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"Old Media" -- Wikipedia

This presentation will provide you with an overview of how the government of the United States is supposed to function, and we'll get into how it actually does function. The two aren't always the same thing. We'll be learning about the branches of government, politics, elections, and political parties.

This presentation is going to give you a broad overview of elections in the United States. So as you may have noticed, there are kind of a lot of people in the U.S, and holding individual issues up to a public vote doesn't seem particularly plausible. So to deal with this complexity, we vote for people, not policies, that represent our best interests. But as you'll see, this process was not thoroughly addressed in the Constitution, so there have been a number of amendments and laws at the state level implemented to create the election system we all know today.

This presentation is going to dive into the history of American political parties. So throughout most of United States history our political system has been dominated by a two-party system, but the policies and the groups that support these parties have changed drastically throughout history. There have been five, arguably six, party systems since the election of John Adams in 1796 (George Washington’s presidency was an unusual case, and we’ll get to that), so we’ll look at the supporters and policies of each of the parties during these eras and look at how historical contingencies cause these policy shifts. We’ll also talk a bit about the benefit of a third party, which although rarely ever wins, helps to influence political debate.

In this presentation we look at political ideology in America.

The concept of Ideology simply means how we see the world, our world view or personal belief system.

We're going to focus on liberals and conservatives and talk about the influencers of both of these viewpoints.

Now, it's important to remember that political ideologies don't always perfectly correspond with political parties, and this correspondence becomes less and less likely over time.

So, sure we can say that Democrats tend to be liberal and Republicans tend to be conservative, but we're not going to be talking about political parties in this episode.

It's also important to note, that there are going to be a lot of generalizations here, as most peoples' ideologies fall on a spectrum, but we're going to try our best to summarize the most commonly held viewpoints for each of these positions as they are used pretty frequently in discussions of American politics.

Critical realignment theory is a synthesis of perspectives emanating out of political science and history that suggest the existence and impact of “critical elections” as major determinants in the practice of democratic politics. These elections are said to mobilize new voters, bring new issues to bear, promote a new class of political elites, and most profoundly, alter the distribution of voter alignments in a sudden and durable manner. Critical realignment theory is one of the most profound developments in empirical political thought and stands out as a cross-disciplinary phenomenon between political science and political history. It also served as the initial theoretical contribution for an entire subfield within American political science – now known as American political development. This subfield employs systematic historical analysis in theoretical and methodological ways in order to study American politics.

A realigning election (often called a critical election or political realignment) is a term from political science and political history describing a dramatic change in the political system. Scholars frequently apply the term to American elections and occasionally to other countries. Usually it means the coming to power for several decades of a new coalition, replacing an old dominant coalition of the other party as in 1896 when the Republican Party (GOP) became dominant, or 1932 when the Democratic Party became dominant. More specifically, it refers to American national elections in which there are sharp changes in issues, party leaders, the regional and demographic bases of power of the two parties, and structure or rules of the political system (such as voter eligibility or financing), resulting in a new political power structure that lasts for decades.

The central holding of realignment theory, first developed in the political scientist V. O. Key, Jr.'s 1955 article, "A Theory of Critical Elections," is that American elections, parties and policymaking routinely shift in swift, dramatic sweeps.

V.O. Key Jr., E.E. Schattschneider, James L. Sundquist, Walter Dean Burnham and Paul Kleppner are generally credited with developing and refining the theory of realignment. Though they differed on some of the details, scholars have generally concluded that systematic patterns are identifiable in American national elections such that cycles occur on a regular schedule: once every 36-years or so. This period of roughly 30 years fits with the notion that these cycles are closely linked to generational change. For social scientists, this point is important, since it helps to provide an objective sociological basis for the theory. Some, such as Schafer and Reichley, argue that the patterns are longer, closer to 50 to 60 years in duration, noting the Democratic dominance from 1800 to 1860, and Republican rule from 1860 to 1932. Reichley argues that the only true realigning elections occurred in 1800, 1860, and 1932.

The alignment of 1860, with Republicans winning a series of close presidential elections, yielded abruptly in 1896 to an era of more decisive GOP control, in which most presidential elections were blowouts, and Democratic Congresses were infrequent and brief. Thirty-six years later, that system was displaced by a cycle of Democratic dominance, lasting throughout the Great Depression and beyond.

Realigning elections in United States history

Here is presented a list of elections most often cited as "realigning," with disagreements noted:

