Ideological divisions cut across the geographical. Progressives and Socialists, though hating the autocracies, were largely (though by no means all) isolationist, partly because they did not want war to interfere with domestic reform and partly from inherited dislike of Europe. They shunned foreign entanglements with the Old World from whose quarrels and standing armies and reactionary regimes their fathers had escaped to the promise of America. Regardless of background or position, they all joined in one dominant argument: Sentiment for war was manufactured for profit by bankers and businessmen. David Starr Jordan, pacifist president of Stanford, pictured Uncle Sam “throwing his money with Morgan & Co. into the bottomless pit of war,” La Follette denounced profiteers as the real promoters of preparedness, and Eugene Debs, leader of the Socialist party, declared he would rather be shot as a traitor than “go to war for Wall Street.”
Foreseeing that we might, and believing that we should, enter the war, pro-Allied groups opened a preparedness campaign in 1915. Supported by the Army and Navy Leagues, they formed committees for national security and American rights, organized parades, distributed books, films, and leaflets identifying preparedness with patriotism, introduced a bill in Congress to expand the Reserve into a continental army of 400,000, and called for a congressional appropriation of $500 million to build an “adequate Navy.” As the agitation mounted, vociferously led by Theodore Roosevelt, the administration forces took alarm lest in resisting it, in a diehard grip on neutrality, they allow a partisan issue to develop in which the Republicans would become the party of patriotism and the Democrats be identified with “weakness.”
Wilson accordingly embraced preparedness, marched straw-hatted in parades, supported the Army Bill for increasing the Regulars from 80,000 to 140,000 and the Reserves to 400,000, and approved a five-year program of naval construction to provide 10 battleships, 16 cruisers, 50 destroyers, and 100 submarines. He undertook a speaking tour through the Midwest on behalf of the Army Bill, but failed to persuade the hard core of isolationists of the need for adequate armed forces. This outcome was not surprising since he balanced every eloquent plea to prepare “not for war but for adequate national defense” with an equally eloquent avowal of his and the country’s “deep-seated passion for peace.”
In the spring of 1916 debate raged in Congress and country over the Army Bill. Progressives thundered against militarism as the spawn of capitalist greed and the destroyer of the American dream. Interventionists insisted America must join in the battle of the democracies against tyranny (a cause embarrassed by the inconvenient alliance of the Czar) if political freedom was to survive anywhere. Preparedness parades grew louder and longer, a mammoth example on Fifth Avenue lasting twelve hours with 125,000 civilian men and women marchers, two hundred brass bands and fifty drum corps, thousands of cheering observers on the sidewalks, and floodlights on the last squadrons as they marched on into the night. Impervious, a majority of Republican Representatives in the House voted to warn American citizens off armed merchant ships, indicating their firm preference for discretion over neutral rights.
A stunning and unexpected testimony to the depth of pacifist feeling emerged at the Democratic convention at St. Louis in June. Wilson’s managers had planned to make patriotism the theme, with bands concentrating on the national anthem instead of “Dixie” and bursts of “spontaneous” enthusiasm for the flag. These demonstrations proved uninspired, but the keynote speech of ex-Governor Martin Glynn of New York, which argued that the American tradition was to stay out of war whatever the provocation, produced a frenzied outburst and a “delirium of delight.” Designed to appeal to the peace sentiment, it had been approved in advance by the President, who, no less than any other practicing politician in search of re-election, was interested in consensus. As Glynn cited each historical precedent, his audience took up the chant, “What did we do? What did we do?” and the speaker roared in reply, “We did not go to war!” Delegates cheered, waved flags, jumped on their seats. When Glynn, becoming somewhat dismayed at what he had aroused, tried to slide over his prepared text, they yelled, “No! No! Go on! Give us more! More! More!” They danced about the aisles, “half mad with joy … shouting like schoolboys and screaming like steam sirens.”
Glynn had shown that pacifism, instead of being something not quite manly, was right, patriotic, and American. The effect was “simply electrifying.” Convention leaders were appalled. Chairman McCombs hastily scribbled on a sheet of paper, “But we are willing to fight if necessary,” signed his name, and passed it to Glynn, who nodded and called back, “I’ll take care of that.” But by now fascinated with his own effect on the crowd, he never did. Political plans were deranged. Wilson’s campaign was revised to make peace the main issue; the Republicans, repudiating Roosevelt, nominated Hughes on a platform of “straight and honest neutrality” and lost in November to the slogan promoted by Wilson’s managers, “He kept us out of war.”
It was this use of the peace sentiment which accomplished the close victory through a notably sectional vote of the Western states in new alliance with the South. It enabled Wilson to recover for the Democratic party what Bryan had three times failed to win, the support of the majority of predominantly agricultural states.
The final four months leading up to U.S. belligerency began with Wilson’s concerted effort through December and January to end the war through mediation. His concept of a “peace without victory,” although called by Senator La Follette “the greatest message of the century,” did not appeal to the belligerents. Since neither side wanted the American President to arrange the terms of a settlement and each was bent on total victory, Wilson’s attempt to negotiate a peace failed.
