The World Remade Read online

  Copyright © 2016 by G. J. Meyer

  Map copyright © 2016 by Jeffrey L. Ward

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  BANTAM BOOKS and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Photo credits appear on this page.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Meyer, G. J., author.

  Title: The world remade : America in World War I / G. J. Meyer.

  Description: New York : Bantam, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016036502 | ISBN 9780553393323 (hardback)

  Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1914–1918—United States. | BISAC: HISTORY / Military / World War I. | HISTORY / United States / 20th Century. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Historical.

  Classification: LCC D619 .M465 2017 | DDC 940.3/73—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2016036502

  Ebook ISBN 9780553393330

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Virginia Norey, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Marietta Anastassatos

  Cover photograph: Armistice celebration, 1918 (Granger, NYC, all rights reserved)

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Part One: The Crooked Road to War

  Chapter 1: December 1918: Apotheosis

  Background: How It Happened

  Chapter 2: Neutrality the Wilson Way

  Background: Coming of Age

  Chapter 3: Quickly to the Brink

  Background: The Tortoise and the Hare

  Chapter 4: Many Sacred Principles

  Background: Mystery Voyage

  Chapter 5: Marked Cards and a Stacked Deck

  Background: Choosing Sides

  Chapter 6: “A Dangerous Thing—To Inflame a People”

  Background: The War of Words—and Pictures

  Chapter 7: Onward, Christian Soldiers

  Background: Troublemaker

  Chapter 8: Why

  Background: Over There—The War as of April 1917

  Chapter 9: “A Message of Death”

  Part Two: The Price

  Chapter 10: Taking Charge

  Background: Going Dry

  Chapter 11: “Skin-Deep Dollar Patriotism”

  Background: Destiny’s Child

  Chapter 12: Cracking Down

  Background: Three Faces of Labor

  Chapter 13: Welcome to France

  Background: Buffalo Soldiers

  Chapter 14: “A Moblike Madness”

  Background: “Disgusting Creatures”

  Chapter 15: The Law of Selfishness

  Background: The War, Too, Changes

  Chapter 16: The Last Roll of the Iron Dice

  Background: The War of the Air—and of the Future

  Chapter 17: Deadlocked No More

  Background: Death from a New Direction

  Chapter 18: The Tide Turns

  Background: Eggs Loaded with Dynamite

  Chapter 19: An Army at Last

  Background: “A Soldier’s Soldier”

  Chapter 20: In at the Kill

  Part Three: Sowing Dragons’ Teeth

  Chapter 21: The World the War Made

  Background: Lost?

  Chapter 22: Compromise or Betrayal?

  Background: Strange Bedfellows

  Chapter 23: “Hell’s Dirtiest Work”

  Background: The Palmer Raids

  Chapter 24: “The Door Is Closed”

  Aftermath: “Now It Is All Over”

  Woodrow Wilson’s Program for Peace

  Dedication

  Sources and Notes

  Bibliography

  Photo Credits

  By G. J. Meyer

  About the Author

  Introduction

  THIS BOOK INTERTWINES four stories that are almost always told separately:

  The story of how the United States came to enter the First World War two and a half long years after it began, when it had already proved ruinous to almost every nation involved.

  And the story of how American intervention decided the outcome of the war, with consequences that still reverberate after a hundred years.

  Of how the war changed the United States politically and economically and in its very nature, challenging Americans’ understanding of themselves as a nation and their nation’s place in the world.

  And how the hope that the postwar settlement would justify America’s sacrifices was dashed first at the Paris peace conference, then again in Washington, D.C.

  The combining of these stories sheds light on questions that were controversial a century ago and remain so today.

  Why did the United States go to war in 1917, really?

  Should she have gone to war? Was the decision necessary? Was it justified by the outcome?

  Is it a good thing that American intervention caused the war to end the way it did?

  And how much responsibility does the United States bear for the disasters that followed?

  World War I, like so many of history’s great events, is heavily encrusted with myth. But gradually, over the generations, the truth has been breaking through. Today anyone wanting to defend the old stories about how Germany started the war, and did so because she wanted to conquer the world, takes on a heavy burden of proof. As for who did start the war, an uncertain finger of blame points first at Serbia—or is it Austria-Hungary?—before moving on to Russia. After which it hardly knows where to go next.

  Which is to say that answers that in 1920 seemed obvious have long since crumbled into dust.

  Which in turn is not to say that Germany was some kind of innocent victim. There were no innocent victims, though every one of the nations that went to war claimed to be exactly that. Each of them had a story that explained why. Those stories, too, are now threadbare.

