actions were a key factor in the downfall of the Communist regime in Hungary, which took place shortly after the Versailles Peace Conference ended. The heart of the Versailles negotiations took place with the active threat of Communist revolution literally on the horizon.
The Communist regime of Hungary lasted one hundred days. A counter-revolution overthrew Kun on August 1, 1919. Bela fled the country and some of his officials killed themselves because they knew they would be killed in revenge for the people they had killed.
The new government was led by trade unions. It was something like the Kerensky social-democrat coalition that ruled Russia in 1918 for a while.
Romania now saw its chance to right the wrongs of old feuds with Hungary. The Romanian army invaded Hungary in the late summer of 1919 and actually occupied Budapest, the Hungarian capitol. Looting was widespread and the Romanian Army was now seizing the same relief supplies that the US had protected against the usurpations of Kun.
Again the United States was forced to threaten a cut off all relief supplies if Bela Kun’s Communists continued to misuse them. American political action on this matter helped to bring about the downfall of the Commie Kun government.
CHAOS IN THE RUSSIAN REGION
The war spun on out of control in Russia in the form of a full-scale civil war on several simultaneous fronts. There were democratic and autocratic Royalist forces in Russia that did not accept the new Red regime. The United States intervened in this Russian Civil War, sending troops into northern Russia to try and tip the scales against the Bolsheviks. There were small engagements between United States and Red Army units with casualties on both sides.
Chaos was the way of life in Germany as well as in Russia. There was fighting in the streets in Germany between factions for and against the new government. Things were hardly settled on the ground while the particulars of the Versailles treaty were implemented.
Germany was the obvious central problem in the postwar settlement, but Russia (and Poland) was always a major problem. Russia had not exactly won or lost the war, was in the middle of a military and political civil war, and was endlessly claiming that it was going to instigate and command the overthrow of the very nations that were the only ones in a position to save Russia from a starvation holocaust. The west offered millions of dollars on food relief for starving Russia but the Reds told the west where they could stuff it. Millions would die because Red Russia would not accept food relief.
The situation of the eastern front from 1917-1920 was possibly the most complex political situation in the history of the world, so much so that most histories give it short shrift rather than take it on. We get macro details on the west but less from the east where there was more to tell.
There was Russia fighting among itself between moderate socialists, Bolshevik Communists, and Tsarist royalists hoping for a comeback. The western nations of England France, and to a more limited extent, the United States were launching limited invasions on three fronts (northern Europe, southwestern Europe and the Vladivostok region of the far east.) trying to overthrow the Bolshevik regime which was actively working to overthrow the established governments of these nations. I put these words in italics because for the next 90 years, Soviet propaganda would cry and moan about how they were the victims of these western aggressor states. Poor innocent USSR was just trying to set up a new government but no, the west would not let them live in peace. Stalin and Molotov and Brezhnev and Gorbachov never missed a chance to rub it in that we had attacked Russia so unfairly in 1919-1920 at the height of their tragic civil war.
I don’t know about you, but if my neighbor has a flame-thrower pointed at my house and sends me letters threatening to use it and explaining what an evil person I am and how good and perfect he is, I will burn his house down with a cheap lighter the first time I can confirm he is asleep and drunk in his bed. The ‘Allied Intervention’ is nothing the west has to feel ashamed of historically. But the liberal historians still cite it in passing (never with deep details of course) as proof or our innate bullyhood. On this they are in cahoots with Soviet propaganda from 1920 to the post Soviet era. The myth of Soviet innocence and victimization in the Allied Intervention still persists in Russia today. It is a lie. Without Soviet Communist declaration of its overt intention to overthrow the Western governments, the west does not try to overthrow the Soviets in 1919-1920. Offense is immoral. Defense is moral.
There was the chaos in Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, and Romania. There was aforementioned successful Communist revolution in Hungary in 1919 that scared the west to reaction. There were the new nations of Jugo-slavia and Czechoslovakia, a mess in the northern Adriatic map and the extreme complexities in the Middle East. It was political chaos on a wide open and dramatic field.