  • 1800 presidential election — Thomas Jefferson
    • This election completed the turnover of power in the First Party System from the Federalist Party, led by Alexander Hamilton, to Jefferson and his Democratic-Republican Party. The center of power shifted from New England to the South and Jeffersonian democracy became the dominant ideology.
    • Democratic-Republicans gained 19.7% of House seats in 1800, 9.4% in 1802 and 9.7% in 1804, for a total gain of 38.8% in 3 elections.
    • As late as 1812, the Federalists came within one state of winning. A larger shift in electoral politics arguably came in the 1812–1816 period, as the Federalists became discredited after opposing the War of 1812.
  • 1828 presidential election — Andrew Jackson
  • 1860 presidential election — Abraham Lincoln
    • After the Whigs collapsed after 1852, party alignments were in turmoil, with several third parties, such as the Know Nothings and the Opposition Party. The system stabilized in 1858 and the presidential election marked the ascendence of the Republican Party. Abraham Lincoln beat out three other contenders — but even if they had somehow united he still had the majority of the electoral vote. The Republican party was pledged to the long-term ending of slavery, which was proximate cause of secession. Republicans rallied around nationalism in 1861 and fought the American Civil War to end secession. During the war the Republicans, under Lincoln's leadership, switched to a goal of short-term ending of slavery. By 1864, the Republicans had a coalition built around followers of the "free labor" ideology, as well as soldiers and veterans of the Union Army (Since then, the military establishment has been solidly Republican).
      • The Republican Party went from 18.3% of the House in 1854, to 38.0% in 1856, 48.7% in 1858, and 59.0% in 1860, for a total gain of 40.7% in 4 elections.
  • 1896 presidential election — William McKinley
    • The status of this election is hotly disputed; some political scientists, such as Jerome Clubb, do not consider it a realigning election. Other political scientists and historians, such as Kleppner and Burnham consider this the ultimate realignment and emphasize that the rules of the game had changed, the leaders were new, voting alignments had changed, and a whole new set of issues came to dominance as the old Civil-War-Era issues faded away. Funding from office holders was replaced by outside fund raising from business in 1896 — a major shift in political history. Furthermore, McKinley's tactics in beating William Jennings Bryan (as developed by Mark Hanna) marked a sea change in the evolution of the modern campaigning. McKinley raised a huge amount of money from business interests, outspending Bryan by 10 to 1. Bryan meanwhile invented the modern technique of campaigning heavily in closely contested states, the first candidate to do so. Bryan's message of populism and class conflict marked a new direction for the Democrats. McKinley's victory in 1896 and repeat in 1900 was a triumph for pluralism, as all sectors and groups shared in the new prosperity brought about by his policy of rapid industrial growth.
    • While Republicans lost House seats in 1896, this followed a massive two-election gain: from 25.9% in 1890 to 34.8% in 1892 and 71.1% in 1894, for a total 45.2% gain. Republicans lost 13.4% in 1896, but still held 57.7% of House seats.
    • In terms of correlations among counties, the election of 1896 is a realignment flop, but this is only a problem if realignment is considered to occur in single elections. Rather, if realignment is thought of as a generational or long-term political movement, then change will occur over several elections, even if there is one "critical" election defining the new alignment. So, as pointed out above, the 1896 realignment really began around 1892, and the 130 seat GOP gain (after all, this is the all-time record) in 1894 meant there were almost no seats left to pick up in 1896. However, the presidential election in 1896 is usually considered the start of the new alignment since the national election allowed the nation to make a more conscious decision about the future of industrial policy by selecting McKinley over Bryan, making this the defining election in the realignment. The election of 1876 passes the numbers test much better compared to 1896 alone, and Mayhew (2004) argues it resulted in far more drastic changes in United States politics: Reconstruction came to a sudden halt, African-Americans in the South would soon be completely disenfranchised, and politicians began to focus on new issues (such as tariffs and civil service reform).
  • 1932 presidential election — Franklin D. Roosevelt
    • Of all the realigning elections, this one musters the most agreement from political scientists and historians; it is the archetypal realigning election. FDR's admirers such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. have argued that New Deal policies, developed in response to the crash of 1929 and the miseries of the Great Depression under Herbert Hoover, represented an entirely new phenomenon in American politics. More critical historians such as Carl Degler and David Kennedy see a great deal of continuity with Hoover's energetic but unsuccessful economic policies. There is no doubt Democrats vehemently attacked Hoover for 50 years. In many ways, Roosevelt's legacy still defines the Democratic Party; he forged an enduring New Deal Coalition of big city machines, the White South, intellectuals, labor unions, Catholics, Jews, and Westerners. In 1936, African-Americans were added to the coalition (African-Americans had previously been denied the vote or voted Republican). For instance, Pittsburgh, which was a Republican stronghold from the Civil War up to this point, suddenly became a Democratic stronghold, and has elected a Democratic mayor to office in every election since this time.
    • The Democrats went from controlling 37.7% of House seats in 1928 to 49.6% in 1930 and 71.9% in 1932, for a total gain of 34.2% in two elections.
    • In the Senate, the Democrats went from controlling 40.6% of seats in 1928 to 49% in 1930 and 61.5% in 1932, for a total gain of 20.9% in two elections.
  • First Party System
  • Second Party System
  • Third Party System
  • Fourth Party System
  • Fifth Party System
  • Sixth Party System
  • Seventh Party System – Why 2016 Could Mark the Next Electoral Shift
  • Democracy and Laissez Faire: the New York State Constitution of 1846 -- Arthur A. Ekirch Jr. article
  • The Truth About Abraham Lincoln -- Stefan Molyneux presentation

Did you know that Abraham Lincoln was abandoned by his father and was suicidal for many years? Do you know the hidden story behind how Lincoln became president? What is the truth about Abraham Lincoln?

This powerful book by abolitionist Lysander Spooner profoundly influenced the anti-slavery arguments of the Liberty Party and those of fellow abolitionist Frederick Douglass who dramatically changed his view of the Constitution as a pro-slavery document (in conformance with that put forth by William Lloyd Garrison) to that of an anti-slavery document propounded by Spooner.

The Unconstitutionality of Slavery (1845, 1860)

CONTENTS OF PART FIRST. [PDF]

CHAPTER I.: WHAT IS LAW? [SEARCHABLE TEXT] [PDF]

CHAPTER II.: WRITTEN CONSTITUTIONS. [SEARCHABLE TEXT] [PDF]

CHAPTER III.: THE COLONIAL CHARTERS. [SEARCHABLE TEXT] [PDF]

CHAPTER IV.: COLONIAL STATUTES.[SEARCHABLE TEXT] [PDF]

CHAPTER V.: THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE. [SEARCHABLE TEXT] [PDF]

CHAPTER VI.: THE STATE CONSTITUTIONS OF 1789. [SEARCHABLE TEXT][PDF]

CHAPTER VII.: THE ARTICLES OF CONFEDERATION. [SEARCHABLE TEXT] [PDF]

CHAPTER VIII.: THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES. [SEARCHABLE TEXT] [PDF]

SECONDLY. [SEARCHABLE TEXT] [PDF]

CHAPTER IX.: THE INTENTIONS OF THE CONVENTION. [SEARCHABLE TEXT] [PDF]

CHAPTER X.: THE PRACTICE OF THE GOVERNMENT. [SEARCHABLE TEXT] [PDF]

CHAPTER XI.: THE UNDERSTANDING OF THE PEOPLE. [SEARCHABLE TEXT] [PDF]

CHAPTER XII.: THE STATE CONSTITUTIONS OF 1845. [SEARCHABLE TEXT] [PDF]

CHAPTER XIII.: THE CHILDREN OF SLAVES ARE BORN FREE. [SEARCHABLE TEXT] [PDF]

(Part 1 and Part 2) -- documentaries

"Progressivism brought the triumph of institutionalized racism, the disfranchising of blacks in the South, the cutting off of immigration, the building up of trade unions by the federal government into a tripartite of big government, big business, big union alliance, the glorifying of military virtues and conscription, and a drive for American expansion abroad. In short, the Progressive era ushered the modern American politico-economic system into being."

