THE DEEP ROOTS OF WAR AND PEACE
Thomas, Norman
The Deep Roots Of War And Peace And Some Memoirs Of World War I From Norman Thomas WOOD ROW WILSON AND THE GREAT BETRAYAL, by Thomas A. Bailey. Macmillan. $3. THE ANATOMY OF PEACE, by Emery...
...Reves comes far closer to making his point than the academically trained historian, Dr...
...Many of us believed that Wilson had put us into a war which might have been avoided...
...America temporarily has swung from what Was, for many " Americans, an irrational distrust in any international association to an equally irrational faith in a glorified alliance...
...Marshall who lacked any particular qualities of greatness but could get along with folks...
...Wilson in a small committee rebuke a professor with a sharpness out of all proportion to the man's unquestionable stupidity...
...By no means does he answer in his chapter, The Melee, the problems of making even a beginning of true federation in a world of nations so unequal, not only in power but in experience with the ballot, and so obsessed with nationalism...
...Then came Wilson's armed intervention in Russia without even authorization of Congress, rampant reaction at home unchecked by him, and the repudiation of some of the most important of the 14 Points in the Treaty of Versailles...
...Today emotional wrath against Germany blinds most people to the fact that liberals and socialists all over the world denounced the Treaty of which the League Covenant was a part as a "betrayal" and predicted that it would lead to new war which no League Would avert...
...disaster...
...the troubles began before Palmer was Attorney General, and it was Wilson himself who refused Palmer's belated recommendation that Debs be pardoned...
...AFTER stabilization of the western front it is possible, even probable, that by bold and skillful use of American moral and economic power Wilson could have gotten a peace far better than the Peace of Versailles under which Europe would not have avoided conflict or achieved Utopia, but might have escaped its present fate...
...It and the Treaty of which it was a part were designed and used by its British and French authors in the earlier years to strengthen capitalism, nationalism, and the imperialism of the victor, not only against Lenin's Russia but all international socialism...
...The general acceptance of military conscription on the European continent had psychologically weakened the capacity of the masses to resist the follies of war...
...Our' only hope is in the reign of law, supported by world wide government...
...In they went...
...For him there is no salvation while, the doctrine of the sovereignty of nation states' continues...
...The nations primarily responsible for the war were, or had been, members of the League...
...With this last statement Emery Reves, author of The Anatomy Of Peace, would emphatic ally agree, and go on to say that the San Francisco Charter...
...The League did not avert it and would not have averted it had America joined it in 1919...
...Our chief purpose was to warn the President through his confidential adviser that if he wanted to put America Intel li-^* gently behind his 14 Points he was making a great mistake by throwing his leftist critics in jail while the Tories flourished and were, some of them, in high office...
...All of us know that he had gone to great lengths to kill freedom of speech, the press, and assemblage...
...He says that on any explanation of his physical condition Wilson should have resigned...
...I found it absorbingly interesting because it brought vividly to mind an old struggle which I had watched closely and in which as editor of The World Tomorrow I had played a small part...
...That might is a certainty unless one is to assume a lot of other changes not logically connected with our membership in the League...
...It was not solely, or perhaps even chiefly, a selfish isolationism, but a justified disillusionment which made the American people, with increasing conviction, reject the League...
...One who knew the elder La Follette and George Norris as well as I did and what they suffered for their convictions must deeply resent his imputation—plainer in the case of La Follette than of Norris—that they were influenced by the large number of German Americans in their states...
...In spite of what we suffered at Mr...
...House's attention to the secret treaties which had been published by Oswald Garrison Villard in the New York Evening Post...
...With all its faults, I think Mr...
...Bailey refers to Attorney General Palmer's "obscene orgy of red-baiting," but that would have been impossible without Wilson's consent...
...SOME of Mr...
...Bailey gives an excellent account of Wilson's physical breakdown and points out how nearly it brought the country to...
...There were important differences between Mr...
...While the Treaty of Versailles was less bad than Hitler said (and, I fear, less bad than that which will now be imposed on Europe), it and the power politics which it perpetuated between capitalist nationalist states, led straight towards World War II...
...As a student at Princeton I heard Mr...
...the moral differences between them and the Germanic powers and America's true interests, did not justify American participation in the war...
...SO EXCELLENT is Dr...
...But they had planned the rival imperialism which led to it...
...Indeed these power politics rivalries were the unavoidable consequence of the capitalist, nationalist organization of the world...
...While American sympathies, rightly, were mostly with the Allies...
...Reves does not explain is how this idea of nationalism, to him so evil, got so great a hold on men...
...Reves furiously argues that no league, association or alliance of independent nations can preserve peace which is continuously betrayed or denied by the doctrine of national sovereignty...
...Wilson's hands, many of us, socialists and liberals, had been ardent supporters of the League idea and turned against it in its final form and in its relation to the Treaty of Versailles very sorrowfully...
...Under all the circumstances Wilson can be forgiven for lacking the extraordinary greatness which might have brought this to pass...
...His rejection of economic roots for war is so complete and his theory that wars spring solely from clashes of sovereignty so un...
...Some of his assertions as to what might have been, had the United States promptly ratified the Treaty and joined the League, are, to say the least, dubious, and could be countered by the possibility or probability which I and other far more important critics of the League presented at the time—that by joining America would merely involve herself in underwriting imperial power politics which she was in no position to remedy...