  So are other stories that once seemed almost too obviously true to require defense. Stories about what the two sides were fighting for. And why they refused to discuss peace even as the death toll rose into the millions and kept climbing. About how they came to see submarine attacks on passenger liners and the systematic starvation of millions of civilians as not only justified but necessary.

  But even as new and more convincing stories have emerged, the one about American intervention in the war has remained unknown to a surprising extent within the United States itself. There are of course reasons for this—and they, too, are largely unknown.

  The first and perhaps the most important is the power of propaganda. Americans have pretty thoroughly forgotten—it is more accurate to say that they never actually knew—that even before the shooting started in August 1914, the United States became the prime target of a British propaganda campaign of unprecedented extent, sophistication, and intensity. Communications from Germany and Austria-Hungary were at the same time essentially shut down. America’s newspapers were so accepting of this, and Washington so acquiescent, that the public had scarcely a clue that it was being told almost nothing about the war except what was approved (and often embellished, and not infrequently invented) by platoons of censors in London.

  Important truths remained untold, while untruths were spread widely. Small wonder, then, that as months and then years passed, more and more once-skeptical Americans were brought to see the war as a morally simple matter: a conflict between the innocent and the good on one side, the unfathomably evil on the other.

  Nor i
s it remembered that, almost from the day of America’s declaration of war in April 1917, the Wilson administration put in place a propaganda machine of its own, one even bigger and more potent than Britain’s and aimed at the same target. For the president no less than for the British and French, the war had become a crusade against a Berlin regime (and ultimately a German population) so vicious, so morally degenerate, as to be unworthy of membership in the community of nations. It was made a crime for American citizens to challenge this view, with penalties so severe as to ensure that few would dare to do so. It is Woodrow Wilson’s supreme achievement, proof of his success in bending public opinion to his purposes, that he enshrined himself as an international icon, one of history’s great champions of liberty, while mounting the most savage attack on individual rights in American history before or since.

  He accomplished this by hammering into the national psyche a manufactured but majestically eloquent account of the war’s causes, the reasons for his decision to intervene, and the blessings victory would bring. This account was cemented in place by the speed with which Germany’s Western Front defenses began to give way soon after (though not simply because) the American Expeditionary Force entered the fight. And by the years in prison—the decades—to which scores and hundreds of Americans could be and were sentenced not only for dissenting from what the White House proclaimed to be true, but merely for failing to display enthusiasm for the cause.

  Also important is the fact that what Europe rightly called the Great War never became, for the United States, the nightmare it was for the other belligerent nations. All the others were impoverished; the United States grew fabulously rich. Her “doughboys” were in combat for only half a year and operated as a distinct American army for only the last couple of months. Her casualties, while heartbreaking enough, were a mere fraction of what even the smallest of her allies and enemies suffered. When it was over, Americans simply had less to lament and therefore less reason for anger, bitterness, or defiance.

  This goes a long way toward explaining why the war changed the United States in the ways that it did—and why the changes were by no means entirely positive. Understandably but foolishly, Americans saw a direct causal connection between their army’s entry into combat and the disintegration of Germany’s Western Front defenses that began at exactly that time. The connection was tenuous at best, a case of post hoc, ergo propter hoc, but it reinforced a deep-rooted national inclination to see the United States as unique not just in size and wealth but morally and spiritually. It seemed obvious: what else could explain how a war that had been deadlocked for nearly four years became fluid as soon as the Yanks were in the field? It was taken to be as true of the American soldier as of Galahad that

  His strength was as the strength of ten

  Because his heart was pure.

  Finally there is the crucial fact that another war, one even bigger and more global, followed after barely more than twenty years. This time the United States played an incomparably more central part, for reasons incomparably less ambiguous. What was for Americans the smaller, briefer, less painful first conflict disappeared in a sense behind the second. Or disappeared within it, by a curious process of historical absorption. It became easy to suppose that Kaiser Wilhelm II, a pathetically ineffectual man turned into a monster by the propagandists, must have been in fact a kind of earlier Hitler, a prototype of the real thing. That Wilhelmine Germany must have been barely distinguishable from Hitler’s Germany, so that U.S. intervention was no less necessary and constructive in the first case than in the second.

  Thus the purpose of this book: to bring light to old questions by melding into a single narrative what is now known, a hundred years on, about the four stories that make up its subject. To make that narrative as factual as the state of our knowledge permits, and as complete as a single volume can be. And, scarcely less important, to make all of it accessible to and interesting for today’s general reader.

  I have been at pains to minimize overlap with my earlier A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914–1918. That book, being an account of the whole conflict from beginning to end, could give only limited attention to America’s place in it, leaving much of that story untouched. My aim has been to make the two works complementary, each providing a dimension beyond the scope of the other.

