{"id":10632,"date":"2017-09-22T11:50:39","date_gmt":"2017-09-22T15:50:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=10632"},"modified":"2024-09-11T17:07:43","modified_gmt":"2024-09-11T21:07:43","slug":"fff-world-war-one-still-haunts-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2017\/09\/22\/fff-world-war-one-still-haunts-america\/","title":{"rendered":"FFF: World War One Still Haunts America"},"content":{"rendered":"

Future of Freedom Foundation<\/a> \"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

How World War One Still Haunts America<\/a><\/h2>\n

by James Bovard<\/p>\n

This year is the 100th anniversary of Woodrow Wilson\u2019s pulling America into World War I. Many people celebrate this centenary of America\u2019s emergence as a world power. But at a time when the Trump administration is bombing or rattling sabers at half a dozen nations and many Democrats are clamoring to bloody Russia, it is worth reviewing how World War I turned out so much worse than the experts and politicians promised.<\/p>\n

Wilson was narrowly reelected in 1916 on the basis of a campaign slogan, \u201cHe kept us out of war.\u201d But Wilson had massively violated neutrality by providing armaments and money to the Allied powers that had been fighting Germany since 1914. At the same time, he had no quarrel with the British blockade that was slowly starving the German people. In his April 1917 speech to Congress seeking a declaration of war against Germany, he hailed the U.S. government as \u201cone of the champions of the rights of mankind\u201d and proclaimed that \u201cthe world must be made safe for democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n

American soldiers helped turn the tide on the Western Front in late 1918. But the cost was far higher than Americans anticipated. More than 100,000 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. But the political damage lasted far longer.<\/p>\n

In his speech to Congress, Wilson declared, \u201cWe have no quarrel with the German people\u201d and feel \u201csympathy and friendship\u201d towards them. But his administration speedily commenced demonizing the \u201cHuns.\u201d One Army recruiting poster portrayed German troops as an ape ravaging a half-naked damsel beneath an appeal to \u201cDestroy this Mad Brute.\u201d Wilson\u2019s evocations of fighting for universal freedom were quickly followed by bans on sauerkraut, beer, and teaching German in public schools. Tolerance quickly became unpatriotic.<\/p>\n

The Wilson administration sold the war as an easy win \u2014 failing to realize how close France and Russia were to either collapsing or surrendering. When fewer than 100,000 Americans volunteered for the military, Congress responded by authorizing conscripting 10 million men. Wilson proclaimed that \u201cit is in no sense a conscription of the unwilling. It is, rather, selection from a Nation which has volunteered in mass.\u201d But people had voted against the war. Regardless, Wilson touted the draft as a new type of freedom: \u201cIt is nothing less than the day upon which the manhood of the country shall step forward in one solid rank in defense of the ideals to which this Nation is consecrated.\u201d It was as if Wilson was presaging George Orwell\u2019s motto in 1984<\/i> \u2014 \u201cFreedom is Slavery.\u201d<\/p>\n

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, \u201cWilson, 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.\u201d Wilson even urged Congress to set up detention camps to quarantine \u201calien enemies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wilson unleashed ruthless censorship. Anyone who spoke publicly against military conscription was likely to get slammed with federal espionage or sedition charges. Possessing a pamphlet entitled \u201cLong Live the Constitution of the United States\u201d earned six months in jail for a Pennsylvania malcontent. Censorship was buttressed by fanatic propaganda campaigns led by the Committee for Public Information, a federal agency whose shameless motto was \u201cfaith in democracy \u2026 faith in fact.\u201d The government cared so much about the American people that it could not burden them with details of government follies and fiascoes.<\/p>\n

The government also assumed it was entitled to practically brainwash any and all conscripts. As Thomas Fleming noted in his masterpiece The Illusion of Victory: America in World War One,<\/i> soldiers were subject to many hours of exhortations \u201cto resist sexual temptation\u2026. Spokesmen for the Committee on Training Camp Activities urged soldiers to stop thinking about sex: \u2018A man who is thinking below the belt is not efficient.\u2019\u201d The Wilson administration strove for the creation of \u201c\u2018moral and intellectual armor\u2019 that would sustain the soldiers when they went overseas and were beyond the U.S. government\u2019s \u2018comforting and restraining and helpful hand.\u2019\u201d The failure of the purity campaign was best reflected in the lyrics of a 1919 hit song: \u201cHow ya gonna keep \u2019em down on the farm after they\u2019ve seen Paree?\u201d<\/p>\n

