Abstract
This chapter applies the theoretical frameworks utilized by scholars wondering why Europe went to war in 1914 to the specific case of the US decision to go to war in 1917, and to enter into an undeclared (but very real) alliance with Britain (and France). Canvassed are all the leading explanatory accounts that have been proffered of that intervention decision, over the course of many decades. This chapter’s theoretical and empirical contextualization of the debates over April 1917 provides essential background for the novel argument that unfolds in Part II of the book. Highlighted in this chapter is the supposition that “emotion” played a much more important part in the American decision to join the war than it had, nearly three years earlier, in the divers decisions of the initial belligerents to resort to military force. And from this supposition, important consequences were to arise.
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Notes
- 1.
Not all scholars agree that it was Wilson’s position on the war that bore primary responsibility for his re-election, though no one would deny it was an important factor; as one expert on that vote writes, the “really basic influences on the election … were social legislation and peace,” with the former being more important than the latter. See S. D. Lovell, The Presidential Election of 1916 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), pp. 181–82; and Nicole M. Phelps, “The Election of 1916,” in A Companion to Woodrow Wilson, ed. Ross A. Kennedy (Chichester, UK: John Wiley and Sons, 2013), pp. 173–89.
- 2.
Frederic L. Paxson, American Democracy and the World War: Pre-War Years, 1914–1917 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1936), p. 14.
- 3.
Though Cleveland held office for eight years, they were not consecutive, due to his having failed in his re-election bid in 1888 (even though winning a larger share of that year’s popular vote than his Republican rival, Benjamin Harrison). Accordingly, Cleveland is listed as being both the 22nd and 24th president of the United States, respectively, from 1885 to 1889 and 1893 to 1897; see Horace Samuel Merrill, Bourbon Leader: Grover Cleveland and the Democratic Party (Boston: Little, Brown, 1957).
- 4.
James Chace, 1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft & Debs—The Election that Changed the Country (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004). Together, Roosevelt and Taft took around 52 percent of the popular vote, to Wilson’s 42 percent, with the bulk of the remainder going to the Socialist candidate, Eugene V. Debs.
- 5.
Justus Drew Doenecke, Nothing Less Than War: A New History of American Entry into World War I (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011), pp. 293–96. In 1812, the war resolution passed in the house by a vote of 79–49, and in the senate by 19–13. Kevin P. Phillips, The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics, and the Triumph of Anglo-America (New York: Basic Books, 1999), p. 336.
- 6.
The United States never did declare war against two members of the Central Powers’ coalition, the Ottoman empire and Bulgaria; David R. Woodward, Trial By Friendship: Anglo-American Relations, 1917–1918 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993), pp. 42–43.
- 7.
Quoted in John Milton Cooper, Jr., “‘An Irony of Fate’: Woodrow Wilson’s Pre-World War I Diplomacy,” Diplomatic History 3 (Fall 1979): 425–37, quote at p. 425.
- 8.
The most comprehensive account of that activity is presented in three works by the leading Wilson scholar, Arthur S. Link, Wilson: The Struggle for Neutrality, 1914–1915 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960); Wilson: Confusion and Crises, 1915–1916 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964); Wilson: Campaigns for Progressivism and Peace, 1916–1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965). Also see Patrick Devlin, Too Proud to Fight: Woodrow Wilson’s Neutrality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).
- 9.
Nearly, but not everyone, as there is a school of Wilson interpreters, to be discussed at the end of this chapter, who consider his diplomacy to have been represented much more by continuity than by rupture; for an expression of this perspective, see Robert E. Hannigan, The Great War and American Foreign Policy, 1914–24 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).
- 10.
Arthur S. Link, “That Cobb Interview,” Journal of American History 72 (June 1985): 7–17.
- 11.
Immortal Quotes from the Great War, available at http://www.greatwar.nl/quotes/immortal44.html, accessed 3 March 2018.
- 12.
Among this group being a recent Wilson biographer, A. Scott Berg, Wilson (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2013), p. 433.
- 13.
Skeptics include Jerold S. Auerbach, “Woodrow Wilson’s ‘Prediction’ to Frank Cobb: Words Historians Should Doubt Ever Got Spoken,” Journal of American History 54 (December 1967): 608–17; and Brian J. Dalton, “Wilson’s Prediction to Cobb: Notes on the Auerbach-Link Debate,” Historian 32 (August 1970): 545–63. Even Arthur Link, who thinks that the president and the editor did have a discussion, more or less along the lines reported, nevertheless concedes that their meeting took place in mid-March, not on 2 April. Link, “That Cobb Interview,” p. 7.
- 14.
