Practicing History: Selected Essays

  Thus foreshortened, the analysis is less persuasive than in the book, where all the details, examples, and corroborative evidence from episode to episode build up an inherent logic which has the same quality as certain dream interpretations: When they are right they fit, and one knows it at once. Otherwise no bell rings. The bell rings here. One feels that Wilson, himself so like a queer dream, is explained.

  Certain aspects seem slighted: for one, the fact of Wilson’s late reading, whose repercussions for a mentally gifted child in an intellectual family could not fail to have been devastating, and for another, oddly enough, Wilson’s relations with women. The easy references to mother identification and to his wives as “mother substitutes” are coupled with the flat statement that until the first Mrs. Wilson’s death Wilson “had not the slightest sexual interest in any other woman.” I am perfectly prepared to believe it, but, to quote my own marginal notes at this point, “how on earth do they know?” What is the evidence for or proof of this negative? (The book, incidentally, is without notes or references of any kind, and quotations are given without attribution.) As regards the second Mrs. Wilson: “Let us content ourselves,” the authors say airily, that Wilson “again found a mother’s breast on which to rest.” In view of rather more genial aspects of this relationship not mentioned in this book, including the fact that Wilson habitually referred to his second wife as “Little Girl,” the authors’ reliance on mother seems a bit glib.

  Sex in lay terms in fact receives surprisingly little explicit emphasis in a work co-authored by the progenitor of the sexual revolution. (I note this less in complaint than in wonder.) Even the male friendships are treated as facets of the father-son problem, not as latent homosexuality, a relief to anyone whose cup of ennui has been filled by that particular strain in our current literary supply.

  Up to this point the authors’ exploration of Wilson’s unconscious is enlightening and valuable, despite an irritating style. Among other faults is a habit of maddening repetition, not only of phrases but of whole episodes, recounted two or three times in identical language as if the reader were some sort of nitwit who could not be trusted to retain what he is told from one chapter to the next. More fundamental is the basically irresponsible approach. The authors have allowed emotional bias to direct their inquiry, which has led to undisciplined reasoning, wild overstatement (the Treaty of Versailles was “the death sentence for European civilization”), and false conclusions.

  A writer dealing with the world of actuality as distinct from fiction has, it seems to me, an obligation to the reader to deal as honestly with the facts as he knows how. It is easy enough with even a minimum skill in words to leave a loaded impression on the reader while evading the responsibility of being explicit, but the temptation is one that most writers who respect their profession will try to resist. Freud and Bullitt indulge it. They repeatedly, for instance, use the suggestive but loose terms “mental degeneracy” and “degeneration” (“the mental degeneration which led him to sign the Treaty of Versailles”), and sidle up to psychosis while avoiding a precise statement which could be challenged (“he nearly plunged into psychosis” or “he was rapidly nearing that psychic land … in which an asylum chair may be the throne of God”). This is pretty, but is it historical? The fact may be historical; indeed, the evidence adduced by the authors, especially the truly frightening quotations from Wilson’s last frenetic speeches on the League, suggests that he was psychotic in the final period from Versailles to his collapse. But the historian’s duty, especially in a matter of such moment as the psychosis of a President, is to state plainly, not to evade responsibility by the blurring of metaphor.

  Freud says in his preface that as he studied Wilson’s life “a measure of sympathy developed … mixed with pity” which grew until it “was so overwhelming that it conquered every other emotion,” and he vouches the same for Bullitt. If so, the pity does not penetrate into print. Dislike and contempt dominate these pages. So highly charged is the authors’ bias that it is a constant astonishment to realize that they seem unaware of its effect on their thinking. Watching Dr. Freud exhibiting overtones of the Freudian unconscious is a faintly eerie experience, like watching a Pirandello play within a play. The authors, for instance, describe Wilson as “ugly,” though, judging by the hundreds of pictures one has seen of him, he was reasonably presentable. They depict him from youth onward with decayed teeth, “disfiguring” eyeglasses, putty-colored, unhealthily blotched skin, protuberant ears, short legs, “sour” stomach, a priggish, sickly, nervous, rather repulsive hypochondriac. Is this the man two women loved devotedly? I do not know whether Mrs. Galt was in love or beglamoured by the Presidency, but of Ellen Axson’s feelings there is no doubt. “He is the most wonderful man in the world,” she wrote, “and the best.”

