The U.S. entry into the war far over-balanced the Russian defection. At
first, Wilson (and the American people) had blamed both sides, assuming their
own moral superiority to all of the combatants. When he did decide to go to
war, Wilson announced his objectives on moral grounds: to re-establish
international law upon the seas from which Allied and neutral ships were being
driven by German submarines and "to make the world safe for democracy."
Mrs. Edith Wharton, the novelist, remembered Nov. 11, 1918: "Through the
deep, expectant hush we heard, one after another, all the bells of Paris
calling to each other...We had fared so long on the thin diet of hope deferred
that for a moment or two our hearts wavered and doubted. Then like the bells,
they swelled to bursting, and we knew the war was over." Out of the mud came
the men who had sung of Madelon and Mademoiselle from Armentieres and of how
far it was to Tipperary. They thought they had made the world safe for
democracy. They, and all the world, turned to Woodrow Wilson; he would make
real the dream of peace.
He failed. Nationalism, which had been one of the great progressive forces
of the 19th Century, had grown to the point where nations would not limit their
sovereignty, even in the hope of escaping war. And Wilson himself dwelt in a
self-righteous personal isolation unbecoming to a champion of collective
security. He insisted that only Democrats could properly support his efforts of
war & peace in Congress. Churchill said of him: "If Wilson had been either
simply an idealist or a caucus politician, he might have succeeded. His attempt
to run the two in double harness was the cause of his undoing...That was his
ruin, and the ruin of much else as well. It is difficult for a man to do great
things if he tries to combine a lambent charity embracing the whole world with
the sharper forms of populist party strife."
Churchill played no great part in the Peace Conference. He deplored its
failure to make peace on the principles he had recommended for the Boer War.
The terms the victors gave Germany were neither generous nor safe. Churchill
called the reparation clauses "malignant and silly."
The Allies made him their agent in an effort to crush the Bolsheviks. It
would not have been a difficult job then; the Reds controlled only about 20% of
the Czar's old territories. But the world was sick of war. Communists led a
mutiny in a French fleet sent to the Black Sea to help the Russian Whites.
After a desultory struggle, which Churchill called "a war of few casualties and
unnumbered executions," the Allies gave up and the Communists won by default.
Not their own strength, but the weakness and indecision of their enemies
brought them to power and saved their skins.
The Demon Rum. In a sense Europe never recovered from World War I. The old
sense of unity, stability and confidence had been buried in the trenches. The
U.S. went through a similar experience. In the midst of prosperity greater than
it had ever known, it began to doubt itself more deeply than ever before. The
political muckrakers of Teddy Roosevelt's day had been succeeded by a brilliant
group of muckrakers of the spirit. Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, Ernest
Hemingway asserted the barrenness and hypocrisy of American life.