From the Preface by Murray N. Rothbard

Walter Karp -- Book Excerpt 1

The Eve of a Very Dark Night,

The Broad Ground of a Common Humanity

excerpted from the book

The Politics of War

the story of two wars which altered forever the political life of the American republic

by Walter Karp

Franklin Square Press, 1979, paper

Part I

The Eve of a Very Dark Night

p5

Until 1890 the American electorate had been, for a generation a predictable and readily managed body of voters. In the off-year election of 1890, however, they delivered a stunning rebuke to the long-dominant Republican Party, reducing its House majority to a mere rump of 88 representatives and sweeping the party out of power in states that had gone Republican since the first election of Abraham Lincoln. If the origin of the Spanish War can be given a fixed date, that date is Election Day 1890, for the election prompted the Republican Party, at once, to take the first major step that ultimately led to that war. It was also the first serious warning that a political crisis was brewing, for it revealed a sudden weakening in the electorate's once ardent loyalty to one or the other of the two major parties, the most distinctive feature of the post-Civil War party system.

This passionate attachment to party, little known before the Civil War, had been forged by the Civil War itself. If was as if, in the cauldron of civil strife, every American had been melted down into one or the other of two elementary political particles, one Republican, the other Democrat. To its massed and devoted partisans the party was a church, whose creeds and slogans supplied men with their political principles, whose celebrations supplied them with their holiday outings. To its massed and devoted partisans the party was also a standing army perpetually arrayed for battle, an army whose orders men gladly obeyed, whose rudest tricks its partisans cheered, as patriots will cheer the night raids and ambushes of the nation's fighting men. Identifying themselves with a party, Americans looked on their chosen party as a kind of end in itself; its victories were their victories, its prosperity their prosperity. For themselves they asked little, for the identification with party was strong and passionate.

p6

Along as men adhered to their party on the basis of Civil War passions, as long as they "voted as they shot," the two major parties could refight the Civil War in their election campaigns and leave the electorate reasonably appeased. Since both parties benefited by keeping Civil War passions alive, both parties cooperated in doing so.

p7

As the 1890s began, millions of Americans had begun pressing their economic grievances upon politicians and officeholders. They demanded to know why, for example, an expanding economy had a deflated currency advantageous chiefly to New York bankers; why manufacturers grew rich through special legislation while farm prices continued to fall; why the evils of monopoly went unchecked; why a few private banks in New York controlled so much of the nations credit while land bore almost the whole burden of taxes. Men looked around them and saw the free enterprise system falling into the hands of a few powerful capitalists, saw special privilege dispensed to the rich and general privileges denied to the rest. America's farmers, a near-majority of the country, saw in the mighty owners of the railroads men with a death grip on their farms and their fates and an equally deadly grip on their elected representative Industrial expansion which almost all Americans had wholeheartedly welcomed, had ceased by 1890 to be a glowing promise and had become, instead, the source of innumerable burning and bitter questions.

p8

... the voters in 1890 had risen up in wrath against the Republicans' vaunted instrument for promoting industrial expansion, the protective tariff.

... That the protective tariff had become a special privilege was precisely the reason Republican leaders were determined to maintain it. It was the basis of their power within the Republican Party itself. By dispensing corrupt tariff favors to the "manufacturing interests," they had turned them into clients of the party oligarchy, tied to that oligarchy by the strong ligaments of greed, dependent on the oligarchy for the protection of their unearned profits, and consequently committed, in turn, to protecting the power of the party leaders.

p10

The disastrous election of 1890 left the Republican oligarchy on the horns of a serious dilemma. Despite the electorate's rebuke, the party leaders had no intention of modifying, let alone abandoning, their protectionist policy. It was the chief prop of their power over the Republican Party. They also had no intention of turning the party into a mere opposition, a party of perennial "outs." That, all Republicans agreed, was the proper role only for Democrats. For the moment, however, the two ambitions of the Republican oligarchy-serving their power through the politics of corrupt tariff privilege and ruling the country by winning elections-were each an obstacle to the other. For the Republicans the skies had darkened suddenly and they seemed likely to grow darker still with the electorate's reassertion of the republican standard in economic affairs. To question the virtues of mere industrial expansion was to question the Republican Party's very reason for being.

It was Secretary of State Blame-a man always one step ahead of his party colleagues-who pointed the way out of the dilemma. The renewal of the Republican Party, the restoration of its former power and glory, the recovery of an acceptable national purpose could indeed be accomplished, Blame believed. It would require the party leaders to undertake a course of action far bolder than protectionism and far more consequential for the future of the country. According to Blame, the party's salvation-and for all his ability, Blaine never thought beyond the interests of party-lay in launching under the Republican aegis a new assertive foreign policy for the United States ...

p11

Before the Civil War Republicans had vehemently denounced an expansionist foreign policy as one of the more contemptible deceit: of the hated "Slavocrats." Most important, such a policy had no support in the country, either among ordinary citizens or the business classes. There was no demand for such a policy, no practical need for such a policy, and, given America's geographical position, precious few opportunities for launching such a policy.

