American Experiment (223 page)

Rather than recognize Huerta, Wilson recalled the U.S. ambassador, froze Mexican government funds in the United States, and instituted a policy of “watchful waiting” toward the dictator’s regime. To the traditional tests for recognizing a foreign power, Wilson added a new formula: its government must be “constitutionally legitimate.” American friendship, he postulated in a “Declaration of Policy in Regard to Latin America,” must be predicated on “the orderly processes of just government based upon law, not upon arbitrary or irregular force.”

Wilson’s ideological approach to the Mexican crisis came under a storm of fire. The European powers regarded his new doctrine of legitimacy as an insufferable affront to accepted diplomatic practice. At home, Roosevelt and others took a different tack, charging that the President was not acting strongly enough, and calling for war with Mexico. For Wilson, the conflict soon assumed the aspect of a personal vendetta with the Mexican dictator. “There can be no certain prospect of peace in America,” he warned Congress, “until General Huerta has surrendered his usurped power.” In private Wilson also railed against his critics, charging them with base motives of gain. “I have to pause and remind myself,” he told his secretary, “that I am President of the United States and not of a small group of Americans with vested interests in Mexico.”

Wilson hoped that the United States could continue to exercise “the self-restraint of a really great nation, which realizes its own strength and scorns to misuse it.” Slowly, however, the country edged toward war. In February 1914 the President allowed arms to be shipped to the rebel Constitutionalists in Mexico. Still, Huerta seemed to be growing stronger; only military intervention, wrote Wilson’s personal envoy in Mexico City, could bring to an end the dictator’s “saturnalia of crime and oppression.” When U.S. sailors and Mexican police clashed in Tampico, Wilson went before Congress and requested authority to use force. The next day, April 21, American troops seized the port of Veracruz after overcoming stiff Mexican resistance.

The occupation of Veracruz helped bring about the downfall of Huerta and the elevation of Venustiano Carranza, chief among the Constitutionalist rebels. But Carranza was no more legitimate a ruler than Huerta; Francisco “Pancho” Villa and others kept revolt brewing in the northern provinces, while Carranza took a harshly anti-American position. Wilson was rescued from this embarrassing impasse by the diplomats of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, who offered to mediate between Washington and Mexico City. With the help of the ABC powers, Wilson was able to evacuate Veracruz in November, and a year later he grudgingly extended recognition to Carranza.

Were Wilson’s moral pronouncements merely a smokescreen for a policy of economic imperialism? Holding up Veracruz and the Caribbean interventions as examples, some observers—and some historians later— charged that Wilson “outraged the sovereignty of unwilling nations” in the interests of American business, and that his actions were indistinguishable from those of his Republican predecessors. Actually, Wilson displayed considerable restraint in dealing with Mexico. American property, and even American lives, continued to be lost in that country, yet Wilson resisted pressures to launch an all-out war. Presented with a stark choice between economic and ideological interests, Wilson used limited means and pursued democratic ends.

When he could, Wilson did try to reconcile material interests with morality, and he achieved some success. The Philippines gained limited self-government under his Administration, and the inhabitants of Puerto Rico were granted the rights of American citizenship. In the Caribbean, intervention by the United States brought democratic reforms to several states, at least on paper. Yet it is questionable whether Wilson achieved his stated goal, to “teach the South American republics to elect good men.” Certainly in China, where there were no U.S. Marines to back up his edicts, Wilson’s policy drifted toward failure as Yuan’s regime degenerated into despotism and Sun Yat-sen was forced to flee the country. The practical question, of how ideas and force should be mixed in a single consistent approach to foreign affairs, remained unresolved. At the very least for Wilson—and for all twentieth-century Presidents—Latin America was an early schooling in the complex and powerful autonomous forces operating in what would come to be known as the Third World.

Events in Mexico continued to frustrate Wilson. There Pancho Villa, the illiterate but wily peasant leader, had emerged as an even greater threat than the hostility of Carranza. Villa’s men lent a nationalist tincture to their banditry by killing Americans, blackmailing U.S. firms, and even raiding
into the United States. Henry Cabot Lodge rose in the Senate to denounce Villa as a murderous peon, although to other Americans he seemed a Latin Robin Hood on horseback.