In 2015, some Princeton students stumbled upon what they took to be breaking news, namely that Wilson had been considered somewhat of a racist during his lifetime; therefore, they lobbied university administrators, unsuccessfully as things transpired, to change the name of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. See “The Case Against Woodrow Wilson,” New York Times, 25 November 2015, p. A26; and Alexandra Markovich, “Wilson Name Will Be Kept at Princeton,” ibid., 5 April 2016, p. A23. Notwithstanding the students’ evident surprise, Wilson’s views on race relations, which were hardly enlightened ones, even for his day, have been well-known to scholars for many decades. For examples, see Kathleen L. Wolgemuth, “Woodrow Wilson and Federal Segregation,” Journal of Negro History 44 (April 1959): 158–73; Nancy J. Weiss, “The Negro and the New Freedom: Fighting Wilsonian Segregation,” Political Science Quarterly 84 (March 1969): 61–79; Morton Sosna, “The South in the Saddle: Racial Politics During the Wilson Years,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 54 (Autumn 1970): 30–49; and Richard M. Abrams, “Woodrow Wilson and the Southern Congressmen, 1913–1916,” Journal of Southern History 22 (November 1956): 417–37. The best recent sources on the issue of Wilson and race are Patricia O’Toole, The Moralist: Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018); and Eric Steven Yellin, Racism in the Nation’s Service: Government Workers and the Color Line in Woodrow Wilson’s America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013). More generally, see John Milton Cooper, Jr., and Thomas J. Knock, eds., Jefferson, Lincoln, and Wilson: The American Dilemma of Race and Democracy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010); and George Sinkler, The Racial Attitudes of American Presidents from Abraham Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971).
- 15.
In the judgment of one leading student of US foreign policy, “[i]n the history of America’s encounter with the world in the twentieth century, Woodrow Wilson is the central figure.” Robert W. Tucker, “The Triumph of Wilsonianism?” World Policy Journal 10 (Winter 1993/94): 83–99, quote at p. 83.
- 16.
This third set of decisions can be counted upon to be the most enduring legacy of Wilsonian decisionmaking, not just for its intrinsic relevance to our own time, but also because of the current centenary of the epochal peacemaking parley that took place in Paris in 1919. For the moment, the most comprehensive assessment of the peace conference remains Manfred F. Boemeke, Gerald D. Feldman, and Elisabeth Glaser, eds., The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment after 75 Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Also invaluable is Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2002).
- 17.
Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001). According to Mead, there have been only four such paradigms in the long history of the United States, with the other three being Hamiltonianism, Jeffersonianism, and Jacksonianism.
- 18.
Useful discussions of the rubric’s varied meanings are found in G. John Ikenberry, Thomas J. Knock, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and Tony Smith, The Crisis of American Foreign Policy: Wilsonianism in the Twenty-first Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); John A. Thompson, “Wilsonianism: The Dynamics of a Conflicted Concept,” International Affairs 86 (January 2010): 27–47; David Fromkin, “What Is Wilsonianism?” World Policy Journal 11 (Spring 1994): 100–11; Allen Lynch, “Woodrow Wilson and the Principle of ‘National Self-Determination’: A Reconsideration,” Review of International Studies 28 (April 2002): 419–36; Michla Pomerance, “The United States and Self-Determination: Perspectives on the Wilsonian Conception,” American Journal of International Law 70 (January 1976): 1–27; Derek Heater, National Self-Determination: Woodrow Wilson and His Legacy (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994); Richard K. Betts, “Systems for Peace or Causes of War? Collective Security, Arms Control, and the New Europe,” International Security 17 (Summer 1992): 5–43; and Peter Beinart, “Balancing Act: The Other Wilsonianism,” World Affairs 171 (Summer 2008): 76–88.
- 19.
Observed one of Wilson’s cabinet colleagues, the secretary of the interior, Franklin K. Lane, Wilson might have shown himself to be “surprisingly” aware of public opinion, but “he never takes public sentiment as offering a solution for a difficulty.” Quoted in Henry A. Turner, “Woodrow Wilson and Public Opinion,” Public Opinion Quarterly 21 (Winter 1957–58): 505–20, quote at p. 519. Also see E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1946), p. 32, where Wilson is said to have found particularly “congenial” the “voice of the people”—so long as it represented the “voice of reason speaking though his lips.”
- 20.
Robert W. Tucker, Woodrow Wilson and the Great War: Reconsidering America’s Neutrality, 1914–1917 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), pp. 20–21. Wilson routinely ignored counsel tendered not only by cabinet colleagues but also by his ambassadors in key European postings, including London and Berlin; apropos the latter capital, Wilson considered his ambassador to Germany, James Gerard, to be “an idiot.” Wilson, quoted in Harvey A. DeWeerd, President Wilson Fights His War: World War I and the American Intervention (New York: Macmillan, 1968), pp. 17–18. As for the former capital, Wilson remained consistently mistrustful of advice sent from London by his ambassador, Walter Hines Page, despite erroneous claims made by some that Wilson was too much under the influence of Page, “perhaps simply because he liked him and both were Southerners. Page had fallen under the influence of the government to which Wilson had accredited him. He thereby lost all influence at the White House, inclining the President to believe almost the opposite of anything Page recommended.” Robert H. Ferrell, Woodrow Wilson and World War I, 1917–1921 (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), p. 90. But for a different view, stressing the malign impact of Page upon the president, cf. C. Hartley Grattan, “The Walter Hines Page Legend,” American Mercury 6 (September 1925): 39–51. Useful correctives are John Milton Cooper, Jr., Walter Hines Page: The Southerner as American (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977); and Ross Gregory, Walter Hines Page: Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970).
- 21.
Quoted in Joseph E. Persico, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918—World War I and Its Violent Climax (New York: Random House, 2004), p. 67.
- 22.
Jack S. Levy and John A. Vasquez, “Introduction: Historians, Political Scientists, and the Causes of the First World War,” in The Outbreak of the First World War: Structure, Politics, and Decision-Making, ed. Levy and Vasquez (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 3–29, quote at p. 28.
