The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931

by Adam Tooze

Hindenburg and Ludendorff were the generals who had saved Germany from Russia in 1914 and conquered Poland in 1915. But they owed their rise to the Supreme Command to the crisis of the Central Powers in August 1916. This experience of near disaster defined the politics of the war in Germany from this moment onwards.

The leading figures in Berlin never took seriously the idea that Wilson might actually manage to stop the war. Whatever the nuances of American politics, they insisted its economy was ever more committed on the Entente side. The effect was self-fulfilling.

On 9 January 1917, overriding the hesitant objections of their Chancellor, Hindenburg and Ludendorff rammed through the decision to resume unrestricted U-boat warfare.31 Within less than two weeks the depths of their miscalculation were to become obvious.

As Ambassador Bernstorff informed the State Department in anguished terms, it was too late for them to be recalled. At 5 p.m. on 31 January he handed Secretary of State Lansing the official declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare against the supply lines of the Entente in the Atlantic and the eastern Mediterranean. On 3 February, Congress approved the breaking of diplomatic relations with Germany.

The German decision cast ‘peace without victory’ into historical oblivion. It drove America into a war that Wilson detested. It robbed him of the role to which he truly aspired, the arbiter of a global peace. The resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare on 9 January 1917 marked a turning point in world history.

Already at the time unrestricted U-boat warfare was the subject of anguished self-examination. As Bethmann Hollweg’s diplomatic advisor, Kurt Riezler, noted in his diary, ‘the fate that hangs over everything suggests the thought that Wilson may in fact have intended to pressure the others and had the means to do so and that that would have been 100 times better than the U Boat war’.

if we allow the peculiar pathology of German political history alone to explain the derailment of ‘peace without victory’, we understate the significance of the rift between Washington and the Entente over the winter of 1916–17. Wilson’s challenge was not to Germany in particular, but to European power as a whole.

it was the Entente that took the initiative in replying to Wilson’s obvious desire for a negotiated peace, by widening and intensifying the conflict. The fact that this caused Germany to tip America into the Entente’s camp should not obscure the fact that the Entente too was running huge risks.

To compound the irony, the Entente ran them on assumptions that were complementary to those on which Germany committed itself to its disastrous course of aggression. If London and Paris entwined America ever more into their war effort, Wilson’s hand would be forced.

Following the severing of diplomatic relations with Germany, there were many in Wilson’s administration, perhaps most notably Secretary of State Lansing, who now wanted to commit completely to the Entente. America, he demanded, should align itself with its ‘natural’ allies in the cause of ‘human liberty and the suppression of Absolutism’.

Having belatedly come to the realization that, as their ambassador to Washington put it, ‘Morgans cannot be regarded as a substitute for the proper diplomatic authorities in conducting negotiations likely to affect our relations with the United States’, London hurriedly dispatched a Treasury team to Washington in the hope of initiating government-to-government contact.

Since before the war, starting with the Second Moroccan Crisis at Agadir in 1911, it had become increasingly commonplace to stress the political solidarity of Britain and France against the bullying imperialism of Germany.

Already before the war, many in the Third Republic had looked upon the Entente with Britain as a ‘liberal alliance’ that would help France offset its regrettable dependence on an alliance with the autocracy of Tsarist Russia.

In the spring of 1917, French delegations to Washington and New York were feted as the heirs of Lafayette who had helped to win freedom for the colonists in 1776.

what both the Entente strategists and the Germans had not reckoned with was the White House and the substantial body of American opinion that President Wilson represented. Despite German aggression, America was not yet at war, and the President and his circle continued to cold-shoulder the Entente.

Wilson’s reluctance to become involved in the European conflict derived in part from his belief that wider issues were at stake.

Over the winter of 1916–17 the strategy of American leadership that lay behind his call for a peace without victory was explicitly spelled out in racial terms. Given China’s vulnerability and the dynamic expansion of Japanese power, what was at stake for Wilson in suppressing the self-destructive violence of European imperialism were not just the petty quarrels of the old world, but nothing less than the future of ‘white supremacy on this planet’.

The President was ‘more and more impressed with the idea that “white civilization” and its domination in the world rested largely on our ability to keep this country intact, as we would have to build up the nations ravaged by the war.

Ick

When Wilson said it would be a ‘crime against civilization’ for America to allow itself to become sucked into the war, it was ‘white civilization’ that he had in mind.

