The Tragedy of Woodrow Wilson

...If an armistice had been forced by a judicious use of American power in 1916, the changes in Russia might well have taken a form infinitely more beneficial to the Russian people and to the rest of the world...

...But that water poured down on our heads and, in a sense, is still pouring down...

...They and their fellows of the academies would rather "celebrate" Wilson??laud him...

...Instead, Wilson took the United States into the war...

...In the re-examination of Wilson's ideas which the Wilson Foundation is planning, it would be a happy circumstance indeed if a truly critical assessment of this phase of the Wilsonian tradition could be made...

...It simply won't do to allege that if only the world had taken to heart some of his nobler preachments, all would be well...

...I joined the latter group...

...I refer to such efforts as that to establish the idea that Wilson led the country into the war because he recognized the place of the United States in the Atlantic Community and that that recognition required that the nation fight, or that he acted to re-establish the balance of power in favor of the Atlantic as against the Continental power when, as a matter of fact, he was an ardent anti-balance-of-power man...

...And, if I were directing the job...

...Since this is true, it seems to me that what is required is a critical reassessment of not only Wilson's ruling ideas and crucial acts, but also the ideas and acts of his heirs and assigns from his day to the present time...

...As Goethe said: "In the beginning was the deed...

...father of Harold Nicolson...

...Like Franklin Roosevelt, Wilson as a political leader divides into two parts...

...By entering World War I, instead of ending it, he helped imperil for decades the very society he hoped to save THE TRAGEDY OF WOODROW WILSON By C. Hartley Grattan Woodrow Wilson was bom on December 28, 1856, and next year, if the plans of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation are realized, the centenary of his birth will be widely celebrated and his ideas systematically re-examined...

...A good many would still sum up their reaction to him in Clemeneeau's remark: "He talks like Jesus Christ and acts like Lloyd George...

...Nevertheless I, in my perversity, want to know what is the actual relation between Wilson's policies and actions and the state of the world as we find it at this moment...

...Plainly they have contributed very, very little toward creating a tolerable world...

...I say all this without the slightest expectation that the Woodrow Wilson Foundation will sponsor such a study, or even grasp exactly what I have just said...

...This is a national disaster...

...power in his hands to achieve the moral ends he had in view...

...As one who took a fairly conspicuous part in the ex post facto assault on the participation of the United States in World War I, I am more than passingly amused by the effort to rationalize Wilson's 1914-1918 actions in terms of later insights and currently felt needs, as though he had acted long ago in the light of the kind of world we have now and which his actions contributed to creating...

...If, as is commonly asserted, the world today is in a dangerously disordered state, some degree of responsibility for the condition must be sheeted home to the men who set policies which either contributed to the current state of affairs or else failed to prevent its development...

...During World War I, I was an ardent, if adolescent, consumer of Creel Bureau and League to Enforce Peace publications...

...Moreover, there were men around at the time who knew that taking Russia into war in 1914 was playing with fire, though they probably did not have a clear idea of the kind of fire that might burn Russia and the world...

...Why, having perceived how shaky Tsarist Russia was, Carnock (or Sir Arthur Nicolson, as he then was) proceeded to tie Russia into a system of alliances which insured her participation in a European war is a bit of a mystery until one recalls how frivolous diplomats have been (and can be...

...since 1914, we have rather thoroughly learned the lesson that no matter how bad things may be, they could be worse...

...Maybe he deserves laudation...

...I was delighted to find Raymond Aron expressing much the same opinion in The Century of Total War...

...At any rate, I am reasonably sure that little of what I wrote is cherished by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, but one of my books must be in that collection of 500 volumes "essentially on Wilson" which the Foundation's press release says exists...

...I am not alone, though perhaps I bit bolder than most in that I am prepared bluntly to say so on the eve of nationwide ceremonies in his honor...

...Read Book III of Nicolson's life of his father, Portrait of a Diplomatist (1930...

...After the war there was published in Paris a book called Les Allies Contre la Russie...

...Afterward, I got into essentially the same relationship to Franklin Roosevelt...

...Water over the dam...

...after the war, I said goodbye to all that...

