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The Illusion of Victory, by Thomas Fleming.
Basic Books, 2003, 543 pages.
The Professor's Deadly
Dream by Clark Stooksbury
Thomas Fleming, who shattered the FDR icon in "The New
Dealer's War," has returned with a similar treatment of Woodrow Wilson's handling
of World War I in "The Illusion of Victory."The Great War has not been
mythologized the way that the Second World War has been by Tom Brokaw and the
late Stephen Ambrose. It is unsentimentally recalled as a monstrous bloodletting
for all parties involved. The United States entered the fighting late and
consequently paid a comparatively small price in blood. Still, more than 100,000
doughboys died from war and disease. Many others came home physically and
psychologically shattered.
| | Clark
Stooksbury has written for The American Conservative, Chronicles and Metro
Pulse (of Knoxville, Tenn.). |
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Fleming notes an influence on Wilson's thinking in a novel written by one of
his top aides. Colonel Edward House was a close Wilson adviser during most of his
presidency. Prior to serving the president, he had written "Philip Dru,
Administrator," a fictional account of a "military and political genius who took
over a wealthy, disordered, quarrelsome nation and led it into an era of almost
superhuman contentment by persuading the people to make him their supreme
autocrat." This is a pretty fair representation of Woodrow Wilson's second term,
except, of course, for the superhuman contentment.
At first the Great War was strictly a war among European powers. But the
British sought America as an ally, and got a tremendous leg up in the information
war against Germany by cutting Germany's undersea cables which were used to
communicate with the Western Hemisphere, reducing their information flow to a
trickle.
Britain scored early propaganda coups by spreading lurid tales of supposed
German atrocities in Belgium, including the amputation of women's breasts and of
babies being speared on German bayonets. The British even sponsored a tour of
Belgians to spread the stories. Fleming points to the irony of these defenses of
"poor little Belgium," which had actually committed shameful crimes against
humanity in the Congo a few years earlier. "The Congo's blacks had been routinely
starved, beaten, and shot for trivial offenses while being forced to labor. .
. . Behind a screen of unctuous lies about bringing Christianity to the dark
continent, an estimated 10 million natives had died."
The pro-war crowd in the United States received a boost when a German U-boat
sank the British liner, the Lusitania, off the coast of Ireland on May 7,
1915, killing more than 1,198 people, including 128 Americans. Although the
German government publicly warned in newspaper ads that the British ship was
carrying munitions and other war materiel, and thus was a legitimate and legal
target, the Wilson administration insisted that Americans had the right to travel
on belligerents' ships into a war zone. |
| The British scored early
propaganda coups by spreading lurid tales of supposed German atrocities in
Belgium, including the amputation of women's breasts and of babies being speared
on German bayonets. |
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Teddy Roosevelt was among those calling for an immediate declaration of war.
Woodrow Wilson demanded that the Germans cease their unrestricted submarine
warfare, which they did for almost two years. Secretary of State William Jennings
Bryan refused to sign off on the demand, and resigned, insisting that it would
lead to war with Germany.
Another characteristic of the road to war was the repression of critics of the
government and Americans of German and Irish descent, who were generally opposed
to going to war as an ally of Britain. The repressive atmosphere of the Wilson
years makes anything that happened in the McCarthy era seem trivial. Wilson's
repression permeated the country and was reflected even in the pages of elite
media such as the New York Times and The Atlantic Monthly. Fleming reports that
even before U.S. troops were committed to battle, "Lutheran schools were
described as hotbeds of disloyalty, where 'The Star Spangled Banner' was never
played and German heroes such as Bismark displaced Washington and Lincoln." In
October of 1917 Wilson signed legislation requiring German language newspapers to
provide English translation of any commentary on the government or the war
effort.
Non-German Americans were free of this repression so long as they marched in
unison with the Wilson administration. One American who failed to do so was
Eugene Debs. The Socialist leader was arrested and sentenced to ten years in
prison after an incendiary speech in Ohio. Debs was pardoned by President Harding
in 1921.