The Second World War would have one thing in common with the First one. Both continental wars would be fought on two fronts west and east, but both originated in the east. The danger signs, the problem spots that seemed unsolvable and turned out to be so, were in the east.
GERMANY FROM VERSAILLES TO 1920
It was called the Weimar republic. This was the new Germany and it was the new democracy. In fact, Weimar Germany was arguably more democratic than the United States for a few years after WWI.
Pluralism was extreme. There were many political parties, too many in fact for effective government. No party could rule so coalitions had to be formed to make any effective governmental structure. Many of the parties in the coalition governments were clear enemies, so smooth operations were precluded.
The first German democratic election for Chancellor, President, and Reichstag was held in late 1919 and it was with true universal suffrage. Every adult in Germany could vote. In the USA women still couldn't vote, and blacks were deprived of the vote in much of the south, but in Germany is was true freedom. Our enemy was embarrassing our own democracy, at least for a while.
The only political party that did not participate in the first free German election were the Communists. They were in the revolution and obstruction business so being part of anyone's coalition was out of the question.
For the first weeks after the war ended it was chaos in Germany. With the army far off in the field and then disbanded, Germany deteriorated into the condition of lawlessness. Left-wing factions battled right-ring factions all over the streets from the end of 1918 well into the twenties. Hitler grew to a position of leadership in one of these street-fighting groups in these early days, the National Socialist Democratic Labor Party, the NSDLP.
The right-wing groups were better organized, armed, and financed. The officer class of the disbanded German Army led them. There were millions of bitter German men who wanted to continue the war and the manly and violent way of life. You could take the German out of the army, but you couldn’t take the army out of the German.
An enemy was needed and the Communists showed up right on cue. It was better to be poor and jobless and be part of an army fighting a hated enemy than to just hang around and be poor and jobless. The Armistice of 11/11 could not snuff out Prussian militarism. It had to find an outlet and it did in the ‘Freikorps’
These ‘Free Corps’ of armed volunteers for German militarism’s preservation and survival won the civil war in the end. 20 years later the ol’ Freikorps provided the middle-aged leaders who got their old war back.
A democratic temporary government was set up, the Weimar republic, but the civil war between Communist political agitators and German chauvinist reactionaries continued on under its weak rule. The imposed democratic post-war government of Germany started off poorly and then went downhill after.
Marshall Foch of France said it best when he said in 1919, “This is not Peace. It is an Armistice for twenty years.”
THE FIRST PERSON TO FLY ACROSS THE ATLANTIC 1919
It wasn’t Charley Lindbergh.
In May of 1919 the world became a smaller place. Three U.S. Navy flying boats called NC’s were assigned to fly the Atlantic Ocean to Europe. It had never been done before. One of the three made it across. The others had to land in the water.
The historic bird was named NC-4, commanded by Albert Read. He and his crew were the first people to fly across the Atlantic Ocean. The route was well marked by friendly ships placed at intervals with helpful lights and reassurance against death. NC-4 left Newfoundland, and a few scary moments notwithstanding, made it safely to the Azores non-stop. After a short rest and refueling, the bi-plane finished the trip by landing in Portugal.
Amidst all the celebrating the breakthrough of cross-ocean flight had long-term security implications for the United States. The oceans had protected us since the time of Washington. The Read flight was a warning of a not too distant future when oceans could no longer guarantee homeland safety.
Later that year of 1919 the inter-continent trip was made for the first time non-stop. The heroes this time were John Alcock and his co-pilot Lieutenant Arthur Brown. Their plane, The Crazy World of Arthur Brown crossed the Atlantic at one jump a full eight years before the Spirit of St. Louis.
BOSTON POLICE STRIKE SEPTEMBER 1919
Because police unions were illegal, the Boston Police in 1919 formed a social organization to get together and talk about their problems. When they approached the Commissioner about these problems he made it clear that he did not recognize their organization. In anger they marched over to the American Federation of Labor and, defying the rules, became a recognized chapter of organized labor. Unfortunately it was Samuel Gompers, not Curtis the Commissioner that recognized them. When they were not recognized as a union they went on strike.
