1. World War I: The Turning Point

CHAPTER 1

World War I: The Turning Point

With the World War mankind got into a crisis with which nothing that happened before in history can be compared.... In the world crisis whose beginning we are experiencing, all peoples of the world are involved.... War has become more fearful because it is waged with all the means of the highly developed technique that the free economy has created.... Never was the individual more tyrannized than since the outbreak of the World War and especially of the world revolution. One cannot escape the police and administrative technique of the present day.

Ludwig von Mises (1919)¹

The First World War is the turning point of the twentieth century. Had the war not occurred, the Prussian Hohenzollerns would most probably have remained heads of Germany, with their panoply of subordinate kings and nobility in charge of the lesser German states. Whatever gains Hitler might have scored in the Reichstag elections, could he have erected his totalitarian, exterminationist dictatorship in the midst of this powerful aristocratic superstructure? Highly unlikely. In Russia, Lenin’s few thousand Communist revolutionaries confronted the immense Imperial Russian Army, the largest in the world. For Lenin to have any chance to succeed, that great army had first to be pulverized, which is what the Germans did. So, a twentieth century without the Great War might well have meant a century without Nazis or Communists. Imagine that. It was also a turning point in the history of our American nation, which under the leadership of Woodrow Wilson developed into something radically different from what it had been before. Thus, the importance of the origins of that war, its course, and its aftermath.

INTRODUCTION

In 1919, when the carnage at the fronts was at long last over, the victors gathered in Paris to concoct a series of peace treaties. Eventually, these were duly signed by the representatives of four of the five vanquished nations, Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Bulgaria (the final settlement with Turkey came in 1923), each at one of the palaces in the vicinity. The signing of the most important one, the treaty with Germany, took place at the great Palace of Versailles. Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles reads:

The Allied and Associated Governments affirm and Germany accepts the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies.²

It was unprecedented in the history of peace negotiations that those who lost a war should have to admit their guilt for starting it. The fact that the “war-guilt clause” implied German liability for unstated but huge reparations added fuel to the controversy over who was to blame for the outbreak of the war. This immediately became, and has remained, one of the most disputed questions in all of historical writing. When the Bolsheviks seized power, they gleefully opened the Tsarist archives, publishing documents that included some of the secret treaties of the Entente powers to divide up the spoils after the war was over. Their purpose was to embarrass the sanctimonious “capitalist” governments, which had insisted on the virgin purity of their cause. This move contributed to other nations making public many of their own documents at an earlier point than might have been expected.

In the interwar period, a consensus developed among scholars that the war-guilt clause of the Versailles Treaty was historically worthless. Probably the most respected interpretation was that of Sidney Fay, who apportioned major responsibility among Austria, Russia, Serbia, and Germany.³ In 1952, a committee of prominent French and German historians concluded:

The documents do not permit any attributing, to any government or nation, a premeditated desire for European war in 1914. Distrust was at its highest, and leading groups were dominated by the thought that war was inevitable; everyone thought that the other side was contemplating aggression....⁴

This consensus was shaken in 1961 with the publication of Fritz Fischer’s Griff nach der Weltmacht (“Grab for World Power”). In the final formulation of this interpretation, Fischer and the scholars who followed him maintained that in 1914 the German government deliberately ignited a European war in order to impose its hegemony over Europe.⁵ (Would that all historians were as cynical regarding the motives of their own states.) The researches of the Fischer school forced certain minor revisions in the earlier generally accepted view.

But the historiographical pendulum has now swung much too far in the Fischer direction. Foreign historians have tended to accept his analysis wholesale, perhaps because it fit their “image of German history, determined largely by the experience of Hitler’s Germany and the Second World War.”⁶ The editors of an American reference work on World War I, for example, state outright that “Kaiser and [the German] Foreign Office... along with the General Staff... purposely used the crisis [caused by the assassination of Franz Ferdinand] to bring about a general European war. Truth is simple, refreshingly simple.”⁷

Well, maybe not so simple. Fritz Stern warned that while the legend propagated in the interwar period by some nationalistic German historians of their government’s total innocence “has been effectively exploded, in some quarters there is a tendency to create a legend in reverse by suggesting Germany’s sole guilt, and thus to perpetuate the legend in a different form.”⁸

PRELUDE TO WAR

The roots of the First World War reach back to the last decades of the nineteenth century.⁹ After France’s defeat by Prussia, the emergence in 1871 of a great German Empire dramatically altered the balance of forces in Europe. For centuries the German lands had served as a battlefield for the European powers, who exploited the disunity of the territory for their own aggrandizement. Now the political skills of the Prussian minister Otto von Bismarck and the might of the Prussian army had created what was clearly the leading continental power, extending from the French to the Russian borders and from the Baltic to the Alps.

One of the main concerns of Bismarck, who served as Prussian minister and German Chancellor for another two decades, was to preserve the new-found unity of the this, the Second Reich. Above all, war had to be avoided. The Treaty of Frankfurt ending the Franco-Prussian War compelled France to cede Alsace and half of Lorraine, a loss the French would not permanently resign themselves to. In order to isolate France, Bismarck contrived a system of defensive treaties with Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Italy, insuring that France could find no partner for an attack on Germany.

In 1890, the old Chancellor was dismissed by the new Kaiser, Wilhelm II. In the same year, Russia was suddenly freed of the connection with Germany by the expiration and non-renewal of the “Reinsurance Treaty.” Diplomatic moves began in Paris to win over Russia to an alliance which could be used to further French purposes, defensive and possibly offensive as well.¹⁰ Negotiations between the civilian and military leaders of the two countries produced, in 1894, a Franco-Russian military treaty, which remained in effect through the onset of the First World War. At this time it was understood, as General Boisdeffre told Tsar Alexander III, that “mobilization means war.” Even a partial mobilization by Germany, Austria-Hungary, or Italy was to be answered by a total mobilization of France and Russia and the inauguration of hostilities against all three members of the Triple Alliance.¹¹

In the years that followed, French diplomacy continued to be, as Laurence Lafore put it, “dazzlingly brilliant.”¹² The Germans, in contrast, stumbled from one blunder to another; the worst of these was the initiation of a naval arms race with Britain. When the latter finally decided to abandon its traditional aversion to peacetime entanglements with other powers, the French devised an Entente cordiale, or “cordial understanding,” between the two nations. In 1907, with France’s friendly encouragement, England and Russia resolved various points of contention, and a Triple Entente came into existence, confronting the Triple Alliance.

The two combinations differed greatly in strength and cohesion, however. Britain, France, and Russia were world powers. But Austria and Italy were the weakest of the European powers; moreover, Italy’s unreliability as an ally was notorious, while Austria-Hungary, composed of numerous feuding nationalities, was held together only by allegiance to the ancient Habsburg dynasty. In an age of rampant nationalism, this allegiance was wearing thin in places, especially among Austria’s Serb subjects. Many of these felt a greater attachment to the Kingdom of Serbia, where, in turn, fervent nationalists looked forward to the creation of a Greater Serbia, or perhaps even a kingdom of all the South Slavs — a “Yugoslavia.”

A series of crises in the years leading up to 1914 solidified the Triple Entente to the point where the Germans felt they faced “encirclement” by superior forces. In 1911, when France moved to complete its subjugation of Morocco, Germany forcefully objected. The ensuing crisis revealed how close together Britain and France had come, as their military chiefs discussed sending a British expeditionary force across the Channel in case of war.¹³ In 1913, a secret naval agreement provided that, in the event of hostilities, the Royal Navy would assume responsibility for protecting the French Channel coast while the French stood guard in the Mediterranean. “The Anglo-French entente was now virtually a military alliance.”¹⁴ In democratic Britain, all of this took place without the knowledge of the people, Parliament, or even most of the Cabinet.

The dispute over Morocco was settled by a transfer of African territory to Germany, demonstrating that colonial rivalries, though they produced tensions, were not central enough to lead to war among the powers. But the French move into Morocco set into motion a series of events that brought on war in the Balkans, and then the Great War. According to a previous agreement, if France took over Morocco, Italy had the right to occupy what is today Libya, at the time a possession of the Ottoman Turks. Italy declared war on Turkey, and the Italian victory roused the appetite of the small Balkan states for what remained of Turkey’s European holdings.

Russia, especially after being thwarted in the Far East by Japan in the war of 1904–5, had great ambitions in the Balkans. Nicholas Hartwig, Russia’s highly influential ambassador to Serbia, was an extreme Pan-Slavist, that is, an adherent of the movement to unite the Slavic peoples under Russian leadership. Hartwig orchestrated the formation of the Balkan League, and, in 1912, Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, and Greece declared war on Turkey. When Bulgaria claimed the lion’s share of the spoils, its erstwhile allies, joined by Romania and Turkey itself, fell upon Bulgaria the next year, in the Second Balkan War.

These wars caused great anxiety in Europe, particularly in Austria, which feared the enlargement of Serbia backed by Russia. In Vienna, the head of the army, Conrad, pushed for a preventive war, but was overruled by the old Emperor, Franz Josef. Serbia emerged from the Balkan conflicts not only with a greatly expanded territory, but also animated by a vaulting nationalism, which Russia was happy to egg on. Sazonov, the Russian Foreign Minister wrote to Hartwig: “Serbia’s promised land lies in the territory of present-day Hungary,” and instructed him to help prepare the Serbians for “the future inevitable struggle.”¹⁵ By the spring of 1914, the Russians were arranging for another Balkan League, under Russian direction. They received the strong support of France, whose new President, Raymond Poincaré, born in Lorraine, was himself an aggressive nationalist. It was estimated that the new league, headed by Serbia, might provide as many as a million men on Austria’s southern flank, wrecking the military plans of the Central Powers.¹⁶

Russia’s military buildup was commensurate with its ambitions. Norman Stone has written, of Russia on the eve of the Great War:

The army contained 114½ infantry divisions to Germany’s 96, and contained 6,720 mobile guns to the Germans’ 6,004. Strategic railway-building was such that by 1917 Russia would be able to send nearly a hundred divisions for war with the Central Powers within eighteen days of mobilization — only three days behind Germany in overall readiness. Similarly, Russia became, once more, an important naval power... by 1913–14 she was spending £24,000,000 to the Germans’ £23,000,000.¹⁷

And this is not even to count France.

The Russian program underway called for even more imposing forces by 1917, when they might well be needed: “Plans were going ahead for seizure by naval coup of Constantinople and the Straits, and a naval convention with Great Britain allowed for co-operation in the Baltic against Germany.”¹⁸

Russia regarded Germany as an inevitable enemy, because Germany would never consent to Russian seizure of the Straits or to the Russian-led creation of a Balkans front whose object was the demise of Austria-Hungary. The Habsburg monarchy was Germany’s last dependable ally, and its disintegration into a collection of small, mostly Slavic states would open up Germany’s southern front to attack. Germany would be placed in a militarily impossible situation, at the mercy of its continental foes. Austria-Hungary had to be preserved at all costs.

Things had come to such a pass that Colonel Edward House, Woodrow Wilson’s confidant, traveling in Europe to gather information for the President, reported in May, 1914:

The situation is extraordinary. It is militarism run stark mad.... There is too much hatred, too many jealousies. Whenever England consents, France and Russia will close in on Germany and Austria.¹⁹

AND THE WAR CAME

The immediate origins of the 1914 war lie in the twisted politics of the Kingdom of Serbia.²⁰ In June, 1903, Serbian army officers murdered their king and queen in the palace and threw their bodies out a window, at the same time massacring various royal relations, cabinet ministers, and members of the palace guards. It was an act that horrified and disgusted many in the civilized world. The military clique replaced the pro-Austrian Obrenović dynasty with the anti-Austrian Karageorgevices. The new government pursued a pro-Russian, Pan-Slavist policy, and a network of secret societies sprang up, closely linked to the government, whose goal was the “liberation” of the Serb subjects of Austria (and Turkey), and perhaps the other South Slavs as well.

The man who became Prime Minister, Nicolas Pašić, aimed at the creation of a Greater Serbia, necessarily at the expense of Austria-Hungary. The Austrians felt, correctly, that the cession of their Serb-inhabited lands, and maybe even the lands inhabited by the other South Slavs, would set off the unraveling of the great multinational Empire. For Austria-Hungary, Serbian designs posed a mortal danger.

The Russian ambassador Hartwig worked closely with Pašić and cultivated connections with some of the secret societies. The upshot of the two Balkan Wars which he promoted was that Serbia more than doubled in size and threatened Austria-Hungary not only politically but militarily as well. Sazonov, the Russian Foreign Minister, wrote to Hartwig: “Serbia has only gone through the first stage of her historic road and for the attainment of her goal must still endure a terrible struggle in which her whole existence may be at stake.” Sazonov went on, as indicated above, to direct Serbian expansion to the lands of Austria-Hungary, for which Serbia would have to wage “the future inevitable struggle.”²¹

The nationalist societies stepped up their activities, not only within Serbia, but also in the Austrian provinces of Bosnia and Hercegovina. The most radical of these groups was Union or Death, popularly known as the Black Hand. It was led by Colonel Dragutin Dimitriević, called Apis, who also happened to be the head of Royal Serbian Military Intelligence. Apis was a veteran of the slaughter of his own king and queen in 1903, as well as of a number of other political murder plots. “He was quite possibly the foremost European expert in regicide of his time.”²² One of his close contacts was Colonel Artamonov, the Russian military attaché in Belgrade.

