Read THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES Online
Authors: Philip Bobbitt
The election now over, Wilson and House turned their attention again to foreign affairs. Wilson had campaigned on a slogan, “He Kept Us Out of
War,” though in truth he had been preparing for intervention for some months, should that ultimately become his chosen course. This did not trouble the pragmatic Colonel. Though acknowledging that he
had himself advocated a plan which under certain conditions would have brought the country into the war, [s]ince the attitude of the Allies had prevented the execution of the plan, it would have been rather Quixotic to have disregarded the political advantages resulting from the Allies' refusal.
53
A stronger case can be made that House's and Wilson's war aims were not entirely the same as Theodore Roosevelt's, who wished to enter the war unequivocally in support of the allies.
*
In retrospect, the obvious question that the House-Wilson war policy raises is: for what? For what did the Americans need to send 1.5 million infantrymen into battle? Surely not for the technical violations of American neutrality; American-flagged ships were in fact being used to resupply and arm a belligerent, just as the Germans claimed. When the United States finally went to war, its disregard of the rights of neutral nations was as great as that previously exhibited by the Allies, to whom the United States was constantly protesting. The Germans could hardly be blamed for halting shipping in the only way the British Royal Navy permitted them, while the Royal Navy itself stopped U.S. ships illegally and simply seized them by virtue of its command of the ocean surface. Was it for the sinking of U.S. ships by German submarines, then, that the United States went to war? Surely the remedy for this, as for the attacks by terrorist states on American civilians, is retorsion. It can hardly be proportionate, or even rational, to decide that the death of innocent Americans requires a world war for just retaliation.
America went to war in 1917 in order to create a system of nation-states whose legitimacy would be based on democracy and self-determination. Within this system all states were to be legally equal, because Wilson and House believed that such a system would prevent future wars against the
democracies. This system would reflect American conceptions of the relationship between nation and state and for that reason it could call upon an American commitment to intervene if necessary to protect the system. The establishment of the League of Nations came to be America's principal war aim because it gave an institutional structure to these ideas. A world order based on a German victory would not be one that was ultimately safe for the American democracy, but neither would an Allied victory that merely reinstated in Europe the state system that had collapsed in the first place. As Lord Devlin, a Wilson biographer, shrewdly observed, “Indeed [Wilson] never lost his distrust of Allied motives… The Allies did not, he believed, genuinely care about democracy and the right to self-government.”
54
And of course Wilson was right: the Allies, like the Central Powers they opposed, shared a European conception of sovereignty that held the State's authority to have come by descent from its predecessors, and not to arise directly from its people. Even democratic states like Britain and France held sovereignty to be distinct from elections; sovereignty was an attribute of the State. European states were not limited sovereigns. Because their peoples had wholly delegated their sovereignty to the State the nation could scarcely demand the creation of a new state by withholding sovereignty from that power that ruled them. Yet this was the reason America entered the Long War: to allow the democratic form to fulfill its role in creating the proper relation between a State and its nation. These are Wilson's words when he announced he was taking the United States to war:
But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have carried nearest to our hearts—for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free people as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free…. [T]he day has come when America 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.
55
This is Professor Wilson the constitutional scholar as well as President Wilson the statesman, for he was well aware that “the principles that gave [America] her birth and happiness” were the principles of the Declaration of Independence, that is, the assertion of limited state sovereignty, and not the constitutional structure of the mass democracy of the nation-state, which had had to wait almost a century to come into being. What Wilson sought required a world of law because his vision was universal, and because it rested on legal institutions that would enforce certain grounds of
legitimacy (democracy) and justification (limited sovereignty). Yet even these conditions, though necessary, were not enough. If states stood toward one another under law in the same relation that individuals stood toward each other in society, they—like individuals—would still be animated by the same drives that had brought them to war in the first place. It was necessary that the state system generate a spiritual change in its composition. As Devlin noted, “It was almost, but not quite, as if he were trying to bring Christianity into public life.”
56
Wilson seems to have believed, with House, that truly democratic institutions that actually reflected the will of the people and made commensurate demands on their attention and contributions would yield just such a spiritual change in mankind. Certainly House did not believe that, absent such a transformation, these institutions could possibly prevail against the self-interests of the State and the powerful sectors that endowed the State, interests that sometimes led to war.
From 1916 on it began to be suggested that House was the author of
Philip Dru
.
57
One newspaper learned that House had given an autographed copy of the novel to Culberson.
[O]fficial Washington is startled from its customary aplomb to find that the sphinx of Texas has treated it to a voluble discourse. Col. E. M. House, maker of governors and a President, the popularly accredited power behind the throne of the present Administration, the western Warwick, the silent Man of Mystery—and now
Philip Dru: Administrator.
Most of the initial reaction tended to identify House with Dru: the newspaper that broke the news wrote, “Even the description of Dru in the novel is a description of House.”
But it was not so simple. The 1916 election campaign had uncannily followed the prescriptions not of Dru, who ruled by decree, but of Selwyn, the corrupt political boss.