In the meantime Germany, having built up a fleet of two hundred submarines, took the decision to risk American hostility for the sake of an all-out effort to end the war her way. On January 31, 1917, she formally notified Washington of intent to resume unrestricted submarine warfare beginning next day. All neutral ships would be “forcibly prevented” from reaching England. A single exception in the form of one U.S. passenger ship a week would be allowed provided that it carry no contraband, dock only at Falmouth and only on a Sunday, be marked by three vertical stripes each a meter wide painted alternately white and red, and fly at each mast a large flag checkered white and red.
At the prospect of funnels “striped like a barber’s pole and a flag like a kitchen tablecloth,” the American historian J. B. McMaster could hardly contain his indignation. The insult implied in such orders addressed to the major neutral indicated that Germany had no doubts of America’s answer. “We are counting on the probability of war with the United States,” Field Marshal von Hindenburg had said at Supreme Headquarters when the decision was taken, but “things cannot be worse than they are now. The war must be brought to an end by whatever means as soon as possible.” Headquarters had convinced itself that in the time before the submarine could knock out the Allies, American military assistance would “amount to nothing.” But the civilian Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg believed the entry of America meant “finis Germaniae.”
In the vortex of the conflict, America had become, willing or not, a major power: as arsenal and bank of the Allies, to whose cause our economy no less than our political system was now attached, and as obstacle, so long as we continued to supply the Allies, to any German hope of victory. To yield freedom of the seas now after two years’ hard-fought maintenance of the principle was incompatible with first-class status. Wilson was left with no choice but to declare the long-avoided rupture of relations. At once pacifist groups were roused to feverish action in mass meetings to demand that American ships stay out of war zones, while interventionists agitated equally loudly for the arming of our ships and the aggressive assertion of American rights.
As ships piled up in home ports, American commerce threatened to come to a standstill affecting the entire national economy. The Cabinet grew seriously alarmed. Although Wilson possessed the executive authority to
arm ships, he was reluctant to take the step that would inevitably start the shooting. He preferred to ask Congress for authorization, thus touching off the great debate and filibuster on the Armed Ship Bill. In the midst of it came the revelation of the telegram from German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann inviting Mexico into alliance as a belligerent. As a scheme to keep U.S. forces occupied on their own border, it offered to help Mexico regain her lost territories of Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. Intercepted and decoded by British naval intelligence and made available to this country, the telegram was released to the press on March 1 in the hope of influencing “the little band of willful men” in the Senate. It failed of that purpose, but aroused the American public more than anything since the outbreak of war. As a proposed assault on U.S. territory, it convinced Americans of German hostility to this country.
On March 9 Congress adjourned without passing the bill. The President issued the order for arming ships anyway and waited for the “overt act.” It came on March 18 in the torpedoing without warning of three American merchant ships with heavy loss of life. Conveniently at this moment the overthrow of the Czar by the preliminary revolution in Russia purified the Allied cause, and the advent of the great new convert to democracy under the Kerensky regime brought a glow of enthusiasm to liberal hearts. At the same time the relentlessly mounting toll of the submarine was making a graveyard of the Atlantic and raising a serious prospect of the Allies’ defeat.
For two more weeks the President hesitated in his agony, afflicted by his sense, as he had said earlier that month, that “matters outside our life as a nation and over which we had no control … despite our wish to keep free of them” were drawing the country into a war it did not want. “If any nation now neutral should be drawn in,” he had said in November, “it would know only that it was drawn in by some force it could not resist.”
This is as just a statement of the truth as any. We were not artificially maneuvered to a fate that might have been otherwise; what engulfed us were the realities of world conflict. In the latest of a long train of scholars’ examinations, Ernest May of Harvard in his The World War and American Isolation, 1914–17, published in 1959, concluded, “Close analysis cannot find the point at which he [Wilson] might have turned back and taken another road.”
On April 2 Wilson went to Congress to ask for its formal acceptance of “the status of belligerent that has been thrust upon it.” He put the blame specifically on submarine warfare: “a war against all nations.” He said “neutrality is no longer feasible or desirable” when the peace of the world and freedom of its people are menaced “by the existence of autocratic governments backed by force which is controlled wholly by their will, not by the will of the people.”
The validity of this proposition was somewhat weakened by the fact that he had believed neutrality feasible and eminently desirable in coexistence with these same nations for nearly three years. “A steadfast peace,” he now discovered, “can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations.” Citing the Zimmermann telegram as evidence of hostile purpose, he said there could be no assured security for the democracies in the presence of Prussian autocracy, “this natural foe of liberty.” And so to the final peroration: “The world must be made safe for democracy … the right is more precious than peace.”
