The Will To Believe
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The Will To Believe

Woodrow Wilson, World War I, and America's Strategy for Peace and Security

Ross Kennedy

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The Will To Believe

Woodrow Wilson, World War I, and America's Strategy for Peace and Security

Ross Kennedy

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About This Book

A fresh analysis of Woodrow Wilson's national security strategy during World War I

"By addressing all sides of the American debate on national security questions, and by showing both the complexity and the nuance that characterized that debate, The Will to Believe fills a major gap in the literature on both World War I and all things 'Wilsonian.'"
—Mary Ann Heiss, series editor, New Studies in U.S. Foreign Relations Series

In many ways, Woodrow Wilson and the era of World War I cast a deeper shadow over contemporary foreign policy debates than more recent events, such as the Cold War. More so than after World War II, Wilson and his contemporaries engaged in a wide-ranging debate about the fundamental character of American national security in the modern world. The Will to Believe is the first book that examines that debate in full, offering a detailed analysis of how U.S. political leaders and opinion makers conceptualized and pursued national security from 1914 to 1920.

Based on extensive research gleaned from public documents, presidential papers, and periodicals, The Will to Believe departs significantly from existing scholarship, which tends to examine only Wilson or his critics. This is the first study of America's approach to the war, which examines all major U.S. perspectives from across the political spectrum and analyzes Wilson's security strategy from the beginning of U.S. neutrality through the end of his presidency. During World War I there was no consensus among Wilson and his contemporaries on such fundamental issues as the nature of the international system, the impact of security policies on domestic freedom, the value of alliances and multinational organizations, and the relationship between democracy and peace. Historian Ross A. Kennedy focuses on how three competing groups—pacifists, liberal internationalists, and Atlanticists—addressed these and other national security issues.

