Part-time Savior
Wynner, Edith
Part-time Savior Wilson. Campaigns for Progressivem and Peace, 1916-1917, by Arthur S. Link. Princeton University Press. 464 pp. $8.50. Reviewed by Edith Wynner HHhis is the fifth volume in...
...the solutions he hoped for continue to elude us...
...The problems he faced are still with us...
...While Link is scrupulously fair in assessing the strong anti-war sentiment in the United States throughout this crucial time, he does not deal adequately with that segment of the peace movement which was not solely crisis-oriented but which had, in cooperation with European pacifists, steadfastly urged American participation in a standing conference of neutral nations to offer continuous mediation to the belligerents, whether the moment seemed auspicious or not...
...There is meticulous mining here of a much-worked lode, most of it familiar to students of World War I. Since Link has had access to French and British archives not hitherto available, some new details have been brought to the surface...
...The American Congress moonlights as part-time World Parliament and World Treasury...
...It was also urged upon Wilson in frequent frantic appeals by European and Latin American neutrals, rebuffed each time by a standardized State Department form letter...
...New details on the background of the Zimmermann telegram emerge...
...The story of his failure is of more than academic interest, for we are still paying for its consequences...
...We are also the World Army, Navy, and Bomb Patrol...
...We know his letters and speeches were very much his own and not those of a collective of ghosts...
...Wilson is poignantly contemporary...
...Concerted neutral action was not solely a pacifist obsession...
...The persistent sabotage of his would-be peace efforts by Secretary of State Robert Lansing and by that omnipresent and meddlesome busybody, Colonel House, is strongly highlighted...
...This is a scholar's book, destined to be read mostly by scholars who want chapter and verse indicated for every statement...
...Wilson is the outstanding pioneer of righteous war and showy but ineffective international organization...
...A part-time savior at best, Wilson had wasted the two most auspicious years available for mediation...
...Link dismissed this arduous, many-faceted campaign for collective mediation in his earlier volume, Confusions and Crises, 1915-1916, in a long, inadequate, and inaccurately telescoped footnote...
...The United States has now had a half century of conditioning in wars for righteousness...
...He was conscientious, high-minded, generously-intentioned, the very model of the idealized American President...
...We have taken over the unofficial governing of the world despite an unprecedented proliferation of international organizations, both regional and near-universal, non-existent in Wilson's time, which were to make reliance on war obsolete...
...However, as we enter on a second half century of war-to-end-war —an addiction begun in Wilson's time —such a study is a relevant for all of us as today's headlines on the war in Vietnam...
...As such entries are excluded from the book's index, even this reference is not easily found...
...Had he espoused this proposal, mediation could have been a functioning system, independent of domestic political distractions, the complications of submarine war, blockade and black-listing, and the uncertainties of his own reelection...
...This procedure was urged on Wilson at various times from September, 1914, until the April, 1917, declaration of war...
...Reviewed by Edith Wynner HHhis is the fifth volume in Arthur ¦*· S. Link's almost day-to-day chronicle of Woodrow Wilson's life...
...Wilson's thinking, practically to the day he decided on war, is now ticketed with greater precision...
...By the time Wilson launched his long-awaited peace effort, much weakened and watered by Lansing and House, it was only a request for a statement of terms and came too late...
...Pacifist emissaries of the time knew that Wilson as sole mediator was destined to frustration, for neither the German nor the Austro-Hungarian leadership considered him or the United States truly neutral, while British statesmen, we now know, had no need to heed his peace-making ambitions, since Wilson's trusted emissary, Colonel House, discussed with them not American peacemaking but war-involvement...
...As in the earlier volumes, the chief emphasis continues to be on the danger of war with Mexico and the ever-present menace and final involvement in what was called the European War...
...It is sad to contemplate how little his successors have improved on his early formulas, and depressing to think that despite frequent bloodshed there is probably less democratic government in the world today than there was on war's outbreak in 1914...
...American Presidents since Wilson have been operating increasingly as part-time Presidents of the World...
Vol. 30 • July 1966 • No. 7
