On Patriotism, World War I, and The Illusion of Victory

June 22, 2002. It is a typical summer day in suburban Arlington, Virginia. High school students from as far away as California have come to Marymount University to hear lectures from prominent names in the conservative movement at the Young America’s Foundation National High School Leadership Conference. In a wood-grained lecture hall Anthony, I, and around 150 or so self-described conservatives watch and listen as Nigel Ashford, program officer at the Institute for Human Studies, takes the podium. The title of Ashford’s speech is “What Type of Conservative Are You?” a talk designed to address the differences within the larger conservative movement on foreign, social, and economic policy.

Around a quarter of the way through Ashford begins to discuss foreign policy, putting forth three general right-wing classifications: so-called “neo-isolationist," national interest, and global democrat conservatives. I was immediately taken aback when Ashford announced the latter’s agenda – that until the world is “democratic” America will not be safe and therefore we are completely justified in using our power to go around the globe bringing democracy and “freedom” to far away lands. To me the whole concept sounded positively Wilsonian. Woodrow Wilson was no conservative, I assured myself. After all, World War I – the war fought to “make the world safe for democracy” – was an utter failure, making the world safe for Bolshevism, Nazism, and fascism. While Wilson’s internationalism as expressed in the League of Nations would have imperiled American sovereignty if not for the efforts of conservative Senate Republicans.

Yet I did not always have this understanding. My high school history classes gave the standard account. The Germans waged an aggressive war against Great Britain and France while conducting a relentless submarine war, which ultimately led to the death of 128 American civilians traveling on the peaceful passenger liner, the Lusitania. Enraged by such brutality, Congress declared war on Germany before the American people responded by going to the Western Front in droves, saving civilization in the process. This is, no doubt, the understanding of the Great War many of my colleagues took to the YAF conference with them.

To understand my change of mind I must take you back to the time I really started to take a serious interest in politics – late 2001, just months after 9/11. While channel surfing I stumble across The News with Brian Williams on MSNBC just as a segment featuring Pat Buchanan begins. At the time, I was vaguely familiar with Buchanan, mainly due to the 2000 election and his stance on the immigration issue. Pat is on to discuss his new book The Death of the West, which chronicles the imminent fading away of Western Civilization and the European peoples who gave it birth. My father, as intrigued as I by Buchanan’s appearance, suggests a run to the local bookstore. Within days I finish the book, determined to do something to roll back the destructive forces that endangered the way of life I had taken for granted. Impressed by Buchanan, I go to the library and pick up another one of his books, A Republic, Not an Empire, a volume in which Buchanan argues for a foreign policy based on “vital national interests” in the context of a sweeping history of American international relations from Washington to Clinton. It is in this book that I read my first critical account of American entry into World War I and the consequences of that intervention – reverberating, ultimately in the death and destruction of World War II, which the vengeful Treaty of Versailles made an inevitability.

A matter of months later, at the YAF conference, I meet Anthony for the first time. He is also well aware of the true history regarding American intervention in World War I – a history he attempted to convey to others at the conference on a number of occasions with varying success.

Why weren’t the vast majority of those he talked to persuaded? I believe the answer lies in the way the other students defined conservatism - a concept influenced largely by the mass press and establishment conservative media. To these folks, a conservative in America isn’t necessarily one who lobbies for smaller government, balanced budgets, tax cuts, and pro-life causes. No, a conservative is one who loves America to the utmost, a patriot rising in opposition to those resentful old leftists on college campuses who blame America – the ultimate force for good the world – for humanity’s problems. Now there is nothing wrong with defending a nation’s honor against irrational and groundless attacks, but unfortunately, what the establishment conservative eventually adopts is a psychology as irrational as its leftist counterpart, taking on the mantle of a hyper-patriot, an unqualified apologist for everything America has done in the world. Therefore, it is no surprise that students sickened by “the blame America first” crowd would not be inclined to favorably view a critical examination of America’s role in World War I, or God forbid, suggest that the United States should have never gotten involved in the conflagration to begin with.

The consequences of this chauvinism are exhibited by the attempts of neoconservative publications like National Review and The Weekly Standard to run the paleoconservatives – folks like Pat Buchanan, Thomas Woods, and the late Sam Francis – out of the movement. In a post-9/11 the world, the paleos are supposedly damned for their opposition to the Iraq war and President Bush’s crusade to bring “democracy” to the Arab world along with their insidious suggestion that the terrorists attacked us because of our policies in the Middle East, not our freedom. How unpatriotic! The paleos must hate America!

Let it be said clearly: a legitimate love for America does not imply support for every foreign adventure in the history of this country, nor are you “unpatriotic” for recognizing historical mistakes that have cost future generations dearly – World War I being just one these indiscretions.

The Illusion of Victory

Enter Thomas Fleming. Fleming, a historian and novelist, is the author of The Illusion of Victory, a history of America in World War I. Over the course of around 500 pages, Fleming crafts a thorough indictment of Woodrow Wilson and his administration, both on the international and domestic front. It is a tale written in characteristic story-like fashion, full of villains, heroes, and sub-plots.