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1

Militarism and Power Politics, 1914–17

The outbreak of war in late July 1914 immediately provoked an intense debate in the United States about militarism, the nature of power politics, and the status of American national security. Pacifists, liberal internationalists, and Atlanticists all feared that under certain conditions militarism at home could undermine America’s free way of life, but they disagreed about the specifics of those conditions and the likelihood that they would occur. The three groups also all believed that the system of power politics was unstable, but they differed in their analysis of the degree to which this was a problem as well as why it existed in the first place. Finally, as discussed in Chapter 2, they sharply diverged in their assessment of how the war’s outcome might affect America’s security. As the debate over these questions unfolded between August 1914 and January 1917, it became clear that, despite their differences, pacifists and liberal internationalists had more in common with each other than with the Atlanticists. United in their intense fear of militarism and power politics, pacifists and liberal internationalists managed to marginalize the Atlanticists—the only group in American politics with a relatively positive view of the balance-of-power system.
More than anyone else, pacifists raised dire warnings that any significant increases in America’s military establishment above the levels that existed in 1914 might trigger an unraveling of liberty and freedom at home. Created after the Spanish-American War, the existing force structure—a standing army of professional volunteers numbering about 100,000 men, a navy ranked third in the world in warship tonnage, and a reserve force of about 112,000 active National Guardsmen—was safe from the standpoint of preserving America’s domestic way of life. Any large-scale defense expansion, pacifists argued, any “big army and navy programs with their accompanying propaganda,” would be nothing less than “a menace to democracy.”1
Pacifists outlined in some detail the logic that lay behind this position. Drawing on fears about professional standing armies dating back to the Revolution, they asserted that military service, especially if made compulsory through a program of universal military training (UMT), would undermine the citizenry’s democratic spirit. “Free minds, and souls undrilled to obedience,” lectured Crystal Eastman of the American Union against Militarism (AUAM), “are vital to the life of democracy.” The whole point of “military drill,” however, was “to develop unquestioning obedience, so that the soldier will move forward in the face of danger and even certain death.” At the same time, trainees confronted an organization that was “aristocratic” in nature, with a “fixed line between officers and men.” “Cringing before men who abuse their power,” taught to “stop thinking” and respond blindly to the will of others, it was no wonder to the editors of the Nation that a man exposed to military training became “an automaton.”2
Pacifists also stressed that military officers harbored antidemocratic attitudes that led them into aggressively antidemocratic behavior. Officers were used to giving orders and, “clothed with power to gratify caprice,” dominating others with arbitrary commands. Consequently, they showed little patience for civilian authority. Such officers, complained Oswald Garrison Villard of the Nation, arrogantly asserted that they alone had the wisdom to decide military and foreign policy, actively lobbied Congress to increase the armed forces, and pressed for new national defense councils to determine public policy in “secret session.”3
The policies that military officers advocated added to their power. Any “expert” in any field, observed Villard, tended to get so absorbed in his specialty that he was likely to “subordinate everything to the development of that specialty.” Military experts acted no differently. “Their entire training leads them … to fear the oncoming of the enemy and they habitually think of every possible combination that may be brought against them.” They were therefore obsessed with organizing the country for war—an outlook that would “inevitably make for the subordination of everything civilian to the military.” Jane Addams believed that she saw the outcome of military thinking already taking shape in war-torn Europe, observing, in mid-1915, that a “military party” had become ascendant in each of the belligerent states. Censorship of the press had become rampant, and, she worried, “the military power is breaking down all of the safeguards of civil life and of civil government.” Fearing that excessive preparedness could spark a similar process in the United States, Addams became an early and central leader of the AUAM.4
If the “military-naval oligarchy” embodied dangerously antidemocratic ideals and policy aspirations, so too did its chief allies, the “capitalists, imperialists, and war traders” who profited from defense spending and aggression overseas. Nearly all of the major pacifist spokesmen charged that propreparedness movements were “stimulated by interests whose purpose was not entirely the undiluted welfare of the majority.” To the pacifists, preparedness programs furthered the interests of those who “look down with undisguised contempt upon the masses” and who undermined the forces of democratic progressivism.5
Reactionaries benefited from preparedness programs in several ways. Most obviously, corporate munitions makers reaped huge profits from preparedness, as did bankers who helped to finance arms purchases made by the American government and by belligerents overseas. Their efforts to push defense increases through Congress by whipping the country into “a panic” distracted attention from economic and political injustices at home, and by identifying themselves with patriotism and security, reactionary preparedness advocates made passage of legislation aimed at curbing their power difficult.6
Perhaps most disturbingly, expansion of the military served the interests of America’s “upper and leisure classes” by providing them with the means to pursue “class … aggression” at home and abroad. The “real basis for … preparationist propaganda,” alleged a Progressive single-tax journal, the Public, was “to provide an army to over-awe labor unions” and to “repress” them. James Maurer, a Pennsylvania labor leader active in the AUAM, pointed out that stepped-up military forces could be used “to dragoon the working people of the country” into corporate America’s “battles for trade” overseas. Imperialist adventures could only further stimulate demands for military forces—and thus further strengthen the hand of the reactionary plutocracy that advocated preparedness and imperialism in the first place.7
Pacifists were not alone in associating military preparedness with a threat to American democracy and liberty. Liberal internationalists agreed with much of their diagnosis. Like the pacifists, President Wilson associated militarism with the size and composition of America’s armed forces. In his annual message to Congress in December 1914, the president argued that the ability instantly “to put a nation in the field, a nation of men trained to arms” meant an abandonment of “America’s present political principles and institutions.” A volunteer army supported by the National Guard was an appropriate force for the United States, and Americans should certainly consider ways to encourage men to join it. But anything “more than this,” Wilson warned, “carries with it a reversal of the whole history and character of our polity.”8
About one year after this speech, Wilson shifted course and proposed significant increases in America’s defense forces. He called for increasing the army by about 40 percent, to 140,000 men, building a navy that by the early 1920s would rival Great Britain’s, and creating a new 400,000-man force of army-trained federal reserves, the so-called Continental army. The motives behind this policy will be discussed in subsequent chapters. Here, though, it is important to note that Wilson’s decision to expand America’s military establishment in no way indicated that his fear of militarism had suddenly disappeared. Instead, it revealed his belief that America could tolerate a larger military establishment than the pacifists thought wise; his basic concerns about militarism, however, still remained fixed.9
Even as he advocated greater preparedness for the United States, Wilson did not support a program of UMT, the central plank of most propreparedness platforms. In part, the president steered clear of UMT because he knew it had little support in Congress. But he also genuinely believed that compulsory training risked generating militarism at home. His program, he emphasized in late 1915, stepped up the voluntary enlistment of “citizen soldiers,” most of whom would only serve three years before retiring to their civilian pursuits. “What we all wish to accomplish is that the forces of the nation should indeed be part of the nation and not a separate professional force,” he explained. America “does not want to be ruled by the spirit of any class,” and certainly not by “the spirit of a military class”; “militarism,” Wilson stressed, “is the end of progress. There cannot be any progress when the professionalism of the soldier dominates in a national polity.”10