The venerable Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary, Franz Josef, who had come to the throne in 1848, clearly had not much longer to live. His nephew and heir, Franz Ferdinand, was profoundly concerned by the wrenching ethnic problems of the Empire and sought their solution in some great structural reform, either in the direction of federalism for the various national groups, or else “trialism,” the creation of a third, Slavic component of the Empire, along side the Germans and the Magyars. Since such a concession would mean the ruin of any program for a Greater Serbia, Franz Ferdinand was a natural target for assassination by the Black Hand.²³

In the spring of 1914, Serbian nationals who were agents of the Black Hand recruited a team of young Bosnian fanatics for the job. The youths were trained in Belgrade and provided with guns, bombs, guides (also Serbian nationals) to help them cross the border, and cyanide for after their mission was accomplished. Prime Minister Pašić learned of the plot, informed his Cabinet, and made ineffectual attempts to halt it, including conveying a veiled, virtually meaningless warning to an Austrian official in Vienna. (It is also likely that the Russian attaché Artamonov knew of the plot.²⁴) No clear message of the sort that might have prevented the assassination was forwarded to the Austrians. On June 28, 1914, the plot proved a brilliant success, as 19 year old Gavrilo Princip shot and killed Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in the streets of Sarajevo.

In Serbia, Princip was instantly hailed as a hero, as he was also in post-World War I Yugoslavia, where the anniversary of the murders was celebrated as a national and religious holiday. A marble tablet was dedicated at the house in front of which the killings took place. It was inscribed: “On this historic spot, on 28 June 1914, Gavrilo Princip proclaimed freedom.”²⁵ In his history of the First World War, Winston Churchill wrote of Princip that “he died in prison, and a monument erected in recent years by his fellow-countrymen records his infamy, and their own.”²⁶

In Vienna, in that summer of 1914, the prevalent mood was much less Belgrade’s celebration of the deed than Churchill’s angry contempt. This atrocity was the sixth in less than four years and strong evidence of the worsening Serbian danger, leading the Austrians to conclude that the continued existence of an expansionist Serbia posed an unacceptable threat to the Habsburg monarchy. An ultimatum would be drawn up containing demands that Serbia would be compelled to reject, giving Austria an excuse to attack. In the end, Serbia would be destroyed, probably divided up among its neighbors (Austria, which did not care to have more disaffected South Slavs as subjects, would most likely abstain from the partition). Obviously, Russia might choose to intervene. However, this was a risk the Austrians were prepared to take, especially after they received a “blank check” from Kaiser Wilhelm to proceed with whatever measures they thought necessary. In the past, German support of Austria had forced the Russians to back down.

Scholars have now available to them the diary of Kurt Riezler, private secretary to the German Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg. From this and other documents it becomes clear that Bethmann Hollweg’s position in the July crisis was a complex one. If Austria were to vanish as a power, Germany would be threatened by rampant Pan-Slavism supported by growing Russian power in the east and by French revanchism in the west. By prompting the Austrians to attack Serbia immediately, he hoped that the conflict would be localized and the Serbian menace nullified. The Chancellor, too, understood that the Central Powers were risking a continental war. But he believed that if Austria acted swiftly presenting Europe with “a rapid fait accompli,” the war could be confined to the Balkans, and “the intervention of third parties [avoided] as much as possible.” In this way, the German-Austrian alliance could emerge with a stunning political victory that might split the Entente and crack Germany’s “encirclement.”²⁷

But the Austrians procrastinated, and the ultimatum was delivered to Serbia only on July 23. When Sazonov, in St. Petersburg, read it, he burst out: “C’est la guerre européenne!” — “It is the European war!” The Russians felt they could not leave Serbia once again in the lurch, after having failed to prevent the Austrian annexation of Bosnia-Hercegovina or to obtain a seaport for Serbia after the Second Balkan War. Sazonov told a cabinet meeting on July 24 that abandoning Serbia would mean betraying Russia’s “historic mission” as the protector of the South Slavs, and also reduce Russia to the rank of a second-rate power.²⁸

On July 25, the Russian leaders decided to institute what was known in their plans as “The period preparatory to war,” the prelude to all-out mobilization. Directed against both of the Central Powers, this “set in train a whole succession of military measures along the Austrian and German frontiers.”²⁹ Back in the 1920s, Sidney Fay had already cited the testimony of a Serbian military officer, who, in traveling from Germany to Russia on July 28, found no military measures underway on the German side of the border, while in Russian Poland “mobilization steps [were] being taken on a grand scale.” “These secret ‘preparatory measures,’” commented Fay, “enabled Russia, when war came, to surprise the world by the rapidity with which she poured her troops into East Prussia and Galicia.”³⁰ In Paris, too, the military chiefs began taking preliminary steps to general mobilization as early as July 25.³¹

On July 28, Austria declared war on Serbia. The French ambassador in St. Petersburg, Maurice Paléologue, most likely with the support of Poincaré, urged the Russians on to intransigence and general mobilization. In any case, Poincaré had given the Russians their own “blank check” in 1912, when he assured them that “if Germany supported Austria [in the Balkans], France would march.”³² Following the (rather ineffectual) Austrian bombardment of Belgrade, the Tsar was finally persuaded on July 30 to authorize general mobilization, to the delight of the Russian generals (the decree was momentarily reversed, but then confirmed, finally). Nicholas II had no doubt as to what that meant: “Think of what awful responsibility you are advising me to take! Think of the thousands and thousands of men who will be sent to their deaths!”³³ In a very few years the Tsar himself, his family, and his servants would be shot to death by the Bolsheviks.

What had gone wrong? James Joll wrote: “The Austrians had believed that vigorous action against Serbia and a promise of German support would deter Russia; the Russians had believed that a show of strength against Austria would both check the Austrians and deter Germany. In both cases, the bluff had been called.”³⁴ Russia — and, through its support of Russia, France — as well as Austria and Germany, was quite willing to risk war in July, 1914.

As the conflict appeared more and more inevitable, in all the capitals the generals clamored for their contingency plans to be put into play. The best-known was the Schlieffen Plan, drawn up some years before, which governed German strategy in case of a two-front war. It called for concentrating forces against France for a quick victory in the west, and then transporting the bulk of the army to the eastern front via the excellent German railway system, to meet and vanquish the slow-moving (it was assumed) Russians. Faced with Russian mobilization and the evident intention of attacking Austria, the Germans activated the Schlieffen Plan. It was, as Sazonov had cried out, the European War.³⁵

On July 31, the French cabinet, acceding to the demand of the head of the army, General Joffre, authorized general mobilization. The next day, the German ambassador to St. Petersburg, Portalès, called on the Russian Foreign Minister. After asking him four times whether Russia would cancel mobilization and receiving each time a negative reply, Portalès presented Sazonov with Germany’s declaration of war. The German ultimatum to France was a formality. On August 3, Germany declared war on France as well.³⁶

The question of “war-guilt” has been endlessly agitated.³⁷ It can be stated with assurance that Fischer and his followers have in no way proven their case. That, for instance, Helmut Moltke, head of the German Army, like Conrad, his counterpart in Vienna, pressed for a preventive war has long been known. But both military chieftains were kept in check by their superiors. In any case, there is no evidence whatsoever that Germany in 1914 deliberately unleashed a European war which it had been preparing for years — no evidence in the diplomatic and internal political documents, in the military planning, in the activities of the intelligence agencies, or in the relations between the German and Austrian General Staffs.³⁸

Karl Dietrich Erdmann, put the issue well:

Peace could have been preserved in 1914, had Berchtold, Sazonov, Bethmann-Hollweg, Poincaré, [British Foreign Secretary] Grey, or one of the governments concerned, so sincerely wanted it that they were willing to sacrifice certain political ideas, traditions, and conceptions, which were not their own personal ones, but those of their peoples and their times.³⁹

This sober judgment throws light on the faulty assumptions of sympathizers with the Fischer approach. John W. Langdon, for instance, concedes that any Russian mobilization “would have required an escalatory response from Germany.” He adds, however, that to expect Russia not to mobilize “when faced with an apparent Austrian determination to undermine Serbian sovereignty and alter the Balkan power balance was to expect the impossible.” Thus, Langdon exculpates Russia because Austria “seemed bent on a course of action clearly opposed to Russian interests in eastern Europe.”⁴⁰ True enough — but Russia “seemed bent” on using Serbia to oppose Austrian interests (the Austrian interest in survival), and France “seemed bent” on giving full support to Russia, and so on. This is what historians meant when they spoke of shared responsibility for the onset of the First World War.

Britain still has to be accounted for. With the climax of the crisis, Prime Minister Asquith and Foreign Secretary Edward Grey were in a quandary. While the Entente cordiale was not a formal alliance, secret military conversations between the general staffs of the two nations had created certain expectations and even definite obligations. Yet, aside from high military circles and, of course, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, no one in Britain was rabid for war. Luckily for the British leaders, the Germans came to their rescue. The success of the attack on France that was the linchpin of the Schlieffen Plan depended above all on speed. This could only be achieved, it was thought, by infringing the neutrality of Belgium. “The obligation to defend Belgian neutrality was incumbent on all the signatories to the 1839 treaty acting collectively, and this had been the view adopted by the [British] cabinet only a few days previously. But now Britain presented itself as Belgium’s sole guarantor” (emphasis added).⁴¹ Ignoring (or perhaps ignorant of) the crucial precondition of collective action among the guarantors, and with the felicity of expression customary among German statesmen of his time, Bethmann Hollweg labeled the Belgian neutrality treaty “a scrap of paper.”⁴² Grey, addressing the House of Commons, referred to the invasion of Belgium as “the direst crime that ever stained the pages of history.”⁴³

The violation of non-belligerent Belgium’s territory, though deplorable, was scarcely unprecedented in the annals of great powers. In 1807, units of the British navy entered Copenhagen harbor, bombarded the city, and seized the Danish fleet. At the time, Britain was at peace with Denmark, which was a neutral in the Napoleonic wars. The British claimed that Napoleon was about to invade Denmark and seize the fleet himself. As they explained in a manifesto to the people of Copenhagen, Britain was acting not only for its own survival but for the freedom of all peoples.

As the German navy grew in strength, calls were heard in Britain “to Copenhagen” the German fleet, from Sir John Fischer, First Sea Lord, and even from Arthur Lee, First Lord of the Admiralty. They were rejected, and England took the path of outbuilding the Germans in the naval arms race. But the willingness of high British authorities to act without scruple on behalf of perceived vital national interests did not go unnoticed in Germany.⁴⁴ When the time came, the Germans acted harshly towards neutral Belgium, though sparing the Belgians lectures on the freedom of mankind. Ironically, by 1916, the King of Greece was protesting the seizure of Greek territories by the Allies; like Belgium, the neutrality of Corfu had been guaranteed by the powers. His protests went unheeded.⁴⁵

The invasion of Belgium was merely a pretext for London.⁴⁶ This was clear to John Morley, as he witnessed the machinations of Grey and the war party in the Cabinet. In the last act of authentic English liberalism, Lord Morley, biographer of Cobden and Gladstone and author of the tract, On Compromise, upholding moral principles in politics, handed in his resignation.⁴⁷

Britain’s entry into the war was crucial. In more ways than one, it sealed the fate of the Central Powers. Without Britain in the war, the United States would never have gone in.

WOODROW WILSON AND HIS “SECOND PERSONALITY”

Wherever blame for the war might lie, for the immense majority of Americans in 1914 it was just another of the European horrors from which our policy of neutrality, set forth by the Founding Fathers of the Republic, had kept us free. Pašić, Sazonov, Conrad, Poincaré, Moltke, Edward Grey, and the rest — these were the men our Fathers had warned us against. No conceivable outcome of the war could threaten an invasion of our vast and solid continental base. We should thank a merciful Providence, which gave us this blessed land and impregnable fortress, that America, at least, would not be drawn into the senseless butchery of the Old World. That was unthinkable.

However, in 1914 the President of the United States was Thomas Woodrow Wilson.

The term most frequently applied to Woodrow Wilson nowadays is “idealist.” In contrast, the expression “power-hungry” is rarely used. Yet a scholar not unfriendly to him has written of Wilson that “he loved, craved, and in a sense glorified power.” Musing on the character of the U.S. government while he was still an academic, Wilson wrote: “I cannot imagine power as a thing negative and not positive.”⁴⁸ Even before he entered politics, he was fascinated by the power of the Presidency and how it could be augmented by meddling in foreign affairs and dominating overseas territories. The war with Spain and the American acquisition of colonies in the Caribbean and across the Pacific were welcomed by Wilson as productive of salutary changes in our federal system. “The plunge into international politics and into the administration of distant dependencies” had already resulted in “the greatly increased power and opportunity for constructive statesmanship given the President.”

When foreign affairs play a prominent part in the politics and policy of a nation, its Executive must of necessity be its guide: must utter every initial judgment, take every first step of action, supply the information upon which it is to act, suggest and in large measure control its conduct. The President of the United States is now [in 1900], as of course, at the front of affairs.... There is no trouble now about getting the President’s speeches printed and read, every word.... The government of dependencies must be largely in his hands. Interesting things may come of this singular change.