Most Republican leaders were willing to brave the difficulties. An aggressive foreign policy, although it served no national interest whatever, promised to solve all their major problems at a stroke. For one thing it would change-and change fundamentally-the question before the country. An electorate growing restive over economic conditions would find its attention riveted to the spectacle of America's overseas power and pursuits, its republican sentiments diluted and deformed by jingo nationalism, its political energies absorbed by overseas problems and perplexities.

p13

The Republicans' new disposition toward foreign adventure reflected itself at once in the second half of Benjamin Harrison's administration. After the 1890 elections, a new kind of propaganda began to emanate from Republican leaders. In 1891, for example, the public heard from the secretary of the navy, Benjamin Tracy, a line that was to become increasingly familiar in the next few years. "To [gain] a preeminent rank among nations," he advised a people that had not wanted preeminence among nations, "colonies are the greatest help." In the winter of 1891-1892 President Harrison escalated a street brawl in Valparaiso between Chileans and American sailors into a near war with Chile, to avenge, as the President put it in his annual message to Congress, an "insult... to the uniform of the United States." Only the conciliatory action of the Chilean government averted a military clash. At the 1892 national convention, the Republican Party committed itself formally to an expansionist foreign policy. The platform that year pledged the party to "the achievement of the manifest destiny of the Republican its broadest sense." Republican leaders apparently hoped to discover what kind of response the old expansionist slogan of the antebellum Democracy would get from Republican voters with long memories. The platform prudently specified no particular policy, but during 1892 a number of Republican newspapers set to work to win popular support for a concrete step in achieving America's "manifest destiny... in its broadest sense"-the absorption of the Hawaiian Islands, an archipelago 2,000 miles from our shores but with close economic and cultural ties to America.

The annexation itself was not of primary importance. Republican leaders saw it chiefly as the first available step in launching a more general policy of overseas expansion.

p15

... the central national tenet of the Democrats was the principle of doing nothing, which party leaders often described as "True Democracy."

... By uniting on the principle of doing nothing whatever and attacking the Republicans for doing anything at all, the Democratic Party, through the do-nothing principle, was able to keep up, for electoral purposes, a reasonable semblance of national unity.

p16

In the South, the Democracy's dependence on the do-nothing principle was little short of desperate. Ruling over a population of wretched, debt-ridden farmers-peons, in fact-the South's ruling state cliques could cling to power only as long as the farmers remained politically inert, and southern Democrats had but two ways to keep them that way. One was to preach the doctrine of "White Supremacy" sometimes referred to in the South as "the spirit of true patriotism." This enabled the South's state rulers to cry down any political rebel as a traitor to white "solidarity" who was paving the way for "Negro rule," a threat that by the 1890s was inevitably growing weaker as Negroes brave enough to vote grew fewer. The second was simply to persuade the rural populace by sheer iteration that it was unpatriotic, un-Jeffersonian, and grossly improper for them to expect from their state governments any relief from their multifarious economic woes. By thus stultifying political hope, the southern Democrats hoped to stifle any unruly political activity on the part of the most wretchedly misgoverned people in America."

The northern city machines, too, depended for their security on the do-nothing principle and for much the same reason. Reform raises political hopes, encourages independent men to enter politics, and threatens the power of the local machine to control the actions of party members. For this reason, New York's Tammany Hall was unwilling to carry out even the simplest municipal functions, such as collecting the garbage or providing recreational facilities for the New York poor who supported it so faithfully.

p18

If the national Democratic Party began to prosper in the 1880s, it was principally because, given a choice between active Republican corruption and passive Democratic corruption, more voters began choosing the latter.

p20

The politics of [the South] had felt the brewing crisis in 1890 when a pressure group known as the Farmers' Alliance swept one million rural Southerners onto its membership rolls and began demanding that southern office seekers pledge their support to the Alliance program of agrarian reforms.

p20

In the volatile western prairie states, local People's parties had sprung as early as 1890 and had quickly won the endorsement of the Northern Farmers' Alliance. The Southern Alliancemen had held back, however. To break with the Democracy, to defy the doctrine of racial solidarity, was a prospect to daunt the bravest heart. No one knew better than Southerners what the Democratic oligarchs were capable of doing should anyone dare challenge their monopoly of politics and power the summer of 1892, however, the Alliancemen made their historic plunge and hastily began organizing the new party for the forthcoming fall campaign. For the first time since 1850 the southern Democracy was facing electoral opposition from a party of nearly equal strength, for the Populists' rural appeal was instantaneous."

p21

With the decision of the Southern Farmers' Alliance to endorse the new party; the People's Party became a national political entity, it nominated a presidential candidate, General James 'Weaver, in 1892-with a complex program of reform that stood out in sharpest contrast to the obfuscations, panacea-mongering, and bluster of the two established parties. The party program was based on a truly prescient, if doleful, economic insight: that private economic power monopolies in transport and communications, industrial trusts and combinations, private banking control of American currency and credit-was no longer an incidental evil. It was one that would soon overwhelm the economy and the Republic if it were not extirpated at once. The Populists understood with perfect clarity that the already existing monopolies provided the basis for further monopolization. Their ultimate solution was therefore both drastic and logical. They called for direct government ownership of all "natural monopolies" in transport and communication, as well as government control of currency and credit. The government, as the Populists insisted, to the horror of laissez-fairists, was "not a foreign entity; governed by some outside power with which we have no connection... [it] is simply the agent of the people." In effect, what the Populists were telling their fellow countrymen was this: If we Americans want what we all say we want, the maintenance of genuine free enterprise; if we agree, as we all say we do, that only an economy free of privilege and private power is consonant with republican liberty, then these draconian measures are required and anything less is self-deluding. If economic power were not wrested now from the hands of a few, the Populists warned, it would soon be too late-fatally late-for the citizenry to do so."

p23

To the established politicians it must have seemed by 1893 that Providence itself was conspiring to bring victory to the People's Party. A few months after Cleveland's inauguration, a financial panic struck the country, followed shortly after by the most severe and prolonged depression America had ever known. Farm prices, already so low it had inflamed the rural population, fell lower still, inflaming farmers still further. By late 1893 the entire national economy ground to a halt. Five hundred banks and some 16,000 business firms were forced into bankruptcy; Two and a half million men were pushed out of work. During the wretched winter of 1893-94 untold thousands of hungry people were kept alive by local charity, and local soup kitchens, bitterly referred to as "Cleveland cafes."

