ROADS TO TWO WARS
Neumann, William L.
Roads to Two Wars Woodrow Wilson and the Balance of Power, by Edward H. Bueh-rig. Indiana University Press. 325 pp. $5. The Passing of American Neutrality, 1937-1941, by Donald F. Drummond....
...In the end American entry into the war is seen to have been a response to the dangers of a major shift in the European balance of power...
...But after reviewing the obstructionist influences of those who still thought in terms of the mistakes of World War I, Drummond concludes that the external effect of these differences was never grave...
...But it fails to circumvent some pertinent facts...
...Reviewed by William L. Neumann AMERICANS who attended high school and college in the late nineteen twenties and the thirties received a powerful antidote against participation in another world war when their history classes studied American policy in 1917...
...it presented the Wilsonian policy as a disastrous mistake...
...The Roosevelt Administration, he concludes, followed a clear set of objectives from the fall of France in 1940 to Pearl Harbor...
...This policy, he judges, led to "ultimate victory...
...All steps which brought the United States closer to war are generally viewed as wise while those measures which catered to the public concern for neutrality are seen to be obstructionist...
...And when war was declared there seems to have been no expectation that U.S...
...7.50...
...Two widely read books, George Kennan's American Diplomacy, 1900-1950 and Hans Morgenthau's In Defense of National Interest, both published in 1951, dealt briefly with World War I and broke with the earlier studies in arguing the inevitability of increased American participation in European affairs...
...Referring to the celebrated German submarine attack on the U.S...
...The last detailed study of this country's entry into World War I was C. C. Tansill's America Goes to War, published in 1938...
...Woodrow Wilson and the Balance of Power is not based on new researches into private papers and the diplomatic archives, but has been written largely on the basis of the earlier studies...
...Unless the nation had twice blundered the apparent parallels between the two periods must be demonstrated to be false or the policy of the Wilson Administration must be found to have been wise after all...
...Drummond's study of 1937-1941 trudges over the same ground covered recently by Langer and Gleason in their two volume study and by Tansill in his Backdoor to War, without the breadth of research of these writers...
...University of Michigan Press...
...Once the country had entered World War II there was consequently a political as well as a psychological need for a reexamination and a re-writing of the events of 1914-1917...
...Although historians are quick to sense a nation's needs, the profession has been slow in taking up the weighty task of revising the dominant interpretations of the nineteen thirties...
...The reader may be surprised to find America's role in the Atlantic warfare before Pearl Harbor presented as that of a franc-tireur, a belligerent who shoots but hides behind the rights of a neutral...
...Unlike his predecessors of the thirties, Buehrig dismisses American economic commitments to the Allies and the role of Allied propaganda as having had no important influence on the American decision...
...destroyer Greer in September 1941, Drummond points out that the American ship's operations were "no less aggressive" than that of the German sub...
...Actually neither Wilson nor his advisers seem to have doubted in April 1917 that the Allies would win without American aid since the grimmer facts of the British and French situation had been concealed...
...Disillusioned and skeptical over what they had learned were Woodrow Wilson's blunders and failures, the adults of 1940-41 were Teady to take up arms again only when presented with an attack on American soil...
...409 pp...
...participation would need go beyond naval operations and the production and shipping of war materials...
...Yet American policy is described as "essentially defensive," Roosevelt is considered "extremely—perhaps unduly —cautious" in using his power, and the isolationists are charged with having "hampered the effective conduct of relations with Japan...
...II American entry into World War II continues to be the subject of much more historical research...
...While Wilson himself in public rejected balance of power politics as a means to peace, the League of Nations was his instrument to achieve a pro-Allied balance...
...troops would be required in Europe, nor that U.S...
...In its interpretations The Passing of American Neutrality reverts to the oversimplifications of the foreign policy controversies of the years it covers...
...The historian stops his analysis at that point, but the anxious American citizen looking out upon the disordered world of 1956 with its threat of thermonuclear war may be excused for taking the words, "ultimate victory," as a grim jest...
...In dealing with Japan the State Department Is said to have issued "what amounted to an ultimatum" against any further expansion, and to have reduced the Japanese government to "a choice between surrender and war...
...power in 1917 and after...
...It has remained for Edward Bueh-rig, a professor of government at Indiana University, to take up the work of defending the policies which took the nation into its first world war...
...Such an interpretation of the decisions of 1917 provides a justification for the course of the Roosevelt Administration in 1940-41 when Anglo-French dominance of Western Europe was again challenged...
...Instead he centers his attention on German submarine warfare and on Germany itself as a threat to American security and democratic ideals...
...But both men continued to subject Wilson to strong criticism for the way he used U.S...
Vol. 20 • February 1956 • No. 2
