Week 5
Why did Wilson's liberal program of democratization and conflict resolution fail in Paris in 1919? Wilson was immensely popular in Europe, but not so much in America. Republicans captured both houses of Congress in the elections of 1918, so it appeared to European statesmen at the conference that he had sought and lost a vote of confidence at home. Two of Wilson's most powerful political opponents, former President Theodore Roosevelt and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, issued a statement that was duly noted in the capitals of Europe: "Our allies and our enemies should all understand that Mr. Wilson has no authority whatever to speak for the American people at this time. His leadership has just been repudiated by them. The newly elected Congress comes far nearer than Mr. Wilson to having a right to speak the purposes of the American people at this moment. Mr. Wilson and his Fourteen Points and his four supplementary points and his five complementary points and all his utterances every which way have ceased to have any shadow of right to be accepted as expressive of the will of the American people." Attacked by partisan nationalists at home, confronted by an alliance of European nationalists at Paris, Wilson had to abandon, wholly or in part, many of his cherished principles. Although he believed in open covenants openly arrived at, the treaty was drafted behind closed doors. Although he espoused the self-determination of nations, he consented to turn over the Austrian Tyrol to Italy, to put Germans under Polish rule in Silesia and the Corridor, and to allow Japan to take over the German sphere of influence in Shantung. Although he advocated a peace among equals, he agreed that Germany must pay an immediate indemnity of $5 billion, sign a blank check for future reparations (including the full cost of pensions of Allied soldiers), surrender vast amounts of coal- and iron-rich territory, lose much of her merchant marine, and be stripped of her overseas empire" (Leuchtenberg). "Eighteenth-century peacemakers," Henry Kissinger has argued, would have regarded 'war guilt clauses' as absurd. For them, wars were amoral inevitabilities caused by clashing interests. In the treaties that concluded eighteenth-century wars, the losers paid a price without its being justified on moral grounds. But for Wilson and the peacemakers at Versailles, the cause of the war of 1914-18 had to be ascribed to some evil which had to be punished." The reaction began with Warren Harding's promise of a "return to normalcy" after the huge upheaval of the First World War and Woodrow Wilson's failed peace settlement. Harding was fond of alliteration: "not heroics, but healing; not nostrums but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration." "To be sure, the Americans had not suffered on anything like the scale that the European combatant powers had suffered. But they had lost more men than in any previous American war aside from the Civil War, and had lived through a sudden and unprecedented disruption of their none-too-settled economy, all for a cause that now seemed dubious at best, a conflict that the nation could very easily have avoided. All the grand rhetoric from the presidential podium about the nation's noble war aims, making the world safe for democracy, self-determination, open agreements openly arrived at, freedom of the seas, and so on—all of it now rang pitiably hollow (McClay). The final years of the Wilson administration—a botched demobilization, rapid inflation, widespread labor unrest, 25 race riots in cities around the country, the influenza epidemic that killed 675,000 American and infected 28 percent of the population, a Red Scare featuring terrorist bombs and "Palmer Raids" (mass arrests of suspected sympathizers with the Bolshevik Revolution)—no wonder Harding won in a landslide. A basic feature of the Roaring Twenties: Presiding over this decade of effervescent social change and cultural dynamism were two of the most conservative presidents in modern American history, the Republicans Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge.
Bruce Thompson
REQUIRED READING
A Farewell to Arms,
The Hemingway Library Edition,
Scribner; Reprint edition (July 8, 2014),
ISBN 1476764522
"The Great War of 1914–18 was the primal tragedy of modern world civilization, the main reason why the 20th century turned into such a disastrous epoch for mankind." Paul Johnson. For Americans the Great War was also a tragedy in that they were dragged into it against their wishes by a President who had promised to keep them out of it. And afterward there was a darkness that swept over both Europe and the United States about all of what of had just happened and this darkness spawned a generation of writers who attempted to tell their own stories and with these stories tell the bigger story world war. Of all the writers who appeared as war veterans in the 1920s, one American writer succeeded best of all in channeling his war experiences into one great novel: Ernest Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms. The title alone announced the general state of mind that gripped him and his fellow war veterans as they sat down to write about what had happened. Hemingway was the perfect, handsome, American kid gone off to war in all innocence and romantic quest who gets shot, badly wounded, and ends up in a Milan hospital with the other soldiers in various states of pain. I want us all to read this novel. If you have read it before, maybe years ago, pick it up again and just sit down and read it all and be amazed at what a triumph it is. It has everything that led Gertrude Stein to announce: "You are all a lost generation." But Hemingway was not lost; he turned his pain and suffering into one of the great novels in American literature.
RECOMMENDED READING
Modern Times Revised Edition: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties,
Harper Perennial Modern Classics,
ISBN 978-0060935504
As we proceed into Twentieth Century history you may discover that you would like a good general coverage of all the great intellectual and artistic movements of the century. If that is what you need then this is the book for you. It is the single best survey of 20th century intellectual and artistic history in print. It is a big book, but you can use it as you would use a reference volume and look up specific people and movements. The paperback copy is the one you want with its revised up to date edition.