p28

Cleveland and his party had performed the singular feat of alienating virtually every major category of voters. Even so, results of the 1894 elections were electrifying. It remains to' his day the most sweeping rebuke any President and his party ever suffered in an off-year election. Punished by a volatile electorate, the Democrats lost a total of 113 seats in Congress. In the Northeast, the Democrats' congressional contingent was reduced from 88 to 9; in twenty-four states the party no longer had congressional representation at all. In the South, despite the Democrats' increased use of terror and corruption, the People's Party now stood on the verge of victory throughout the Old Confederacy, Whatever else lay in store for the country, the post-Civil War party system had been destroyed forever."

The Malevolent Change in Our Public Life

p29

In mid-February 1895, a small group of Cuban-Americans land secretly in Cuba and raised the banner of armed revolt against Spanish rule in the island, the last remaining possession of any value in the once mighty Spanish Empire. Calling themselves the "Republic of Cuba" and gathering round their flag small bands of guerrillas, whom they designated the "Army of Liberation," rebel leaders began at once a two-front assault on Spanish rule, one in Cuba, the other in New York City.

... The guerrillas did not expect their scorched-earth tactics to drive the Spanish from Cuba or their revolt to win widespread popular support. Not independence but home rule under Spanish sovereignty was the cause supported by most discontented Cubans. In 1895 the chief Cuban advocates of independence lived in New York and Tampa, Florida. The main objective of the rebels' guerrilla warfare was to create conditions so atrocious in Cuba that the United States in due course would intervene.

p32

Since the onset of the political crisis Republican leaders had been determined to transform America into an active world power and thereby make foreign affairs the preeminent factor in American politics.

The Broad Ground of a Common Humanity

p51

As early as the summer of 1895 ... the Republicans-though by no means unanimously in favor of intervention-made it clear that they intended to oppose, disrupt, and render untenable President Cleveland's declared policy of nonintervention in Spain's Cuban problems. With summer's end, organized agitation over the Cuban question burst on the public scene like a series of bomb explosions. In the North, Republicans (and Democrats to a lesser extent) began marshaling support for the Cuban rebels by staging mass rallies in their honor. From September to December 1895 hardly a week passed without news of a pro-rebel rally or a resounding declaration of support for the rebels from some prominent senator, governor, or local party organization. In organizing the rallies, Republicans not only pressed into service their long-standing auxiliary, the Grand Army of the Republic, they found a new ally in Samuel Gompers's fourteen-year-old American Federation of Labor, which now began what would prove to be an unbroken career of favoring foreign wars.

p57

From the outset of the Cuban rebellion the great majority of American newspapers expressed their sympathy for the rebel cause, their support for gunrunning, and their opposition to Cleveland's neutrality. In New York City, only Godkin's Evening Post remembered the sanctity of property, forgotten by the press since the Pullman strike, and castigated the guerrillas for violating it. When it became clear that interventionist sentiment ran strong in both parties, pro-Cuban editorial opinion quickly found its way into the new. Much of the Cuban news, in fact, the American press received directly from the Junta in New York, and the Junta, anxious to draw American attention away from the rebels' terrorist tactics, was ready to offer an endless stock of "eyewitness" reports of Spanish atrocities: the rape of defenseless women, the burning of hospitals, and the bayoneting of babies before the eyes of their horror-stricken parents-the standard "boiler plate" of every modem war's war propaganda. American newspaper readers would learn, day after day, that the Spanish were "feeding prisoners to the sharks," that "old men and little boys were cut down and their bodies fed to the dogs," that General Weyler-"butcher Weyler" in the press had been overheard to threaten his resignation if he were "not allowed to quench his thirst in American gore." As purveyors of sensational Cuba stories, Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and Hearst's rival Journal blazed all the journalistic trails. Newspapers in the hinterlands passed their stories along to the rest of the country.

... America's newspapers did not invent the line on the Cuba question; still less did they force it upon politicians. Of all the myths about the Spanish-American War, none is more frivolous than the assertion that the inflammatory reporting of the American press (or, in the extreme view, the reporting of two rival New York newspapers) was an independent cause of the war. Nothing could be further from the truth, for there was nothing independent about the American press. It was, overwhelmingly, a party press, a press that echoed to the point of slavishness the policies and propaganda of one or the other major party. The majority of American newspapers were little more than quasi-house organs of the party organizations.

... the American press in general was an instrument and a mouthpiece of party, including Pulitzer's World, which was the Democracy's national house organ, and Hearsts Journal, which Hearst was using to further his personal ambitions within the Democratic Party.

p59

Since the press in its Cuba reporting followed the propaganda line of leading politicians, the politicians, in turn, gave official endorsement to the most effective organs of that propaganda, namely the two most sensational newspapers. Throughout the prewar period, senators would take the floor to read aloud a fresh clipping from the World or the Journal, demand an investigation or call for a resolution on the basis of the clipping, and even praise the newspaper for its general excellence. By giving senatorial endorsement to the Journal and the World, interventionist politicians did more than confirm the validity of their barely credible stories: they effectively nationalized their distribution. Staid newspapers that hesitated to repeat verbatim some particularly gruesome item from the Journal would relay it to its readers the next day as a statement made on the floor of the Senate or as testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which treated the reporters from the most avidly prowar papers as their most reliable sources.

p60

Of the mendacious warmongering journalism of the American press, suffice to say that everything that would inflame public sentiment against Spain was prominently reported, exaggerated, or fabricated. Whatever might weaken sympathy for the rebels or support for intervention was pretty well kept out of the news. For the interventionists it was imperative, for example, to sustain the electorate's belief in the military success of the guerrillas, although their rebellion was flagging badly throughout 1896. When one of the leading rebel generals, Antonio Maceo, was killed in a skirmish-a severe blow to the military prestige of the guerrillas - Junta publicists hit upon an old propaganda ruse to undo the damage. They reported that Maceo had actually been killed by treacherous Spaniards while approaching under a white flag of truce. Apprised of this discovery by the Junta, the American press clamored for days over the "murder" of Maceo and the "inherent cowardice and brutality of that human hyena" General Weyler. To confirm the story, the Senate, after its customary fashion, appointed a special committee to investigate what now officially became known as the "Maceo Assassination." So it went with the party-directed press, week after week, month after month, a ceaseless drumbeat of interventionist propaganda, a "cause" of war indeed, but only in the limited sense that a loaded pistol can be termed the cause of a shooting.