...Precisely what he didn't know was how to employ the U.S...

...It is hard to believe that a Wilson centenary is upon us...

...Although Theodore Roosevelt is usually given the "credit" for first attempting to exploit the Big Power potentialities of the United States in foreign affairs, Wilson was really the first President to do so on a massive scale...

...I myself think so...

...Wilson, therefore, set in motion those forces and currents of ideas which, given an even more thorough workout in World War II and since, now dominate the American scene...

...Certainly...

...There is no use trying to impute to him the insights of a power-politics man...

...While some people approved of both at the time, and some of neither, a substantial group thought fairly well of his performance in domestic affairs, but poorly of his handling of foreign affairs...

...Wilson was an actor in one scene of the drama of our times, and he cannot be detached from the scene in which he acted or exculpated for the faults of the acting...

...Of course...

...A revolution in Russia, involving the destruction of the moribund Tsarist regime, was probably as inevitable as anything ever is in history, but it is insufficiently realized today how the Russian democratic leaders were disadvantaged by the Allied insistence on continuing the war...

...The continuation of the war pushed Russia day by day toward unmanageable chaos...

...Later on, however, I spent a good deal of time and energy studying and writing about what Woodrow Wilson did and the consequences thereof...

...On the results, there must be something wrong with them...

...Just possibly Wilson has some responsibility for the sorry conditions with which we struggle today...

...One of them was Lord Carnock...

...Had he had a clear vision of what the war was doing to that community, he would have used American power to the uttermost to force a compromise peace in 1916.Such a peace at such a time would have materially tempered the forces of disintegration at work in the world...

...As Taft was the first President of the United States I had ever seen, I was deeply impressed, but I haven't the faintest idea what he said...

...Later on, writers who took that line were denounced as "irresponsibles," but I always felt, and still feel, that the shoe was on the other foot...

...I've always been an exceedingly poor camp follower of the great and powerful...

...The world is full of people, far from a hundred years old, who still think of him as a contemporary and whose views of him are still largely determined by the emotions of his time and the years immediately following his death...

...What I am rather elliptically saying is that Wilson had little comprehension of the forces at work in the world which brought on World War I, which were being churned around and set going in new (and worse) channels by the war, and which still run and have never yet been mastered, either in peace or war, down to the present moment...

...That was an error, a calamity, from the consequences of which we will suffer till the end of our history...

...It must be faced that many things he did, in a policy sense, contributed directly to the chaos in which we try to live...

...I would place more emphasis on his actions than on his words...

...Wilson was a moralist in politics, not a power manipulator...

...They dominate it so thoroughly that few of the people currently articulate about foreign policy are able to think far out of the frame of reference supplied so long ago...

...What I am- trying succinctly to say is that prolongation of the war favored the Bolshevik extremists, who knew how to exploit the chaos to their own advantage, and undercut the moderate democrats who were not prepared to be so ruthless...

...I have but the dimmest memory of tie election that brought Wilson to the White House and, oddly enough, it does not have to do with Wilson himself at all but with one of his opponents, William Howard Taft, whom I saw, stout, benign, white-mustached and smiling, speaking from the back platform of a railroad train...

...But we should be concerned to identify and describe the errors that contributed to the creation of our present predicament...

...They are rationalizations after the fact...

...What he did had measurable consequences in line with what these ideas refer to, but I doubt that he himself thought in such terms...

...What I wrote about Wilson was in the spirit of the postwar reaction against the war, a sort of non-fictional counterpart of Dos Passos's Three Soldiers and other anti-war fiction...

...Wilson knew nothing about Russia and cannot be held responsible for what happened there or for what Russia became...

...there was something in the thesis the title enunciated...

...Any candid critical review of his ideas and acts must include a consideration of them in relation to the result now spread before us...

...The people who cluster around the Foundation, and similar organizations, suffer a mental block against any truly critical assessment of the life and deeds of their hero...

...His great failure in World War I was precisely a failure to recognize and exploit American power for the welfare of the world community...

...For one thing, peace in 1916 might have blocked off the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia...

...Woodrow Wilson was one of those men...