Fleming recounts perhaps the most egregious violation of freedom of speech in
American history. Even a movie about the Revolutionary War was targeted. Producer
Robert Goldstein, who had worked with D.W. Griffith on "The Birth of a Nation,"
produced a film called "The Spirit of '76" that was attacked because his film
cast the British in a negative light. He was allowed to exhibit the film in Los
Angeles after cutting some scenes objected to by local censors. But he restored
the scenes for exhibition elsewhere. "The film was seized and Goldstein was soon
in court. The docket read United States vs the Motion Picture Film The Spirit
of '76. In the prevailing atmosphere of war rage, no one regarded this
listing as even slightly ironic. The judge found Goldstein guilty of exhibiting
'exaggerated scenes of British Cruelty,' which might make people 'question the
good faith of our ally, Great Britain.'" Like Debs, he was sentenced to ten years
in prison.
Goldstein's saga, which was highlighted three years ago by Bill Kauffman in
The Wall Street Journal and Timothy Noah in Slate, puts into perspective the
recent frenzy over the dissent by celebrities against George W. Bush and the war
in Iraq. The most notorious example was that of the country music group, the
Dixie Chicks, one of whom mildly insulted President Bush during a London concert
in March. While Natalie Maines' lack of servility cost the Dixie Chicks airplay
and CD sales, the wound is superficial, roughly equivalent to the attacks on the
Beatles in 1966 when John Lennon said that he and his band mates were bigger than
Jesus Christ. Had Natalie Maines tepidly insulted Woodrow Wilson in 1917, she
might have gone to prison.
| In the end, more than
100,000 Americans paid with their lives for a victory that was, as Fleming's
title suggests, illusory. |
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The Wilson administration was better at repressing dissent than it was at
preparing the country for war. The Senate majority leader, Thomas Martin,
exclaimed to an Army major testifying shortly after war was declared, "Good Lord!
You're not going to send soldiers over there, are you?" At the time he spoke, the
U.S., with an army the size of Chile's, barely had a force to send.
The Wilson administration dithered in preparing to send Americans to war for
months after the declaration. Among the results were poorly fed and equipped
troops, often freezing and succumbing to disease because they had no winter
uniforms. Theodore Roosevelt's son Quentin died while flying a second-rate French
aircraft, because, as Fleming explains, "Woodrow Wilson's administration had
refused to prepare for war and after war was declared the president's appointees
had failed to produce a single aircraft, in spite of spending almost a billion
dollars."
In the end, more than 100,000 Americans paid with their lives for a victory
that was, as Fleming's title suggests, illusory. Germany had agreed to an
armistice on the basis of Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, a document with
several concrete elements such as the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France and
independence for Poland as well as high-minded calls for democracy and openness
in international dealings.
But Wilson' Fourteen Points were not palatable with America's French and
British allies, who insisted on divvying up the German and Ottoman empires, often
on the basis of previous secret agreements, inserting a clause in the treaty
placing sole blame for the war on Germany, and insisting that Germany pay them
crippling reparations.
After compromising on a peace settlement that made a mockery of his
principles, Wilson arrogantly insisted that the U.S. Senate ratify the Versailles
and the League of Nations treaties with no changes. He called for making the 1920
election a referendum on the treaties, and was soundly defeated. U.S.
ratification of the two treaties was dead.
Fleming briefly speculates about what might have occurred had Wilson chosen
another course. The best plausible course, he suggests, would have been to pursue
the genuine neutrality favored by Wilson's first secretary of state, William
Jennings Bryan. "Without the backing of American weaponry, munitions, and loans,
the Allies would have been forced to abandon their goal of a knockout blow. The
war might have ended in 1916 with a negotiated peace based on the mutual
admission that the conflict had become a stalemate. As a genuine neutral, Wilson
might even have persuaded both sides to let him be a mediator." The British would
have been offended at such a cold shoulder proffered by their American "cousins,"
but they would have been better off.
Instead the world Wilson helped bring about included the two greatest criminal
regimes in history, jury-rigged countries such as Yugoslavia and Iraq, and
another war on a scale so great that it would have been difficult to imagine in
1918.
If there are any worthwhile lessons from Thomas Fleming's study of Wilson's
failures, they are lessons as old as King Pyrrhus. When you open Pandora's box of
war, you never know what is waiting inside, and "victory" requires much more than
success on the battlefield.
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