Wilson looked forward to an enduring “new leadership of the Executive,” with even the heads of Cabinet departments exercising “a new influence upon the action of Congress.”⁴⁹

In large part Wilson’s reputation as an idealist is traceable to his incessantly professed love of peace. Yet as soon as he became President, prior to leading the country into the First World War, his actions in Latin America were anything but pacific. Even Arthur S. Link (whom Walter Karp referred to as the keeper of the Wilsonian flame) wrote, of Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean: “the years from 1913 to 1921 [Wilson’s years in office] witnessed intervention by the State Department and the navy on a scale that had never before been contemplated, even by such alleged imperialists as Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.” The protectorate extended over Nicaragua, the military occupation of the Dominican Republic, the invasion and subjugation of Haiti (which cost the lives of some 2,000 Haitians) were landmarks of Wilson’s policy.⁵⁰ All was enveloped in the haze of his patented rhetoric of freedom, democracy, and the rights of small nations. The Pan-American Pact which Wilson proposed to our southern neighbors guaranteed the “territorial integrity and political independence” of all the signatories. Considering Wilson’s persistent interference in the affairs of Mexico and other Latin states, this was hypocrisy in the grand style.⁵¹

The most egregious example of Wilson’s bellicose interventionism before the European war was in Mexico. Here his attempt to manipulate the course of a civil war lead to the fiascoes of Tampico and Vera Cruz.

In April, 1914, a group of American sailors landed their ship in Tampico without permission of the authorities and were arrested. As soon as the Mexican commander heard of the incident, he had the Americans released and sent a personal apology. That would have been the end of the affair “had not the Washington administration been looking for an excuse to provoke a fight,” in order to benefit the side Wilson favored in the civil war. The American admiral in charge demanded from the Mexicans a twenty-one gun salute to the American flag; Washington backed him up, issuing an ultimatum insisting on the salute, on pain of dire consequences. Naval units were ordered to seize Vera Cruz. The Mexicans resisted, 126 Mexicans were killed, close to 200 wounded (according to the U.S. figures), and, on the American side, 19 were killed and 71 wounded. In Washington, plans were being made for a full-scale war against Mexico, where in the meantime both sides in the civil war denounced Yanqui aggression. Finally, mediation was accepted; in the end, Wilson lost his bid to control Mexican politics.⁵²

Two weeks before the assassination of the Archduke, Wilson delivered an address on Flag Day. His remarks did not bode well for American abstention in the coming war. Asking what the flag would stand for in the future, Wilson replied: “for the just use of undisputed national power... for self-possession, for dignity, for the assertion of the right of one nation to serve the other nations of the world.” As President, he would “assert the rights of mankind wherever this flag is unfurled.”⁵³

Wilson’s alter ego, a major figure in bringing the United States into the European War, was Edward Mandell House. House, who bore the honorific title of “Colonel,” was regarded as something of a “Man of Mystery” by his contemporaries. Never elected to public office, he nonetheless became the second most powerful man in the country in domestic and especially foreign affairs until virtually the end of Wilson’s administration. House began as a businessman in Texas, rose to leadership in the Democratic politics of that state, and then on the national stage. In 1911, he attached himself to Wilson, then Governor of New Jersey and an aspiring candidate for President. The two became the closest of collaborators, Wilson going so far as to make the bizarre public statement that: “Mr. House is my second personality. He is my independent self. His thoughts and mine are one.”⁵⁴

Light is cast on the mentality of this “man of mystery” by a futuristic political novel House published in 1912, Philip Dru: Administrator. It is a work that contains odd anticipations of the role the Colonel would help Wilson play.⁵⁵ In this peculiar production, the title hero leads a crusade to overthrow the reactionary and oppressive money-power that rules the United States. Dru is a veritable messiah-figure: “He comes panoplied in justice and with the light of reason in his eyes. He comes as the advocate of equal opportunity and he comes with the power to enforce his will.” Assembling a great army, Dru confronts the massed forces of evil in a titanic battle (close to Buffalo, New York): “human liberty has never more surely hung upon the outcome of any conflict than it does upon this.” Naturally, Dru triumphs, and becomes “the Administrator of the Republic,” assuming “the powers of a dictator.” So unquestionably pure is his cause that any attempt to “foster” the reactionary policies of the previous government “would be considered seditious and would be punished by death.” Besides fashioning a new Constitution for the United States and creating a welfare state, Dru joins with leaders of the other great powers to remake the world order, bringing freedom, peace, and justice to all mankind.⁵⁶ A peculiar production, suggestive of a very peculiar man, the second most important man in the country.

Wilson utilized House as his personal confidant, advisor, and emissary, bypassing his own appointed and congressionally scrutinized officials. It was somewhat similar to the position that Harry Hopkins would fill for Franklin Roosevelt some twenty years later.

When the war broke out, Wilson implored his fellow-citizens to remain neutral even in word and thought. This was somewhat disingenuous, considering that his whole administration, except for the poor baffled Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, was pro-Allied from the start. The President and most of his chief subordinates were dyed-in-the-wool Anglophiles. Love of England and all things English was an intrinsic part of their sense of identity. With England threatened, even the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Edward D. White, voiced the impulse to leave for Canada to volunteer for the British armed forces. By September 1914, the British ambassador in Washington, Cecil Spring-Rice, was able to assure Edward Grey, that Wilson had an “understanding heart” for England’s problems and difficult position.⁵⁷

This ingrained bias of the American political class and social elite was galvanized by British propaganda. On August 5, 1914, the Royal Navy cut the cables linking the United States and Germany. Now news for America had to be funneled through London, where the censors shaped and trimmed reports for the benefit of their government. Eventually, the British propaganda apparatus in the First World War became the greatest the world had seen to that time; later it was a model for the Nazi Propaganda Minster Josef Goebbels. Philip Knightley noted:

British efforts to bring the United States into the war on the Allied side penetrated every phase of American life.... It was one of the major propaganda efforts of history, and it was conducted so well and so secretly that little about it emerged until the eve of the Second World War, and the full story is yet to be told.

Already in the first weeks of the war, stories were spread of the ghastly “atrocities” the Germans were committing in Belgium.⁵⁸ But the Hun, in the view of American supporters of England’s cause, was to show his most hideous face at sea.

AMERICA GOES TO WAR

With the onset of war in Europe, hostilities began in the North Atlantic which eventually provided the context — or rather, pretext — for America’s participation. Immediately, questions of the rights of neutrals and belligerents leapt to the fore.

In 1909, an international conference had produced the Declaration of London, a statement of international law as it applied to war at sea. Since it was not ratified by all the signatories, the Declaration never came into effect. However, once war started the United States inquired whether the belligerents were willing to abide by its stipulations. The Central Powers agreed, providing the Entente did the same. The British agreed, with certain modifications, which effectively negated the Declaration.⁵⁹ British “modifications” included adding a large number of previously “free” items to the “conditional” contraband list and changing the status of key raw materials — most important of all, food — to “absolute” contraband, allegedly because they could be used by the German army.

The traditional understanding of international law on this point was expounded a decade and a half earlier by the British Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury:

Foodstuffs, with a hostile destination, can be considered contraband of war only if they are supplies for the enemy’s forces. It is not sufficient that they are capable of being so used; it must be shown that this was in fact their destination at the time of the seizure.⁶⁰

That had also been the historical position of the U.S. government. But in 1914 the British claimed the right to capture food as well as other previously “conditional contraband” destined not only for hostile but even for neutral ports, on the pretense that they would ultimately reach Germany and thus the German army. In reality, the aim was, as Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty candidly admitted, to “starve the whole population — men, women, and children, old and young, wounded and sound — into submission.”⁶¹

Britain now assumed “practically complete control over all neutral trade,” in “flat violation of international laws.”⁶² A strong protest was prepared by State Department lawyers but never sent. Instead, Colonel House and Spring-Rice, the British Ambassador, conferred and came up with an alternative. Denying that the new note was even a “formal protest,” the United States politely requested that London reconsider its policy. The British expressed their appreciation for the American viewpoint, and quietly resolved to continue with their violations.⁶³

In November, 1914, the British Admiralty announced, supposedly in response to the discovery of a German ship unloading mines off the English coast, that henceforth the whole of the North Sea was a “military area,” or war zone, which would be mined, and into which neutral ships proceeded “at their own risk.” The British action was in blatant contravention of international law—including the Declaration of Paris, of 1856, which Britain had signed—among other reasons, because it conspicuously failed to meet the criteria for a legal blockade.⁶⁴

The British moves meant that American commerce with Germany was effectively ended, as the United States became the arsenal of the Entente. Bound now by financial as well as sentimental ties to England, much of American big business worked in one way or another for the Allied cause. The House of J. P. Morgan, which volunteered itself as coordinator of supplies for Britain, consulted regularly with the Wilson administration in its financial operations for the Entente. The Wall Street Journal and other organs of the business elite were noisily pro-British at every turn, until we were finally brought into the European fray.⁶⁵

The United States refused to join the Scandinavian neutrals in objecting to the closing of the North Sea, nor did it send a protest of its own.⁶⁶ However, when, in February, 1915, Germany declared the waters around the British Isles a war zone, in which enemy merchant ships were liable to be destroyed, Berlin was put on notice: if any American vessels or American lives should be lost through U-boat action, Germany would be held to a “strict accountability.”⁶⁷

In March, a British steamship, Falaba, carrying munitions and passengers, was torpedoed, resulting in the death of one American, among others. The ensuing note to Berlin entrenched Wilson’s preposterous doctrine — that the United States had the right and duty to protect Americans sailing on ships flying a belligerent flag. Later, John Bassett Moore, for over thirty years professor of international law at Columbia, long-time member of the Hague Tribunal, and, after the war, a judge at the International Court of Justice, stated of this and of an equally absurd Wilsonian principle:

what most decisively contributed to the involvement of the United States in the war was the assertion of a right to protect belligerent ships on which Americans saw fit to travel and the treatment of armed belligerent merchantmen as peaceful vessels. Both assumptions were contrary to reason and to settled law, and no other professed neutral advanced them.⁶⁸

Wilson had placed America on a direct collision course with Germany.

On May 7, 1915, came the most famous incident in the North Atlantic war. The British liner Lusitania was sunk, with the loss of 1,195 lives, including 124 Americans, by far the largest number of American victims of German submarines before our entry into the war.⁶⁹ There was outrage in the eastern seaboard press and throughout the American social elite and political class. Wilson was livid. A note was fired off to Berlin, reiterating the principle of “strict accountability,” and concluding, ominously, that Germany

will not expect the Government of the United States to omit any word or any act necessary to the performance of its sacred duty of maintaining the rights of the United States and its citizens and of safeguarding their free exercise and enjoyment.⁷⁰

At this time, the British released the Bryce Report on Belgian atrocities. A work of raw Entente propaganda, though profiting from the name of the distinguished English writer, the Report underscored the true nature of the unspeakable Hun.⁷¹ Anglophiles everywhere were enraged. The Republican Party establishment raised the ante on Wilson, demanding firmer action. The great majority of Americans, who devoutly wished to avoid war, had no spokesmen within the leadership of either of the major parties. America was beginning to reap the benefits of our divinely appointed “bipartisan foreign policy.”

In their reply to the State Department note, the Germans observed that submarine warfare was a reprisal for the illegal hunger blockade; that the Lusitania was carrying munitions of war; that it was registered as an auxiliary cruiser of the British Navy; that British merchant ships had been directed to ram or fire upon surfacing U-boats; and that the Lusitania had been armed.⁷²

Wilson’s Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, tried to reason with the President: “Germany has a right to prevent contraband going to the Allies, and a ship carrying contraband should not rely upon passengers to protect her from attack—it would be like putting women and children in front of an army.” He reminded Wilson that a proposed American compromise, whereby Britain would allow food into Germany and the Germans would abandon submarine attacks on merchant ships, had been welcomed by Germany but rejected by England. Finally, Bryan blurted out: “Why be shocked by the drowning of a few people, if there is to be no objection to starving a nation?”⁷³ In June, convinced that the Administration was headed for war, Bryan resigned.⁷⁴

The British blockade was taking a heavy toll, and in February, 1916, Germany announced that enemy merchant ships, except passenger liners, would be treated as auxiliary cruisers, liable to be attacked without warning. The State Department countered with a declaration that, in the absence of “conclusive evidence of aggressive purpose” in each individual case, armed belligerent merchant ships enjoyed all the immunities of peaceful vessels.⁷⁵ Wilson rejected Congressional calls at least to issue a warning to Americans traveling on armed merchant ships that they did so at their own risk. During the Mexican civil war, he had cautioned Americans against traveling in Mexico.⁷⁶ But now Wilson stubbornly refused.

Attention shifted to the sea war once more when a French passenger ship, the Sussex, bearing no flag or markings, was sunk by a U-boat, and several Americans injured. A harsh American protest elicited the so-called Sussex pledge from a German government anxious to avoid a break: Germany would cease attacking without warning enemy merchant ships found in the war zone. This was made explicitly conditioned, however, on the presumption that “the Government of the United States will now demand and insist that the British Government shall forthwith observe the rules of international law.” In turn, Washington curtly informed the Germans that their own responsibility was “absolute,” in no way contingent on the conduct of any other power.⁷⁷ As Borchard and Lage commented:

This persistent refusal of President Wilson to see that there was a relation between the British irregularities and the German submarine warfare is probably the crux of the American involvement. The position taken is obviously unsustainable, for it is a neutral’s duty to hold the scales even and to favor neither side.⁷⁸

But in reality, the American leaders were anything but neutral.