- 23.
Jack S. Levy, “The Initiation and Spread of the First World War: Interdependent Decisions,” Foreign Policy Analysis 7 (April 2011): 183–88, quote at p. 184.
- 24.
Levy and Vasquez, “Introduction,” p. 29. Also see John A. Vasquez, Paul F. Diehl, Colin Flint, and Jürgen Scheffran, “Forum on the Spread of War, 1914–1917: A Dialogue between Political Scientists and Historians,” Foreign Policy Analysis 7 (April 2011): 139–41.
- 25.
See Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela, “The Great War as a Global War: Imperial Conflict and the Reconfiguration of World Order, 1911–1923,” Diplomatic History 38 (September 2014): 786–200.
- 26.
Italy did not actually commence hostilities until May 1915, but its signature on the (secret) treaty of London on 26 April 1915 committed it to join the war on the Allied side within a month.
- 27.
David Stevenson, Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy (New York: Basic Books, 2004), p. 88.
- 28.
Japan declared war on Germany on 23 August 1914; see Frederick R. Dickinson, War and National Reinvention: Japan in the Great War, 1914–1919 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
- 29.
Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 34.
- 30.
One of the leading war correspondents, Philip Gibbs, who covered the fighting for two London papers, the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Chronicle, commented after the war that the soldiers with whom he was embedded “had been taught to believe that the whole object of life was to reach out to beauty and love, and that mankind, in its progress to perfection, had killed the beast instinct, cruelty, blood-lust, the primitive, savage law of survival by tooth and claw and club and ax. All poetry, all art, all religion had preached this gospel and this promise. Now that ideal had broken like a china vase dashed to hard ground.” Gibbs, Now It Can Be Told (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1920), p. 131.
- 31.
Though he did not consider nationalism to be the fundamental cause of the war, it was one of the half-dozen contributing factors listed by Stephen Van Evera as predisposing Europe to fighting, given that “each major power taught its people a mythical nationalistic history that emphasized the righteousness of its own conduct, and falsely cast itself as the innocent victim in past conflicts.” Stephen Van Evera, “Why Cooperation Failed in 1914,” World Politics 38 (October 1985): 80–117, quote at p. 81.
- 32.
Michael S. Neiberg, “The 1914 Analogy at War,” Orbis 58 (January 2014): 486–99, quote at p. 496.
- 33.
That he is not so inclined is made obvious in this passage: “historians grow suspicious when history becomes a footnote to a discussion of policy or theory. As one political scientist told me, history is for the political scientist what the Navy is for the Marines: history gets them to the beaches, then they go and fight. My colleague seemed more than a bit puzzled when I expressed discomfort with his analogy.” Ibid., p. 498.
- 34.
Michael S. Neiberg, Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak of World War I (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), pp. 152, 179–80. Also see Eric J. Leed, No Man’s Land: Combat & Identity in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
- 35.
William Mulligan, The Great War for Peace (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), pp. 61–62. Also see Fritz Stern, The Failure of Illiberalism: Essays on the Political Culture of Modern Germany (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), p. 120: “With what innocence, with what enthusiasm, did the Europeans of 1914 respond to the tocsin!... The enthusiasm for war did not bespeak a great bloodthirstiness. For some, it signified a yearning to escape insufferable boredom, to get rid of bourgeois sham and oppressiveness.”
- 36.
Jeffrey Verhey, The Spirit of 1914: Militarism, Myth and Mobilization in Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 97, 113. Notes one author, apropos claims that the outrages of the Nazi era were prefigured by a zeal for war in Germany in 1914, the “attempt to see in the ephemeral ‘war enthusiasm’ of 1914 an anticipation of fanatical Nazi demonstrations is puzzling and probably wrong. Whatever happened in a few corners of Berlin, Vienna, or Paris, it is still true that the outbreak of war was received with stupefaction, disbelief, and resignation on the part of most ordinary observers.” Jay M. Winter, “Catastrophe and Culture: Recent Trends in the Historiography of the First World War,” Journal of Modern History 64 (September 1992): 525–32, quote at p. 529.
- 37.
See Wesley Marsh Gewehr, The Rise of Nationalism in the Balkans, 1800–1930 (New York: Henry Holt, 1931); and Richard J. Crampton, “The Decline of the Concert of Europe in the Balkans, 1913–1914,” Slavonic and East European Review 52 (July 1974): 393–419.
- 38.
I borrow here from the title of a book written by a key participant in the American culture wars of the neutrality period (on the German-American side), George S. Viereck, Spreading Germs of Hate (New York: Horace Liveright, 1930).
- 39.
For interesting discussions of similarities between the theoretical approaches of the two subdisciplines of IR and diplomatic history, see Alexander L. George, “Knowledge for Statecraft: The Challenge for Political Science and History,” International Security 22 (Summer 1997): 44–52; and John Lewis Gaddis, “History, Theory, and Common Ground,” ibid., pp. 75–85. Also see Colin Elman and Miriam Fendius Elman, eds., Bridges and Boundaries: Historians, Political Scientists, and the Study of International Relations (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001).
- 40.
John Dos Passos, Mr. Wilson’s War (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962).
- 41.
On that coming of age, see Robert E. Hannigan, The New World Power: American Foreign Policy, 1898–1917 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).
