World War I began 100 years ago this month. Beinart marks the anniversary by remembering how the war spurred a major crackdown on civil liberties. He uses that history to consider how war changes the national psyche:
The problem is that the unity war breeds come at the expense of those Americans who become associated—either because of their political views or their religion, race or ethnicity—with the enemy. To avoid becoming targets of the fanatical patriotism that World War I sparked, many German Americans changed their last names. Unable to so easily conceal their ancestry, Japanese Americans during World War II were interned. For many Muslim Americans, 9/12 and the days that followed were marked not by fidelity to the “the values and principles of the greatest nation ever created” but by the government’s violation of those principles, as it surveilled and harassed vast numbers of Muslims purely because of their religion or country of origin. Since then, America’s invasion of two majority Muslim countries has fueled the paranoia that has led national politicians to warn that Sharia law is infecting the United States and local bigots to challenge the building of mosques.
As [progressive philosopher John] Dewey foresaw, wars do empower the state, a power that, in theory, could be used to redress social ills. But in the real world, argued Dewey’s protégé-turned-accuser Randolph Bourne, using war powers to achieve domestic reform is like using a firehose to fill a water glass. “War,” wrote Bourne, “is just that absolute situation … which speedily outstrips the power of intelligent and creative control.”
In another meditation on WWI, John M. Cooper insists that Wilson was right to send the US into WWI:
Wilson’s failure to educate the public about his design for peace and his permissiveness toward repression of civil liberties deservedly remain blots on his historical reputation. But his greatest failings, particularly in shaping the peace settlement and in bringing the United States into a collective security system, stemmed from bad luck. His worst misfortune came when he suffered a massive stroke just after a belated and foreshortened speaking tour to sell the public on the League of Nations. It left him a broken man, whose impaired judgment turned him into a major element in the spiteful stalemate that kept the America out of the League of Nations.
Would things have been different if Wilson had not decided to go to war in 1917? Yes, because Germany would almost certainly have won by the end of that year. Military disasters in Russia and Italy, grievous shipping losses inflicted by the submarines, and an untenable financial situation (the British had run out of credit in the U.S. to sustain their massive war orders), and no prospect of American troops eventually coming to their rescue—all these added up to a recipe for Allied defeat. Europe dominated by a victorious Germany would almost certainly have been more benign than the Nazi-conquered continent following the Fall of France in 1940. But how much more benign? The settlement imposed on the Bolsheviks at Brest-Litovsk in 1918 leaves the question open. Likewise, what impact would such a victory have had on the long march toward the end of colonialism that began with the League of Nations mandate system?
Michael Kazin disagrees with Cooper:
The consequences of the victory won by the U.S. and its allies led, in part, to an even greater tragedy. As Wilson feared, the punitive settlement made in Paris did not last. The president may have won Senate approval for the peace treaty, if he had accepted some of the reservations which Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and his supporters demanded. But American membership in the League of Nations would likely not have stopped the rise of fascism, Nazism, or the Communist International—which, together, sowed the seeds of the Second World War. The terrible irony is that U.S. entry into World War I probably made that next and far bloodier global conflict more likely.
As the historian John Coogan has written, “It was the genius of Woodrow Wilson which recognized that a lasting peace must be ‘a peace without victory.’ It was the tragedy of Woodrow Wilson that his own unneutrality would be a major factor in bringing about the decisive Allied victory that made a healing peace impossible.”
(Photo: Royal Irish Rifles in a communications trench, first day on the Somme, 1916. Via Wikipedia.)
