Wilson's Blunders
O'NEILL, WILLIAM L.
Wilson's Blunders Crusader Nation: The United States in Peace and the Great War, 1898-1920 By David Traxel Knopf. 432 pp. $27.50. Reviewed by William L. O'Neill Professor of history,...
...There is no guarantee the approach would have worked, because Germany's leaders, as arrogant as they were insensitive to the best interests of their nation, might have demanded terms the Allies could not accept...
...Traxel views him in the old-fashioned manner, as a noble statesman felled by narrowminded partisans utterly lacking in vision—a fable that makes no sense and serves no purpose today...
...Then he kept America out of the League by refusing to accept perfectly reasonable changes in its Covenant demanded by the Senate...
...With Germany disarmed and the Allies free of prior constraints, the Fourteen Points fared poorly at Versailles, infuriating many Germans and paving the way for Hitler's rise to power...
...author, "A Democracy at War: American's Fight at Home and Abroad in World War II" Numerous works on the Progressive Era already exist...
...After Wilson aligned the United States with the Allies, German leaders making the suicidal decision to break the Sussex Pledge reasoned that the U.S...
...That step fatally prolonged the War, but by the end of 1916 the Allies were running out of money despite having gained access to American capital markets...
...The so-called armistice was not a truce at all, for Wilson demanded that Germany disarm as a condition of the cease-fire...
...But those interested in what really happened should read Thomas J. Fleming's The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I...
...Hailed in the United States as a mighty blow for peace, the pledge had two features...
...American entry was the culmination of a series of steps that narrowed Wilson's options yet left him with choices right up to the end...
...On the one hand, Germany promised to visit and search all merchant shipping as Wilson demanded, but on the other, if German leaders chose to resume unrestricted warfare, Wilson would have to make a military response...
...Wilson had many chances to stay out of the War, and, better still, he may have had the power to force an earlier settlement...
...In the fall of 1918, when Germany contacted him directly about negotiating an end to the War, his terms were unconditional surrender...
...Perhaps no other American President made as many catastrophic blunders...
...had already sided with their enemies in practice and could hardly do more damage as another enemy than it was doing as a neutral...
...Traxel also prefers narration to analysis, which sometimes works, but not with huge and complicated subjects like America's entry into World War I. In Crusader Nation the moral dilemma is absent: Wilson asked for a declaration of war because German perfidy and aggression left him no choice...
...On the plus side, there is a charming photograph of Louise Bryant, John Reed's wife, posing nude in the Provincetown dunes...
...In Russia, the Bolsheviks had already seized power in October 1917...
...The most important aspect of the Great War was not who won, but how long it lasted...
...His famous "Peace Without Victory" speech to the Senateon January 22,1917—when the country was still neutral—contains the following passage: "Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor's terms imposed upon the vanquished...
...Traxel ignores Wilson's follies as well as his megalomaniacal belief that he was doing God's work on earth...
...The tragedy is that after U.S...
...In fact, more pages seem to be devoted to Reed than to anyone else, besides Wilson himself...
...was set on the road to war when a German U-boat sank the British passenger liner Lusitania on May 7, 1915, atacostof 1,195 lives, 128 of them American...
...He rationalized the resulting treaty's faults by claiming the League of Nations would set them right in time...
...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...
...This is a curious choice, for although Reed had considerable influence as a propagandist for Bolshevism thanks to his Ten Days That Shook the World (1919), he did not have anything like the stature of Jane Addams or Robert La Follette, or hundreds of others who receive little or no attention here...
...15 years later, Hitler would do so in Germany, setting the stage for an even larger and more terrible conflict...
...Germany reluctantly acceded to this ultimatum, replying with a conciliatory note that came to be known as the "Sussex Pledge...
...The U.S...
...George F. Kennan pointed out long ago that by 1916 either side would have been better off surrendering to the enemy on its terms than winning a victory two years later...
...That is not the case...
...Not since the late Arthur Link has a historian been so uncritical of him...
...Army to France...
...Treasury Secretary William MacAdoo, his son-in-law, wanted Wilson to compel the Allies to moderate their War aims before lending them any money...
...Only a peace between equals can last, only a peace the very principle of which is equality and a common participation in a common benefit...
...Even then Wilson had choices...
...While not literally true, the comment shows Wilson understood that Germany could force his hand at any time...
...Instead, Wilson declared all-out war on Germany while exacting no concessions from the Allies...
...These were the truest words Wilson ever spoke...
...Had Wilson kept the ban on private loans to the Allies, they would have had to think seriously about negotiating a peace with Germany, probably in 1916...
...Traxel summarizes the Peace Without Victory speech and then dismisses it, just as Wilson did...
...Although Wilson did not ask for a declaration of war as Theodore Roosevelt and other interventionists wished, he pressed Germany harder and harder to observe the maritime rules of war...
...The author's worst failing is his almost worshipful portrait of President Wilson...
...Reviewed by William L. O'Neill Professor of history, Rutgers...
...He pursued victory as zealously as the other Allies...
...entry Wilson forgot about the importance of achieving a peace between equals...
...The new civilian government of Germany was treated as if it, not Imperial Germany, had started the War, and it had no say in the negotiations at Versailles, where the Allies debated the terms to be forced down its throat...
...When the War ended, European civilization had been irreparably harmed...
...In September 1915, Wilson lifted the ban on U.S...
...He has a focus rarely encountered in works of history: an overwhelming interest in personal experiences that makes his text read like People magazine...
...On October 10 John Maynard Keynes, then an adviser in the British Treasury, reported to the Cabinet that while Britain was at that point deriving two-fifths of its funds for prosecuting the War from the U. S., in the future it would have to obtain four-fifths from unsecured public loans in America...
...Thus vanished the last thin hope of avoiding another war...
...He could, for example, have limited U.S...
...One might therefore suppose David Traxel, in writing yet another, has something new to add to the existing literature, at least an original interpretation...
...Traxel zips through the first 14 years of his subtitle in 38 pages, so Crusader Nation is really about the Woodrow Wilson Administration, with digressions into social and cultural history...
...And it did on February 1, 1917, when U-boats began sinking all merchant ships without warning, including those of neutral states, in a designated killing zone...
...There is much on Wilson as well as Henry Ford and General John Pershing, among others, and especially on John Reed...
...He remarked in private that "any little German lieutenant" can put us in this War...
...France was in an even more desperate state...
...involvement to the sea by having the Navy escort American ships—without joining the Allies, loaning them money, or sending the U.S...
...Wilson understood the dangers...
...He fought not for peace without victory but for Germany's unconditional surrender, arriving at Versailles with no way to compel the Allies to accept his relatively moderate terms...
...These stipulated that commerce raiders had to visit and search an enemy merchant ship for contraband and see to it that passengers and crew were safely away in boats before sinking the vessel...
...This is far from the case...
...Nor does the author cover the period comprehensively, or in any way indicate that an organizing principle is at work...
...purchases of Allied bonds imposed by former Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan...
...An early end to the conflict offered so many benefits, however, that reason might have prevailed...
...He sent three increasingly harsh notes to Germany after the Lusitania went down, and in April 1916 threatened to break off diplomatic relations with Berlin if visit-and-search did not become the norm for all merchant ships, belligerent and neutral...
...Or, he could have joined the Allies on the condition that they agree to his Fourteen Points peace plan...
...They were wrong, of course, which does not excuse Wilson...
Vol. 88 • November 2005 • No. 6