Wilson finally was forced to act when Villa shot up the border town of Columbus, New Mexico, in February 1916. The President dispatched a cavalry force under General John Pershing across the border to track down the bandit chief. Pershing’s men crisscrossed northern Mexico on horseback, in automobiles, and with airplanes; they had a few colorful gunfights with the Mexicans, but Villa and his main force eluded a showdown. The main effect of the expedition was further to poison relations with Carranza. At last, in early 1917, Wilson was forced to withdraw his men—they were needed elsewhere.

L
IÈGE, BELGIUM, AUGUST
12, 1914:
From concealed bunkers cut into the hillside, machine-gun bullets spray out at the advancing German soldiers. The attackers hit the dirt, their freshly issued uniforms soiled with blood and grime. The Germans continue to crawl forward, only to be checked by a Belgian counterattack. Suddenly the attack halts; the battlefield is gripped by silence. Then the German siege guns, the largest in the world, come into play. Shrilling like speeding express trains, their shells arch over the crouched men in
feldgrau
and smash into the Belgian forts. The cannon, with their yard-long shells and barrels the length of a freight car, easily dwarf the two hundred men that service each of them. They are the “guns of August,” the heralds of Europe’s twentieth-century holocaust of total war.

The German emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, had inspected the guns in their Krupp factories and approved their destructive purpose. But back in his palace outside Berlin, as the assassination of Austria’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand pushed Europe toward the continental war that Wilhelm had often blustered about fighting, the Kaiser’s nerve failed. Although Austria had already attacked Serbia, and Russia was mobilizing, Wilhelm summoned his army chief of staff to the royal chambers. Tall, gloomy Helmuth von Moltke informed the agitated monarch that there was no alternative: Germany’s Schlieffen Plan, for a two-front war against Russia and France, was under way and could not be stopped. Eleven thousand trains, half a million railroad cars, and nearly 2 million men were moving with meticulous precision across Central Europe. Five German columns thrust into neutral Belgium, aiming to reach Paris and destroy the French army before Russia could act. Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg announced to the German people that their fate now rested on the “iron dice” of war.

In Paris, the leaders of the French government also met in a palace—the beautiful gilded Elysée, which seemed to embrace the diverse glories of France’s democrats, kings, and despots. Here too the political leaders found themselves at the mercy of the soldiers’ long-drafted plans. General Joseph Joffre, the stolid commander of the French army, brushed aside President Raymond Poincaré’s suggestion that a force be detached to help
the Belgians. Instead, the entire army was launched against Alsace-Lorraine with the aim of wresting those two provinces back from Germany. But within days—hours in some places—the spirited French attack was bloodily repulsed. Gallic
élan
proved no match for German barbed wire and machine guns.

As the French army recoiled in defeat from the German frontier, Britain’s Cabinet met in the modest row house at 10 Downing Street. Prime Minister Herbert Asquith and Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey had led their country into the war over Germany’s attack on Belgium, despite the opposition of much of their own party. Now they watched in consternation as staff officers sketched out on a large-scale map how the Germans were sweeping with unexpected strength and strategic effectiveness across the Belgian plain, heading straight for France’s unguarded northern frontier and Channel ports. Britain itself seemed suddenly in danger.

Only one minister appeared undaunted by the Germans’ quick success. Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, at thirty-nine was regarded as a reckless soldier, a melodramatic author, and a political jackanapes of considerable flair but little reliability. Less obvious was his passion for the fleet that he had built under the tutelage of crusty Admiral Lord John Fisher, and his cool efficiency in directing it. When the Cabinet voted for war, it found that Churchill already had the navy assembled and at battle stations, ready to block any further German surprises. In Churchill’s fleet—their answer to the Germans’ cannon—the British possessed the second-strongest piece on the European chessboard.

The most awesome piece, the 6-million-man Russian army, was commanded by the weakest player. Nicholas II, “Czar of All the Russias,” was not even master in his dreary palace on the gray Baltic seashore. Dominated by a jealous and superstitious wife; manipulated by fawning, reactionary ministers; gulled by the vicious yet mesmerizing monk Rasputin— still Nicholas himself believed the myth of his own absolute power. Honoring a pledge to come to France’s aid at the earliest possible moment, the Czar ordered the first mobilized units of his ponderous force to make an immediate attack on Germany.

