Should America
Have Entered World War I?/The Great Mistake
in the Great War.
By MICHAEL KAZIN APRIL 6, 2017
Army
recruits filled a street in New York in April 1917 soon after President Woodrow
Wilson declared war on Germany. CreditAssociated
Press
One hundred
years ago today, Congress voted to enter what was then the largest and
bloodiest war in history. Four days earlier, President
Woodrow Wilson had sought to unite a sharply divided
populace with a stirring
claim that the nation “is privileged to spend
her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness
and the peace which she has treasured.” The war lasted only another year and a
half, but in that time, an astounding 117,000 American soldiers were killed and
202,000 wounded.
Still, most
Americans know little about why the United States fought in World War I, or why
it mattered. The “Great War” that tore apart Europe and the Middle East and
took the lives of over 17 million people worldwide lacks the high drama and
moral gravity of the Civil War and World War II, in which
the very survival of the nation seemed at stake.
World War I
is less easy to explain. America intervened nearly three years after it began,
and the “doughboys,” as our troops were called, engaged in serious combat for
only a few months. More Americans in uniform died away from the battlefield —
thousands from the Spanish flu — than with weapons in hand. After victory was
achieved, Wilson’s audacious hope of making a peace that would advance
democracy and national self-determination blew up in his face when the Senate
refused to ratify the treaty he had signed at the Palace of Versailles.
But
attention should be paid. America’s decision to join the Allies was a turning
point in world history. It altered the fortunes of the war and the course of
the 20th century — and not necessarily for the better. Its entry most likely
foreclosed the possibility of a negotiated peace among belligerent powers that
were exhausted from years mired in trench warfare.
Although the
American Expeditionary Force did not engage in combat for long, the looming
threat of several million fresh troops led German generals to launch a last,
desperate series of offensives. When that campaign collapsed, Germany’s defeat
was inevitable.
How would
the war have ended if America had not intervened? The carnage might have
continued for another year or two until citizens in the warring nations, who
were already protesting the endless sacrifices required, forced their leaders
to reach a settlement. If the Allies, led by France and Britain, had not won a
total victory, there would have been no punitive peace treaty like that
completed at Versailles, no stab-in-the-back allegations by resentful Germans,
and thus no rise, much less triumph, of Hitler and the Nazis. The next world
war, with its 50 million deaths, would probably not have occurred.
The foes of
militarism in the United States had tried to prevent such horrors. Since the
war began, feminists and socialists had worked closely with progressive members
of Congress from the agrarian South and the urban Midwest to keep America out.
They mounted street demonstrations, attracted prominent leaders from the labor
and suffrage movements, and ran antiwar candidates for local and federal
office. They also gained the support of Henry Ford, who chartered a ship full
of activists who crossed the Atlantic to plead with the heads of neutral
nations to broker a peace settlement.
They may
even have had a majority of Americans on their side. In the final weeks before
Congress declared war, anti-militarists demanded a national referendum on the
question, confident voters would recoil from fighting and paying the bills so
that one group of European powers could vanquish another.
Once the
United States did enter the fray, Wilson, with the aid of the courts,
prosecuted opponents of the war who refused to fall in line. Under the
Espionage and Sedition Acts, thousands were arrested for such “crimes” as
giving speeches against the draft and calling the Army “a God damned legalized
murder machine.”
The
intervention led to big changes in America, as well as the world. It began the
creation of a political order most citizens now take for granted, even as some
protest against it: a state equipped to fight war after war abroad while
keeping a close watch on allegedly subversive activities at home.
The identity
of the nation’s enemies has changed often over the past century. But at least
until Donald Trump took office, the larger aim of American foreign policy under
both liberal and conservative presidents had remained much the same: to make
the world “safe for democracy,” as our leaders define it. To achieve that
purpose required another innovation of World War I: a military-industrial
establishment funded, then partly and now completely, by income taxes.
For all
that, the war is largely forgotten in the United States. Combatants in World
War II and Vietnam are memorialized in popular sites on the National Mall, but
the men who fought and died in the Great War have no such honor (though there
is a small memorial specific to soldiers from Washington, and a small national
monument is in the planning stages).
Alone among
the former belligerent nations, the United States observes a holiday on the
anniversary of the Armistice — Veterans Day — that
makes no explicit reference to the conflict itself. The centennial of the
declaration of war is a good time to remember how much the decision to enter it
mattered.
Michael Kazin is the author of “War Against
War: The American Fight for Peace, 1914-1918,” a professor of history at
Georgetown and the editor of Dissent.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section
on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTOpinion),
and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.
A version
of this op-ed appears in print on April 6, 2017, on Page A27 of the New
York edition with the headline: The Great Mistake in the Great War.
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center,
325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email:
mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the
subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to
gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and
everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
No comments:
Post a Comment