58
The entire organization of the campaign—the concentration on marginal states, the intense precinct focus on swing voters, the frequent polling and issue tracking—all were lifted from Selwyn's rules. Most important for our study, however, is Dru's exchange with his fiancée's wealthy and conservative father about the impossibility of the State actually serving the interests of the mass of its people by redistributing wealth. The father says:
If we had pure socialism, we could never get the highest endeavor out of anyone, for it would seem not worth while to do more than the average. The race would then go backward instead of lifting itself higher by
the insistent desire to excel and to reap the rich reward that comes with success,
[to which Dru replies:] In the past… your contention would be unanswerable, but the moral tone and thought of the world is changing. You take it for granted that man must have in sight some material reward in order to achieve the best there is within him. I believe that mankind is awakening to the fact that material compensation is far less to be desired than spiritual compensation. This feeling will grow, and when it comes to full fruition, the world will find but little difficulty in attaining a certain measure of altruism. I agree with you that this much-to-be desired state of society cannot be altogether reached by laws, however drastic.
59
House believed, like Hitler and Lenin, that his favored form of the nation-state would produce a spiritually renewed man, and a new society. For House, however, this would come about not through the creation and application of laws but in the private world outside law. House's new man grows from the earth of private life, not the concrete and steel of public life. That is what made House's vision uniquely American, marrying the American division between public and private, and its limitation of state sovereignty, to the parliamentary ideal of the nation-state. That is why Wilson's (and House's) League of Nations had to be a league of self-determination, of democracies, indeed, finally, of American democracies.
This
goal brought the United States into the world war.
House had persuaded Wilson that submarine warfare would inevitably draw the United States into the conflict and therefore the President now sought to press once more for mediation. Wilson wanted to begin by asking both sides to state their war aims, but House thought it was too late to act as an impartial broker; in the event, both the Allies and the Central Powers refused to state terms for mediation, probably on the grounds that if realistic terms were disclosed, the disclosure would endanger their war efforts. Wilson's proposal died stillborn.
On January 22 in a speech to Congress, Wilson called for a league of peace to enforce the peaceable resolution of state disputes, and he once again asked for the belligerent powers to state their terms. Then on January 31 the Germans did so, coupling their terms—which were expansive and provocative—with the announcement of the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare. House went to Washington, and shortly thereafter, diplomatic relations with Germany were broken. Even now, however, Wilson did not agree with House that war was unavoidable, and left the next step to the Germans. Despite asking Congress for the power to arm merchant seamen on February 26, Wilson still maintained that no “overt
act” had yet been committed. Actually that very day a German U-boat sank the liner
Laconia
without warning; twelve died, including two American women. Of even greater impact on the public was the sensational publication of an intercepted telegram between the German foreign office and the German minister in Mexico City instructing the latter, in case of war with the United States, to attempt to negotiate a Mexican-German alliance with the promise that Mexico would be assisted in the reconquest of New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona. On March 14, the American steamer
Algonquin
was sunk, again without warning. The next week, on March 19, three American ships were sunk within twenty-four hours by German submarines. Finally, on April 2, Wilson went before Congress, declaring that a state of war existed between Germany and the United States, though he was careful to discriminate between the hostile German state and its people. Wilson had written the pope, implying that the German regime was illegitimate and did not really represent its nation:
The object of war is to deliver the fine peoples of the world from the menace and the actual power of a vast military establishment controlled by an irresponsible government. This power is not the German people but the masters of the German people.
60
In October House sailed for Europe as head of the American mission and the U.S. representative on the inter-allied war committee. In August, he proposed to Wilson, and Wilson approved, the setting up of “The Inquiry,” which would prepare for the peace settlement. The United States had gone to war not because she was attacked but to pursue specific international, political goals at the peace settlement. Now House had to prepare to achieve these goals, which were far more complex and difficult than the mere defeat of the German forces.
American war aims were outlined in the famous “Fourteen Points” first privately formulated by House and Wilson in early January of 1917. Throughout that year the two men worked to refine a settlement proposal embodying this model for internationalism, integrating the micro and the macro aspects, as it were, of a new world order. Now House and Wilson no longer had to attempt to persuade the warring states of Europe to accept American mediation. Rather they would use U.S. intervention in the war to pre-empt the allied states of their war aims, making agreement the price of alliance, while offering to Germany a more attractive settlement option than Britain and France would be willing to give. In the past House had played this two-track strategy: proffering American assistance to the Allies if they would back American war aims while enticing Germany to mediation with the threat of American intervention. This strategy had not worked. Neither side was willing to give up its national ambitions for the
mere possibility of American intervention, which, in any event, might not prove decisive.
Now House had made this strategy more potent. By actually entering the conflict, the United States could replace its passive mediation objectives with war aims enforced by the American army. In order to do this, as Walter Lippmann later observed, House persuaded Wilson that by thus joining the war the United States could prevent future wars. He supplied Wilson “with the rationalizations by means of which Wilson was able to bow to a destiny that was overbearing him, and even ultimately to sow the seed of a triumph that may make him immortal.”
61