As two hastily assembled armies of white-uniformed peasants advanced slowly over sandy roads into East Prussia, the limitations of czarist fiat became clear. Nicholas could not will into being the supplies of telegraph wire, shells, horses—even the black bread and tea of the men’s rations—that ran short in the very first days of the offensive. Nor could he overcome the years of neglect by a war minister who denounced machine guns and rifled cannon as “vicious innovations” and insisted that the Russian army
continue its reliance on the bayonet. Most of all, there was an unfillable void of leadership. Men of ability—including the Czar’s own cousin—had been systematically barred from power as threats to the regime’s sclerotic stability. Even the cunning Rasputin was incapacitated at this crucial moment, hospitalized with a knife wound inflicted by an outraged woman. And Russia’s finest strategic mind was a thousand miles away, in exile and bitter opposition.

In neutral Switzerland, a small group of Russian émigrés watched with a wild surmise as Europe disintegrated around them. Most of these assorted literati and revolutionaries had their eyes fixed on Russia, where the czarist regime began to crumble beneath the hammer blows of 1914 and 1915. A few, however, looked farther, and among these was a balding, Tatar-eyed Marxist named Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov.

Ulyanov, a brilliant lawyer turned revolutionary, had for more than two decades cut a swath through Russia’s underground politics. Under the
nom de révolution
of Lenin he had led the Bolsheviks, the most extreme faction of the Marxist Social Democratic Party. Now exiled in Zurich, Lenin was at low ebb politically. He was cut off from Russia, bereft of all but a few diehard supporters, earning a meager living with occasional library work. Sharing an apartment with the family of a shoemaker, he and his wife Krupskaya took their meals at a dilapidated boardinghouse that Krupskaya suspected of being frequented by criminals.

Yet if Lenin was almost barren of political resources, he was powerful in intellectual ones. In his Zurich rooms, he drafted his most devastating attack on the international political-economic order, in a pamphlet entitled
Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism,
which laid the blame for the holocaust of World War I squarely on the system of industrial monopolies that had transformed Europe and America over the preceding decades. The war was caused not by faulty leadership or rising nationalism or uncontrolled militarism; rather it was “an annexationist, predatory, plunderous war” being fought “for the division of the world, for the partition and reparation of colonies, ‘spheres of influence’ of finance capital.” The strains and contradictions of monopoly capitalism had reached out to engulf the entire world, and now they were grinding to their inevitable bloody conclusion in the trenches of Europe.

Drawing on the work of J. A. Hobson, Lenin documented the growth of industrial capitalism into a global system of investment and control, especially the concentration of industrial holdings into giant monopolistic holdings throughout Europe and America. In the United States, for example, 1 percent of the firms in the country employed 30 percent of the workers, used more than 75 percent of the electric and steam power
generated, and produced 43 percent of all output. These huge combines, Lenin concluded, were forced to look abroad for further growth. Thus Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company, the Anglo-Dutch Shell trust, and a consortium of German banks divided up control of wells in Russia, Romania, and the East Indies, as did the House of Morgan and German shipping cartels of world steamship lines. “Today,” he summarized the world situation, “monopoly has become a fact.”

Railroads in particular seemed to fascinate Lenin. Railroad construction, he claimed, seemed a “simple, natural, democratic, cultural and civilising enterprise…. But as a matter of fact the capitalist threads, which in thousands of different intercrossings bind these enterprises with private property in the means of production in general, have converted this work of construction into an instrument for oppressing
a thousand million
people (in the colonies and semi-colonies), that is, more than half the population of the globe.”

As the economic struggle for division of the world continued, Lenin claimed, it increasingly took the form of violence and political domination. By the early 1900s, the world was completely divided; only a redivision was possible. Since the industrial nations, in Lenin’s analysis, were buying off their working classes with the profits squeezed from colonies, that redivision was imperative. Since each of those nations had built great military machines, the redivision would be by force. The result, he concluded, was the World War.