In Britain there were plenty who shared Wilson’s racial vision of world history. But it was precisely so that Britain could concentrate its main force in Asia, they believed, that Germany must be tamed.

As a conservative Southern liberal, Wilson’s view of history was shaped by two great events: the disaster of the Civil War, and the drama of the eighteenth-century revolutions as interpreted by the writings of the Anglo-Irish conservative, Edmund Burke.

Whereas Burke showered praise on the freedom-loving American colonist, he ‘hated the French revolutionary philosophy and deemed it unfit for free men’. Wilson heartily agreed. Looking back over a century of revolution, he denounced the legacy of that philosophy as ‘radically evil and corrupting.

Sure Willy

Even in 1900 he saw in the French Third Republic a dangerously unsteady descendant of absolute monarchy, the ‘eccentric influence’ of which had brought the entire project of democracy in the modern world into disrepute.

True freedom was for Wilson indelibly rooted in the deep-seated qualities of a particular national and racial way of life. Failure to recognize this was the source of a profound confusion about American identity itself.

Those who romanticized America’s eighteenth-century revolution ‘were dreaming’. In truth, ‘The government which we founded one hundred years ago was no type of an experiment in advanced democracy . . .’ Americans ‘never had any business harkening to Rousseau or consorting with Europe in revolutionary sentiment’. The strength of democratic self-determination, American-style, was precisely that it was not revolutionary.

In words that were to echo through his views about World War I, Wilson insisted: ‘there is almost nothing in common between popular outbreaks such as took place in France at her great Revolution and the establishment of a government like our own . . . We manifested one hundred years ago what Europe lost . . . self-command, self-possession.’

What the...

precisely because Britain was the nation from which America’s own political culture had historically derived, it was essential for Wilson that Britain itself must remain fixed in the past. The thought that it might be advancing along the path of democratic progress, alongside rather than behind America, was deeply unsettling.

At Versailles, Georges Clemenceau was to remark that he found Wilson’s sanctimoniousness easier to stomach when he reminded himself that the American had never ‘lived in a world where it was good form to shoot a Democrat’.51 But Clemenceau, perhaps out of politeness, perhaps from sheer forgetfulness of his long career, failed to note that he and Wilson did in fact share a common point of reference in a truly violent period of political struggle not in Europe, but in America itself.

In 1862 Clemenceau himself served time in the infamous Mazas jail for seditious activity. In 1865, broken hearted and with nothing to hope for in Napoleon III’s France, Clemenceau shipped out to that great battleground of nineteenth-century democratic politics, Civil War America.

Amongst that crowd was to be found Woodrow Wilson, who as a young man impressed all his acquaintances with his dogged adherence to the Southern cause.

Gross

For Wilson, the heroes of Clemenceau’s reports were the architects of a ‘perfect work of fear, demoralization, disgust and social revolution’.

One cannot help wondering what the future American President might have thought if during his adolescence as a young Southerner he had happened to stumble across the following lines dispatched to Paris in January 1867 by the future leader of wartime France: ‘If the Northern majority weakens and the nation’s representatives let themselves be persuaded in the interests of conciliation or of States’ Rights to let the Southerners reenter Congress easily, there will be no more internal peace for a quarter of a century.

The German declaration of U-boat warfare on 30 January 1917 overshadowed not just Wilson’s Senate speech but also one of the most savage attacks upon it by Teddy Roosevelt.

In the colonial era, it had been the ‘Tories of 1776’, Roosevelt reminded his listeners, who had wanted compromise with Britain, who had ‘demanded peace without victory’. In the agonizing final stages of America’s own civil war, in 1864 it had been the so-called ‘Copperheads’ who ‘demanded peace without victory . . .’57 Now ‘Mr Wilson’ was asking ‘the world to accept a Copperhead peace of dishonor; a peace without victory for the right; a peace designed to let wrong triumph; a peace championed in neutral countries by the apostles of timidity and greed.’

In front of the entire cabinet he rejected Secretary of State Lansing’s contention that ‘an essential of permanent peace was that all nations should be politically liberalized’.60 Wilson wanted the world pacified, for sure. A peace without victory would see to that, but a country’s political complexion was a different matter.

It was only as the full extent of Germany’s disastrously ill-timed lurch into aggression became clear that Wilson was finally forced to abandon his position of moral equivalence. The U-boats were not the last word.