On September 9, 1919 1,100 police officers out of a total of 1,500 men did not report for duty. The city was plunged into lawless chaos and disorder. Slimeballs walked up and down Tremont street, smashing windows and taking home fine jewelry for the Mrs.
It justifies those with a dim view of human nature to report this. It would have been nice to say that when the police went out on strike the population was on its best behavior and there was no immediate action by criminals and criminals of opportunity. But it was not that way. The lowlifes heard the dinner triangle ring while grandma yelled ‘Come and get it!’ There was looting and a plethora of crime. Six people died in the first three days.
Emergency replacements came in as volunteers including a contingent from the Harvard football team. One Harvard tackled a would-be burglar with a fantastic open field move that later inspired a folk song.
Then Governor Coolidge got tough and called out the state militia. Boston was under martial law as uniformed troops patrolled the city to keep the jackals at bay. When they marched downtown with fixed bayonets, the criminals got the message and went back to the rathole they came from.
The city then began training replacement police. The strikers were never to come back. Each was fired for ‘neglecting his duty’. The replacements were granted all the demands that the others had struck for. But the right to a union was still denied.
The Police Strike isn’t in this history because my father was a Boston Police officer for 30 years, nor because I grew up in Boston. The Boston Police Strike of 1919 was not even important because I was in their headquarters this afternoon, renewing my Hackney license to drive a cab if I want to in Boston.
BPS19 was important because it made a national name out of Calvin Coolidge and enabled him to win the presidency later as a quiet get-tough reactionary Republican (what other kind are there?), and because it showed how low people are in general: that as soon as the cops walk out, its riot time. It reminds us that the only thing that protects the rich and the middle class from the poor is the police. Without them, free enterprise could not exist because its results would not be honored by a too large and too dangerous element of the poor.
Not all poor are criminal. Not all criminal are poor. But the poor will physically overpower the rich, and enforce Darwinian Socialism if the moneyed property does not have the protection of police force. The normal day we crave is one short moment away from predatory chaos with the worst in human nature erupting to the fore. The BPS19 proved it.
VOLSTEAD ACT RATIFIED JANUARY 29 1919
After a century of agitation, the prohibitionists had their day of jubilee on 1.29.19. On that day enough states had finally ratified the 18th Amendment. The Volstead Act was passed. From that date, the people had one year to drink up or sell whatever booze they owned or were producing. After 1.29.20 the sale, ownership, distribution or production of alcohol was strictly forbidden. Connecticut and Rhode Island, the way, stuck to their guns. They never ratified the 18th Amendment but had to abide by it when passed.
Prohibition would prove to be a total failure and was overturned under FDR. One of the first consequences of Volstead was an increase in whiskey consumption. The nation had a stockpile of long lasting whiskey while beer and wine had a more ephemeral schedule. Whiskey also had more value to the size and weight, and so was to quickly become the drug of choice for the 20’s.
THE PALMER RAIDS 1919-20
Palmer is one of the arch-villains of American History. He is the namesake of the "Palmer Raids." These were searches seizures and arrests of American Communists and socialists in 1919-1920, or anyone else who ever talked to one.
The new Communist International met in March of 1919 and it was proclaiming a sacred war against all the capitalist nations of the world. Russia had won its battle against capitalism and was exporting Communist rebellions to eastern European states like Hungary and the defeated and prostrate German nation. The Comintern was exhorting the proletarians of the world through its publications to overthrow the capitalist states. The Palmer raids were overreactions to this threat, which we now know was not all that serious. The USSR would itself soon revert to more of a state capitalism than a true socialist economy. The Communist revolutions of Eastern Europe would end in defeat.
But in the panic of the moment, the United States government believed the great publicity campaigns of the Communists. Their propaganda worked a little too well and the capitalist states felt their precious money being threatened and whenever that happens its Katy bar the door.