...We prophesied exactly what came to pass...
...The determining factor was the degree to which American economic interests became involved in the triumph of the Allies...
...I went back over the files of my own magazine to remind myself what some of us socialists and liberals were saying about the League in 1918-1920 and under what circumstances we said it...
...We did not like some of the company we necessarily kept in opposing the Treaty or in insisting on strong reservations, but both socialist and liberal spokesmen made their own position clear...
...By the admission of its intelligent friends, the League went to none of the great roots of war...
...The Colonel admitted that the President knew about the Treaties—a fact which Wilson himself later denied—and woul leal with them in due time...
...Wilson's position in 1919 and Mr...
...Despite his irritating exaggerations and over-simplifications which make one cry out rn protest in every chapter, Mr...
...Bailey is less than fair...
...The latter's book is well written and delightfully spiced with comments and cartoons from the newspapers of the period...
...HE OFFERS no help in our present crisis except to insist on the validity of his principles...
...TO SOCIALISTS and liberals Dr...
...Nevertheless, we applauded, for the m6st part, his 14 Points...
...The author obviously has tried to be fair...
...Abstractly he believed in democracy, but I have known few men with less patience with any sort of opposition and criticism or the long discussions and compromises which democracy involves...
...I was impressed with how little I would have changed even in the light of hindsight...
...He seems to suggest a weighted representation of various countries not based wholly on population...
...Bailey suggests doubts which I share...
...What Mr...
...She had remembered her father's resentment through 20 crowded years...
...After his death one of his daughters reminded me how "cruel" was the class (to which I belonged) to her father because in our senior year we had satirized a fence he had put around the President's house on the campus...
...THE ANATOMY OF PEACE, by Emery Reves...
...Reves' impassioned argument will help the world move in this direction...
...Roosevelt's in 1945, but there were enough similarities to make ojne realize how much more fortunate were both Roosevelt and the country that he died at the height of his popularity rather than live on like his predecessor, an invalid who for months could, not properly perform the duties of his office...
...The rest of his book does not support the charge...
...It left the doctrine of absolute national sovereignty unimpaired...
...He fails to see how it can be helpfully used against a terrible super state...
...I thought, as I still think, that the Conference could have given us a better basis for peace than the Charter although it fell short of true federation towards which goal we ought rapidly to move...
...Bailey's book as history, and for the "most part so fair, that one is surprised to find him, in his last chapter, stigmatizing the rejection of the Treaty as "the great betrayal...
...Bailey is honest enough to admit that the League might "have proved a failure even with our participation...
...Wilson emerges from these pages in about as unattractive a light as Lodge himself and at least as much to blame for the Senate's failure to ratify the Treaty of Versailles, including the Covenant of the League of Nations...
...qualified, that his book cannot account for such struggles as our own Civil War long after a federation such as he apparently favors had been established...
...I suggested in these pages (April 23, 1945) that the San Francisco Conference might consider something of the sort for the Assembly but I recognized the difficulties...
...And history is being written to support the swing...
...He cannot be so easily forgiven for what he did to civil liberty at home during the war or for his compromises with his own principles at Paris—compromises which were not justified by his achievement of the Covenant of the League...
...The fault was in the instrument itself and the attitude of the ruling classes in all nations...
...It is another evidence of the recklessness of democracy that no single step has been.taken to provide for an orderly solution in the future of a problem like that raised by Mr...
...The way the Treaty was handled showed the democratic process and human nature in their less favorable aspects...
...Despite his defects, to which I have already referred, he makes a powerful case which somehow stirs the reader moxe than Mortimer Adler's better and more balanced argument to the same effects in How to Think About War and Peace...
...We also called Col...
...Will do no better...
...Wilson's collapse...
...Wilson's genuine idealism and his many elements of-greatness from his Princeton days on were compromised by his inability to get along with people who differed from him...
...Harpers...
...Reviewed by Norman Thomas THE editor who sent me these 2 books to review together must have a keen sense of the ironic...
...Wilson's friends explain his extraordinarily bad handling of his own Treaty by his sickness...
...I believe that more accurate history could be written—indeed it has been written in part by men like Fay, Barnes, and Millis—to fill in the following picture: * * * NO NATION plotted World War I. As Lloyd George once said, "they stumbled and blundered" into it...
...Shortly after he announced them, I was a member of a committee which went to see Colonel House, the President himself being inaccessible...
...But neither the author's narrative of events, nor his 14 "maxims" to substantiate his charge of betrayal, prove his point...
...And, I may add, those faults are not removed by the' Charter of San Francisco...
...That participation was made hard to avoid but not inevitable by war's interference with American emotions, rights, and trade...
...Bailey's case is that America's failure to join the League of Nations was "the great betrayal" of mankind, while Mr...
...There may be truth in the explanation, but Dr...
...As I have argued previously in these pages (March 12,1945) the notion that the United States would have averted World War II merely by joining the League is fantastically wrong...
...All this discussion of the past is important because of its bearing on the present and future...
...His whole answer was "trust the President...
...Repeatedly it could have been ratified with reservations which most supporters of the League found harmless or in a few cases even beneficial...
...If he had it was almost certain that the Treaty would have gone through with unimportant reservations under Mr...
Vol. 9 • September 1945 • No. 36