  Dislike shows too in borrowings from William Bayard Hale’s clever but venomous Story of a Style, published in 1920. Although, according to Dr. Jones, Freud had read this book “with gusto,” Bullitt in his preface carefully omits it from the list of books they consulted.

  Kept under control, bias can direct and inform an inquiry, but Freud allows himself the undisciplined prejudices of a Personage—with sometimes ludicrous results. The passage on America is certainly his. According to this, Wilson was able to flourish in America because America was a nation “protected from reality during the nineteenth century by inherited devotion to the ideals of Wyclif, Calvin and Wesley” and because the “Thou shalt not!” of the “Lollard” tradition produced an atmosphere congenial to women and feminine men but “intolerable” to a masculine man. Had Wilson been brought up in “the comparative freedom of European civilization,” the argument continues, he would have had to face up to his inner conflicts.

  One is almost helpless before this concoction. Besides twice using “Lollard” where he means “Puritan” (a very different thing), and assuming that Puritanism was alien to masculine men (Cotton Mather? Oliver Cromwell?), and transferring in one magnificent swoop the entire Protestant tradition of Europe to the United States, and picturing Europe in the Victorian age as a place where screens of rationalizations fell “early,” the passage also imagines an America that is the never-never land of Peter Pan. It exemplifies a characteristic of the psychoanalytic method that is its own worst enemy, the habit of rapid expansion from the perceptive and profound to the fatuous.

  The authors give Wilson no credit for ideas. They absurdly claim that his legislative program as President was derived from Colonel House’s novel Philip Dru, evidently themselves suffering from total ignorance of the Progressive movement and its ideas. When Wilson takes a definite stand, they gave it a minimizing explanation; they ignore or underrate his positive policies; they are lavish with sarcasm. When forced to allow that Wilson’s super-ego drove him to “considerable accomplishments,” they hurriedly add that it made him in the end “not one of the world’s greatest men but a great fiasco.” Their emphasis is always on the failure, not the achievement. True, Wilson’s end, from the Peace Conference on, was a fiasco, but not the totality of his life and not what he is remembered for.

  How do the authors account for his “considerable accomplishments”? Easily. It was a matter of rhetoric. Superb oratory was the secret of his influence. They present Wilson as obsessed by speech-making, as no doubt he was. (In Freudian terms speechmaking, it appears, is a “pleasure of the mouth,” and the mouth is a “feminine weapon.” They have lost me here.) But that his speeches were merely verbal emperor’s clothes, the pretense of a vacant mind, hardly suffices to explain a man whose collected papers are now being issued in forty volumes, who had the stuff to fill an eight-volume official biography thirty years ago, plus a new one of equal length now under way, as well as countless other appraisals and studies over a period of fifty years. Behind Wilson’s speeches were thought and profound belief and ideas which pierced through to men’s hearts, aroused minds, and awakened hopes. That he was also weak, self-deceiving, rigid, sometimes hypocritical, even
dishonest, self-defeating, insufferably self-righteous, ruthless, unforgiving, and mean is equally true but not the whole truth.

  In allowing their bias to control their judgment, what the authors have come up with is Mencken’s “the perfect model of a Christian cad”—with headaches. This is inadequate. It does not account for Wilson’s enduring influence or for the devotion, adoration, and respect of good men that he was able to inspire. The puzzle of Wilson remains.