Nothing that Wilson said about the danger to democracy could not have been said all along. For that cause we could have gone to war six months or a year or two years earlier, with incalculable effect on history. Except for the proof of hostility in the resumed submarine campaign and the Zimmermann telegram, our cause would have been as valid, but we would then have been fighting a preventive war—to prevent a victory by German militarism with its potential danger to our way of life—not a war of no choice. Instead, we waited for the overt acts of hostility which brought the war to us.
The experience was repeated in World War II. Prior to Pearl Harbor the threat of Nazism to democracy and the evidence of Japanese hostility to us was sufficiently plain, on a policy level, to make a case for preventive war. But it was not that plain to the American people, and we did not fight until we were attacked.
In our wars since then the assumption of responsibility for the direction, even the policing, of world affairs has been almost too eager—as eager as it was formerly reluctant. In what our leaders believe to be a far-sighted apprehension of future danger, and before our own shores or tangible interests have been touched, we launch ourselves on military adventure half a world away with the result that the country, as distinct from the government, does not feel itself fighting in self-defense. Korea was thoroughly unpopular and Vietnam—where we have gone a step further into a purely preventive war, to contain Chinese communism—even more so. In the circumstances the instinct of the country is uneasy, consciences troubled, and counsels divided.
Two kinds of war, acquisitive and preventive, make hard explaining and the last more so than the first. Although the first might be considered less moral, so far in human experience abstract morality has not notably determined the conduct of states and a good, justifiable reason like need, or irredentism, or “manifest destiny,” can always be found for taking territory. Besides, acquisitive wars tend to be short, sharp, and successful and success never needs explaining. But it is never possible to prove a preventive war to have been necessary, for no one can ever tell what would have happened without it. Given the gap in modern power and organized resources between China and ourselves, our exaggerated fear of Chinese communism, both as threat to us and in its appeal to the rest of Asia, seems unwarranted by a “clear and present danger.” In the grip of a new illusion we have not waited, as in World Wars I and II, for the enemy’s shot to be aimed at us.
In April 1917 the illusion of isolation was destroyed. America came to the end of innocence, and of the exuberant freedom of bachelor independence. That the responsibilities of world power have not made us happier is no surprise. To help ourselves manage them, we have replaced the illusion of isolation with a new illusion of omnipotence. That screen, too, must fall.
Where once we saw ourselves self-contained and free to stand apart, we now see ourselves as if endowed with some mission to organize the world in our image. Militarily we could knock out Hanoi, and doubtless Peking, too, tomorrow, but we cannot raise a clean new democracy on nuclear ashes. Whatever our material or political power, it is not enough for omnipotence. We cannot mold the non-Western world to our desires nor require its acceptance of our concepts of political freedom and representative government. It is too late in history to export to the nations of Asia and Africa with unschooled and undernourished populations in the hundreds of millions the democracy that evolved in the West over a thousand years of slow, small-scale experience from the Saxon village moot to the Bill of Rights. They have not had time to learn it and history is not going to give them time. Meanwhile we live on the same globe. The better part of valor is to spend it learning to live with differences, however hostile, unless and until we can find another planet.
* * *
New York Times Magazine, May 5, 1967.
Israel’s Swift Sword
A PEOPLE CONSIDERED FOR CENTURIES non-fighters carried out in June against long odds the most nearly perfect military operation in modern history. Surrounded on three sides, facing vast superiority in numbers and amount of armament, fighting alone against enemies supported and equipped by a major power, and having lost the advantage of surprise, they accomplished the rarest of military feats, the attainment of exact objectives—in this case the shattering of the enemy’s forces and the securing of defensible lines—within a given time and with absence of blunder. The war, which taken as a whole was the greatest battle ever fought in this area, shook the world, leaving local and international balances in new focus, incidentally rescuing the United States from a critical position and, not the least of effects, exposing a profound failure of Russian calculations and presumably of military intelligence. That the armed forces who achi
eved this result drew on statehood of less than twenty years and on a population more than half immigrant raises questions about the components of effective military power. Who are the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), and how did they do it?
The fundamental components were, of course, motivation and compelling necessity, but all the will in the world would not have sufficed without capacity. What furnished capacity primarily was that the brainpower with which this people is endowed was channeled for the first time since the Exile into the military art in defense of their own homeland.
Second, they developed by conscious choice of their General Staff what it calls “the Israeli answer,” in tactics, weaponry, and training, to suit their own needs and people in the particular war they had to fight. Partly this was a military decision, partly it reflected political experience of disillusionment in reliance on others; basically it was temperamental, deriving from the enforced self-reliance of the early Zionist settlers from whom the higher-grade officers, largely native-born, descend.
The third component of capacity was development of a military doctrine based on absolute fulfillment of mission by all ranks under all circumstances and the fullest exploitation of every resource, particularly knowledge of the enemy and weapon capacity. A tank, plane, or gun in Israeli hands is expected to outperform its equal in other hands. The principle of exploitation is also applied to opportunities as they develop in battle, based on belief in improvisation, in action if not in plan.