A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (107 page)

The cease-fire was announced around five o’ clock in the morning Paris time, indicating eleven o’clock as the appointed Armistice hour. Harry Truman, commanding a battery of the 129th Field Artillery, fired his last shell just a few minutes before the set time, having received orders to keep fighting until the actual Armistice hour. Ironically, Truman, at least indirectly, may have fired the last shots of
both
world wars—one at his artillery station in France and another through his order to drop the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, in Japan.

When the shooting stopped, the United States was fortunate that its casualty lists were considerably shorter than those of the other participants. The numbers of dead were mind-numbing: 1.8 million Germans, 1.7 million Russians, 1.4 million French, 1.3 million Austrians, and 947,000 British or Commonwealth troops. American losses were staggeringly light by comparison. The nation soberly absorbed the actual battle deaths for the American Expeditionary Force, which stood at 48,909, although a total of 112,432 soldiers and sailors had died in all theaters of all causes in a conflict not of their own making.

Wilson, meanwhile, had already outlined a proposal for ensuring (in his mind) that another such war would never occur. He had labeled his program the Fourteen Points, yet even before the Armistice had taken effect, eleven German cities were flying the communist red flag of revolution. Germany had deteriorated into chaos before Wilson even boarded the vessel sailing to France for the peace conference. Germany was not the only European power whose collapse involved the United States. To the east, Russia had disintegrated in the face of antiwar protests and the skillful maneuvering of the diabolical V. I. Lenin, Russia’s “Red Son,” who would spawn the first communist state of the twentieth century.”

Red Son Rising

Amid the sea of blood and America’s entry into the Great War, Russia’s second revolution went almost unnoticed. But not for long. In October 1917, Vladimir Lenin and a tiny core of radically committed Bolshevik communists, took the Russian government by force, grabbing the key centers of communication and controlling the legislature. Estimates put the number of loyal Leninist supporters in Russia at no more than twenty thousand—in a nation of 160 million—but with zealous fervor and unshakable focus, the Bolsheviks seized near-total power in a few months. Lenin’s puppet legislature announced an immediate end to hostilities with Germany, freeing millions of Germany’s Eastern Front troops for service against the newly arrived Yankee forces.

During the civil war that followed between Communist forces (Reds) and nonCommunists (Whites), the United States and the Allies sought to ensure supply lines. Anglo-American troops landed to secure objectives imperative to the Allies’ war effort. When the Bolsheviks finally won, and had pulled Russia out of the war with the Treaty of Brest Litovsk (1918), these actions later aided the Soviet propaganda line that the United States and other capitalist nations had arrayed themselves against Communism in its infancy.

Few Euopeans or Americans—Churchill excepted—saw the menace posed by a Communist government in such a large resource-rich nation. Quite the contrary, many American intellectuals welcomed the Communist movement in Russia as a harbinger of what “should” happen next in America. It did not matter that Joseph Stalin’s minister Vyacheslav Molotov “could sign the death sentences of 3,187 people in just one night and then watch Western movies with Stalin with a pure conscience.”
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When Stalin later claimed his show trials were fair, the
New Republic
accepted his explanations at face value. Owen Lattimore commented that “the executions of dissidents sounds like democracy to me.”
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(Lattimore would be revealed in the 1950s as a Soviet accomplice, if not outright agent.) Harry Ward, a professor of Christian ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York, compared the Soviet system with the teachings of Jesus. From 1919 on, large numbers of the intelligentsia in the United States ignored or downplayed Lenin’s and Stalin’s atrocities, hiding behind the lack of firsthand evidence about the actual brutality of the regime.

At home, however, the Communist movement could not cover up its activities. In April 1919, New York City postal clerks found twenty package bombs addressed to public officials and caught all but two of the saboteurs. The undetected bombs exploded at the attorney general’s house, blowing a deliveryman to pieces, and another exploded at a U.S. senator’s house, shattering the arm of a maid. Outraged citizens supported immediate action, which, with Senate approval, the Justice Department took by launching a series of raids on suspected communists. Authorized by Attorney General Mitchell Palmer, the raids, directed by Palmer’s assistant J. Edgar Hoover, smashed the Communist movement in the United States. A team of lawyers claiming that the government’s attacks endangered civil liberties for all citizens resisted the raids and eventually forced Palmer’s resignation but not before he had reduced membership in the American Communist party and its allies by 80 percent.

The remaining Communists might have remained underground and harmless after the war, but for a sensational murder trial of two anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who were convicted of a Braintree, Massachusetts, robbery and murder in 1921. Both supporters and opponents misidentified the pair as Communists (when in fact they were anarchists), and both sides saw the case as a test of the government’s position on radicals. The two were executed on solid evidence, and attempts to portray the trial as rigged have not stood up. In any event, the prosperity of the 1920s soon combined with the concerns about anarchism to blunt any further spread of communism in the United States. “Sacco and Vanzetti forged an important bond between Communists and their liberal sympathizers,” a bond that resurfaced during the Great Depression and the rise of fascism in the 1930s.
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Versailles and the Fourteen Points