  It hardly need be said that any deficiencies in the pages that follow are my responsibility entirely. They would be more numerous were it not for my good fortune in having Tracy Devine as my editor. She is a superb coach: calling my attention to things that could be done better, gently giving a nudge when I am in danger of becoming careless, making me raise my game. I am indebted also to designer Virginia Norey and production editor Loren Noveck for making this book the handsome object that it is.

  I am grateful to the Library of Congress and the libraries of the University of Minnesota and the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul for putting so much essential material within easy reach.

  I am grateful to my daughters, Ellen and Sarah, and their families for providing me with two bases from which to do my research.

  Above all I am grateful to my wife, Rosie, for allowing this project to devour so much of our lives.

  G. J. Meyer

  Mere, Wiltshire, England

  President Woodrow Wilson and the members of his cabinet as they took office in 1913.

  Have you ever heard what started the present war? If you have, I wish you would publish it, because nobody else has, so far as I can gather. Nothing in particular started it, but everything in general.

  —WOODROW WILSON, OCTOBER 26, 1916

  Chapter 1

  ____

  December 1918: Apotheosis

  IT WAS DELIVERANCE.

  It was like being born again—albeit after an unspeakably difficult birth—free to start over and get it right this time.

  It was the end of a nightmare that had threatened never to end, and the beginning, everyone desperately wanted to believe, of a new and permanently better world.

  It was peace.

  It was victory.

  And it was Paris—Paris!—with the year’s climactic holiday less than two weeks in the future. After four dark, grim, clenched-teeth Christmases spent under the shadow of the apocalypse, the City of Light was free again to be itself, ablaze with the celebration of life.

  There was much to grieve, yes—a terrible burden of grief, the incomprehensible sum of something like nine million fighting men dead along with a like number of civilians, plus survivors beyond numbering too broken ever to be put together again. France had suffered as much as any country and more than most, the war having taken nearly 3.5 percent of her population, one of every four men between the ages of eighteen and thirty. But a dozen other nations were similarly bereaved. From Portugal to the Russian steppe, men were learning to live without a limb or all their limbs. And learning to live with the compulsive twitching and trembling that were among the mysterious symptoms of shell shock, a new kind of affliction the name of which reflected ignorance of its causes. Men without eyes were being taught to weave baskets.

  But the worst was over. In western Europe at least, the bloodletting had stopped. There were no more enemy armies just beyond the horizon, pressing to break through. There was no need to fear that those enemies might soon be marching in triumph down the Champs-Élysées. Such nightmare visions belonged to the past.

  And upon this reborn Paris there now descended the man who had saved it, Thomas Woodrow Wilson, president of the United States. He arrived like a god, the first serving president ever to cross the Atlantic, borne on a great liner that, as it approached the port of Brest, passed through an honor guard of nine of his navy’s battleships, twenty of its destroyers, and like numbers of French and British warships.

  (That liner, by the way, was herself a symbol of conquest and of new beginnings. Christened the George Washington when launched by her German builders, she was the third largest passenger ship in the world and at the
start of the war ranked as Germany’s finest. She had happened to be in New York harbor when war broke out in August 1914, was unable to return home because Britain’s Royal Navy controlled the North Atlantic, and was impounded when the United States declared war on Germany in 1917. She was in every way perfect for this glorious mission.)

  The harbor at Brest overflowed with rapturous crowds as Wilson’s ship approached her berth. Bands played, cannons boomed. And then that night, all along the route of the special train that carried the president and his wife and their entourage through cities and towns and country crossroads to Paris, people of every age and description came down to the tracks to see their deliverer go rumbling by. Some of them knelt, in attitudes of prayer.

  It is said that two million people thronged the streets of the capital the morning of the president’s arrival. Even those old enough to remember the pomp of Napoleon III’s reign said it paled in comparison with this. The Gare de Luxembourg was turned into the world’s biggest flower basket, strains of “The Star-Spangled Banner” filled the air, and crowds cheered and laughed and wept. The Tiger was there, of course: Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, an old man so combative, so rich in enemies, that he would never have been given the premiership if the only alternative had not appeared to be peace on Germany’s terms. The man who, upon taking office, had declared that his only foreign policy was to make war and his only domestic policy was the same. His short, plump body, round bald pate, and fat white mustache were unmistakable to all who caught a glimpse of him. He was joined by a less striking figure, President Raymond Poincaré, taller and almost slender by comparison, elegantly goateed. The two despised each other and made no secret of it. They had come together not just to welcome the American but to bask in the glow of his glory.