II. America in the World Wars--A Revisionist Perspective

As Gore Vidal presents i t in Hollywood, American intervention in World War I was engineered by the United States' Anglophile president, Woodrow Wilson, who was always eager to help the British out of any pickle they might have got themselves into. Even after creating a special office of wartime propaganda to "sell" the war to the American public, however—and after following the lead of Lincoln and forcibly silencing those publishers who dared disagree with his policies—Wilson still found it necessary to force young American men into the U.S. army through a revival of the military draft; too few of them were volunteering to come to England's aid.

When Vidal researched the war, he could well have found all the intellectual ammunition he needed to defend such a view in the works of the Progressive historians, especially Harry Elmer Barnes. Barnes has been discussed as a "second-generation" practitioner of the "New History" pioneered by James Harvey Robinson and Charles A. Beard. But, as Novick points out,

"New Historians" is a designation generally given to the Columbia group around Robinson and Beard, and one which emphasizes methodology; "Progressive Historians" describes a descent from [Frederick Jackson] Turner and Beard, and emphasizes substantive interpretations of American history. The usage employed in the histo-riographical literature generally depends on the subject under discussion. Because Turner prefigured many New Historical themes, and Robinson, though a Europeanist, was the ultimate Progressive, all three of these men—plus [Carl] Becker, the student of both Turner and Robinson, and an "associate member" of both groups—are here treated as both New and Progressive historians.²¹²

I follow Novick's lead in this matter, reasoning that, since both Beard and his protege Barnes were consistent advocates of Progressive reform, as well as advocates of the use of the social sciences to inform historical scholarship, they may be treated as both New and Progressive Historians.

Beard, writing in 1930 in The Rise of American Civilization, characterized the "official thesis" as to the origins of World War I in the following way:

Germany and Austria, under autocratic war lords, had long been plotting and preparing for the day when they could overwhelm their neighbors and make themselves masters of the world. England, France, and Russia, on the other hand, all unsuspecting, had pursued ways of innocence, had sincerely desired peace, and made no adequate preparations for a great cataclysm. When England and France were trying to preserve equal rights for all in Morocco, Germany had rattled the sword and now, taking advantage of the controversy over the assassination of the Austrian archduke, the Central Powers had leaped like tigers upon their guileless victims.²¹³

Earlier, in a 1926 article for Current History, Beard had been even more sardonic: the conventional view of the war's origins, he wrote, amounted to the claim that "three pure and innocent boys—Russia, France and England—without military guile in their hearts, were suddenly assailed while on the way to Sunday school by two deep-dyed villains—Germany and Austria—who had long been plotting cruel deeds in the dark." ²¹⁴ By 1926, Barnes had long since recognized this story as so much twaddle, and by 1930 his old mentor had come entirely over to his side of the question.

And Barnes's side of the question was rather different. He wrote in 1926 in The Genesis of the World War, that

the only direct and immediate responsibility for the World War falls upon France and Russia, with the guilt about equally distributed. Next in order—far below France and Russia—would come Austria, though she never desired a general European war. Finally, we should place Germany and England as tied for last place, both being opposed to war in the 1914 crisis. Probably the German public was somewhat more favorable to military activities than the English people, but[...] the Kaiser made much more strenuous efforts to preserve the peace of Europe in 1914 than did Sir Edward Grey.²¹⁵

As for U.S. intervention in the war, the reasons for it, Barnes wrote in 1928 in In Quest of Truth and Justice: De-Bunking the War-Guilt Myth, were "many and complex." One factor was "the pro-British sources of most of our news concerning Germany in the decade prior to 1914." Another was the "enormous sums" lent to Allied governments by American bankers. Another was the simple fact that President "Wilson was [...] very pro-British in his cultural sympathies. [...] He did not desire to have the United States enter the war if England seemed likely to win without our aid, but as soon as this appeared doubtful he was convinced that we should enter as early as he could persuade Congress and the country to follow him." "Later," Barnes added, "Mr. Wilson added to his pro-British reasons for desiring to enter the War the conception that unless he was at the Peace Conference he could not act decisively in bringing about a peace of justice and permanence." Unfortunately, "[t]here can be little doubt that the entry of the United States into the World War was an unmitigated disaster for all concerned. It made it possible for one set of combatants to win a crushing victory, whereas, as Mr. Wilson once wisely said, the only enduring peace would have to be a peace without victory."²¹⁶

Earlier, in The Genesis of the World War, Barnes had seen another motive, something different from the desire to build a "peace of justice and permanence," behind Wilson's change of heart on U.S. participation in the war. He saw lust for power. He suggested that "Wilson's decision was affected by the conviction that he could assume world leadership only if he led the United States into the war."²¹⁷ In 1948, looking back, Charles Beard saw a closely related sort of megalomania lurking behind Wilson's benign, professorial visage—the delusion "that the President of the United States has the constitutional and moral right to proclaim noble sentiments of politics, economics, and peace for the whole world and commit the United States to these sentiments by making speeches and signing pieces of paper on his own motion."²¹⁸ In 1939, Beard recalled the violence Wilson had done to the Constitution in the service of his mega-lomaniacal vision: "I saw the freedom of the press trampled by gangs of spies, public and private."²¹⁹ Thirteen years earlier, in 1926, in History and Social Intelligence, Barnes, too, had noted the domestic consequences of Wilson's commitment of U.S. troops to the European war—the fact that, in prosecuting his war, the president had "sanctioned[...] the most serious inroads upon democratic practice and human liberty in the history of our country, wiping out in three years most of the solid gains of a century and a half of struggle against arbitrary power."²²⁰

In Barnes's view, the Versailles Treaty that ended the war, based as it was on the very "charge of German war guilt" that had since been exposed as arrant nonsense, was so grossly unfair to Germany as almost to guarantee a resumption of hostilities within a few years at best.²²¹ And, of course, hostilities did resume in the 1930s. When they did, both Beard and Barnes were wary of any analysis of current events that appeared to see merit in another U.S. intervention. Had nothing been learned from the experience of World War I?, they wondered.