  • Walter Karp -- Book Excerpt 2

Walter Karp -- Book Excerpt 2

An Uncommonly Dangerous Politician

excerpted from the book

The Politics of War

the story of two wars which altered forever the political life of the American republic

by Walter Karp

Franklin Square Press, 1979, paper

p72

The White House has rarely known a President more devious, crafty, or subtle than the amiable, mild-mannered McKinley and few so adept at getting what he wanted. He was, remarked Adams, "easily first in genius for manipulation." That was exactly the truth. McKinley was a political genius, and manipulation was the mode of his genius. Among American Presidents he is the supreme example of the political wirepuller, the leader who gets things done without ever seeming to lead.'

If contemporaries never knew McKinley's intentions it was because the President never candidly avowed them to anyone. If he seemed to be the victim of events, it was because he was master of the fait accompli, the patient contriver of circumstances which, as he would ruefully announce, gave him no choice but to do exactly what he privately wanted. Although he kept his goals secret, McKinley was superbly adept at letting those who had to divine them divine them correctly and at getting them to do what he wanted without ever openly declaring that he wanted it. Inevitably the men McKinley bent to his purposes often stole the limelight from the President, but McKinley cared nothing for the limelight. "He was a man of great power," his secretary of war Elihu Root recalled after his death, "because he was absolutely indifferent to credit... but McKinley always had his way.

p72

If McKinley appeared weak, vacillating, and passive, the tool of others and the slave of circumstance, it was because he wished to appear that way. The appearance was a political necessity. In order to get what he wanted, McKinley had to go to great lengths to deny that he wanted anything at all.

There was nothing safe or conservative about President McKinley's political objectives. By the standards of the nineteenth century he was not conservative but radical. Conservatism in the 1890s still retained a republican form: It meant adherence to the teachings of the founders; it meant disdain for the "murky radiance" of world power; it meant respect for constitutional forms; it meant protecting the free enterprise system from the new menace of trusts and monopolies; it meant-especially among rank-and-file Republicans-opposition to the growing power of the state party machines. On the road to the White House McKinley had been careful to heed the canons of conservatism, or at least make no departures from them. On the Republican large policy he had kept silent, preferring to preach the safer theme of patriotism. On the issue of boss rule he had enthralled the party's citizen adherents with his unprecedented antiboss nominating campaign. In his Inaugural Address he had vowed to combat trusts and big business combinations just as he had vowed nonintervention in the internal affairs of other countries. On every count McKinley intended to betray both his followers and his pledges. "The Major," remarked Henry Adams, "is an uncommonly dangerous politician ..."

p74

The "national unity" McKinley hoped to forge... He wanted a higher or transcendent unity, a unity that would quell discontent, eliminate dissension, and weaken the troublesome republican spirit which had revived so alarmingly during the preceding half-dozen years. He wanted to impose order and discipline on the Republic's unruly politics, order and discipline on its sprawling economy. Above all, he wanted to replace loyalty to the American Republic with loyalty to that very different thing, the Nation; love of liberty with love of the flag and the mystique of proud bunting. To those far-reaching aims, all the efforts of his administration were to be directed.

To impose greater order on American politics, McKinley hoped I to transform the Republican Party itself into a rigidly disciplined national political machine-aloof, dominating, and impregnable. Of all McKinley's betrayals none was more marked than his determination to quash Republican insurgents, the very people he had so captivated with his antiboss campaign. With few exceptions all the patronage, power, and prestige of the presidency McKinley was to put at the disposal of the state party bosses in their fight against rank-and-file party rebels.

p75

McKinley's economic policy, quite simply, was to encourage the concentration of economic power in the hands of a few. This was partly a reflection of his desire for order and partly an extension of his party aims. The rise of great interstate trusts and monopolies made the centralization of the Republican Party possible, for the monopolists were beholden not to particular state bosses, but to the national Republican Party and its policies. Consequently, McKinley, despite his inaugural pledge to combat the trusts, did nothing to enforce the Sherman Act, while making it abundantly clear to Wall Street financiers that he favored the making of combinations, a complicated endeavor that could not readily be carried out without tacit governmental approval.

'What McKinley envisioned for the American Republic was a genuine new order of things, a modern centralized order, elitist in every way, profoundly alien to the spirit of the Republic, and imposed from above on its indestructible constitutional forms. Doubtless McKinley's vision was all light to the President but it was not so to the American people. Had McKinley submitted his grand design for a new modeled republic to the judgment of the American electorate, only a small minority would have approved of it.* Republican sentiment remained too strong in the country. Of necessity, therefore, the key to McKinley's grand design for national unity and cohesion was the Republican large policy. It was the only way to supplant the republican spirit with the spirit of nationalism, to replace love of liberty with love of the flag, and to make the Nation a political presence strong enough to overwhelm the Republic and supplant it in popular affections. Only by transforming America into an active world power "in contact with considerable foreign powers at as many points as possible" could the Nation (which exists only in relation to other nations) become the unifying force that McKinley and the Republican oligarchy intended to make of it.

p76

If the large policy was essential to McKinley's ambitions there was only one certain way to launch it-through armed intervention in Cuba. It was the only opportunity at hand and McKinley intended to seize it. That intention he dared not avow; indeed it as imperative to avow it, for in the aftermath of a resounding election victory, some of the most powerful people in Republican ranks opposed intervention. The party's new Wall Street allies strongly opposed war ...

p77

It was the Presidents plan to reassure the peace faction of his pacific intentions while he pursued a course of action that would slowly but surely reduce it to a nullity. McKinley's Cuban policy, a shrewd and subtle feat of political manipulation, was shaped from the start not by his fear of warmongers - the conventional historical view - but by his fear of Republican and Wall Street proponents of peace.