  More serious than their one-sided picture of the man is the authors’ twisting of history. The most startling example is their claim that for eight months, from October 1915 to May 1916, Wilson’s “supreme desire was to lead the United States into war” on the basis of an agreement to be reached with the Allies allowing him to dictate the peace. This is their analysis of the negotiations surrounding the House-Grey Memorandum. It supposes that the combined lure of being leader in war and arbiter of peace was irresistible to Wilson because the first would release his hostility to his father and the second would satisfy the super-ego’s demand to become Savior of the World. The argument is compelling if one grants the Freudian premise that unconscious drives invariably control conscious acts, but the human record suggests rather that sometimes they do and sometimes they do not. It is quite possible that a subconscious desire for war as a vent for hostility may have been rumbling around in Wilson’s interior, but the historical fact is that his conscious determination to stay neutral maintained control. Undoubtedly Colonel House, out of strong personal conviction, was trying at this time to maneuver the United States into the war. By playing upon the President’s ambitions and weaknesses and judiciously misinforming him, he may have lured Wilson for a time into believing that the Allies’ acceptance of his terms was possible (being ignorant of the Allies’ secret treaties, House may have thought it was). But that American entry into the war was Wilson’s “supreme desire,” or that he was “doing his best” to bring it about, is, to put it politely, hokum.

  To reveal Wilson as warmonger, the opposite of what he professed and everyone has believed him to be, is the kind of magicianship Freud delighted in. He always “took a special interest,” says Dr. Jones, “in people not being what they seemed to be.” He was convinced that Shakespeare was really Bacon or the Earl of Oxford and discovered to his own satisfaction that Moses was not Hebrew but Egyptian. Giving free rein to intuitive flashes may be fun, but it is not history and it is not science. These disciplines require that the intuitive flash must stand the test of evidence. Freud, by reason of the change he wrought on habits of thought, with effect on art, literature, philosophy, medicine, social relations, and indeed almost any aspect of modern life, is one of the world’s outstanding figures, but when he called his method “the science of the unconscious” he was setting a standard that it does not live up to.

  We come now to the gaping hole in the argument. It is the assumption that in the conditions prevailing after the Armistice, in the passion of anti-German feeling, in the wounds of the victors, in the antagonisms and nationalisms released by the breaking up of three empires, an ideal peace was possible; that, in short, Wilson had the power to dictate a just peace and failed to exercise it.

  All he need have done, the authors announce, was to have faced Clemenceau and Lloyd George with “masculine” weapons: threaten to leave the Conference, to publicly denounce the Allies as the “enemies of peace,” and to withdraw American financial and economic aid. In fact, as Wilson well knew, to have risked such an open rupture was impossible, if only for his own sake, for with it would have gone any glimmering hope of the League. Rather than being hailed as Savior, he would have been denounced as a destroyer, and pro-German besides. But, careless of history, the authors rush on. “One crack of Wilson’s financial whip,” they inform us with characteristic restraint, might have brought Lloyd George “to heel.” “One threat” to leave France to face Germany alone might have brought Clemenceau “to compromise” (which suggests a capacious ignorance of the Tiger). Wilson, they state, “still had more men ready to answer his call and follow him to battle than any man has had before or since. He was still the leader of all the idealists of the world.” Two sentences less translatable into reality or more empty of hard fact would be difficult to imagine. The idealists of the world, if the authors are referring to the crowds who cheered Wilson in ecstasy when he arrived in Europe, were now, if French, shouting for reparations and the Saar; if Italian, for Trentino and Fiume; if English, to “hang the Kaiser” and “squeeze the orange till the pips squeak.”