There were also acts of terrorism that spawned the reactionaryism. Dozens of mail bombs were sent to capitalists enemies of the wild left. A bomb exploded in the home of Mitchell Palmer. No one was hurt but he and his family were terrorized and his house was damaged.
The US government began reprisal raids against socialists, communists, anarchists and anyone suspected of being one of these. At one point in 1919 a special ship was loaded with 250 Russian leftist undesirables and sent on a one way trip to Murmansk. It was called “ Ivan’s Ark”. A Russian Noah picked out two radicals from each political group and walked them aboard. Among the unwanted passenger list being expelled from the US to the watery horizon were Al Berkman and Emma Goldman. (Berkman was the man who tried to murder Frick.)
The Palmer Raids indeed broke many laws and are not defensible at face value. But the underlying reasons for them were not redneck. They were derived from the instinct of self-preservation. The nation was told that it was going to be attacked from within. The enemy did not really have this capability but professed as loudly as it could shout that it did. We believed the boast and a lot of innocent people were hauled off to jail (along with a few guilty ones.) And Mitch Palmer is now one of the bad guys in US History. I say he was a good guy who made a bad call for the right reasons.
19th AMENDMENT PASSED 1920
Here is the sequence of the franchise in United States history. First the rich men got the vote. Then the men; then the rich black men, then the black men. But still not yet the ladies. ‘Ladies first’ apparently did not apply to political rights. Several states had passed laws giving partial voting rights to women before the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920. Illiterate unemployed men could vote but not educated women. It was a ridiculous miscarriage of justice for which the nation should still feel ashamed.
Many states had previously held referendums on whether or not females should be allowed the vote. Talk about a logic trap, a ‘Catch-22.’ Women were not allowed to vote on whether they should be allowed to vote. That’s like the Klan leader declaring to his mob, “Now they say we don’t respect democracy. Well show of hands, how many think blacks should be allowed to vote? Now. How many think they should not be allowed to vote? Well the nays have it! Three cheers for democracy!” Same thing. If women had been allowed the vote, they would have voted themselves the vote a lot sooner than 1920.
Many fine and courageous and famous women had for decades fought the good fight for the franchise, including Susan B. Anthony, Carrie Chapman Catt, Alice Paul, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. But what is less known and ten times as bizarre is that there was a counter-movement and it was led by women. As association of women were formed demanding that women not be allowed to vote.
What?
Josephine Dodge in 1911 founded the NAOWS, the National Association Opposed to Women Suffrage. Mrs. Dodge was a wealthy widow and she held meetings of NAOWS at her Fifth Avenue home. That one is too weird for me to even think about. Maybe her children founded the CIIT, the Committee to Increase our Income Taxes, or the FPOW, the Foundation to Pollute our Waterways.
WILSON LOSES LEAGUE AND HIS HEALTH 1919-21
The men who defeated the LON and the VT are among the arch-villains of American history. Senator Lodge of Massachusetts is probably the number one bad guy of the whole affair, followed by several other prominent Republicans. I feel sorry for Lodge when I visit his picturesque grave at the Mt Auburn Cemetery.
The hard-liners of 1920 are supposed to be partly responsible for World War II. If the US had joined the League of Nations, it would have had the teeth to handle any crisis, even a Hitler. WWII would never have happened if not for the Lodge gang. That is the orthodox view and is probably true..
But the politicians of 1920 did not have the hindsight of knowing how everything turned out. If they could have foreseen World War II, they would have supported Wilson’s League. But they couldn’t, so they didn’t.
The opposition gang had many lodge-ical reasons to vote against the League of Nations. It wasn’t just Republican vindictiveness, as some history books seem to think. The anti-League arguments included many that are still believed today by many respectable people. Their arguments weren’t the work of simple obstructionists, who wanted to sabotage Wilson, just because he was a Democrat or because they were snobby about American superiority (as is often charged.)
For one they genuinely feared that American men might go and fight in a war the country did not support and that the power of the Congress and the Executive would be superseded by an international police force that would come before the US flag. They weren’t ready for that. We still aren’t. How many times have the little nations tried to gang up on the USA via UN voting in the last 50 years? Po-lenty. If a democratic vote had controlled a super UN military force in the last 50 years with US participation, would our military forces have been sent to combat against our national will in that time? Probably. So the “irreconcilables” of 1920 had reasons to feel that way.