McKinley's immediate problem, in fact, was to rally the interventionists and keep alive their hopes. Even before his inauguration, McKinley began privately reassuring key Republican interventionists that his Cuban policy was not quite what the peace faction expected it to be.

p80

It was with reconcentration in mind that McKinley in May delivered the well-timed stroke that decisively revived the interventionists ...

The stage was set on May 4 by Senator Morgan, the ranking Democrat on the committee. Speaking in favor of his new resolution favoring belligerency rights for Cuban rebels, Morgan announced that he had definite proof that American citizens in Cuba "are now literally starving to death in numbers for this want of provisions and supplies.

p80

On May 12, Republican Senator Gallinger, in support of Morgan, submitted a resolution calling for a $50,000 appropriation to feed suffering Americans in Cuba. It was a typical propaganda tactic. A half-dozen times interventionists had taken an inflammatory rumor, made a speech about it, submitted an appropriate resolution, and transformed it into a senatorial fact. If the members of the peace faction were concerned they gave no sign of it. Five days later the blow from the White House fell. On the morning of May 17, President McKinley sent Congress a special message announcing that, according to Consul General Lee, who was already proving his usefulness, "a large number of American citizens in the island are in a state of destitution.'; The President asked for a $50,000 appropriation to relieve them.

... McKinley's message created, as expected, an immediate nation-wide sensation. At once the war spirit revived in the press, which hailed the message as the first logical step toward armed intervention. "The relief-bearer," Hearst's Journal observed, "is but the American camel intruding its head in the Spanish tent in Cuba." Since the relief funds, by reluctant consent of the Spanish authorities, were to be distributed by the United States, intervention of sorts had already begun. The New York Mail and Express, an administration paper, openly concluded that McKinley's policy is "to secure Cuban independence," by arms if necessary.

p84

While Ambassador Woodford was testing the European reaction to a future war with Spain, the President was secretly laying the groundwork for far-reaching wartime expansion in the Pacific. Publicly, the President had already placed himself, as ambiguously as he could manage it, in the Republican expansionist camp. On June 16 he signed and submitted to the Senate a new treaty of annexation with the Hawaiian government, although he took pains to assure the foes of expansion that Hawaiian annexation was not meant to lead to further expansion. It was, he said, "not a change but a consummation," exactly the opposite of what McKinley or the expansionists intended it to be. Carl Schurz, for one, was not convinced. At a White House dinner on July 1, he bluntly asked the President how the annexation of Hawaii squared with his personal promise of "no jingo nonsense." McKinley was momentarily taken aback. Hastily he disavowed any personal intentions. He himself was not eager for annexation, he assured Schurz. He was merely testing public opinion. Privately McKinley thought otherwise. As he later confided to his personal secretary: "We need Hawaii just as much and a good deal more than we did California. It is manifest destiny." Since a two-thirds majority for ratification was nowhere in sight, the Senate adjourned on July 24 without undermining destiny with a vote."

Several weeks later McKinley privately conferred with his energetic assistant secretary of the navy [Theodore Roosevelt] on aspects of "manifest destiny" considerably more advanced than Hawaiian annexation. A decrepit Spanish fleet lay permanently anchored in the Bay of Manila, capital of Spain's Philippine colony. Would it not be useful, Roosevelt apparently suggested, to plan an attack on that fleet and even seize Manila should the United States ever intervene in Cuba to bring about peace? McKinley piously deplored the prospect of war, but he managed to encourage Roosevelt to pursue his Philippine assault preparations. Indeed, after hearing McKinley deploring war with Spain, Roosevelt promptly made plans to raise a regiment for the invasion of Cuba. McKinley never fooled anyone he did not wish to fool. Shortly after their meeting, Roosevelt suggested to the President that an aggressive naval officer, Commodore George Dewey, be made commander of the Asiatic Squadron over the heads of more senior officers. McKinley secured the necessary congressional approval. In October the squadron was placed on a war footing. The machinery of manifest destiny was now emplaced. All McKinley needed was a war with Spain."

p86

On December 2, the President ordered the U.S. battleship Maine to the Florida Keys at the suggestion of Consul General Lee, who had reported, with his usual mendacity, that a dangerous anti-American conspiracy was brewing in the Cuban province of Matanzas. The ship commander was instructed to proceed to Havana in the event of an anti-American disturbance. It was to do so, said McKinley, on receiving a coded signal from Lee, at whose disposal the President now placed the great warship. The President had "full confidence in [Lee's] judgment," the commander was informed. Exactly so. By putting a warship of the most provocative kind in the hands of an inveterate warmonger, McKinley had ingeniously arranged for a minor diplomatic official to provoke an anti-American incident in Cuba likely to inflame American passions, moot the whole question of the Spanish reforms, and leave the President no alternative save armed intervention to protect American lives and property.

p87

With that McKinley sentenced Cuban autonomy to death. He had openly assured the rebels that if they fought on for a few more months Americans would step in and do their fighting for them. He had robbed those Cubans who dreaded American intervention of any hope that autonomy could stave it off. After McKinley refused the Spanish queen request that America publicly endorse the new reforms, the Spanish government in January had to face up to the grim truth: The American President was deliberately subverting Spanish efforts to achieve a negotiated settlement. Despite the generally pacific tone of his annual message, McKinley on December 6, 1897, had let slip the dogs of war. With America's consul general openly working against autonomy in Havana, armed intervention in Cuba was now only a matter of time.