Anglophile does not begin to describe our ambassador to London, Walter Hines Page, who, in his abject eagerness to please his hosts, displayed all the qualities of a good English spaniel. Afterwards, Edward Grey wrote of Page: “From the first he considered that the United States could be brought into the war early on the side of the Allies if the issue were rightly presented to it and a great appeal made by the President.” “Page’s advice and suggestion were of the greatest value in warning us when to be careful or encouraging us when we could safely be firm.” Grey recalled in particular one incident, when Washington contested the right of the Royal Navy to stop American shipments to neutral ports. Page came to him with the message. “‘I am instructed,’ he said, ‘to read this despatch to you.’ He read and I listened. He then added: ‘I have now read the despatch, but I do not agree with it; let us consider how it should be answered.’” Grey, of course, regarded Page’s conduct as “the highest type of patriotism.”⁷⁹

Page’s attitude was not out of place among his superiors in Washington. In his memoirs, Bryan’s successor as Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, described how, after the Lusitania episode, Britain “continued her policy of tightening the blockade and closing every possible channel by which articles could find their way to Germany,” committing ever more flagrant violations of our neutral rights. In response to State Department notes questioning these policies, the British never gave the slightest satisfaction. They knew they didn’t have to. For, as Lansing confessed:

in dealing with the British Government there was always in my mind the conviction that we would ultimately become an ally of Great Britain and that it would not do, therefore, to let our controversies reach a point where diplomatic correspondence gave place to action.

Once joining the British, “we would presumably wish to adopt some of the policies and practices, which the British adopted,” for then we, too, would be aiming to “destroy the morale of the German people by an economic isolation, which would cause them to lack the very necessaries of life.” With astounding candor, Lansing disclosed that the years-long exchange of notes with Britain had been a sham:

everything was submerged in verbiage. It was done with deliberate purpose. It insured the continuance of the controversies and left the questions unsettled, which was necessary in order to leave this country free to act and even act illegally when it entered the war.⁸⁰

Colonel House, too, was distinctly unneutral. Breaking with all previous American practice, as well as with international law, House maintained that it was the character of the foreign government that must decide which belligerent a “neutral” United States should favor. When in September, 1914, the Austrian ambassador complained to House about the British attempt to starve the peoples of Central Europe—“Germany faces famine if the war continues” — House smugly reported the interview to Wilson: “He forgot to add that England is not exercising her power in an objectionable way, for it is controlled by a democracy.”⁸¹

In their President, Page, Lansing, and House found a man whose heart beat as theirs. Wilson confided to his private secretary his deep belief: “England is fighting our fight and you may well understand that I shall not, in the present state of the world’s affairs, place obstacles in her way.... I will not take any action to embarrass England when she is fighting for her life and the life of the world.”⁸²

Meanwhile, Colonel House had discovered a means to put the impending American entry into war to good use—by furthering the cause of democracy and “turning the world into the right paths.” The author of Philip Dru: Administrator revealed his vision to the President who “knew that God had chosen him to do great things.”⁸³ The ordeal by fire would be a hard one, but “no matter what sacrifices we make, the end will justify them.” After this final battle against the forces of reaction, the United States would join with other democracies to uphold the peace of the world and freedom on both land and sea, forever. To Wilson, House spoke words of seduction: “This is the part I think you are destined to play in this world tragedy, and it is the noblest part that has ever come to a son of man. This country will follow you along such a path, no matter what the cost may be.”⁸⁴

As the British leaders had planned and hoped, the Germans were starving. On January 31, 1917, Germany announced that the next day it would begin unrestricted submarine warfare. Wilson was stunned, but it is difficult to see why. This is what the Germans had been implicitly threatening for years, if nothing was done to end the illegal British blockade.

The United States severed diplomatic relations with Berlin. The President decided that American merchant ships were to be armed and defended by American sailors, thus placing munitions and other contraband sailing to Britain under the protection of the U.S. Navy. When eleven Senators, headed by Robert La Follette, filibustered the authorization bill, a livid Wilson denounced them: “A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great Government of the United States helpless and contemptible.” Wilson hesitated to act, however, well aware that the defiant Senators represented far more than just themselves.

There were troubling reports—from the standpoint of the war party in Washington—like that from William Durant, head of General Motors. Durant telephoned Colonel House, entreating him to stop the rush to war; he had just returned from the West and met only one man between New York and California who wanted war.⁸⁵ But opinion began to shift and gave Wilson the opening he needed. A telegram, sent by Alfred Zimmermann of the German Foreign Office to the Mexican government, had been intercepted by British intelligence and forwarded to Washington. Zimmermann proposed a military alliance with Mexico in case war broke out between the United States and Germany. Mexico was promised the American Southwest, including Texas. The telegram was released to the press.

For the first time backed by popular feeling, Wilson authorized the arming of American merchant ships. In mid-March, a number of freighters entering the declared submarine zone were sunk, and the President called Congress into special session for April 2.

Given his war speech, Woodrow Wilson may be seen as the anti-Washington. George Washington, in his Farewell Address, advised that “the great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible” (emphasis in original). Wilson was also the anti-John Quincy Adams. Adams, author of the Monroe Doctrine, declared that the United States of America “does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” Discarding this whole tradition, Wilson put forward the vision of an America that was entangled in countless political connections with foreign powers and on perpetual patrol for monsters to destroy. Our purpose in going to war was

to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples, the German people included: for the rights of nations great and small and the privilege of men everywhere to choose their way of life and of obedience. The world must be made safe for democracy... [we fight] for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world at last free.⁸⁶

Wilson was answered in the Senate by Robert La Follette, and in the House by the Democratic leader Claude Kitchin, to no avail.⁸⁷ In Congress, near-hysteria reigned, as both chambers approved the declaration of war by wide margins. The political class and its associates in the press, the universities, and the pulpits ardently seconded the plunge into world war and the abandonment of the America that was. As for the population at large, it acquiesced, as one historian has remarked, out of general boredom with peace, the habit of obedience to its rulers, and a highly unrealistic notion of the consequences of America’s taking up arms.⁸⁸

Three times in his war message, Wilson referred to the need to fight without passion or vindictiveness—rather a professor’s idea of what waging war entailed. The reality for America would be quite different.

THE WAR ON THE HOME FRONT

The changes wrought in America during the First World War were so profound that one scholar has referred to “the Wilsonian Revolution in government.”⁸⁹ Like other revolutions, it was preceded by an intellectual transformation, as the philosophy of progressivism came to dominate political discourse.⁹⁰ Progressive notions—of the obsolescence of laissez-faire and of constitutionally limited government, the urgent need to “organize” society “scientifically,” and the superiority of the collective over the individual—were propagated by the most influential sector of the intelligentsia and began to make inroads in the nation’s political life.

As the war furnished Lenin with otherwise unavailable opportunities for realizing his program, so too, on a more modest level, it opened up prospects for American progressives that could never have existed in peacetime. The coterie of intellectuals around The New Republic discovered a heaven-sent chance to advance their agenda. John Dewey praised the “immense impetus to reorganization afforded by this war,” while Walter Lippmann wrote: “We can dare to hope for things which we never dared to hope for in the past.” The magazine itself rejoiced in the war’s possibilities for broadening “social control... subordinating the individual to the group and the group to society,” and advocated that the war be used “as a pretext to foist innovations upon the country.”⁹¹

Woodrow Wilson’s readiness to cast off traditional restraints on government power greatly facilitated the “foisting” of such “innovations.” The result was a shrinking of American freedoms unrivaled since at least the War Between the States.

It is customary to distinguish “economic liberties” from “civil liberties.” But since all rights are rooted in the right to property, starting with the basic right to self-ownership, this distinction is in the last analysis an artificial one.⁹² It is maintained here, however, for purposes of exposition.

As regards the economy, Robert Higgs, in his seminal work, Crisis and Leviathan, demonstrated the unprecedented changes in this period, amounting to an American version of Imperial Germany’s Kriegssozialismus. Even before we entered the war, Congress passed the National Defense Act. It gave the President the authority, in time of war “or when war is imminent,” to place orders with private firms which would “take precedence over all other orders and contracts.” If the manufacturer refused to fill the order at a “reasonable price as determined by the Secretary of War,” the government was “authorized to take immediate possession of any such plant [and]... to manufacture therein... such product or material as may be required”; the private owner, meanwhile, would be “deemed guilty of a felony.”⁹³

Once war was declared, state power grew at a dizzying pace. The Lever Act alone put Washington in charge of the production and distribution of all food and fuel in the United States.

By the time of the armistice, the government had taken over the ocean-shipping, railroad, telephone, and telegraph industries; commandeered hundreds of manufacturing plants; entered into massive enterprises on its own account in such varied departments as shipbuilding, wheat trading, and building construction; undertaken to lend huge sums to business directly or indirectly and to regulate the private issuance of securities; established official priorities for the use of transportation facilities, food, fuel, and many raw materials; fixed the prices of dozens of important commodities; intervened in hundreds of labor disputes; and conscripted millions of men for service in the armed forces.

Fatuously, Wilson conceded that the powers granted him “are very great, indeed, but they are no greater than it has proved necessary to lodge in the other Governments which are conducting this momentous war.”⁹⁴ So, according to the President, the United States was simply following the lead of the Old World nations in leaping into war socialism.

Throngs of novice bureaucrats eager to staff the new agencies overran Washington. Many of them came from the progressive intelligentsia. “Never before had so many intellectuals and academicians swarmed into government to help plan, regulate, and mobilize the economic system” — among them Rexford Tugwell, later the key figure in the New Deal Brain Trust.⁹⁵ Others who volunteered from the business sector harbored views no different from the statism of the professors. Bernard Baruch, Wall Street financier and now head of the War Industries Board, held that the free market was characterized by anarchy, confusion, and wild fluctuations. Baruch stressed the crucial distinction between consumer wants and consumer needs, making it clear who was authorized to decide which was which. When price controls in agriculture produced their inevitable distortions, Herbert Hoover, formerly a successful engineer and now food administrator of the United States, urged Wilson to institute overall price controls: “The only acceptable remedy [is] a general price-fixing power in yourself or in the Federal Trade Commission.” Wilson submitted the appropriate legislation to Congress, which, however, rejected it.⁹⁶

Ratification of the Income Tax Amendment in 1913 paved the way for a massive increase in taxation once America entered the war. Taxes for the lowest bracket tripled, from 2 to 6 per cent, while for the highest bracket they went from a maximum of 13 per cent to 77 per cent. In 1916, less than half a million tax returns had been filed; in 1917, the number was nearly three and half million, a figure which doubled by 1920. This was in addition to increases in other federal taxes. Federal tax receipts “would never again be less than a sum five times greater than prewar levels.”⁹⁷

But even huge tax increases were not nearly enough to cover the costs of the war. Through the recently established Federal Reserve system, the government created new money to finance its stunning deficits, which by 1918 reached a billion dollars a month — more than the total annual federal budget before the war. The debt, which had been less than $1 billion in 1915, rose to $25 billion in 1919. The number of civilian federal employees more than doubled, from 1916 to 1918, to 450,000. After the war, two-thirds of the new jobs were eliminated, leaving a “permanent net gain of 141,000 employees —a 30 per cent ‘rachet’ effect.’ ”⁹⁸

Readers who might expect that such a colossal extension of state control provoked a fierce resistance from heroic leaders of big business will be sorely disappointed. Instead, businessmen welcomed government intrusions, which brought them guaranteed profits, a “riskless capitalism.” Many were particularly happy with the War Finance Corporation, which provided loans for businesses deemed essential to the war effort. On the labor front, the government threw its weight behind union organizing and compulsory collective bargaining. In part, this was a reward to Samuel Gompers for his territorial fight against the nefarious IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World, which had ventured to condemn the war on behalf of the working people of the country.⁹⁹

Of the First World War, Murray Rothbard wrote that it was “the critical watershed for the American business system... [a war-collectivism was established] which served as the model, the precedent, and the inspiration for state corporate capitalism for the remainder of the century.”¹⁰⁰ Many of the administrators and principal functionaries of the new agencies and bureaus reappeared a decade and a half latter, when another crisis evoked another great surge of government activism. It should also not be forgotten that Franklin Roosevelt himself was present in Washington, as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, an eager participant in the Wilsonian revolution.