They opposed some of the specific terms of the Versailles Treaty. Many wanted Europe to start paying back some of its US loans before asking us to join in binding military pacts.
They invoked the warning of Washington’s farewell address when he told the American future to stay completely out of the endless troubles in Europe.
The Lodge gang continually insisted on amendments to the Treaty and the League. Wilson did not want to try and sell these reservations to his big shot chums in Europe. He refused to support the US entry into the League with these reservations. It was you were either for Wilson and his vision for a new world order, or you were against Wilson and his vision of a new world order.
With the Senate and Congress debating endlessly on the V Treaty Wilson decided to go over the heads of the Congress and appeal directly to John and Mary Doe. In early September 1919 Wilson embarked on a speaking tour of the USA to promote the League of Nations, and the Treaty of Versailles. Wilson racked up 6 thousand train miles of speechmaking. He gave speeches from Columbus to Seattle. But the plan backfired when physical exhaustion and stress broke Wilson down. The poor man suffered a physical breakdown while making a speech from the back of a train. He couldn't finish his speech. I heard the tape of this on my first day of broadcasting school at Career Academy in Boston. It was chilling. The last sentence of the last speech started “We believe…..” and was not finished. Show’s over, folks. A few days later he had a stroke. Woodrow was paralyzed on the left side, had slurred speech and tired almost instantly when intellectually taxed. His wife ran the country from then on.
It is possible (some historians say probable) that the Lodge amendments were not a real threat to Wilson's vision of new Europe and a new world. Wilson may have simply been small minded because he so disliked Lodge. Wilson is reported to have snapped that he will not sign on to any plan which “that man” is a part of.
Lodge said of Wilson that he “would like the President except for one thing.”
“What's that?,” asked the reporter.
“I hate him.”
It wasn't pretty. And it showed the power of hate. If these two guys hadn't hated each other there might never have been a World War II.
Because it included Lodge’s amendments when the bill for ratification was presented to the senate Wilson asked his Democratic Congressmen to vote against it! Why did we not join the League of Nations? Because Wilson ordered his Democratic Party to join the Republican opposition. Woodrow Wilson zapped his precious League of Nations with his stubborn petulance.
The Versailles Treaty failed the Senate on November 19,1919. Then it failed a second time on March 19, 1920. Rejection of Wilson's treaty was not a plus for Democrat election chances in 1920.
Secretary of State Bobby Lansing may have had the best understanding of why the League of Nations failed ratification here and failed in practice in Europe and Asia.
The idea of a moral league to enforce peace was obviously a good one but in Lansing’s mind it had to be based on an equality of nations. The League at is was formed was a victors peace of conquest with a false overcoat of morality. Lansing saw the way the League was shaping up in early 1919 and was appalled. While the two of them were in Europe, Lansing tried to suggest to Wilson a League based on national equality complete with a powerful international judiciary, a sort of checks and balances UN. But Wilson did not even read these pleading letters of his Secretary of State and continued with his League of Victors plan with the eager help of his French, Italian and English colleagues. To Lansing this,
“could mean nothing less than the primacy of the
Great Powers and the acknowledgement that
because they possessed the physical might they
had a right to control the affairs of the world”
THE AMERICAN ECONOMY 1919-1920
In spite of many predictions of a post-war bust, the American economy experienced a brief, but resounding boom in the first year after the end of World War I.
War controls had to be shut down carefully, and in stages. The octopus of government control of a wartime economy had to be tamed and then carefully put to sleep, lets its grip become a self contained monster that can never be released. It would not be simple or easy for Sam had his mitts on almost everything.
The United States government had taken over the railroads. We were the Socialist States of America for the entire war, and the fastest way to get into a US jail in these years was to stand up for socialism.