- 42.
John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), pp. 236–37. For a recent combined restatement of the assumed strategic merits of offshore balancing, see Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, “The Case for Offshore Balancing: A Superior U.S. Grand Strategy,” Foreign Affairs 95 (July/August 2016): 70–83. Individually, the two structural realists have championed this grand strategy in Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018); and Mearsheimer, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018).
- 43.
Stephen M. Walt, “US Grand Strategy after the Cold War: Can Realism Explain It? Should Realism Guide It?’ International Relations 32, 1 (2018): 3–21, quote at p. 8. On its face, this statement would seem to contradict the ascription to Walt of a defensive-realist perspective, for the latter, properly understood, would have US intervention motivated not by what a would-be “hegemon” was threatening to do in its own neck of the woods, but rather by what Americans feared it intended to do in America’s “near abroad.”
- 44.
Cited, somewhat irreverently, in “100 Famous Quotes You Need to Know if You Ever Want to Win a Pub Quiz,” Telegraph (London), 26 January 2017; available at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/the-filter/famous-quotes-you-need-to-know-if-you-ever-want-to-win-a-pub-qui/leon-trotsky/, accessed 14 March 2018.
- 45.
On those campaigns of the neutrality years, see John Patrick Finnegan, Against the Specter of a Dragon: The Campaign for American Military Preparedness, 1914–1917 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1974); George C. Herring, Jr., “James Hay and the Preparedness Controversy, 1915–1916,” Journal of Southern History 30 (November 1964): 383–404; and Michael Pearlman, To Make Democracy Safe for America: Patricians and Preparedness in the Progressive Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984).
- 46.
See Alfred Vagts, “Hopes and Fears of an American-German War, 1870–1915: I,” Political Science Quarterly 54 (December 1939): 514–35; and more generally, Clara Eve Schieber, The Transformation of American Sentiment Toward Germany, 1870–1914 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1923). German activities in the United States, including espionage, propaganda, and sabotage initiatives, did little to win a place of affection for the country in the hearts of preparedness advocates, always more than “prepared” to put those initiatives in the most sinister possible light, as not just annoying (which they were), but also endangering. For a critical assessment of German attempts to influence developments in the United States, see Reinhard R. Doerries, “Imperial Berlin and Washington: New Light on Germany’s Foreign Policy and America’s Entry into World War I,” Central European History 11 (March 1978): 23–49; and Idem, Imperial Challenge: Ambassador Count Bernstorff and German-American Relations, 1908–1917 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989).
- 47.
For the acrimonious campaign waged by Roosevelt after mid-1915 to try to get Wilson to join the war against Germany, see J. Lee Thompson, Never Call Retreat: Theodore Roosevelt and the Great War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Also see John Milton Cooper, Jr., The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1983).
- 48.
Though some scholars would later, during the era of the Vietnam War and shortly thereafter, dare to question whether US physical security had ever been imperilled by Nazi Germany. See, for expressions of this doubt, Bruce M. Russett, No Clear and Present Danger: A Skeptical View of the United States Entry into World War II (New York: Harper & Row, 1972); and Melvin Small, Was War Necessary? National Security and the U.S. Entry into War, Sage Library of Social Research, vol. 105 (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1980).
- 49.
Walter Lippmann, U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1943).
- 50.
Forrest Davis, The Atlantic System: The Story of Anglo-American Control of the Seas (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1941).
- 51.
I have made this argument in my book, Latin America and the Transformation of U.S. Strategic Thought, 1936–1940 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), which is heavily based on documents in official US government files, contained in the National Archives in Washington and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, in Hyde Park, New York.
- 52.
Arthur S. Link, The Higher Realism of Woodrow Wilson (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1971). Also see William G. Carleton, “A New Look at Woodrow Wilson,” Virginia Quarterly Review 38 (Fall 1962): 545–66.
- 53.
For this intriguing claim, see Ross A. Kennedy, “Woodrow Wilson, World War I, and an American Conception of National Security,” Diplomatic History 25 (Winter 2001): 1–31. Also see Idem, The Will to Believe: Woodrow Wilson, World War I, and America’s Strategy for Peace and Security (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2009).
- 54.
For instance, see the vigorous rebuttal of the Wilson-as-realist theme in Lloyd E. Ambrosius, Wilsonian Statecraft: Theory and Practice of Liberal Internationalism during World War I (Wilmington, DEL: Scholarly Resources, 1991).
- 55.
In addition to the works by Arthur S. Link cited above, in notes 8 and 52, see Edward H. Buehrig, Woodrow Wilson and the Balance of Power (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955); and Ernest R. May, The World War and American Isolation, 1914–1917 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959).
- 56.
Daniel Malloy Smith, “National Interest and American Intervention, 1917: An Historiographical Appraisal,” Journal of American History 52 (June 1965): 5–24, quote at pp. 23–24. Also see Idem, The Great Departure: The United States and World War I, 1914–1920 (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1965).
- 57.
Richard W. Leopold, “The Problem of American Intervention, 1917: An Historical Retrospect,” World Politics 2 (April 1950): 405–25, quote at p. 423, n52.
- 58.
Galen Jackson, “The Offshore Balancing Thesis Reconsidered: Realism, the Balance of Power in Europe, and America’s Decision for War in 1917,” Security Studies 21 (July 2012): 455–89, quoting from pp. 485–6 and 488–89 (emphasis added).