In addition to refusing to endorse UMT, Wilson resisted calls by propreparedness forces to increase the regular army up to 250,000 men. The House of Representatives would not support such an increase, but, in any event, Wilson considered it “much too large.” “We are not asking for armies,” Wilson informed a crowd in St. Louis, “we are asking for a trained citizenry which will act in the spirit of citizenship and not in the spirit of military establishments.” That was why he limited his increase of the regular army to 40,000 men: it was the figure Wilson considered “adequate to the uses of peace” and faithful to the fact that he was “just as much opposed to militarism as any man living.”11
Wilson echoed pacifist anxieties about the reactionary potential of preparedness as well. To be sure, he did not explicitly address the idea that expanding the military establishment would sabotage Progressive reform, nor did he endorse the charge that munitions manufacturers manipulated defense programs for their own selfish power and profit. At one point, in fact, Wilson said that such a charge was “preposterous.” But the president did not totally dismiss the pacifists’ worries about the anti-Progressive character of preparedness either. Wilson avoided UMT, for example, in part because he believed voluntary training would spur the sense of civic virtue that most reformers associated with Progressivism; it would make Americans “a little less careless of the general interest of the nation, a little less thoughtful of their own peculiar and selfish interests.” In addition, although he downplayed the notion that munitions manufacturers influenced preparedness planning, Wilson also assured Americans that he was not a “dupe” of the arms business. “I know the points of danger,” he confided to an audience in Des Moines, and he therefore urged Congress to expand government ownership of armaments plants. In sum, while Wilson associated militarism more with the military itself than with reactionary corporate interests, he clearly harbored some fears on this score too.12
Wilson further signaled his desire to link preparedness with Progressivism by suggesting that voluntary military training could be accompanied by “a great system of industrial and vocational education.” Under such a program, explained Wilson, “men will think first of their families and their daily work, of their service in the economic fields of the country, of their efficiency as artisans, and only last of all of their serviceability to the nation as soldiers and men at arms.” In this way, preparedness could work in the interests of the many instead of the few.13
Finally, the president went out of his way to defend his naval program in the language of antimilitarism. Again, this made good political sense, but Wilson had said the same thing before he had formulated and started campaigning for his preparedness plan. The navy’s ships “have no suggestion of bluster about them,” he asserted, and “are commanded by men thoughtful of the duty of citizens as well as the duty of officers.” Americans had always supported a powerful navy “because they seem to think that, if you can keep your fighting men at sea, they are not in danger of disturbing your peace of mind or the character of the national life.” In so defending his naval buildup, Wilson again revealed that while he judged the risks involved with military expansion differently than the pacifists, he nevertheless still shared their belief that, under certain circumstances, militarism could threaten America’s domestic freedoms.14
The editors of the Progressive journal, the New Republic, the most articulate proponents of liberal internationalism in the press, essentially agreed with Wilson’s perspective on preparedness. They especially stressed the idea that professional military forces possessed a political outlook at odds with democracy. An America that had “a small standing professional army which was really no more than a national police force,” wrote chief editor Herbert Croly, had “no reason to fear the corruption of its democratic institutions and ideals by a military caste or spirit.” But increasing that army to a size where it could instantly defeat any invader would be a different story. That kind of force, warned Croly, would “have a profound reaction on American domestic life, because as a consequence of its increased size and authority it will be constantly making imperative demands upon the civil authorities which they will be reluctant to grant and which will raise the issue between civil and military control over American policy.”15
Like the pacifists, the New Republic also associated preparedness advocates with anti-Progressive elements in American life. Editor Walter Weyl in particular made this point. He argued that the “dominant classes” in Europe had long agitated for preparedness and had manipulated the “constant fear of war” to “allay domestic discontent and to oppose democratic progress.” While he thought that American preparedness campaigns cut across more diverse groups, Weyl still believed, at least “to a certain extent,” that conservative forces in America hoped to use military expansion to achieve “political quiescence and domination.” Just as the pacifists did, Weyl perceived “a reactionary shape” in the preparedness movement.16
“If preparation for war meant only what it means to many of the defense societies and military agitators,” agreed Croly and Walter Lippmann, then America could not pursue preparedness “without being false to national ideals as well as its traditions.” Their concern about the character of the preparedness movement did not lead the New Republic’s editors to reject all types of military expansion, however. In line with President Wilson, they did not believe that military training per se would undermine a person’s democratic character and “turn citizens into mere military automatons.” On the contrary, the editors asserted, voluntary training could be a “stirring and illuminating episode” for an enlistee, teaching him “moral discipline,” not in a “servile” way but “as part of a system, to which as a civilian he had given his consent.”17
Compulsory training fell into a different category. If UMT was necessary to combat America’s “prevailing tendencies towards faction and disintegration,” and the editors thought it might well be, then it had to be combined with sweeping advances in Progressive reform. Specifically, the New Republic could only go along with UMT if it was accompanied “by the nationalizing of essential public services, like the railroads,” by government ownership of vital natural resources, and by a “strengthening of the trades unions and their frank recognition as an independent member of the official industrial organization.” Without an attempt “to make the American commonwealth better worth defending,” warned the editors, an upgraded military featuring UMT “might be as demoralizing as an armament intended plainly for undemocratic aggression.”18
The League to Enforce Peace (LEP), the most conservative component of the liberal internationalist coalition, represented a variety of views concerning militarism. Some members, such as the Independent’s editor, Hamilton Holt, shared Wilson’s conviction that a “large standing army” was “the greatest foe of liberty” and supported the president’s defense program as the best way to achieve preparedness “in consonance with American spirit and American traditions.” Other members, such as conservatives Edward Filene and William Wadhams, ignored the charges often made by Progressives that professional military forces possessed an antidemocratic outlook. But they did worry that excessive preparedness might lead to huge tax increases and “serious class strife” harmful to America’s political stability. Still others, such as William Howard Taft, Theodore Marburg, and A. Lawrence Lowell, considered Wilson’s defense program weak; indeed, Taft supported UMT.19
In adopting this position, Taft and other conservatives in the LEP tilted toward the Atlanticist perspective on the relationship between the military and American democracy. At first glance, the Atlanticist approach to military matters starkly contrasted with that of the pacifists and Progressive liberal internationalists. Roosevelt and his supporters demanded that preparedness go well beyond Wilson’s plan. At a minimum, they wanted a standing army of 250,000 men supported by UMT and a faster naval buildup than t...

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