AFTER OFFICE
Life was difficult for Wilson. He was paralyzed on his left side in his last years. His last coherent sentence before he passed away in 1924 was “I am a broken piece of machinery. When the machine is broken I am ready.”
Woodrow Wilson died in his sleep at 11:15 a.m. on February 3 1924 at his home in Washington D.C.
SOURCES
America Faces Russia, by Thomas A. Bailey – American foreign relations with Russia by one of the best writers ever.
American Military History, Department of the Army c) 1959
This is the soldier’s textbook teaching him military history. The multiple authors are uncredited and it’s a superior no-nonsense read, reflecting its era, both in style as well as in conservative substance. It might be a little biased towards the USA.
The American People, a History, by Pauline Maier, c) 1986. This middle school textbook quizzes the poor student every three paragraphs about what they just read, often a question relating to the last sentence.
Bizarre.
Lot's of illustrations and the writing is easy, but the constant quizzing sets a most unfriendly tone.
Boston Police Department Headquarters– The figure of 1,100 police that walked off the job is approximate as is the 1,500 total of officers. They had an extensive account of the Police Strike of 1919 on display in the main lobby, part of an overall exhibition on Boston Police History. Some textbooks incorrectly state that the entire Boston Police force was fired. Only the strikers were, and 400 or so remained on the job.
The Decision to Intervene by George F. Kennan
Kennan is a powerful figure in American history both as a writer and as an active player. These 3 books blew me away when I read them as a young man. Kennan is always a pleasant read. But in recent years I have learned that many scholars do not agree with him on a lot of things. His word isn’t the bible on the Soviet Union but it’s tempting to think so.
Kennan's two volume memoirs aren’t quite as enjoyable as these 3, especially volume one which is a snoozer. I don't care what you had to eat at mealtimes at the boarding house.
Kennan is most famous for (allegedly) formulating the policy of “containment” against the Soviet Union in the period between 1946 and 1948.
Enduring Vision, huge 1990's textbook by Harvard Sitkof and friends, for the map of women voting and WW1 US troop action.
Europe Since 1914, In It’s World Setting, by F. Lee Benns, C)1954
F. Lee is one of my top five historians of all time.
This textbook sat in my library for more than 20 years before I finally cracked it and now it is my constant companion. It’s the tops. Heavily scholastic yet I rarely have to look up a fancy word. Hoo-ray! The book’s popularity is understandable once you start it, but it doesn’t look like candy until you dig in. It went through many editions, beginning way back in 1930. It was also republished without revision in 1958 and 1962. Now that’s proof of a good textbook. My copy is the 1962 republishing of the last revised edition of 1954.
It seems to me that Benns didn’t really revise his opinions about the First World War in the aftermath of the Second. I have a suspicion that he would have if he had chosen to go over everything with a fine re-write and re-think. He was probably too busy with writing the new chapters to completely overhaul the old. He definitely still has a 1934 lens on World War I as it reads in all editions.
Benns is all business, never snobby, writes flawlessly, and honestly tries to be objective. That is not to say that he is. But he tries. I didn’t know that Indiana University had a Larry Bird of History.
From Versailles to the New Deal, by Harold Faulkner – c) 1951 –A general history essay on the time slot. This little 366 page hardcover has a pro-Democratic bias.
The Gift of Fear, by Gavin de Becker, c) 1997 for the film-maker story on Schrank and the 1912 TR shooting. It’s a true-crime page-turner with special attention on celebrity stalkers.
My Autobiography, by Calvin Coolidge – c)1929 – His account of the Boston Police strike is very instructive.
My Memoir, by Edith Bolling Wilson, c)1938 – A very enjoyable book. You have to get past some fluff to get to the useful stuff. Two pages on Woodrow's snoring, we can do without that kind of detail.
The National Experience, by Stampp, Woodward and Schlesinger, Jr. c) 1981, Fifth Edition – Big general history.