The permanent effect of the war on the mentality of the American people, once famous for their devotion to private enterprise, was summed up by Jonathan Hughes:

The direct legacy of war—the dead, the debt, the inflation, the change in economic and social structure that comes from immense transfers of resources by taxation and money creation—these things are all obvious. What has not been so obvious has been the pervasive yet subtle change in our increasing acceptance of federal nonmarket control, and even our enthusiasm for it, as a result of the experience of war.¹⁰¹

Civil liberties fared no better in this war to make the world safe for democracy. In fact, “democracy” was already beginning to mean what it means today—the right of a government legitimized by formal majoritarian processes to dispose at will of the lives, liberty, and property of its subjects. Wilson sounded the keynote for the ruthless suppression of anyone who interfered with his war effort: “Woe be to the man or group of men that seeks to stand in our way in this day of high resolution.” His Attorney General Thomas W Gregory seconded the President, stating, of opponents of the war: “May God have mercy on them, for they need expect none from an outraged people and an avenging government.”¹⁰²

The Espionage Act of 1917, amended the next year by the addition of the Sedition Act, went far beyond punishing spies. Its real target was opinion. It was deployed particularly against socialists and critics of conscription.¹⁰³ People were jailed for questioning the constitutionality of the draft and arrested for criticizing the Red Cross. A woman was prosecuted and convicted for telling a women’s group that “the government is for the profiteers.” A movie producer was sentenced to three years in prison for a film, The Spirit of ‘76, which was deemed anti-British. Eugene V. Debs, who had polled 900,000 votes in 1912 as presidential candidate of the Socialist Party, was sentenced to ten years in prison for criticizing the war at a rally of his party. Vigilantes attacked and on at least one occasion lynched anti-war dissenters. Citizens of German descent and even Lutheran ministers were harassed and spied on by their neighbors as well as by government agents.

The New York Times, then as now the mouthpiece of the powers that be, goaded the authorities to “make short work” of IWW “conspirators” who opposed the war, just as the same paper applauded Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia, for “doing his duty” in dismissing faculty members who opposed conscription. The public schools and the universities were turned into conduits for the government line. Postmaster General Albert Burleson censored and prohibited the circulation of newspapers critical of Wilson, the conduct of the war, or the Allies.¹⁰⁴ The nation-wide campaign of repression was spurred on by the Committee on Public Information, headed by George Creel, the U.S. government’s first propaganda agency.

In the cases that reached the Supreme Court the prosecution of dissenters was upheld. It was the great liberal, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who wrote the majority decision confirming the conviction of a man who had questioned the constitutionality of the draft, as he did also in 1919, in the case of Debs, for his antiwar speech.¹⁰⁵ In the Second World War, the Supreme Court of the United States could not, for the life of it, discover anything in the Constitution that might prohibit the rounding up, transportation to the interior, and incarceration of American citizens simply because they were of Japanese descent. In the same way, the Justices, with Holmes leading the pack, now delivered up the civil liberties of the American people to Wilson and his lieutenants.¹⁰⁶ Again, precedents were established that would further undermine the people’s rights in the future. In the words of Bruce Porter: “Though much of the apparatus of wartime repression was dismantled after 1918, World War I left an altered balance of power between state and society that made future assertions of state sovereignty more feasible — beginning with the New Deal.”¹⁰⁷

We have all been made very familiar with the episode known as “McCarthyism,” which, however, affected relatively few persons, many of whom were, in fact, Stalinists. Still, this alleged time of terror is endlessly rehashed in schools and media. In contrast, few even among educated Americans have ever heard of the shredding of civil liberties under Wilson’s regime, which was far more intense and affected tens of thousands.

The worst and most obvious infringement of individual rights was conscription. Some wondered why, in the grand crusade against militarism, we were adopting the very emblem of militarism. The Speaker of the House Champ Clark (D-Mo.) remarked that “in the estimation of Missourians there is precious little difference between a conscript and a convict.” The problem was that, while Congress had voted for Wilson’s war, young American males voted with their feet against it. In the first ten days after the war declaration, only 4,355 men enlisted; in the next weeks, the War Department procured only one-sixth of the men required. Yet Wilson’s program demanded that we ship a great army to France, so that American troops were sufficiently “blooded.” Otherwise, at the end the President would lack the credentials to play his providential role among the victorious leaders. Ever the deceiver and self-deceiver, Wilson declared that the draft was “in no sense a conscription of the unwilling; it is, rather, selection from a nation which has volunteered in mass.”¹⁰⁸

Wilson, lover of peace and enemy of militarism and autocracy, had no intention of relinquishing the gains in state power once the war was over. He proposed post-war military training for all 18 and 19 year old males and the creation of a great army and a navy equal to Britain’s, and called for a peacetime sedition act.¹⁰⁹

Two final episodes, one foreign and one domestic, epitomize the statecraft of Woodrow Wilson.

At the new League of Nations, there was pressure for a U.S. “mandate” (colony) in Armenia, in the Caucasus. The idea appealed to Wilson; Armenia was exactly the sort of “distant dependency” which he had prized twenty years earlier, as conducive to “the greatly increased power” of the President. He sent a secret military mission to scout out the territory. But its report was equivocal, warning that such a mandate would place us in the middle of a centuries-old battleground of imperialism and war, and lead to serious complications with the new regime in Russia. The report was not released. Instead, in May 1920, Wilson requested authority from Congress to establish the mandate, but was turned down.¹¹⁰ It is interesting to contemplate the likely consequences of our Armenian mandate, comparable to the joy Britain had from its mandate in Palestine, only with constant friction and probable war with Soviet Russia thrown in.

In 1920, the United States — Wilson’s United States — was the only nation involved in the World War that still refused a general amnesty to political prisoners.¹¹¹ The most famous political prisoner in the country was the Socialist leader Eugene Debs. In June, 1918, Debs had addressed a Socialist gathering in Canton, Ohio, where he pilloried the war and the U.S. government. There was no call to violence, nor did any violence ensue. A government stenographer took down the speech, and turned in a report to the federal authorities in Cleveland. Debs was indicted under the Sedition Act, tried, and condemned to ten years in federal prison.

In January, 1921, Debs was ailing and many feared for his life. Amazingly, it was Wilson’s rampaging Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer himself who urged the President to commute Debs’s sentence. Wilson wrote across the recommendation the single word, “Denied.” He claimed that “while the flower of American youth was pouring out its blood to vindicate the cause of civilization, this man, Debs, stood behind the lines, sniping, attacking, and denouncing them... he will never be pardoned during my administration.”¹¹² Actually, Debs had denounced not “the flower of American youth” but Wilson and the other war-makers who sent them to their deaths in France. It took Warren Harding, one of the “worst” American Presidents according to numerous polls of history professors, to pardon Debs, when Wilson, a “Near-Great,” would have let him die a prisoner. Debs and twenty-three other jailed dissidents were freed on Christmas Day, 1921. To those who praised him for his clemency, Harding replied: “I couldn’t do anything else.... Those fellows didn’t mean any harm. It was a cruel punishment.”¹¹³

An enduring aura of saintliness surrounds Woodrow Wilson, largely generated in the immediate post-World War II period, when his “martyrdom” was used as a club to beat any lingering isolationists. But even setting aside his role in bringing war to America, and his foolish and pathetic floundering at the peace conference — Wilson’s crusade against freedom of speech and the market economy alone should be enough to condemn him in the eyes of any authentic liberal. Yet his incessant invocation of terms like “freedom” and “democracy” continues to mislead those who choose to listen to self-serving words rather than look to actions. What the peoples of the world had in store for them under the reign of Wilsonian “idealism” can best be judged by Wilson’s conduct at home.

Walter Karp, a wise and well-versed student of American history, though not a professor, understood the deep meaning of the regime of Woodrow Wilson:

Today American children are taught in our schools that Wilson was one of our greatest Presidents. That is proof in itself that the American Republic has never recovered from the blow he inflicted on it.¹¹⁴

THE ROAD TO WORLD WAR II

The war’s direct costs to the United States were: 130,000 combat deaths; 35,000 men permanently disabled; $33.5 billion (plus another $13 billion in veterans’ benefits and interest on the war debt, as of 1931, all in the dollars of those years); perhaps also some portion of the 500,000 influenza deaths among American civilians from the virus the men brought home from France.¹¹⁵ The indirect costs, in the battering of American freedoms and the erosion of attachment to libertarian values, were probably much greater. But as Colonel House had assured Wilson, no matter what sacrifices the war exacted, “the end will justify them” — the end of creating a world order of freedom, justice, and everlasting peace.

The process of meeting that rather formidable challenge began in Paris, in January, 1919, where the leaders of “the Allied and Associated Powers” gathered to decide on the terms of peace and write the Covenant of the League of Nations.¹¹⁶

A major complication was the fact that Germany had not surrendered unconditionally, but under certain definite conditions respecting the nature of the final settlement. The State Department note of November 5, 1918 informed Germany that the United States and the Allied governments consented to the German proposal. The basis of the final treaties would be “the terms of peace laid down in the President’s address to Congress of January, 1918 [the Fourteen Points speech], and the principles of settlement enunciated in his subsequent addresses.”¹¹⁷

The essence of these pronouncements was that the peace treaties must be animated by a sense of justice and fairness to all nations. Vengeance and national greed would have no place in the new scheme of things. In his “Four Principles” speech one month after the Fourteen Points address, Wilson stated:

There shall be no contributions, no punitive damages. People are not to be handed about from one sovereignty to another by an international conference.... National aspirations must be respected; peoples may now be dominated and governed only by their own consent. “Self-determination” is not a mere phrase.... All the parties to this war must join in the settlement of every issue anywhere involved in it... every territorial settlement involved in this war must be made in the interest and for the benefit of the populations concerned, and not as a part of any mere adjustment or compromise of claims amongst rival states....¹¹⁸

During the pre-armistice negotiations, Wilson insisted that the conditions of any armistice had to be such “as to make a renewal of hostilities on the part of Germany impossible.” Accordingly, the Germans surrendered their battle fleet and submarines, some 1,700 airplanes, 5,000 artillery, 30,000 machine guns, and other materiel, while the Allies occupied the Rhineland and the Rhine bridgeheads.¹¹⁹ Germany was now defenseless, dependant on Wilson and the Allies keeping their word.

Yet the hunger blockade continued, and was even expanded, as the Allies gained control of the German Baltic coast and banned even fishing boats. The point was reached where the commander of the British army of occupation demanded of London that food be sent to the famished Germans. His troops could no longer stand the sight of hungry German children rummaging in the rubbish bins of the British camps for food. (See also “Starving a People into Submission, in the present volume.)¹²⁰ Still, food was only allowed to enter Germany in March, 1919, and the blockade of raw materials continued until the Germans signed the Treaty.

Early on in Paris, there were disquieting signs that the Allies were violating the terms of surrender. The German delegation was permitted to take no part in the deliberations. The Treaty, negotiated among the bickering victors—Wilson was so angry at one point that he temporarily withdrew—was drawn up and handed to the German delegates. Despite their outraged protests, they were finally forced to sign it, in a humiliating ceremony at the Palace of Versailles, under threat of the invasion of a now helpless Germany.

This wobbly start to the era of international reconciliation and eternal peace was made far worse by the provisions of the Treaty itself.

Germany was allowed an army of no more than 100,000 men, no planes, tanks, or submarines, while the whole left bank of the Rhine was permanently demilitarized. But this was a unilateral disarmament. No provision was made for the general disarmament (Point 4 of the Fourteen Points) of which this was supposed to be the first step and which, in fact, never occurred. There was no “free, open-minded and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims” (Point 5). Instead, Germany was stripped of its colonies in Africa and the Pacific, which were parceled out among the winners of the war. In that age of high imperialism, colonies were greatly, if mistakenly, valued, as indicated by the brutality with which Britain and France as well as Germany repressed revolts by the native peoples. Thus, the transfer of the German colonies was another source of grievance. In place of a peace with “no contributions or punitive damages,” the Treaty called for an unspecified amount in reparations. These were to cover the costs not only of damage to civilians but also of pensions and other military expenses. The sum eventually proposed was said to amount to more than the entire wealth of Germany, and the Germans were expected to keep on paying for many decades to come.¹²¹

Most bitterly resented, however, were the territorial changes in Europe.

Wilson had promised, and the Allies had agreed, that “self-determination” would serve as the cornerstone of the new world order of justice and peace. It was this prospect that had produced a surge of hope throughout the Western world as the Peace Conference began. Yet, there was no agreement among the victors on the desirability of self-determination, or even its meaning. Georges Clemenceau, the French Premier, rejected it as applied to the Germans, and aimed to set up the Rhineland as a separate state. The British were embarrassed by the principle, since they had no intention of applying it to Cyprus, India, Egypt — or Ireland. Even Wilson’s Secretary of State could not abide it; Lansing pointed out that both the United States and Canada had flagrantly violated the sanctity of self-determination, in regard to the Confederacy and Quebec, respectively.¹²²

Wilson himself had little understanding of what his doctrine implied. As the conference progressed, the President, buffeted by the grimly determined Clemenceau and the clever British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, acquiesced in a series of contraventions of self-determination that in the end made a farce of his own lofty if ambiguous principle.

Wilson had declared that national groups must be given “the utmost satisfaction that can be accorded them without introducing new, or perpetuating old, elements of discord and antagonism.” At Paris, Italy was given the Brenner pass as its northern frontier, placing nearly a quarter of a million Austrian Germans in the South Tyrol under Italian control. The German city of Memel was given to Lithuania, and the creation of the Polish Corridor to the Baltic and of the “Free City” of Danzig (under Polish control) affected another 1.5 million Germans. The Saar region was handed over to France for at least 15 years. Altogether some 13.5 million Germans were separated from the Reich.¹²³ The worst cases of all were Austria and the Sudetenland.