- 59.
Notes one student of presidential decisionmaking style, commenting upon the strategic course Wilson charted in April 1917, “[w]hether right or wrong, wise or unwise, that course was the result of a flawed policymaking process that left the crucial decision for war or peace in the hands of one man, the president….. In 1908, Wilson had written that ‘the initiative in foreign affairs, which the President possesses without any restriction whatever, is virtually the power to control them absolutely.’ He believed that was a good thing, a desirable aspect of the presidency, because he assumed that presidents would know and act in the national interest. His own experience in the White House … calls that confidence into question.” Kendrick A. Clements, “Woodrow Wilson and World War I,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 34 (March 2004): 62–82, quote at pp. 81–82. Also see Idem, The Presidency of Woodrow Wilson (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992).
- 60.
Robert D. Accinelli, “Link’s Case for Wilson the Diplomatist,” Reviews in American History 9 (September 1981): 285–94, quote at p. 293. In a similar vein, another scholar discerned a “correlation between the character of the times and the differing appraisals” of the man. See Richard L. Watson, Jr., “Woodrow Wilson and His Interpreters, 1947–1957,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 44 (September 1957): 207–36, quote at pp. 208–9.
- 61.
The editorial appeared in his newspaper, the Emporia [Kansas] Gazette, and is quoted in William Allen White, The Autobiography of William Allen White (New York: Macmillan, 1946), p. 640.
- 62.
The tragic dimension is poignantly captured in John Milton Cooper, Jr., Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Gene Smith, When the Cheering Stopped: The Last Years of Woodrow Wilson (New York: William Morrow, 1964).
- 63.
John Milton Cooper, Jr., “The World War and American Memory,” Diplomatic History 38 (September 2014): 727–36, quote at p. 734.
- 64.
No less a classical-realist icon than George Kennan could profess to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a member of the foreign relations committee of the senate before which he was giving testimony in 1989, that “recent events in Europe had caused him to reconsider his earlier views on Wilson, a leader Kennan now stated appeared to be well in advance of his time, given that globalization and the spread of political liberalization suggested that the world was moving in a Wilsonian direction.” David Steigerwald, “Historiography: The Reclamation of Woodrow Wilson?” Diplomatic History 23 (Winter 1999): 79–99, quote at pp. 79–80.
- 65.
David M. Esposito, The Legacy of Woodrow Wilson: American Aims in World War I (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996), pp. 140–41.
- 66.
Robert Endicott Osgood, Ideals and Self-Interest in America’s Foreign Relations: The Great Transformation of the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), p. 175.
- 67.
Collective security is often, sloppily, used as a synonym for a different, and competing, sort of security dispensation, collective defense. The biggest difference between the two security arrangements concerns the place of alliances, forbidden in the former, essential in the latter. A good analysis of the concept remains Inis L. Claude, Jr., “Collective Security as an Approach to Peace,” in Claude, From Swords into Plowshares: The Problems and Progress of International Organization, 4th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), pp. 353–64. Also see Roland N. Stromberg, “The Idea of Collective Security,” Journal of the History of Ideas 17 (April 1956): 250–63.
- 68.
Lloyd E. Ambrosius, “Wilson, the Republicans, and French Security after World War I,” Journal of American History 59 (September 1972): 341–52. Wilson agreed, reluctantly, that the tripartite alliance so desired by France should be incorporated into the Versailles treaty, but when the US senate failed to ratify the latter, the former also became a dead letter. See Louis A. R. Yates, The United States and French Security, 1917–1921: A Study in American Diplomatic History (New York: Twayne, 1957); and Walter A. McDougall, France’s Rhineland Diplomacy, 1914–1924: The Last Bid for a Balance of Power in Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).
- 69.
Thomas A. Bailey, Woodrow Wilson and the Great Betrayal (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1963).
- 70.
Charles Seymour, American Diplomacy during the World War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1934). A generation later, at a time when criticism was again mounting against Wilson’s legacy as a diplomatist, this same historian would continue to fight the good fight on behalf of Wilson’s strategic acumen. On the occasion of the centenary of the president’s birth, he published an account praiseful of Wilsonian diplomacy, writing that “[e]ven those who today believe that only a compromise peace would have provided the base for a permanent settlement admit that Wilson’s hand was forced and that the Germans left him no alternative but to enter the war.” Idem, “Woodrow Wilson in Perspective,” Foreign Affairs 34 (January 1956): 175–86, quote at p. 179.
- 71.
See John W. Coogan, The End of Neutrality: The United States, Britain, and Maritime Rights, 1899–1915 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981).
- 72.
Tucker, Woodrow Wilson and the Great War, p. 204. Also see Doenecke, Nothing Less Than War, p. 249: “Germany’s public announcement of unrestricted submarine warfare marked the beginning of the end of peace with the United States.”
- 73.
For an example of just how perdurable the submarine hypothesis can be, see Gideon Rose, “The Fourth Founding: The United States and the Liberal Order,” Foreign Affairs 98 (January/February 2019): 10–21, where it is asserted that “[u]nrestricted submarine warfare was designed to squeeze the Allies into submission. Instead, it pulled the United States into the war, and the world, for good” (p. 12).
