April 4, 2017
Woodrow Wilson made democracy
unsafe for the world
James Bovard
This week is the 100th anniversary of President Woodrow Wilson’s speech
to Congress seeking a
declaration of war
against Germany. Many people celebrate this centenary of America’s
emergence as a world power. But, when the Trump administration is bombing
or rattling sabers at half a dozen nations while many Democrats clamor to
fight Russia, it is worth reviewing World War One’s high hopes and dire
results.
Wilson was narrowly re-elected in 1916 based on a campaign slogan,
"
He kept us out of war." But Wilson had
massively violated neutrality by providing armaments and money to the
Allied powers that had been fighting Germany since 1914. In
his war speech to
Congress, Wilson hailed the U.S. government as "one of the
champions of the rights of mankind" and proclaimed that "the
world must be made safe for democracy."
American soldiers fought bravely and helped turn the tide on the Western
Front in late 1918. But the cost was far higher than Americans
anticipated. More than
a hundred thousand American soldiers died in the third bloodiest war
in U.S. history. Another
half million
Americans perished from the Spanish flu epidemic spurred and spread
by the war.
In his speech to
Congress, Wilson declared, "We have no quarrel with the German
people" and feel "sympathy and friendship" towards them.
But his administration speedily commenced demonizing the
"Huns." One Army recruiting poster portrayed German troops as
an ape ravaging a half-naked damsel beneath an appeal to
"
Destroy this mad brute."
Wilson acted as if the congressional declaration of war against Germany
was also a declaration of war against the Constitution. Harvard professor
Irving Babbitt commented in 1924: "Wilson, in the pursuit of his
scheme for world service, was led to make light of the constitutional
checks on his authority and to reach out almost automatically for
unlimited power." Wilson even urged Congress to set up detention
camps to quarantine
"alien enemies."
Wilson unleashed ruthless censorship of any criticism. Anyone
who
spoke publicly against military conscription was likely to get
slammed with federal espionage or sedition charges. Possessing a pamphlet
entitled
Long Live the Constitution of the United States earned six
months in jail for a Pennsylvania malcontent. Censorship was buttressed
by fanatic propaganda campaigns led by the
Committee on Public Information, a federal agency whose shameless
motto was
"
faith in democracy... faith in fact."
The war enabled the American equivalent of the Taliban to triumph on the
home front. Prohibition advocates
"
indignantly insisted that... any kind of opposition to prohibition
was
sinister and subversively pro-German," noted William Ross,
author of World War 1 and the American Constitution. Even before
the 18th Amendment (which banned alcohol consumption) was ratified,
Wilson
banned beer sales as a wartime measure. Prohibition was a public
health disaster; the
rate of alcoholism tripled during the 1920s. To punish lawbreakers,
the federal government added poisons to industrial alcohol that was often
converted into drinkable hooch;
ten thousand people were killed as a result. Professor Deborah Blum,
the author of The Poisoner's Handbook, noted that
"an
official sense of higher purpose kept the poisoning program in
place."
The war provided the pretext for unprecedented federal domination of the
economy. Washington promised that
"
food will win the war" and farmers vastly increased their
plantings. Price supports and government credits for foreign buyers sent
crop prices and land prices skyrocketing. However, when the credits ended
in 1920, prices and land values plunged,
spurring massive bankruptcies across rural America. This spurred
perennial political discontent that helped lead to a
federal takeover of agriculture by the Roosevelt administration in
the 1930s.
World War One was ended by the Treaty of Versailles, which redrew
European borders willy-nilly and imposed ruinous reparations on Germany.
One of Wilson’s top aides at the peace talks,
Henry White, lamented: "We had such high hopes of this
adventure; we believed God called us and now we are doing hell’s dirtiest
work." Wilson had
proclaimed 14 points to guide peace talks; instead, there were
14 separate small wars in Europe towards the end of his term after
peace had been proclaimed. Millions of Irish Americans were outraged
that, despite Wilson’s bleatings about democracy, Britain brutally
repressed Ireland during and after the war. The League of Nations, which
Wilson championed in vain, was so smarmily worded that it could have
obliged the U.S. to send troops to help Britain crush the burgeoning
Irish independence movement.
The chaos and economic depression sowed by the war and the Treaty of
Versailles helped open the door to some of the worst dictators in modern
times, including Germany’s Adolf Hitler, Italy’s Benito Mussolini, and
Vladimir Lenin whom Wilson intensely disliked because "he felt the
Bolshevik leader had
stolen his ideas for world peace," as historian Thomas Fleming
noted in his 2003 masterpiece, The Illusion of Victory: America
in World War 1.
Despite winning the war, Wilson’s Democratic Party was crushed at the
polls in both 1918 and 1920. H.L. Mencken wrote on the eve of the 1920
election that Americans were sickened of Wilsonian
"
idealism that is oblique, confusing, dishonest, and
ferocious."
Have today’s policymakers learned anything from the debacle a century
ago? Wilson continues to be invoked by politicians who believe America
can achieve great things by warring abroad. The bellicosity of both
Republican and Democratic leaders is a reminder that Wilson also failed
to make democracy safe for the world.
James Bovard, author of
Public Policy Hooligan, is a member of USA TODAY’s
Board of
Contributors. Follow him on Twitter
@JimBovard
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/04/04/woodrow-wilson-democracy-world-war-james-bovard-column/99959474/
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