In Austria, when the war ended, the Constituent Assembly that replaced the Habsburg monarchy voted unanimously for Anschluss, or union with Germany; in plebiscites, the provinces of Salzburg and the Tyrol voted the same way, by 98 per cent and 95 per cent, respectively. But Anschluss was forbidden by the terms of the Treaty (as was the use of “German-Austria” as the name of the new country).¹²⁴ The only grounds for this shameless violation of self-determination was that it would strengthen Germany — hardly what the victors had in mind.¹²⁵

The Peace Conference established an entity called “Czechoslovakia,” a state that in the interwar period enjoyed the reputation of a gallant little democracy in the dark heart of Europe. In reality, it was another “prison-house of nations.”¹²⁶ The Slovaks had been deceived into joining by promises of complete autonomy; even so, Czechs and Slovaks together represented only 65% of the population. In fact, the second largest national group was the Germans.¹²⁷

Germans had inhabited the Sudetenland, a compact territory adjacent to Germany and Austria, since the Middle Ages. With the disintegration of Austria-Hungary they wished to join what remained of Austria, or even Germany itself. This was vehemently opposed by Thomas Masaryk and Eduard Beneš, leaders of the wellorganized Czech contingent at the Conference and liberal darlings of the Allies. Evidently, though the Czechs had the right to secede from Austria-Hungary, the Germans had no right to secede from Czechoslovakia. Instead, the incorporation of the Sudetenland was dictated by economic and strategic considerations — and historical ones, as well. It seems that the integrity of the lands of the Crown of St. Wenceslaus — Bohemia, Moravia, and Austrian Silesia — had to be preserved. No such concern, however, was shown at Paris for the integrity of the lands of the Crown of St. Stephen, the ancient Kingdom of Hungary.¹²⁸ Finally, Masaryk and Beneš assured their patrons that the Sudeten Germans yearned to join the new west Slavic state. As Alfred Cobban commented wryly: “To avoid doubt, however, their views were not ascertained.”¹²⁹

This is in no way surprising. The instrument of the plebiscite was employed when it could harm Germany. Thus, plebiscites were held to divide up areas that, if taken as a whole, might vote for union with Germany, e.g., Silesia. But the German request for a plebiscite in Alsace-Lorraine, which many French had left and many Germans entered after 1871, was turned down.¹³⁰

In the new Czechoslovakia, Germans suffered government-sponsored discrimination in the ways typical of the statist order of Central Europe. They were disadvantaged in “land reform,” economic policy, the civil service, and education. The civil liberties of minority groups, including the Slovaks, were violated by laws criminalizing peaceful propaganda against the tightly centralized structure of the new state. Charges by the Germans that their rights under the minority-treaty were being infringed brought no relief.¹³¹

The protests of Germans within the boundaries of the new Poland resembled those in Czechoslovakia, except that the former were subjected to frequent mob violence.¹³² The Polish authorities, who looked on the German minority as potentially treasonous, proposed to eliminate it either through assimilation (unlikely) or coerced emigration. As one scholar has concluded: “Germans in Poland had ample justification for their complaints; their prospects for even medium-term survival were bleak.”¹³³

At the end of the twentieth century, we are accustomed to viewing certain groups as eternally oppressed victims and other groups as eternal oppressors. But this ideological stratagem did not begin with the now pervasive demonization of the white race. There was an earlier mythology, which held that the Germans were always in the wrong vis-à-vis their Slavic neighbors. Heavily reinforced by Nazi atrocities, this legend is now deeply entrenched. The idea that at certain times Poles and Czechs victimized Germans cannot be mapped on our conceptual grid. Yet it was often the case in the interwar period.¹³⁴

The German leaders, of course, had been anything but angels preceding and during the war. But, if a lasting peace was the purpose of the Versailles Treaty, it was a bad idea to plant time bombs in Europe’s future. Of Germany’s border with Poland, Lloyd George himself predicted that it “must in my judgment lead sooner or later to a new war in the east of Europe.”¹³⁵ Wilson’s pretense that all injustices would be rectified in time — “It will be the business of the League to set such matters right” — was another of his complacent delusions. The League’s Covenant stipulated unanimity in such questions and thus “rendered the League an instrument of the status quo.”¹³⁶

Vengeance continued to be the order of the day, as France invaded the Ruhr in 1923, supposedly because reparations payments were in arrears (Britain and Italy, equal partners in supervision of reparations, disagreed). The French also stepped up their futile efforts to establish a separatist state in the Rhineland. There, as in the Ruhr, they ostentatiously deployed native colonial troops, who delighted in the novelty of their superior status to Europeans. This was felt to be a further indignity by many Germans.¹³⁷

The problems dragged on through the 1920s and early ’30s. The territorial settlement was bitterly opposed by every political party in Germany, from the far left to the far right, through to the end of the Weimar Republic. In the past, treaties had often been gradually and peacefully revised through changes enacted by one party which the other parties declined to challenge.¹³⁸ Yet even with the Nazi threat looming over Weimar Germany, France refused to give an inch. In 1931, Chancellor Heinrich Brüning arranged for a customs union with Austria, which would have amounted to a great patriotic triumph for the fledging democracy. It was vetoed by France. Vansittart, at the British Foreign Office, no lover of Germany, warned that “Brüning’s Government is the best we can hope for; its disappearance would be followed by a Nazi avalanche.”¹³⁹

In the east, France’s allies, Poland and Czechoslovakia, similarly refused any concessions. They had been obliged to sign agreements guaranteeing certain rights to their ethnic minorities. Protests to the League from the German minorities got nowhere: League mediators “almost always recommended accepting the promises of member governments to mend their ways.... Even when the League found fault with a policy that had led to a minority complaint, it was almost never able to get a member state to act accordingly.” In any case, the Polish position was that “minority peoples needed no protection from their own government and that it was ‘disloyal’ for minority organizations to seek redress before the League.”¹⁴⁰

When Germany became a League member, evidence of terrorism against the German minority in Poland carried more weight. In 1931, the League Council unanimously accepted a report “essentially substantiating the charges against the Poles.” But again no effective action was taken. The British delegates had “frankly adopted the view that where German minorities were concerned, it was for the German Government to look after their interests.”¹⁴¹After 1933, a German government chose to do exactly that, in its own savage way.¹⁴²

Back in January, 1917, Wilson had addressed Congress on the nature of the settlement, once the terrible war was over:

it must be a peace without victory.... Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor’s terms imposed upon the vanquished. It would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand.¹⁴³

A prescient warning indeed. Woodrow Wilson’s own foolish, blatant disregard of it helped bring about a tragedy for Europe and the world that surpassed even the First World War.

This is a much expanded version of an essay that originally appeared in The Costs of War: America’s Pyrrhic Victories, 2nd edition, John V. Denson, ed. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2001).

¹Ludwig von Mises, Nation, State, and Economy: Contributions to the Politics and History of Our Time, Leland B. Yeager, trans. (New York: New York University Press, 1983), pp. 215–16.

²Alan Sharp, The Versailles Settlement: Peacemaking in Paris, 1919 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), p. 87. The Allied Covering Letter of June 16, 1919 filled in the indictment, accusing Germany of having deliberately unleashed the Great War in order to subjugate Europe, “the greatest crime” ever committed by a supposedly civilized nation. Karl Dietrich Erdmann, “War Guilt 1914 Reconsidered: A Balance of New Research,” in H. W. Koch, ed., The Origins of the First World War: Great Power Rivalries and German War Aims, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 342.

³Sidney B. Fay, The Origins of the World War, 2 vols. (New York: Free Press, 1966 [1928]).

⁴Joachim Remak, The Origins of World War I, 1871–1914, 2nd ed. (Fort Worth, Tex.: Harcourt, Brace, 1995), p. 131.

⁵See Fritz Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967 [1961]); idem, War of Illusions: German Policies from 1911 to 1914 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975 [1969]), Marian Jackson, trans.; Imanuel Geiss, July 1914: The Outbreak of the First World War, Selected Documents (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1967 [1963–64]); and idem, German Foreign Policy, 1871–1914 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975). The work by John W. Langdon, July 1914: The Long Debate, 1918–1990 (New York: Berg, 1991) is a useful historiographical survey, from a Fischerite viewpoint.

⁶H. W. Koch, “Introduction,” in idem, Origins, p. 11.

⁷Holger H. Herwig and Neil M. Heyman, eds., Biographical Dictionary of World War I (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982), p. 10.

⁸Fritz Stern, “Bethmann Hollweg and the War: The Limits of Responsibility,” in Leonard Krieger and Fritz Stern, eds., The Responsibility of Power: Historical Essays in Honor of Hajo Holborn (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967), p. 254. Cf. H. W. Koch, “Introduction,” p. 9: Fischer “ignores the fundamental readiness of the other European Powers to go to war, but also their excessive war aims which made any form of negotiated peace impossible. What is missing is the comparative yardstick and method.” Also Laurence Lafore, The Long Fuse: An Interpretation of the Origins of World War I, 2nd ed. (Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press, 1971), p. 22: “Fischer’s treatment is very narrowly on the German side of things, and a wider survey indicates clearly that the Germans were by no means the only people who were prepared to risk a war and who had expansionist programs in their minds.”

⁹The following discussion draws on Luigi Albertini, The Origins of the War of 1914, Isabella M. Massey, trans. (Westport, Conn: Greenwood, 1980 [1952]), 3 vols.; L. C. F. Turner, Origins of the First World War (New York: Norton, 1970); James Joll, The Origins of the First World War, 2nd ed. (Longman: London, 1992); Remak, Origins; and Lafore, The Long Fuse, among other works.

¹⁰George F. Kennan, The Fateful Alliance: France, Russia, and the Coming of the First World War (New York: Pantheon, 1984), p. 30.

¹¹Ibid., pp. 247–52.

¹²Lafore, The Long Fuse, p. 134.

¹³In February, 1912, the chief of the French Army, Joffre, stated: “All the arrangements for the English landing are made, down to the smallest detail so that the English Army can take part in the first big battle.” Turner, Origins, pp. 30–31.

¹⁴Ibid., p. 25.

¹⁵Albertini, Origins, vol. 1, p. 486.

¹⁶Egmont Zechlin, “July 1914: Reply to a Polemic,” in Koch, Origins, p. 372.

¹⁷Hew Strachan, The First World War, vol. 1, To Arms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 30, 63: “In the summer [of 1913] the French government intervened in Russian negotiations on the French stock market for a loan to finance railway construction. The French objective was to bring pressure to bear on the speed of Russian mobilization, so as to coordinate mutually supporting attacks on Germany from east and west....” “By 1914, French loans had enabled the construction of strategic railways so that Russian mobilization could be accelerated and the first troops be into battle within fifteen days.”

¹⁸Norman Stone, The Eastern Front, 1914–1917 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975), p. 18.

¹⁹Charles Seymour, ed., The Intimate Papers of Colonel House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1926), vol. 1, p. 249.

²⁰For this discussion, see especially Albertini, Origins, vol. 2, pp. 1–119 and Joachim Remak, Sarajevo: The Story of a Political Murder (New York: Criterion, 1959), pp. 43–78 and passim.

²¹Albertini, Origins, vol. 1, p. 486.

²²Remak, Sarajevo, p. 50.

²³Albertini, Origins, vol. 2, p. 17: “among Serb nationalists and the Southern Slavs who drew their inspiration from Belgrade he was regarded as their worst enemy.”

²⁴Ibid., vol. 2, p. 86.

²⁵Ibid., vol. 2, p. 47 n. 2. A Yugoslav historian of the crime, Vladimir Dedijer, strongly sympathized with the assassins, who in his view committed an act of “tyrannicide,” “for the common good, on the basis of the teachings of natural law.” See his The Road to Sarajevo (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966), p. 446.

²⁶Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, vol. 6 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932), p. 54.

²⁷Konrad H. Jarausch, “The Illusion of Limited War: Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg’s Calculated Risk, July 1914,” Central European History, vol. 2, no. 1 (March 1969), pp. 60–61; Turner, Origins, p. 98; also Lafore, The Long Fuse, p. 217: “it was hoped and expected that no general European complications would follow, but if they did, Germany was prepared to face them.”

²⁸Remak, Origins, p. 135.

²⁹L. C. F. Turner, “The Russian Mobilization in 1914,” Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 3, no. 1 (January 1968), pp. 75–76.

³⁰Fay, Origins, vol. 2, p. 321 n. 98.

³¹Turner, “Russian Mobilization,” p. 82. By 1914 the French general staff had grown optimistic sbout the outcome of a war with Germany. With the French army strengthened and Russian support guaranteed, in French military circles, as in German, “there was a sense that if war was to come to Europe, better now... than later.” Strachan, The First World War. To Arms, p. 93.

³²Albertini, Origins, vol. 2, pp. 587–89, vol. 3, pp. 80–85; Turner, Origins, p. 41.

³³Turner, “Russian Mobilization,” pp. 85–86, Turner described this as “perhaps the most important decision taken in the history of Imperial Russia.”

³⁴Joll, Origins, p. 23, also pp. 125–26.

³⁵L. C. F. Turner, “The Significance of the Schlieffen Plan,” in Paul M. Kennedy, ed., The War Plans of the Great Powers, 1880–1914 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1979), pp. 199–221.

³⁶S. L. A. Marshall, World War I (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964), pp. 39–42

³⁷See Remak, Origins, pp. 132–41 for a fairly persuasive allocation of “national responsibility.”