- 74.
As is argued in M. Ryan Floyd, Abandoning Neutrality: Woodrow Wilson and the Beginning of the Great War, August, 1914–December, 1915 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
- 75.
Ross Gregory, The Origins of American Intervention in the First World War (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), pp. 130–31.
- 76.
Dalton, “Wilson’s Prediction to Cobb,” pp. 559–60.
- 77.
On the oddity of Carr’s being at one and the same time both a leading intellectual critic of the Wilson legacy and (from 1936) the holder of the prestigious Woodrow Wilson Chair in International Relations at the University of Aberystwyth, see Brian Porter, “Lord Davies, E.H. Carr and the Spirit Ironic: A Comedy of Errors,” International Relations 16 (April 2002): 77–96.
- 78.
Arguing that Wilsonian decisionmaking was motivated by idealism born of moral certainty rather than any power-based calculations is Robert H. Ferrell, “Woodrow Wilson: Man and Statesman,” Review of Politics 18 (April 1956): 131–45. “The immediate occasion for American entrance into the war was the German declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare, which to Wilson’s way of thinking was a criminal act. He seems to have gone into the war under the feeling that the balance of justice in the world was being sacrificed to the unjust Central Powers. There is no proof as yet that Wilson led the country into war with a clear determination to preserve the balance of power in Europe…. The ‘new diplomacy’—a weighing of good against evil, rather than power against power—dictated his decision for war in 1917” (quote at pp. 143–44).
- 79.
A claim made by many, including Bernadotte Schmitt, who in acknowledging that the country had become quite pro-Allied in sympathy, insisted that this policy tilt could only be chalked up to “American pride [and] a feeling of outraged honor.” Bernadotte E. Schmitt, “American Neutrality, 1914–1917,” Journal of Modern History 8 (June 1936): 200–11, quote at pp. 201–2.
- 80.
See Miles Kahler, “Rationality in International Relations,” International Organization 52 (Autumn 1998): 919–41; and Jon Elster, Solomonic Judgments: Studies in the Limitation of Rationality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
- 81.
For discussions, see Brandy Lee, et al., The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Discuss a President (New York: St. Martin’s, 2017); and Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018).
- 82.
Wilson’s message to congress stated the following: “The effect of the war upon the United States will depend upon what American citizens say and do. Every man who really loves America will act and speak in the true spirit of neutrality, which is the spirit of impartiality and fairness and friendliness to all concerned. The spirit of the nation in this critical matter will be determined largely by what individuals and society and those gathered in public meetings do and say, upon what newspapers and magazines contain, upon what ministers utter in their pulpits, and men proclaim as their opinions upon the street….. The United States must be neutral in fact, as well as in name, during these days that are to try men’s souls. We must be impartial in thought, as well as action, must put a curb upon our sentiments, as well as upon every transaction that might be construed as a preference of one party to the struggle before another.” Quoted in Matthew J. Stark, “Wilson and the United States Entry into the Great War,” OAH Magazine of History 17 (October 2002): 40–47, quote at pp. 42–43.
- 83.
Sharing the assessment that Wilson was “prejudiced,” and that this was one of the factors leading to the war decision, is Edward M. Coffman, The War to End All Wars: The American Military Experience in World War I (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 6.
- 84.
See Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything in It (New York: Crown, 2001).
- 85.
Daniel Halévy, Le Président Wilson (Paris: Payot, 1918), pp. 9–10.
- 86.
See James P. Walsh, “Woodrow Wilson Historians vs. the Irish,” Éire-Ireland 2 (Summer 1967): 55–66.
- 87.
Writes one scholar, “British social thought filtered up rather than down into American society. It reached as high as the Scotch Presbyterian who was elected President in 1912 and again in 1916. Woodrow Wilson’s traditions were southern, but his intellectual background was English.” Arthur Mann, “British Social Thought and American Reformers of the Progressive Era,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 42 (March 1956): 672–92, quote at p. 691.
- 88.
Robert H. Zieger, America’s Great War: World War I and the American Experience (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), p. 42.
- 89.
Sterling J. Kernek, “The British Government’s Reactions to President Wilson’s ‘Peace’ Note of December 1916,” Historical Journal 13 (December 1970): 721–66, quote at p. 727. Also see Idem, “Distractions of Peace During War: The Lloyd George Government’s Reactions to Woodrow Wilson, December 1916-November 1918,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 65 (April 1975): 7–27; and Wilton B. Fowler, British-American Relations, 1917–18: The Role of Sir William Wiseman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 198–99, where a Wilson who is said by 1918 to be replete with “anti-British principles and prejudices … became increasingly suspicious of the British government.”
- 90.
See David G. Haglund and Deanna Soloninka, “Woodrow Wilson Still Fuels Debate on ‘Who Lost Russia?’” Orbis 60 (Summer 2016): 433–52. Also see Manfred F. Boemeke, “Woodrow Wilson’s Image of Germany, the War-Guilt Question, and the Treaty of Versailles,” in Boemeke, Feldman, and Glaser, eds., Treaty of Versailles, pp. 603–14.
- 91.
On the “two-Germany” thesis, see Michael S. Neiberg, “Blinking Eyes Began to Open: Legacies from America’s Road to the Great War, 1914–1917,” Diplomatic History 38 (September 2014): 801–12; and Oswald Garrison Villard, Germany Embattled: An American Interpretation (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1915).