In late February 1917 British intelligence plucked a top-secret telegram from the transatlantic wires. In it the German Foreign Office authorized its embassy in Mexico City to propose an anti-American alliance to the Mexican government of General Carranza in conjunction with Japan. In exchange for military assistance from Germany, Mexico would launch an immediate attack on Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.

In Germany too there was astonishment. For the Reich to be offering Texas and Arizona to Mexican ‘brigands’ whilst simultaneously angling for an alliance with Japan, the leading German industrialist Walther Rathenau wrote to General Hans von Seeckt, was ‘too sad even to laugh about’.65 But however hallucinogenic these associations may have appeared, the bizarre German scheme to seize the military initiative in the western hemisphere was the logical extension of Berlin’s idée fixe that America was already committed to the Entente and that a declaration of war was under any circumstances inevitable.

Added to the now-routine sinking of American ships by German U-boats, the refusal of Berlin even to deny this unprovoked aggression left Wilson with no option. On 2 April 1917 he went before the Senate to demand a declaration of war. For men like Roosevelt and Lansing the declaration of war was simply a relief.

For Wilson, by contrast, to be forced to abandon his vision of ‘peace without victory’ and to throw his country’s weight onto the side of the Entente was a stomach-churning reversal.

Boo hoo shitbird

examined closely, there was a remarkable selectivity in Wilson’s declaration. He did not include Germany’s main allies, the Ottomans or Habsburgs, in his declaration of war or his denunciation of autocracy. Nor did he squarely endorse the Entente powers as representatives of democracy or examples of self-government. His objectives were stated in abstract and prospective terms.

On 6 April 1917 America entered the war, swinging the balance of force decisively in favour of the Entente. It retrospect it would come to seem a foreordained turn in world history. But at that very moment, it became obvious what extraordinary risks the Entente had been running in escalating the war in the face of American opposition.

On 20 March 1917, the same day that Wilson reluctantly agreed with his cabinet to ask Congress for a declaration of war, Washington instructed its embassy in Petrograd to recognize the new Provisional Government of Russia.

With the authority of the Romanov dynasty in tatters, the Tsar’s brothers refused to take the throne.2 As America moved toward war, Russia was not yet officially a Republic, but the Provisional Government that had constituted itself from progressive elements of the Duma, the Tsar’s rump of a parliament, announced that a Constituent Assembly, elected on a ‘universal basis’, would meet within the year.

In the meantime the chief new sources of revolutionary legitimacy were the assemblies known as Soviets, which constituted themselves on the initiative of radical soldiers, workers and peasants in every city, town and village.

Freedom was the watchword of the revolution. The death penalty was abolished. All restrictions on assembly and free speech were lifted. The civil equality of Jews and other ethnic and religious minorities was proclaimed. Feminist demonstrators loudly and successfully demanded that women, as well as men, must elect the Constituent Assembly. Order number one of the Petrograd Soviet granted to the rank and file of the Russian Army the same catalogue of rights now enjoyed by other citizens. Brutal corporal punishment was outlawed. Even desertion was no longer punishable by death.

What was lost. Fucking Stalin.

Britain and France’s reliance on the armies of the Tsarist autocracy had been the biggest obstacle to his championing of the cause of the ‘democratic Entente’. Now, as Lansing put it to his cabinet colleagues, ‘the revolution in Russia . . . had removed the one objection to affirming that the European war was a war between democracy and absolutism’.

In the spring of 1917 the Russian revolution was first and foremost a patriotic event. Of all the scurrilous rumours spread about the Tsar and Tsarina, by far the most damaging were those alleging treacherous contacts with their cousins in Germany. How else was one to explain the Tsar’s obstinate refusal to embrace the uplifting spirit of reform and mobilization that had swept Russian liberals and even many Russian socialists to his side in August 1914?

It was the failure to make good those victories that turned draft riots, agrarian protest and strikes into a political revolution. With the Tsar out of the way, there could be no talk of surrender. Anyone who insulted the revolutionary patriotism of the great, grey-coated mass of peasant soldiers, who dominated every assembly in Petrograd, ran the risk of lynching.

if capitulation was not an option, nor could the revolution continue the Tsar’s war. The men who dominated the early phase of the revolution – figures such as Alexander Kerensky, the Labourite social democrat shuttling between the Provisional Government and the Soviet, or Irakli Tsereteli, the charismatic Georgian Menshevik internationalist who led foreign policy discussion in the Petrograd Soviet – had no desire to continue the war for the conquest of imperialist objectives such as the Dardanelles.