³⁸Egmont Zechlin, “July 1914: Reply to a Polemic,” pp. 371–85. Geiss, for instance, in German Foreign Policy, pp. 142–45, wildly misinterpreted the meaning of the German “war council” of December 8, 1912, when he painted it as the initiation of the “plan” that was finally realized with Germany’s “unleashing” of war in 1914. See Erwin Hölzle, Die Entmachtung Europas: Das Experiment des Friedens vor und im Ersten Weltkrieg (Göttingen: Musterschmidt, 1975), pp. 178–83; also Koch, “Introduction,” pp. 12–13; and Turner, Origins, p. 49. See also the important article by Ulrich Trumpener, “War Premeditated? German Intelligence Operations in July 1914,” Central European History, vol. 9, no. 1 (March 1976), pp. 58–85. Among Trumpener’s findings are that there is no evidence of “any significant changes in the sleepy routine” of the German General Staff even after the German “blank check” to Austria, and that the actions of the German military chiefs until the last week of July suggest that, though war with Russia was considered a possibility, it was regarded as “not really all that likely” (Moltke, as well as the head of military intelligence, did not return to Berlin from their vacations until July 25).

³⁹Karl Dietrich Erdmann, “War Guilt 1914 Reconsidered,” p. 369.

⁴⁰Langdon, July 1914, p. 181, emphasis in original.

⁴¹Strachan, The First World War. To Arms, p. 97.

⁴²What Bethmann Hollweg actually told the British ambassador was somewhat less shocking: “Can this neutrality which we violate only out of necessity, fighting for our very existence... really provide the reason for a world war? Compared to the disaster of such a holocaust does not the significance of this neutrality dwindle into a scrap of paper?” Jarausch, “The Illusion of Limited War,” p. 71.

⁴³Marshall, World War I, p. 52.

⁴⁴Jonathan Steinberg, “The Copenhagen Complex,” Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 1, no. 3 (July 1966), pp. 23–46.

⁴⁵H. C. Peterson, Propaganda for War: The Campaign against American Neutrality, 1914–1917 (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1939), pp. 45–46.

⁴⁶Joll, Origins, p. 115, attributed Grey’s lying to the public and to Parliament to the British democratic system, which “forces ministers to be devious and disingenuous.” Joll added that more recent examples were Franklin Roosevelt in 1939–41 and Lyndon Johnson in the Vietnam War. A democratic leader “who is himself convinced that circumstances demand entry into a war, often has to conceal what he is doing from those who have elected him.”

⁴⁷John Morley, Memorandum on Resignation (New York: Macmillan, 1928). In the discussions before the fateful decision was taken, Lord Morley challenged the Cabinet: “Have you ever thought what will happen if Russia wins?” Tsarist Russia “will emerge pre-eminent in Europe.” Lloyd George admitted that he had never thought of that.

⁴⁸Walter A. McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World since 1776 (Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), pp. 126, 128.

⁴⁹Woodrow Wilson, Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1973 [1885]), pp. 22–23. These statements date from 1900. Wilson also assailed the Constitutional system of checks and balances as interfering with effective government, pp. 186–87.

⁵⁰Arthur S. Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 1910–1917 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1954), pp. 92–106.

⁵¹Even Link, Woodrow Wilson, p. 106, stated that Wilson and his colleagues were only paying “lip service” to the principle they put forward, and were not prepared to abide by it.

⁵²Link, Woodrow Wilson, pp. 122–28; and Michael C. Meyer and William L. Sherman, The Course of Mexican History, 5th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 531–34.

⁵³The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Arthur S. Link, ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), vol. 30, pp. 184–86. Wilson’s gift of self-deception was already evident. “I sometimes wonder why men even now take this flag and flaunt it. If I am respected, I do not have to demand respect,” he declared. Apparently the Tampico incident of two months earlier had vanished from his mind.

⁵⁴Seymour, The Intimate Papers of Colonel House, vol. 1, pp. 6, 114.

⁵⁵Edward M. House, Philip Dru: Administrator. A Story of Tomorrow, 1920–1935 (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1920 [1912]).

⁵⁶Ibid., pp. 93, 130, 150, 152, and passim.

⁵⁷Charles Callan Tansill, America Goes to War (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1963 [1938]), pp. 26–28. Cf. the comment by Peterson, Propaganda for War, p. 10: “The American aristocracy was distinctly Anglophile.”

⁵⁸Philip Knightley, The First Casualty (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), pp. 82, 120–21; Peterson, Propaganda for War; John Morgan Read, Atrocity Propaganda, 1914–1919 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1941); and the classic by Arthur Ponsonby, Falsehood in Wartime (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1928). That unflagging apologist for global interventionism, Robert H. Ferrell, in American Diplomacy: A History, 3rd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), pp. 470–71, could find nothing to object to in the secret propaganda effort to embroil the United States in a world war. It was simply part of “the arts of peaceful persuasion,” of “Public Relations,” he claimed to believe, since “there is nothing wrong with one country representing its cause to another country.” One wonders what Ferrell would have said to a similar campaign by Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.

⁵⁹Tansill, America Goes to War, pp. 135–62.

⁶⁰Ibid., p. 148.

⁶¹Cited in Peterson, Propaganda for War, p. 83. As Lord Devlin put it, the Admiralty’s orders “were clear enough. All food consigned to Germany through neutral ports was to be captured, and all food consigned to Rotterdam was to be presumed consigned to Germany.... The British were determined on the starvation policy, whether or not it was lawful.” Patrick Devlin, Too Proud to Fight: Woodrow Wilson’s Neutrality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 193, 195.

⁶²Edwin Borchard and William Pooter Lage, Neutrality for the United States (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1937), p. 61.

⁶³Borchard and Lage, Neutrality, pp. 62–72. The U.S. ambassador in London, Walter Hines Page, was already showing his colors. In October, he sent a telegram to the State Department, denouncing any American protests against British interference with neutral rights. “This is not a war in the sense we have hitherto used the word. It is a world-clash of systems of government, a struggle to the extermination of English civilization or of Prussian military autocracy. Precedents have gone to the scrap heap.”

⁶⁴See Ralph Raico, “The Politics of Hunger: A Review,” in Review of Austrian Economics, vol. 3 (1989), p. 254, and the sources cited. The article is included in the present volume.

⁶⁵Tansill, America Goes to War, pp. 132–33: “The Wall Street Journal was never troubled by a policy of ‘editorial neutrality,’ and as the war progressed it lost no opportunity to condemn the Central Powers in the most unmeasured terms.”

⁶⁶Ibid., pp. 177–78.

⁶⁷Robert M. La Follete, the progressive senator from Wisconsin, scathingly exposed Wilson’s double standard in a speech on the Senate floor two days after Wilson’s call for war. It is reprinted in the vital collection, Murray Polner and Thomas E. Woods, Jr., eds., We Who Dared to Say No to War: American Antiwar Writing from 1812 to Now (New York: Basic Books, 2008), pp. 123–32.

⁶⁸Peterson, Propaganda for War, p. 112. Cf. Borchard and Lage, Neutrality, p. 136 (emphasis in original): “there was no precedent or legal warrant for a neutral to protect a belligerent ship from attack by its enemy because it happened to have on board American citizens. The exclusive jurisdiction of the country of the vessel’s flag, to which all on board are subject, is an unchallengeable rule of law.”

⁶⁹On the possible involvement of Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, in the genesis of this disaster, see “Rethinking Churchill,” in the present volume.

⁷⁰Thomas G. Paterson, ed., Major Problems in American Foreign Policy. Documents and Essays, vol. 2, Since 1914, 2nd ed. (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1978), pp. 30–32.

⁷¹On the fraudulence of the Bryce Report, see Read, Atrocity Propaganda, pp. 201–08; Peterson, Propaganda for War, pp. 51–70; and Knightley, The First Casualty, pp. 83–84, 107.

⁷²Tansill, America Goes to War, p. 323. The German captain of the U-boat that sank the Lusitania afterwards pointed out that British captains of merchant ships had already been decorated or given bounties for ramming or attempting to ram surfaced submarines; see also Peterson, Propaganda for War, p. 114.

⁷³William Jennings Bryan and Mary Baird Bryan, The Memoirs of William Jennings Bryan (Philadelphia: John C. Winston, 1925), pp. 397–99; Tansill, America Goes to War, pp. 258–59.

⁷⁴To my mind, Bryan’s antiwar position and principled resignation more than make up for his views on evolution, despite H. L. Mencken’s attempted demolition of Bryan in a well-known essay.

⁷⁵Borchard and Lage, Neutrality, pp. 122–24. John Bassett Moore was scathing in his denunciation of Wilson’s new doctrine, that an armed merchant ship enjoyed all the rights of an unarmed one. Citing precedents going back to Supreme Court Justice John Marshall, Moore stated that: “By the position actually taken, the United States was committed, while professing to be a neutral, to maintain a belligerent position.” Alex Mathews Arnett, Claude Kitchin and the Wilson War Policies (New York: Russell and Russell, 1971 [1937]), pp. 157–58.

⁷⁶In fact, during the Mexican conflict, Wilson had prohibited outright the shipment of arms to Mexico. As late as August, 1913, he declared: “I shall follow the best practice of nations in this matter of neutrality by forbidding the exportation of arms or munitions of war of any kind from the United States to any part of the Republic of Mexico.” Tansill, America Goes to War, p. 64.

⁷⁷Ibid., pp. 511–15.

⁷⁸Borchard and Lage, Neutrality, p. 168.

⁷⁹Edward Grey, Viscount Grey of Fallodon, Twenty-Five Years. 1892–1916 (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1925), pp. 101–02, 108–11.

⁸⁰Robert Lansing, War Memoirs (Indianapolis: Bobbs–Merrill, 1935), pp. 127–28.

⁸¹Seymour, The Intimate Papers of Colonel House, vol. 1, p. 323.

⁸²Joseph P. Tumulty, Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1921), p. 231. Proofs such as these that our leaders had shamelessly lied in their protestations of neutrality were published in the 1920s and ’30s. This explains the passion of the anti-war movement before the Second World War much better than the imaginary “Nazi sympathies” or “anti-Semitism” nowadays invoked by ignorant interventionist writers. As Susan A. Brewer writes in Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq (New York: Oxford University Press 2009), p. 280, “The Committee on Public Information presented the war as a noble crusade fought for democracy against demonized Germans. Such a portrayal was overturned by unfulfilled war aims overseas, the abuse of civil liberties at home, and revelations of false atrocity propaganda. In the years that followed Americans expressed distrust of government propaganda and military intervention in what they considered to be other people’s wars.” This helps account for the appearance from time to time of debunking works of popular revisionism by authors infuriated by the facts they discovered, such as C. Hartley Grattan, Why We Fought (Indianapolis: Bobbs–Merrill, 1969 [1929]); Walter Millis, Road to War: America 1914–1917 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935); and later Charles L. Mee, Jr., The End of Order: Versailles 1919 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1980); and Walter Karp’s invaluable, The Politics of War: The Story of Two Wars which Altered Forever the Political Life of the American Republic (1890–1920) (New York: Harper and Row, 1979).

⁸³McDougall, Promised Land, p. 127.

⁸⁴Seymour, The Intimate Papers of Colonel House, vol. 1, p. 470; vol. 2, p. 92.

⁸⁵Seymour, The Intimate Papers of Colonel House, vol. 2, p. 448.

⁸⁶The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, January 24-April 6, 1917, Arthur S. Link, ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), vol. 41, pp. 525–27.

⁸⁷See Robert M. La Follette, “Speech on the Declaration of War against Germany,” in Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr., ed., Voices in Dissent: An Anthology of Individualist Thought in the United States (New York: Citadel Press, 1964), pp. 211–22; and Arnett, Claude Kitchin, pp. 227–35.

⁸⁸Otis L. Graham, Jr., The Great Campaigns: Reform and War in America, 1900–1928 (Malabar, Fla.: Robert E. Krieger, 1987), p. 89.

⁸⁹Bruce D. Porter, War and the Rise of the State: The Military Foundations of Modern Politics (New York: Free Press, 1993), p. 269.

⁹⁰Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr., Progressivism in America: A Study of the Era from Theodore Roosevelt to Woodrow Wilson (New York: New Viewpoints, 1974); and Robert Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 113–16. See also Murray N. Rothbard’s essay on “World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals,” in John V. Denson, ed., The Costs of War, pp. 249–99.

⁹¹David M. Kennedy, Over There: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 39–40, 44, 246; Ekirch, Decline of American Liberalism, p. 205.

⁹²See Murray N. Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty (New York: New York University Press, 1998 [1982]).

⁹³Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan, pp. 128–29.

⁹⁴Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan, pp. 123, 135.

⁹⁵Murray N. Rothbard, “War Collectivism in World War I,” in Ronald Radosh and Murray N. Rothbard, eds., A New History of Leviathan: Essays on the Rise of the American Corporate State (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1972), pp. 97–98. Tugwell lamented, in Rothbard’s words, that “only the Armistice prevented a great experiment in control of production, control of price, and control of consumption.”