- 92.
On Americans’ respect for German scholarly accomplishments, see Henry A. Pochmann, German Culture in America: Philosophical and Literary Influences, 1600–1900 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957); Charles F. Thwing, The American and German University: One Hundred Years of History (New York: Macmillan, 1928); Carl Diehl, Americans and German Scholarship, 1770–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978); and Jürgen Herbst, The German Historical School in American Scholarship: A Study in the Transfer of Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1965).
- 93.
See in particular Ido Oren, Our Enemies and US: America’s Rivalries and the Making of Political Science (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003); and Idem, “The Subjectivity of the ‘Democratic’ Peace: Changing U.S. Perceptions of Imperial Germany,” International Security 20 (Fall 1995): 147–84.
- 94.
Quoted in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919–1933 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), pp. 148–49. Expressing a similar belief, albeit much more politely stated, that it was theology more than anything else that accounted for Wilson’s decisionmaking blunders, which were considered to be the “normal consequences of his religious convictions, not the pathological results of ‘moral collapse’ or neurological illness,” is Lloyd E. Ambrosius, “Woodrow Wilson’s Health and the Treaty Fight, 1919–1920,” International History Review 9 (February 1987): 73–84, quote at p. 83.
- 95.
Sigmund Freud and William C. Bullitt, Thomas Woodrow Wilson, Twenty-Eighth President of the United States: A Psychological Study (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967). A vigorous dissent was penned by a Wilson defender, who comments archly that for “a mentally unbalanced person, Wilson had a remarkable career. Somehow he managed to make distinguished contributions to the four separate fields of scholarship, higher education, domestic politics, and diplomacy.” Arthur S. Link, “The Case for Woodrow Wilson,” Harper’s Magazine 234 (April 1967): 85–93, quote at p. 93.
- 96.
Alexander L. George and Juliette L. George, Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House: A Personality Study (New York: John Day, 1956). For a hearty endorsement of their findings, see Bernard Brodie, “A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Woodrow Wilson,” World Politics 9 (April 1957): 413–22. Much less exuberant is Robert C. Tucker, “The Georges’ Wilson Reexamined: An Essay on Psychobiography,” American Political Science Review 71 (June 1977): 606–18.
- 97.
See for the neurological account, Edwin A. Weinstein, “Woodrow Wilson’s Neurological Illness,” Journal of American History 57 (September 1970): 324–51; as well as Weinstein, James William Anderson, and Arthur S. Link, “Woodrow Wilson’s Political Personality: A Reappraisal,” Political Science Quarterly 93 (Winter 1978–1979): 585–98. A judicious summary of the contending camps—the psychoanalytical versus the neurological—is found in Dorothy Ross, “Woodrow Wilson and the Case for Psychohistory,” Journal of American History 69 (December 1982): 659–68.
- 98.
For an incisive exposition, see Brian C. Schmidt, “Anarchy, World Politics and the Birth of a Discipline: American International Relations, Pluralist Theory and the Myth of Interwar Idealism,” International Relations 16 (April 2002): 9–31.
- 99.
For a good example of this materialist, albeit non-Marxian, perspective, see Peter Trubowitz, Defining the National Interest: Conflict and Change in American Foreign Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
- 100.
For a flavor of that debate of the 2000s, which to an extent has been overcome by the newer trope, of American “decline,” discussed in this book’s first chapter, see Christopher Layne and Bradley A. Thayer, American Empire: A Debate (New York: Routledge, 2007); Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004); John B. Judis, The Folly of Empire: What George W. Bush Could Learn from Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); and Emmanuel Todd, After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order, trans. C. Jon Delogu (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).
- 101.
Warren I. Cohen, The American Revisionists: The Lessons of Intervention in World War I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967). Also see Stuart I. Rochester, American Liberal Disillusionment in the Wake of World War I (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977).
- 102.
For accounts of antiwar opinion before and during the war years, see Michael Kazin, War Against War: The American Fight for Peace, 1914–1918 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017); Horace C. Peterson and Gilbert C. Fite, Opponents of War, 1917–1918 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957); Charles DeBenedetti, Origins of the Modern American Peace Movement, 1915–1929 (Millwood, NY: KTO Press, 1978); Charles Roland Marchand, The American Peace Movement and Social Reform, 1898–1918 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972); David S. Patterson, Toward a Warless World: The Travail of the American Peace Movement, 1877–1914 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976); Robert D. Johnson, The Peace Progressives and American Foreign Relations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995); and Charles Chatfield, “World War I and the Liberal Pacifist in the United States,” American Historical Review 75 (December 1970): 1920–37.
- 103.
John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920). Also see Selig Adler, “The War-Guilt Question and American Disillusionment, 1918–1928,” Journal of Modern History 23 (March 1951): 1–28.
- 104.