  The authors’ version of a Peace Conference with Wilson cracking the whip that would have brought the Allied powers “to heel” is another never-never land. It ignores those who had done most of the fighting. It presents the Allies as scheming plotters against the noble “idealists of the world,” rather than, nearer to the truth, as the battered, exhausted survivors of terrible war who had lost the best part of a generation and, in the case of France, suffered the wreck, pillage, and ruin of a large part of its territory, and who were determined to make victory produce gains to pay for the long bleeding years. It supposes that Wilson, by the simple exertion of a little masculinity, would have had no problem in extracting a “just” peace out of the rival claims of a dozen nationalities, the redrawing of boundaries, the conflicting promises of secret treaties, the allocating of mandates, the dividing of the spoils of the German colonies and the Turkish dominions, the arranging of areas of sovereignty among Arab claimants, the adjudicating of claims to the coal of Silesia, the oil of Mosul, and the other rich prizes, the application of “self-determination” to Austrians in the Italian Tyrol, Sudeten Germans in Bohemia, Armenians in Turkey, Montenegrins in Yugoslavia, and a score of other groups inside alien frontiers, the settlement of such ancient insolubles as Constantinople and the Straits, Danzig and the Polish Corridor and the status of Palestine, the quarrels of Greeks and Yugoslavs over Salonika, of Poles and Czechs over Teschen, of Romanians and Serbs over Transylvania, of British and French over Syria, of Chinese and Japanese over Shantung, and even of Zionists and anti-Zionists over the National Home, all of whom and many more were at Paris pressing their demands while the specter of the Bolsheviki and the revolution in Germany loomed in the background.

  It was not only Wilson’s psyche that failed in this situation, nor his fault alone that the Treaty of Versailles was less than ideal. The fault was humanity’s.

  It could have sufficed the authors to have analyzed the nature of Wilson’s neuroses, which they have done brilliantly and convincingly. It was not necessary to have claimed it as the historical cause of what they see as the “evil peace” of Versailles. They are addicted to the oversimplified single explanation of great events. There was in Bullitt, writes his fellow New Dealer Raymond Moley, “a deep somewhat disturbing strain of romanticism.” As ambassador he saw foreign affairs as “full of lights and shadows, plots and counterplots, villains and a few heroes”; a dangerous state of mind if not subjected to “the quieting influence of some controlling authority.” It can be dangerous to the historian as well as the ambassador.

  On a grander scale Freud had something of the same quality. As an originator, powered by extraordinary energy of mind, he was capable of great forward bounds, so that he habitually extrapolated a whole system from a single item: saw the ocean in a drop of water, perceived a law of human behavior in a dropped handkerchief. These marvelous leaps of his from observation to deduction, from the particular to the general, opened for the world a whole new area of thought, but they were not subjected to that “controlling authority.” Freud was an adventurer of the mind, and the truest thing ever said of him he said himself: “I am not really a man of science.… I am by temperament a conquistador—an adventurer if you want to translate the word—with the curiosity, the boldness and the tenacity that belong to that type of being.” The Conquistador and the Romantic made natural collaborators.

  The undoubted insights of this book into the motivation of a crucial figure in our p
ast raise the question, What can the Freudian method do for history? The answer must be that as an instrument of illumination it can do much—on one condition: Let it for God’s sake be applied by a responsible historian.

  * * *

  The Atlantic, February 1967.

  How We Entered World War I

  ON APRIL 2, 1917, the United States as a new contender entered the tournament of world power from which we have not since, despite wishful attempts, been able to withdraw. Up to then, notwithstanding our hearty belligerence in the Spanish-American War, we were not regarded as one of the Great Powers, either by them or, on the whole, by ourselves. American participation in the Great War was the beginning of our majority in world affairs.

  In the half-century that has since elapsed, a fundamental shift of the international balance has taken place, with the sites of power spreading outward from Europe to the periphery. The governing seat vacated by the collapse of Britain has been taken—not without kicking and protesting against our fate—by this country. Risen from newcomer to one of the world’s two dominant powers in fifty years, we are once again at war, no longer fresh and untrained but an old hand, skilled, practiced, massively equipped, sophisticated in method, yet infirm of purpose, and without a goal that anyone can define. Is this the destiny to which that first experience has led us? How did the United States become involved and had she a choice? “God helping her,” said President Wilson on that April 2 fifty years ago, “she can do no other.” Could we have done other?