Fleming begins by setting the scene on April 2, 1917 as Woodrow Wilson, who had just months ago won reelection on the slogan “He kept us out of war,” prepares to ask Congress to declare war on Germany. We are then taken to the fierce debate in the US Congress, as anti-war and pro-war factions clash. Here we are first introduced to Senator Robert La Follette, a Wisconsin Republican, and strong opponent of US intervention. Within an impassioned address to the Senate, La Follette makes a point applicable to our time and the legions of supporters of the American invasion of Iraq who insisted that it was the duty of patriotic Americans to “support the president”:

Robert La Follete took the floor. He opened with a brief, almost curt attack on the idea that every senator should ‘stand behind the president.’ What kind of doctrine was that? he asked. What if the president were wrong? That was the crucial question every legislator had to ask. In this case, he knew of no course but ‘oppose the demands of the chief executive.’

The sinking of the Lusitania, the conventional catalyst cited for American intervention, is covered, albeit relatively briefly. Although I was aware that the supposedly peaceful ocean liner had on it thousands of pounds of munitions before I read this book, I did not know that the German government actually published several warnings to American citizens in New York papers urging them not to travel on the ship. While the Americans seethed in rage about Germany’s unrestricted U-boat warfare off the coast of Great Britain designed to prevent the British from getting munitions, the Wilson Administration turned a blind eye to the British blockade of Germany – a gross violation of international law – which kept out munitions and food, a policy purposefully crafted to starve the German civilian population, thus breaking the national will to fight on.

Fleming’s discussion of war propaganda is fascinating and infuriating at the same time. According to Fleming, the American media, led by Anglophiles in New England presented British propaganda about German “atrocities” as fact time after time. This culminated in a series of lies about Germany in Belgium. During the years before American entry into the war, the American people were told that “the Huns” participated in mass rapes of young women and nuns, grotesque mutilations, and speared Belgian babies with bayonets. In May 1915, Lord Bryce released a report – long since repudiated by most historians, including legendary defense attorney Clarence Darrow – claiming to “prove” the claims of German atrocities in Belgium. Predictably, America’s Anglophile media ate it all up, dutifully regurgitating British themes that, according to Fleming, “Convinced millions of Americans and other neutrals – the report was translated into twenty-seven languages – that the Germans were beasts in human form.”

On the home front, the British propaganda mill with assistance from President Wilson succeeded in inciting a voracious anti-German hysteria across the nation:

Coalescing with hate propaganda spewed by Wellington House and its American collaborators, these sentiments inspired the American Protective League and thousands of other freelance patriots to join a nationwide attack on German-Americans and the German language and culture […] An article in the Atlantic Monthly accused the German language press of mass disloyalty. The New York Times agreed that German-language newspapers never stopped trying to surreptitiously support Berlin’s cause.

Eventually, the hate manifested itself in the wanton murder of a German born baker named Robert Prager, who was beaten by a mob, draped in an American flag, and lynched just outside of St. Louis. Not all, however, were apologetic. According to Fleming, the Washington Post editorialized that the Prager murder was “a sign of a ‘healthful and wholesome awakening’ to the reality of Germany’s evil in the heartland.”

The Bill of Rights were another casualty of Wilson’s war to make the world safe for democracy, which Fleming documents with a thorough discussion of the Sedition and Espionage Acts. Like in the time of Abraham Lincoln, the Wilson administration used its power to illegally suppress publications critical of the President and the war effort, eviscerating the First Amendment along the way.

The latter portions of Illusion deal with peace negotiations, the Treaty of Versailles, and the League of Nations. Fleming shows The Treaty of Versailles with its proclamation of German war guilt and levying of astronomical war reparations payments as the grave and tragic injustice it truly was. In the context of the Senate’s debate over admitting the United States into the League of Nations, Fleming again shows us the real Woodrow Wilson – stubbornly unwilling to come to terms with Republican leader Henry Cabot Lodge who favored a treaty “with reservations” pertaining to American sovereignty and war powers. By this time, the President was gravely ill, his condition kept deliberately concealed by Edith Wilson (Woodrow’s wife) and the President’s cabinet. During this time period, Mrs. Wilson acted as a de facto President of the United States, making critical decisions in Woodrow Wilson’s name.

There is so much more regarding Fleming’s treatment that can be discussed, but at this point I highly recommend that you read his book for yourself and come to your own conclusions.

Back to Arlington

Woodrow Wilson, a historic icon of the neoconservatives, fits Nigel Ashford’s description of a “global democrat” well. From the evidence presented by Fleming in Illusion it should be clear to those professing a historic conservatism that he was not one, nor does he deserve to be honored by them. The Wilson Administration consistently demonstrated a lack of regard for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, greatly expanding government involvement in individual and business life from the Espionage Act to the institution of the progressive income tax.

In our present day, with President George W. Bush openly declaring his aim to foment a “global democratic revolution” the experience of America in the Great War is as instructive as ever. For Bush and the neocons that dominate his administration are the progeny of Woodrow Wilson. Indeed, they openly and proudly identify themselves with him.

Although it is understandable for some conservatives, exposed to the relentless musings of various multiculturalists within the academy, to have a knee-jerk revulsion towards historical criticisms of American foreign policy it is incumbent upon the Right to ask some very difficult questions about this administration and its foreign policy. For if the President and his advisors have it their way, the United States will be involved indefinitely in the Middle East, engrossed in the big government project of nation-building with no end in sight.

“He who spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is careful to discipline him,” says the Old Testament book of Proverbs. For American patriots, the same can be said of those who offer only unvarnished support for the foreign policy status quo – a policy of interventionism and incessant meddling in the affairs of other nations. For proper love of country does not just imply a critical analysis of international relations, it demands it – for the policies of the present dictate the political conditions for future generations.