A New American History, by W. E. Woodward, c) 1936 – Woody is sharp in his cynicism about our entry the Great War and his argument could be applied to the Iraq situation today in 2008;
But what special reason was there for the United States
to embark on a vast crusade for the purpose of saving
democracy? For a hundred and twenty-five years our
democratic republic had got along very well in a world
full of emperors, sultans and despots. Why should we
try to set up democratic states in Europe? The European
peoples were capable of establishing democracies if
they really wanted them.
He adds to this the hypocrisy of our alliance with Russia, the most anti-democratic and despotic state on the globe. Good point except that the Russian Revolution overthrew the dynasty in March of 1917 and the Social Democratic Mensheviks were in power when the United States allied itself with Russia in April of 1917.
Woodward’s writing represents mainstream antiwar intellectual feeling in the US in the 1930’s.
There were few at this copyright date of ‘36 that still thought the United States had served a noble cause in World War One.
The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson, by Herbert Hoover, c) 1959. The 83-year-old ex-president looks across party lines to give a sympathetic account of Wilson’s problems in the White House, especially the Versailles Treaty failure. A dry read but indispensable to this story. Hoover was deeply involved in humanitarian relief in Europe both during and after WWI, working closely with President Wilson.
Sometimes I wonder if Hoover isn’t really writing the story of his role in the Wilson era and using the Wilson's personal story as a front.
The Origins of the World War, by Sidney Fay, c) 193-- This an amazing work in which the Harvard professor says the same things as Mills except more gently and in much more detail on diplomacy. Origins is a slow read and easy to put down, but it is magnificent and enjoyable nevertheless. It is a physically great book. Heavy; the pages open and rest open on both sides; gorgeous red cover; a lot fun to handle.
I have a couple of books about Germany that were published just before the First World War. The American authors of both books are stunned and awed in negative terror at the mental state of the German nation around them. While people were acting normally in England, the whole state of the state of Germany was one all-embracing scintillating pulse for the glory of war on the near horizon. Military vehicles and uniforms dominated the buzz of everyday life. It wasn’t kosher.
Other nations had their share of blame in the actual events that started the war of course. But Germany lived for this. In August 1914 Germany was one giant Teddy Roosevelt with ports and railroads. No wonder they gave TR's son a fabulous burial. Germany wanted war, just for the sake of war. It loved war. It cheered the loudest when war came.
The Road to War, by Walter Millis, is an important historic and political book. It not only tells the history of the entrance of America into World War One, its popularity as a best seller influenced the post-war polemic perceptions of that entry. This viewpoint was orthodox redneck leftism for many years after the war. But World War II discredited it as the work of a man whom history proved to have been in the wrong.
Mills tells the story of America’s gradual entry into World War One with skill and in some detail. The thesis which permeates every last sentence is that it was all a mistake and we never should have been involved.
More and most specifically he mocks throughout the book the idea that German militarism had ever been dangerous. He says that Prussian militarism was nothing, no real threat to it’s neighbors or the world.
Americans definitely believed in the threat of German militarism during the War, and in the immediate months after it ended. German militarism was a demonic force that wanted to conquer the world by physical, moral, political, and even spiritual force. Prussian virtues were the root cause of the war of conquest and to the Entente this monster must be crushed in its adolescence.
That is why England and France avoided for as long as possible a diplomatic peace with an armistice, instead pursuing a military victory. The English French and eventually the Americans sincerely thought that German militarism was the evil that started the war and had to be destroyed. There was always some sincere Allied morale in the halls of government, in the home streets and even in the trenches, mutinies notwithstanding. The nations involved believed in the mission.
Mills makes his case well as he ridicules fear of German militarism and cites a lot of evidence that it was absurd to think that one side was guilty over the other. He believed sincerely in the ‘Blame the Entente Equally’ theory of the truth. Mills thinks that France and Britain were not more moral than Germany or Austria.
By 1934, when Mills was drafting his manuscript, this had become a very popular view, so he wasn't being particularly daring. It was a view quite popular when Mills was drafting his manuscript in 1934. Sidney Fay’s prolific both sides are of equal-blame Harvard book on the origins of the war came out around the same time.