It is sometimes claimed, erroneously, that isolation as a policy of the United States implied cutting America off from all economic, political, and military intercourse with the rest of the planet, which of course is so far from the reality of the post-First World War years as to lead some scholars to dismiss isolation as a myth, as for instance William Appleman Williams, “The Legend of Isolationism in the 1920s,” Science & Society 18 (Winter 1954): 1–20; and Idem, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 2nd rev. and enl. ed. (New York: Dell, 1972), pp. 109–61. But isolation was no legend, and America’s eschewal of participation in the European balance of power was to have profound real-world consequences for that region. For corrective views on the concept’s meaning, see Albert K. Weinberg, “The Historical Meaning of the American Doctrine of Isolation,” American Political Science Review 34 (June 1940): 539–47; Manfred Jonas, Isolationism in America, 1935–1941 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966); and Robert W. Tucker, A New Isolationism: Threat or Promise? (New York: Universe Books, 1972).
- 105.
John Kenneth Turner, Shall It Be Again? (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1922).
- 106.
See, for example, Scott Nearing, The Great Madness: A Victory for the American Plutocracy (New York: Rand School of Social Science, 1917).
- 107.
See Benjamin J. Cohen, The Question of Imperialism: The Political Economy of Dominance and Dependence (New York: Basic Books, 1973).
- 108.
Just how fabulous this endowment was is glimpsed in two books from the interwar years: Edwin C. Eckel, Coal, Iron, and War: A Study in Industrialism Past and Future (New York: Henry Holt, 1920); and Brooks Emeny, The Strategy of Raw Materials: A Study of America in Peace and War (New York: Macmillan, 1934).
- 109.
For this staple of interwar revisionism, see Edwin Borchard and William Potter Lage, Neutrality for the United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937); and Alice Morrissey, The American Defense of Neutral Rights, 1914–1917 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1939).
- 110.
See Harry Elmer Barnes, Genesis of the World War: An Introduction to the Problem of War Guilt (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1926); and, especially, C. Hartley Grattan, Why We Fought (New York: Vanguard, 1929).
- 111.
The Allies won the war, but ironically the debts never were repaid, an issue that contributed mightily to the souring of transatlantic amity during the interwar years; see Octave Homberg, La Grande Injustice: La question des dettes interalliés (Paris: Grasset, 1926).
- 112.
Quoted in Denna Frank Fleming, “Our Entry into the World War in 1917: The Revised Version,” Journal of Politics 2 (February 1940): 75–86, quote at pp. 78–79.
- 113.
Hannigan, Great War and American Foreign Policy. Also see, for the continuity thesis, Frank A. Ninkovich, Wilsonian Century: U.S. Foreign Policy since 1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
- 114.
A recent, thoughtful, analysis of the intervention decision as being predicated on the grounds of economic logic, is Benjamin O. Fordham, “Revisionism Reconsidered: Exports and American Intervention in World War I,” International Organization 61 (April 2007): 277–310.
- 115.
See N. Gordon Levin, Jr., Woodrow Wilson and World Politics: America’s Response to War and Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968); and Arno J. Mayer, Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, 1917–1918 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959). But for a persuasive rebuttal of the revisionist contention, at least as it pertains to the Bolsheviks, see J. Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order, 1916–1931 (London: Allen Lane, 2014), especially pp. 156–57, where the decision to intervene in Russia in 1918 is depicted as being taken not out of fear of Bolshevism, but rather of Kaiserism: “The scenario that haunted the Allies and impelled them to action was a ghostly premonition of the future. But what was on their mind was not the spectre of revolution or an anticipation of the Cold War, but a foretaste of the summer of 1941 when the military triumphs of the Wehrmacht threatened to extend Hitler’s slave empire throughout Eurasia.”
- 116.
Frederick Bausman, Let France Explain (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1922), p. 64. Also see Idem, Facing Europe (New York: Century, 1926).
- 117.
For useful correctives of the revisionists’ tendency to minimize or deny altogether accounts of German atrocities, especially in Belgium, see John N. Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); and Larry Zuckerman, The Rape of Belgium: The Untold Story of World War I (New York: New York University Press, 2004).
- 118.
See Horace C. Peterson, Propaganda for War: The Campaign against American Neutrality, 1914–1917 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1939); Charles Callan Tansill, America Goes to War (Gloucester, MA: P. Smith, 1963; orig. pub. 1938); and James M. Read, Atrocity Propaganda, 1914–1917 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941).
- 119.
See Selig Adler, The Isolationist Impulse: Its Twentieth Century Reaction (New York: Collier Books, 1961).
- 120.
Robert Strausz-Hupé, In My Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965), p. 176: “It is, of course, utter nonsense to assert that the internationally minded were restrained by the isolationist few: except for an exceedingly small but influential minority, all Americans were isolationist” (emphasis in the original).
- 121.
Quoted in Cushing Strout, The American Image of the Old World (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), p. 205.
- 122.
Hubert Herring, And So to War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1938), p. 122.
- 123.
Writes the leading authority on interwar revisionism, Warren Cohen, “[i]f the label ‘revisionist’ must be applied to Millis’ interpretation of ‘Why We Fought’ as well as to the interpretations of men like Barnes, Grattan, and John Kenneth Turner, it is obvious how little meaning the label can convey.” Cohen, American Revisionists, p. 167.
- 124.
Walter Millis, “Will We Stay Out of the Next War? How We Entered the Last One,” New Republic 83 (31 July 1935): 323–27, quote at p. 323.
- 125.
Walter Millis, Road to War: America 1914–1917 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935).
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Haglund, D.G. (2019). April 1917 Revisited: The Debate over the War’s Spread to America. In: The US "Culture Wars" and the Anglo-American Special Relationship. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18549-7_3
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