Gore Vidal must have wondered much the same thing. As he depicts it in The Golden Age, American intervention in the new European War began as a move to protect and advance the interests of England, this time with a fully conscious and deliberate eye on the main chance of replacing England as the leading world power. Specifically, Vidal depicts U.S. intervention in the new war as the result of a plot by President Roosevelt to provoke the Japanese into attacking U.S. territory, thereby justifying the president's pre-existing intention to break his campaign promise not to send American boys to die in any foreign war. Again, Vidal would have needed to look no farther than the works of Beard and Barnes to draw such conclusions. In 1939, in an article in Harper's magazine, Beard argued that

[t]he era of universal American jitters over foreign affairs of no vital interest to the United States was opened in full blast about 1890 by four of the most powerful agitators that ever afflicted any nation: Alfred Thayer Mahan, Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge and Albert J. Beveridge. These were the chief manufacturers of the new doctrine correctly characterized as "imperialism for America" [...] the policy of running out and telling the whole world just the right thing to do.²²²

President Franklin Roosevelt now appeared to be falling for the lure of this policy, Beard reported in February 1941, when he testified before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations against the Lend-Lease Bill, calling it

an Act to place all the wealth and all the men and women of the United States at the free disposal of the President, to permit him to transfer or carry goods to any foreign government he may be pleased to designate, anywhere in the world, to authorize him to wage undeclared wars for anybody, anywhere in the world, until the affairs of the world are ordered to suit his policies, and for any other purpose he may have in mind now or at any time in the future, which may be remotely related to the contingencies contemplated in the title of this Act.

Beard proposed "that Congress reject this bill with such force that no President of the United States will ever dare again, in all our history, to ask it to suspend the Constitution and the laws of this land and to confer upon him limitless dictatorial powers over life and death."²²³It was in the service of this imperialistic conception of the U.S. role in world affairs, Beard thundered in that 1939 Harper's article, that "President Roosevelt[...] was maneuvering his country into the war." Convinced that FDR had set up the defenders of Pearl Harbor for a Japanese attack he had deliberately provoked, while making sure that no one in Hawaii knew of it in advance as he himself did, Beard "followed the course of the congressional investigation of Pearl Harbor with an almost microscopic scrutiny. To what the investigation brought forth he added more that he gathered himself," publishing his final statement on the matter in President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941 (1948), only a few months before his death. This book, according to George R. Leighton, Beard's editor at Harper's, "was a ponderous volume in which, with detail and fact piled upon detail and fact until the weight is almost crushing, Beard sought to nail down the proof of Roosevelt's deception so firmly that it could not be got loose."²²⁴

Five years later, in 1953, Beard's longtime protege Harry Elmer Barnes published Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: A Critical Examination of the Foreign Policy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Its Aftermath, dedicated "to the memory of Charles Austin Beard." In this volume, Barnes wrote that "American policy toward Japan in the decade preceding Pearl Harbor [...] was the same hostile policy developed by Stimson during the latter part of the Hoover Administration. It was rejected by President Hoover but was adopted and continued by Roosevelt." According to Barnes, FDR "discussed war with Japan in his earliest cabinet meetings," immediately commenced "an unprecedented peacetime expansion of our naval forces," "laid plans for a naval blockade of Japan in 1937," and relentlessly pursued a "program for the economic strangulation of Japan" that "was generally recognized by Washington authorities" at the time as likely to lead to war. "Roosevelt was personally responsible," Barnes wrote, "for the location of our Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, in which move he disregarded the advice of Admirals Richardson and Stark. The State Department backed Roosevelt and Richardson was relieved of his command."²²⁵

"Japan veritably crawled on its diplomatic belly," Barnes wrote, "from the end of August, 1941, until after the middle of November of that year in an attempt to reach some workable understanding with the United States. The effort met with cold and hostile rebuffs." Finally,

Secretary Hull dispatched an ultimatum to Japan on November 26 which, he fully recognized, decisively closed the door to peace. He himself said that it took the Japanese situation out of diplomacy and handed it over to the Army and Navy. From this time onward it was only a question of when and where the Japanese would attack.

"The decoded Japanese messages between November 26 and December 7 indicated, with relative certainty, when the attack would be made, and they also revealed the strong probability that it would be aimed at Pearl Harbor." Yet "nothing was done to warn General Short or Admiral Kimmel at Pearl Harbor."²²⁶

The president, Barnes wrote

expressed himself as greatly "surprised" at both the time and place of the attack, and his apologists have accepted these words at their face value. Neither the President nor his apologists have ever given any satisfactory explanation of why he could have been surprised. [...] If they had any reason at all to be surprised, it was only over the extent of the damage inflicted by the Japanese. But there was little reason even for this, in the light of Roosevelt's personal order to keep the fleet bottled up like a flock of wooden ducks, of the order that no decoding machine should be sent to Pearl Harbor, and of the fact that Washington had deliberately failed to pass on to Short and Kimmel any of the alarming information intercepted during the three days before the attack. December 7 may have been a "day of infamy," but the infamy was not all that of Japan.²²⁷