I believe that love of war was a real sickness in Germany in 1913 and defeat of this contagious illness was imperative. It was only partially stopped in WWI and then it rose from the ashes. The exterminators finally finished the job in May of 1945.
Russian-American Relations in World War I, by Benson Lee Grayson, c) 1979 – Very insightful short book. Grayson doesn’t waste anyone’s time.
Russia Leaves the War by George F Kennan. - There's some stories about the real James Bond in here, who was on the scene in Russia in real life.
The Russian Revolution, by Richard Pipes – An amazing book and huge. Pipes is considered a bit of a right-wing egghead historian on Russia. I met his niece at a bar in Boston. The niece was nice, but she had mixed feelings about her uncle. She was a left-winger and it turned out that I felt more highly of her uncle than she did.
Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin, by George F. Kennan – What can you say? I wish I could read it again for the first time.
Source Records of the Great War (six volumes), c) 1920 –Fabulous set of books detailing everything about WWI. The authors are either people who participated in the events; prime ministers and generals; or at the least, some of the great historians and correspondents of the time.
The narrator/editor, a Mr. Horne, is either a naïve extremist fool or represents the understandable real feelings of people at the time. In his intro chapters he writes that the Great War was a great victory in a great cause. Horne unabashedly believes that Entente victory was essential to save the world from German militarism. There is none of the cynicism in this set of books that developed later in the 1920’s and well into the 1930’s.
These books were popular and copies of them are floating around in thousands of used book stores and flea markets. Grab them if you can.
Treee-mendous.
The Story of Europe and the Nations at War, by Logan Marshall – c)1914
This is an amazing book. It was written about two months into the war in 1914. This old book with the German Zeppelin on the hardcover explains to the average American the background history of all the European combatants and how they ended up at war. Origins of World War One but as seen from the top of the first inning. Priceless perspective.
A Time for Angels, The Tragicomic History of the League of Nations, by Elmer Bendiner, c)1975
A very useful book.
Elmer may show bias occasionally. He fails to mention the needlessly hostile Wilson letter that killed the Democrats in the fall 1918 elections. He only mentions how the Republicans after the Armistice “enthusiastically hailed the end of the domestic political truce and assailed the President with the customary partisan vehemence.” This is either a sin of omission or he simply missed the info in his research which is entirely forgivable. In any case I don’t generally get a partisan feel from the book and he is rough enough in Wilson in other spots.
This is recommended reading to say the least. I don’t know of many books that focus on the crucial failed League. The uselessness of the League of Nations is blamed for WWII.
Elmer has a good heart. He seems genuinely hurt by what he perceives are the injustices and hypocrisies of the times he is writing about.
The United States, From Colony to World Power, by Chitwood, Owsley, and Nixon, c) 1954 – Thick grey hardcover for college freshmen when my dad was in the Navy. Very good, but racist at times. My opinion.
The Wobblies – This book supplies the story that Joe Hill was guilty and not admirable. I don’t have the book handy but it’s in the house. I read it at Notre Dame University when I was visiting a friend there. I sat in an empty classroom for four hours and knocked off a third of this fine academic paperback. I’ll fill in the author when I find it. The author does not have a conservative axe to grind (as I have) and he tells the facts about Hill with no emotion, a scholar just doing his job.
Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him, by Joseph Tumulty c) 1924 – An American History classic. I love this book. This is the bible on Wilson. The closest thing to his memoirs. Tumulty was very close to Tommy and admired him deeply. Joey’s book is a moving and detailed inside portrait of a great man by another one and an absolute must for all serious American History students. Nothing ever convinced me of Wilson's deep sincerity until I read Know Him.
World Book Encyclopedia, c) 1956
World War I, by S.L.A. Marshall – A military history at war college level but is ruined by a dire need of more and better maps. The detail in the text is way too complex to not have good maps to help the reader. This is so common an occurrence in history books that it is perhaps unfair to single out this one. Without the maps the book alternates between lucid and sightless pages. Some pages I just give up on and keep reading even though I’ve stopped even trying to follow it.
Marshall is one of the heavies in the military history profession.
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