To broaden support for the war, Wilson partnered with the Prohibition movement. Prohibition advocates \u201cindignantly insisted that \u2026 any kind of opposition to prohibition was sinister and subversively pro-German,\u201d noted William Ross, author of World War 1 and the American Constitution.<\/i> Even before the 18th Amendment (which banned alcohol manufacture, sale, and transportation) was ratified, Wilson banned beer sales as a wartime measure. Prohibition itself 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; 10,000 people were killed as a result. Deborah Blum, the author of The Poisoner\u2019s Handbook,<\/i> noted that \u201can official sense of higher purpose kept the poisoning program in place.\u201d It took more than half a century for the quality of American beer to recover from Prohibition. And the effects of the booster shot that organized crime received in those years lasted even longer. Even worse, the war on alcohol paved the way for the war on drugs; many former Prohibition agents signed up to crusade against marijuana after the ban on booze ended.<\/p>\n

Attacking speech, ruining farms<\/b><\/p>\n

World War I exposed the cravenness and authoritarianism of progressive intellectuals. As journalist Randolph Bourne wrote, \u201c\u2018Loyalty,\u2019 or rather war orthodoxy, becomes the sole test for all professions, techniques, occupations. Particularly is this true in the sphere of the intellectual life.\u201d Bourne lamented, “It has been a bitter experience to see the unanimity with which the American intellectuals have thrown their support to the use of war-technique in the crisis in which America found herself. Socialists, college professors, publicists, new-republicans, practitioners of literature, have vied with each other in confirming with their intellectual faith the collapse of neutrality and the riveting of the war-mind on a hundred million more of the world\u2019s people\u2026. Herd-instinct became herd-intellect.”<\/p>\n

Writers who failed to join the stampede found themselves banished or, in some cases, persecuted. One of the Post Office\u2019s primary targets for suppression was magazines guilty of \u201chigh-browism.\u201d The collapse of honest, thoughtful criticism was invaluable to Wilson\u2019s effort to spur mass mindless obedience. Unfortunately, with the same pattern of servility repeated in subsequent wars, few intellectuals seem to recall how World War I set the model for cravenness.<\/p>\n

As Bourne noted, \u201cWar is the health of the state.\u201d The war provided the pretext for unprecedented federal domination of the economy \u2014 and endless debacles. In early 1918, the government \u201cshut down all the factories in the country east of the Mississippi River for a week\u201d to save fuel, as Fleming noted. Even Wilson\u2019s Democratic congressional allies were aghast at the mismanagement and inefficiency. Wilson was outraged at criticism, declaring that it showed \u201csuch an ignorance of the actual conditions as to make it impossible to attach any importance\u201d to the charge. But presidential indignation failed to straighten out the snafus from central control of production processes.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the most dramatic economic impact fell on American farmers. Washington promised that \u201cfood will win the war\u201d 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. They in turn spurred perennial political discontent that helped lead to a federal takeover of agriculture by the Roosevelt administration in the 1930s. When the New Deal imposed price controls across the economy in 1933, World War I was the model that administrators touted.<\/p>\n

Making the world safe<\/b><\/p>\n

Before the war began, Wilson declared in April 2015, \u201cNo nation is fit to sit in judgement upon any other nation.\u201d In his war speech to Congress in 1917, he portrayed the Kaiser as a dictator (though Germany was actually far more democratic than most parts of the British Empire). By 1919, Wilson had totally reversed his moral compass, declaring, \u201cIn the last analysis, my fellow countrymen, as we in America would be the first to claim, a people are responsible for the acts of their government.\u201d Unfortunately, that became the lodestar for subsequent U.S. warring \u2014 including the massive civilian bombings of Germany and Japan in World War II, in North Korea in 1952, in Vietnam, and in Iraq in this century.<\/p>\n

World War I was ended by the Treaty of Versailles, which redrew European borders willy-nilly and imposed ruinous reparations on Germany. Wilson had proclaimed 14 points to guide peace talks; instead, there were 14 separate small wars in Europe towards the end of his term \u2014 after peace had been proclaimed. The League of Nations charter was written so smarmily that the United States could have been obliged to assist Britain and France in suppressing revolts in the new colonies they garnered from the war.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s Adolf Hitler, Italy\u2019s Benito Mussolini, and Russia\u2019s N. Lenin \u2014 whom Wilson intensely disliked because \u201che felt the Bolshevik leader had stolen his ideas for world peace,\u201d as historian Fleming noted.<\/p>\n

Despite winning the war, Wilson\u2019s 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 \u201cidealism that is oblique, confusing, dishonest, and ferocious.\u201d Unfortunately, the recoil against bogus idealism was temporary. Starting in 2002, George W. Bush practically recycled Wilson en masse to whip up fervor for invading Iraq.<\/p>\n

Have today\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

originally published in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. Bovard\u2019s writings have been publicly denounced by FBI director Louis Freeh, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.jimbovard.com","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jim.bovard","https:\/\/x.com\/jimbovard"],"url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/author\/admin\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10632"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10632\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20474,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10632\/revisions\/20474"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}