⁹⁶Kennedy, Over There, pp. 139–41, 243. Kennedy concluded, p. 141: “under the active prodding of war administrators like Hoover and Baruch, there occurred a marked shift toward corporatism in the nation’s business affairs. Entire industries, even entire economic sectors, as in the case of agriculture, were organized and disciplined as never before, and brought into close and regular relations with counterpart congressional committees, cabinet departments, and Executive agencies.” On Hoover, see Murray N. Rothbard, “Herbert Clark Hoover: A Reconsideration,” New Individualist Review (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Press, 1981), pp. 689–98, reprinted from New Individualist Review, vol. 4, no. 2 (Winter 1966), pp. 1–12.

⁹⁷Kennedy, Over There, p. 112. Porter, War and the Rise of the State, p. 270.

⁹⁸Jonathan Hughes, The Governmental Habit: Economic Controls from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1977), p. 135; Kennedy, Over There, pp. 103–13; Porter, War and the Rise of the State, p. 271.

⁹⁹Kennedy, Over There, pp. 253–58; Hughes, The Governmental Habit, p. 141. Hughes noted that the War Finance Corporation was a permanent residue of the war, continuing under different names to the present day. Moreover, “subsequent administrations of both political parties owed Wilson a great debt for his pioneering ventures into the pseudo-capitalism of the government corporation. It enabled collective enterprise as ‘socialist’ as any Soviet economic enterprise, to remain cloaked in the robes of private enterprise.” Rothbard, “War Collectivism in World War I,” p. 90, observed that the railroad owners were not at all averse to the government takeover, since they were guaranteed the same level of profits as in 1916–17, two particularly good years for the industry.

¹⁰⁰Rothbard, “War Collectivism in World War I,” p. 66.

¹⁰¹Hughes, The Governmental Habit, p. 137. See also Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan, pp. 150–56.

¹⁰²Quotations from Wilson and Gregory in H. C. Peterson and Gilbert C. Fite, Opponents of War, 1917–1918 (Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press, 1968 [1957]), p. 14.

¹⁰³Ibid., pp. 30–60, 157–66, and passim.

¹⁰⁴Ekirch, Decline of American Liberalism, pp. 217–18; Porter, War and the Rise of the State, pp. 272–74; Kennedy, Over There, pp. 54, 73–78. Kennedy comments, p. 89, that the point was reached where “to criticize the course of the war, or to question American or Allied peace aims, was to risk outright prosecution for treason.”

¹⁰⁵Ray Ginger, The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene Victor Debs (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1949), pp. 383–84. Justice Holmes complained of the “stupid letters of protest” he received following his judgment on Debs: “there was a lot of jaw about free speech,” the Justice said. See also Kennedy, Over There, pp. 84–86.

¹⁰⁶See the brilliant essay by H. L. Mencken, “Mr. Justice Holmes,” in idem, A Mencken Chrestomathy (New York: Vintage, 1982 [1949]), pp. 258–65. Mencken concluded: “To call him a Liberal is to make the word meaningless.” Kennedy, Over There, pp. 178–79 pointed out Holmes’s mad statements glorifying war. It was only in war that men could pursue “the divine folly of honor.” While the experience of combat might be horrible, afterwards “you see that its message was divine.” This is reminiscent less of liberalism as traditionally understood than of the world-view of Benito Mussolini.

¹⁰⁷Porter, War and the Rise of the State, p. 274. On the roots of the national-security state in the World War I period, see Leonard P. Liggio, “American Foreign Policy and National-Security Management,” in Radosh and Rothbard, A New History of Leviathan, pp. 224–59.

¹⁰⁸Peterson and Fite, Opponents of War, p. 22; Kennedy, Over There, p. 94; Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan, pp. 131–32. See also the essay by Robert Higgs, “War and Levithan in Twentieth Century America: Conscription as the Keystone,” in Denson, ed., The Costs of War, pp. 375–88.

¹⁰⁹Kennedy, Over There, p. 87; Ekirch, Decline of American Liberalism, pp. 223–26.

¹¹⁰Carl Brent Swisher, American Constitutional Development, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1954), pp. 681–82.

¹¹¹Ekirch, Decline of American Liberalism, p. 234.

¹¹²Ginger, The Bending Cross, pp. 356–59, 362–76, 405–06.

¹¹³Peterson and Fite, Opponents of War, p. 279.

¹¹⁴Karp, The Politics of War, p. 340.

¹¹⁵Graham, The Great Campaigns, p. 91. On the influenza epidemic, see T. Hunt Tooley, “Some Costs of the Great War: Nationalizing Private Life,” The Independent Review (Fall, 2009), p. 166 n. 1 and the sources cited there. Tooley’s essay is an original, thought-provoking treatment of some of the war’s “hidden costs.”

¹¹⁶The following discussion draws on John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920); Alcide Ebray, La paix malpropre: Versailles (Milan: Unitas, 1924); Sally Marks, The Illusion of Peace: International Relations in Europe, 1918–1933 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976), pp. 1–25; Eugene Davidson, The Making of Adolf Hitler: The Birth and Rise of Nazism (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1997 [1977]); Roy Denman, Missed Chances: Britain and Europe in the Twentieth Century (London: Cassell, 1996), pp. 29–49; and Alan Sharp, The Versailles Settlement: Peacemaking in Paris, 1919 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), among other works.

¹¹⁷James Brown Scott, ed., Official Statements of War Aims and Peace Proposals, December 1916 to November 1918 (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1921), p. 457. The two modifications proposed by the Allied governments and accepted by the United States and Germany concerned freedom of the seas and the compensation owed by Germany for the damage done to the civilian populations of the Allied nations. For earlier notes exchanged between Germany and the United States regarding the terms of surrender, see pp. 415, 419, 420–21, 430–31, 434–35, 455.

¹¹⁸The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, January 16-March 12, 1918, Arthur S. Link, ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), vol. 46, pp. 321–23. For the Fourteen Points speech of January 8, 1918, see The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, November 11, 1917-January 15, 1918, Arthur S. Link, ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), vol. 45, pp. 534–39.

¹¹⁹Scott, Official Statements, p. 435; Davidson, The Making of Adolf Hitler, p. 112; and Denman, Missed Chances, p. 33.

¹²⁰Denman, Missed Chances, pp. 33–34; and Vincent, The Politics of Hunger, pp. 110 and 76–123. That the hunger blockade had a part in fueling later Nazi fanaticism seems undeniable. See Theodore Abel, The Nazi Movement: Why Hitler Came to Power (New York: Atherton, 1960 [1938]) and Peter Lowenberg, “The Psychohistorical Origins of the Nazi Youth Cohorts,” American Historical Review, vol. 76, no. 3 (December 1971), discussed in “Starving a People into Submission,” a review of Vincent’s book, reprinted in this volume.

¹²¹Charles Callan Tansill, “The United States and the Road to War in Europe,” in Harry Elmer Barnes, ed., Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace (Caldwell, Id.: Caxton, 1953), pp. 83–88; Denman, Missed Chances, pp. 32, 57–59; Davidson, The Making of Adolf Hitler, p. 155.

¹²²Alfred Cobban, The Nation State and National Self-Determination (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1970), pp. 61–62. On the scorn with which the Anglophile Wilson treated the request of the Irish for independence, see p. 66.

¹²³R. W. Seton-Watson, Britain and the Dictators: A Survey of Post-War British Policy (New York: Macmillan, 1938), p. 324.

¹²⁴Davidson, The Making of Adolf Hitler, pp. 115–16. Even Charles Homer Haskins, head of the western Europe division of the American delegation, considered the prohibition of the Austrian-German union an injustice; see Charles Homer Haskins and Robert Howard Lord, Some Problems of the Peace Conference (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1920), pp. 226–28.

¹²⁵The story of Reinhard Spitzy, So Haben Wir das Reich Verspielt: Bekenntnisse eines Illegalen (Munich: Langen Müller, 1986) is instructive in this regard. As a young Austrian, Spitzy was incensed at the treatment of his own country and of Germans in general at the Paris Conference and afterwards. The killing of 54 Sudeten German protestors by Czech police on March 4, 1919 particularly appalled Spitzy. He joined the Austrian Nazi Party and the SS. Later, Spitzy, who had never favored German expansionism, became a caustic critic of Ribbentrop and a member of the anti-Hitler resistance.

¹²⁶On the Czech question at the Peace Conference and the First Czechoslovak Republic, see Kurt Glaser, Czechoslovakia: A Critical History (Caldwell, Id.: Caxton, 1962), pp. 13–47.

¹²⁷This is the breakdown of the population, according the census of 1926: Czechs 6.5 million; Germans 3.3 million; Slovaks 2.5 million; Hungarians 800 thousand; Ruthenians 400 thousand; Poles 100 thousand. John Scott Keltie, ed., The Statesman’s Yearbook, 1926 (London: Macmillan, 1926), p. 768; and Glaser, Czechoslovakia, p. 6.

¹²⁸The Germans were by no means the only people whose “right to self-determination” was manifestly infringed. Millions of Ukrainians and White Russians were included in the new Poland. As for the Hungarians, the attitude that prevailed towards them in Paris is epitomized by the statement of Harold Nicholson, one of the British negotiators: “I confess that I regarded, and still regard, that Turanian tribe with acute distaste. Like their cousins the Turks, they had destroyed much and created nothing.” The new borders of Hungary were drawn in such a way that one-third of the Magyars were assigned to neighboring states. See Stephen Borsody, “State- and Nation-Building in Central Europe: The Origins of the Hungarian Problem,” in idem, ed., The Hungarians: A Divided Nation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 1988), pp. 3–31 and especially in the same volume Zsuzsa L. Nagy, “Peacemaking after World War I: The Western Democracies and the Hungarian Question,” pp. 32–52. Among the states that inherited territories from Germany and Austria-Hungary, the minority components were as follows: Czechoslovakia: (not counting Slovaks) 34.7 per cent; Poland 30.4 per cent; Romania 25 per cent; Yugoslavia (not counting Croats and Slovenes) 17.2 per cent. Seton-Watson, Britain and the Dictators, pp. 322–23.

¹²⁹Cobban, The Nation State, p. 68. C. A. Macartney, National States and National Minorities (New York: Russell and Russell, 1968 [1934]), pp. 413–15, noted that by official decree Czech was the language of state, to be used exclusively in all major departments of government and as a rule with the general public. This led to German complaints that the aim was “to get the whole administration of the country, as far as possible, into Czechoslovak hands.” Macartney maintained, nonetheless, that the Sudeten Germans were “not, fundamentally, irredentist.” Of course, as Cobban observed, they had not been asked.

¹³⁰Cobban, The Nation State, p. 72. Even Marks, The Illusion of Peace, p. 11, who was generally supportive of the Versailles Treaty, stated that Alsace-Lorraine was returned to France “to the considerable displeasure of many of its inhabitants.”

¹³¹Glaser, Czechoslovakia, pp. 13–33.

¹³²Unlike the Sudeten Germans, however, who mainly lived in a great compact area adjacent to Germany and Austria, most of the Germans in Poland (but not Danzig) could only have been united with their mother country by bringing in many non-Germans as well. But even some areas with a clear German majority that were contiguous to Germany were awarded to Poland. In Upper Silesia, the industrial centers of Kattowitz and Königshütte, which voted in plebiscites for Germany by majorities of 65% and 75% respectively, were given to Poland. Richard Blanke, Orphans of Versailles: The Germans in Western Poland 1918–1939 (Lexington, Ky.: 1993), pp. 21, 29.

¹³³Ibid., pp. 236–37. See also Tansill, “The United States and the Road to War in Europe,” pp. 88–93.

¹³⁴In 1919, Ludwig von Mises wrote: “The unfortunate outcome of the war [i.e., increased statism and injustice] brings hundreds of thousands, even millions, of Germans under foreign rule and imposes tribute payments of unheard-of size on the rest of Germany.” Mises, Nation, State, and Ecomomy, p. 217. Still, Mises admonished the Germans to eschew the path of imperialism and follow economic liberalism instead. See also the comment of Hew Strachan, The First World War. To Arms, p. 2: “the injustices done to Germans residing in the successor states of the Austro-Hungarian empire came to be widely recognized.”

¹³⁵“By the early spring of 1922, Lloyd George came to the conclusion that the Treaty of Versailles had been an awful mistake and that it was in no small way responsible for the economic crisis in which both Great Britain and the Continental European nations now found themselves.” Richard M. Watt, The Kings Depart: The Tragedy of Versailles and the German Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), p. 513.

¹³⁶Denman, Missed Chances, pp. 42, 45; Marks, The Illusion of Peace, p. 14.

¹³⁷Tansill, “The United States and the Road to War in Europe,” pp. 94–95; Denman, Missed Chances, pp. 51–52.

¹³⁸Ebray, La paix malpropre, pp. 341–43.

¹³⁹Denman, Missed Chances, p. 53.

¹⁴⁰Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, pp. 132, 136–37.

¹⁴¹Davidson, The Making of Adolf Hitler (the best work on the role of the Versailles Treaty in assisting the rise of Nazism), p. 289; and Cobban, The Nation State, p. 89.

¹⁴²The idea that an Anglo-American guarantee to France against German “aggression” would have availed to freeze the constellation of forces as of 1919 ad infinitum was a fantasy. Already in 1922, Weimar Germany reached a rapprochement with Soviet Russia, at Rapallo.

¹⁴³The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, November 20, 1916-January 23, 1917, Arthur S. Link, ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982), vol. 40, p. 536.