As events in Bolshevik Russia unfolded, they had a direct impact on Wilson’s philosophy of foreign policy. Lenin had already (in December 1917) issued a declaration of his government’s war aims, which was in many ways a formality: he intended to get out of the war as quickly as possible. Partly in response to the Soviet proposals, in January 1918 Wilson offered his own program, known as the Fourteen Points, which in some ways mirrored Lenin’s suggestions. Although the president hoped Russia could be persuaded to stay in the war, he soon “realized that Lenin was now a competitor in the effort to lead the postwar order.”
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In 1918, Wilson the social scientist had convened a panel of 150 academic experts to craft a peace plan under the direction of his close adviser, Colonel Edward House. Some observers, including British diplomatic historian Harold Nicolson, were impressed by this illustrious group, asserting it had produced one of the “wisest documents in history.”
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Others remained skeptical of foreign policy drafted by an academic elite. Attracted to numbers and categories, Wilson outlined five points that related to international relations, including “open covenants” (a concession to Lenin, who had already made public all the treaties Russia had secretly made prior to the revolution), freedom of the seas, free trade, arms reductions, and review of colonial policies with an eye toward justice for the colonized peoples. Then Wilson added eight more points addressing territorial claims after the war, including the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France, recovery of Russian and Italian territory from the Central Powers, establishment of a new Polish nation, and modifications in the Ottoman Empire to separate ethnic minorities into their own countries under the rubric of the Wilsonian phrase, “national self-determination.” That made thirteen points, with the fourteenth consisting of a call for an international congress to discuss and deliberate, even to act as an international policeman to prevent future wars.

Before anyone in the international community could absorb even a few of the Fourteen Points, Wilson inundated them with still more. In February, the Four Principles followed, then in September 1918, the Five Particulars. All of this relentless drafting, pontificating, and, above all,
numbering
came during the bloody final months of the war, when some 9 million Germans still faced the Allied-American armies now without regard to the Eastern Front. The constant stream of points and principles and particulars gave the Germans the impression that the basis of an armistice was constantly in flux and negotiable. Consequently, in early October 1918, German and Austrian diplomats agreed to what they thought Wilson had offered—the Fourteen Points.

More accurately, the Fourteen Points should have been called the
American
Fourteen Points. Certainly the British and the French did not sign off on them, and no sooner had the Central Powers agreed to the stipulations than a secret meeting occurred between House and Anglo-French leaders where they introduced numerous caveats. The Allies changed or amended many of the most important passages. This “Anglo-French Commentary,” as it was called, left the Allies everything and the Central Powers virtually nothing. It created a “Polish Corridor” that divided Prussia; it broke up the Austro-Hungarian Empire and stripped Germany of overseas colonies; it changed Wilson’s word “compensation” to a more harsh-sounding “reparations,” opening the door for the hated war-guilt clause.

Perhaps the worst feature of the Fourteen Points (besides deceiving Germany after a deal had been offered and accepted) was that it proffered a phony explanation of the war itself with the Central Powers the sole villains. It excused Britain and France from their own desire for territory and dominance. To be sure, Germany had struck first; the Germans had engaged in unrestricted submarine warfare, which had already been demonized as “inhuman”; Germany had used zeppelins to bomb London civilians, and had introduced the flamethrower; and Germany had smugly thought she could launch a last-minute offensive and smash France as late as 1918. But it would be unrealistic to ignore the British and French (not to mention Russian and Serbian) culpability in starting the war. Indeed, when comparing the relatively mild treatment post-Napoleonic France had received after Waterloo by the Congress of Vienna—which followed a period of constant war that lasted three times longer than World War I—Germany was unfairly punished in 1919.

Wilson set the stage for such international malfeasance by his make-the-world-safe-for-democracy comments in the original war message, indicating he would not be satisfied until he had reshaped the world in the image of America. The Central Powers should have listened then. Instead, having accepted the Fourteen Points as the grounds for the November 1918 Armistice, they now found themselves excluded from the treaty process entirely, to be handed a Carthaginian peace.

Nevertheless, when Wilson sailed for the peace conference in Paris on December 4, 1918, it is safe to say that he took the hopes of much of the world with him. His arrival in Europe was messianic in tone, the cheers of the people echoing a desperate longing that this American leader might end centuries of Continental conflict. The “stiff-necked, humorless, self-righteous, and puritan” Wilson lapped up the adulation.
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European leaders may have privately scoffed at the president—the French Premier Georges Clemenceau dourly said, “The Fourteen Points bore me…God Almighty has only ten!”—but the masses embraced him.
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Wilson’s reception, in part, involved a natural euphoria over the termination of the war, akin to the brief Era of Good Feelings that had surfaced between the North and South in the weeks following Appomattox.

Personally attending the conference, while good for Wilson’s ego, proved a fatal political mistake. Other representatives, by nature of their parliamentary systems, already had the support of their legislatures. The Constitution, however, required the president to obtain Senate ratification of treaties. By participating personally, Wilson lost some of the aura of a deity from a distance that had won him the adoration of the French.

Unfortunately, Wilson’s lofty phrases did not easily translate into genuine policy with teeth. For example, national self-determination, while apparently sensible, was an idea fraught with danger. Carving a new Poland out of parts of Germany and Russia failed to take into account the many decades when an aggressive Poland had waged war to expand
her
boundaries in the past. Nor did the Ottoman Empire get off easily: Palestine, Mesopotamia (later Iraq), and Syria were sliced off and handed to the League of Nations as trust territories, as was Armenia, though too late to save the half million Armenian civilians slaughtered by the Turkish government. Wilson did not originally insist on establishing completely new states of Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro—only “autonomy” within empires—but by October 16, 1918, while the guns still blazed, Wilson had upped the ante to require statehood status. Perversely, the Allies now lobbied for entire Slavic and Slovakian states that would themselves subordinate Serbs, Croats, Slovenians, Albanians, and other groups trapped within the new nationalities. Wilson had moved in less than four years from neutral in thought and deed to outright hostility toward Germany and Austria-Hungary.

Other punitive clauses reduced the army to a rump, eliminated Germany’s navy as well as stripped her rich industrial territories, and imposed massive reparations. These included not only direct gold payments, but also the construction of ships and railroad cars that the Germans had to offer to the British and French free of charge. All of these constituted massive (and foolish) economic dislocations that helped send Europe into a depression within a few years.