p89

A fake reform party in 1896, the Democrats, determined to drive out reform and reformers, were becoming, as fast as they could manage it, a token opposition as well. Just as Republicans had agitated for war instead of opposing Cleveland's domestic policies, so now the Democrats clamored for intervention in Cuba instead of seriously opposing McKinley's. Had the Republican President controlled the Democracy he could scarcely have contrived matters better. Here was an entire national party vehemently demanding that he do today what he intended to do tomorrow while accusing him of being the earnest advocate of peace he was trying so hard to appear.

p89

On January 24, after warning the Spanish ambassador that an antiAmerican outburst in Cuba would compel him to send in troops, the President ordered the warship to Havana to provoke an anti-American outburst. Publicly, McKinley assured the country that the Maine was merely paying a courtesy visit, but not many people were fooled. "A warship is a curious kind of oil on troubled waters," wrote Godkin in the New York Evening Post, "though the administration would have us believe the Maine to be about the most unctuously peaceful ship that ever sailed." That the Maine might trigger an anti-American incident was obvious.

p90

The Spanish authorities, for their part, did their best to foil the American President. They received the Maine with an elaborate show of courtesy and strained every nerve to prevent an untoward outburst against the ship or its crewmen. McKinley, on his side, made matters as difficult as possible: He simply would not recall the Maine. Day after day for two weeks the menacing warship sat in the harbor of Havana, wearing out the flimsy pretext that it was paying a courtesy call and driving the Spanish frantic with fear. By February 8, the Spanish government in Madrid was thoroughly alarmed. The sheer prolongation of the visit, Madrid wired Ambassador de Lome, "might, through some mischance, bring about a conflict. We are trying to avoid it at any cost, making heroic efforts to maintain ourselves in the severest rectitude." It was no fault of Spain's, however, that on the evening of February 15 the Maine exploded in Havana harbor, killing 252 of the 350 men aboard .21

It was not precisely the anti-American incident that McKinley had hoped for; nonetheless the shocking disaster was a stroke of good fortune for America's interventionists. Overnight it drastically shortened the road to war, for the Maine explosion wrought a profound change in American public sentiment. Not that it provoked a national clamor for war. After the initial shock and dismay the American people fell into a state of tense and sober expectancy. What restrained popular bellicosity was the fact, obvious to all, that whatever blew up the Maine, the Spanish government certainly had not: nothing could have been more contrary to its interests.

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In early March a peace movement of "substantial citizens" gathered force and began protesting loudly against intervention in Cuba. McKinley took two quick steps to quash it. The peace faction contended, for one thing, that America was unprepared for war. McKinley met that objection easily. He called in Representative Joe Cannon of Illinois, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, and told him to introduce a bill calling for $50 million for national defense. Still posing as a man of peace, McKinley directed Cannon not to associate his name with the measure. Cannon did as he was told. The national defense bill became law on March 9. That was the end of the preparedness argument.

p94

... the navy board of inquiry handed the President I its fateful report. The Maine, it concluded, had been "destroyed by the explosion of a submarine mine," perpetrator unknown. Not surprisingly, the board's conclusion, though not dishonest, was unwarranted by the shaky evidence. Later inquirers have pretty much concluded that the Maine's destruction was due to an accidental internal explosion. With the Maine report in hand, McKinley's difficulties were at an end. He had only to bring his diplomacy with Spain to a crisis-never very difficult in dealing with a fifth-rate power-while satisfying the rapidly weakening peace faction that he was still trying to avert war if possible.

p95

With the official release of the Maine report on March 28, he now had overwhelming popular support for armed intervention; in the face of it even Wall Street's opposition was crumbling. The President's final dealings with Spain were merely a cruel farce. On April 5, Spain agreed to lay down its arms at the behest of the Pope-a desperate face-saving arrangement. "I believe that this means peace," reported Woodford, who still thought avoiding war was McKinley's objective. McKinley rejected that offer, too. He could not, he cabled the ambassador, "assume to influence the action of the American Congress." On April 9, notwithstanding McKinley's reply, the desperate Spanish government formally proclaimed an armistice in Cuba at the behest of the Pope. McKinley had now won virtually all his official demands: revocation of reconcentration and an end to hostilities. Few sovereign nations have ever made such concessions to a foreign power in peacetime over their own internal affairs. It availed Spain nothing.

On April 11, the President delivered his war message to Congress. It began with one of the more notable deceptions in the annals of presidential messages. Tracing the course of his diplomacy down to March 31-thereby conveniently ignoring Spain's subsequent concessions-the President concluded quite falsely that he had "exhausted" all diplomatic means to secure peace: "The Executive is brought to the end of his effort." He therefore called for "the forcible intervention of the United States as a neutral to stop the war, according to the large dictates of humanity .... I ask the Congress to authorize and empower the President to take measures to secure a full and final termination of hostilities between the Government of Spain and the people of Cuba and to secure in the island the establishment of a stable government... and to use the military and naval forces of the United States as may be necessary for these purposes."

p97

... Congress, on April 19, passed a join resolution calling for armed intervention. The "Republic of Cuba" was not to be recognized; the guerrillas, having served their purpose, were to be brushed ruthlessly aside. On the other hand, by the terms of the resolution, the United States was forbidden from ever annexing Cuba. On April 20 the President signed the resolution. The war that so many had sought for so long was now but a few days away."

The American people were jubilant. Pushed and prodded toward intervention for two and a half years, they now took the last mile at the gallop. Popular support for the war was more than overwhelming. It was joyful, exuberant, ecstatic. Americans greeted the war in a tumultuous holiday spirit, for in truth it was a holiday-a vacation from the years of suspicion, dissension, disillusion, and bitterness. Was the American Republic despoiled and corrupted? How could it be with America on the march, defending liberty, succoring the needy, and uprooting Old World villainy! Was the Republic in the grip of the money power? How could it be with the Wall Street peace faction so utterly routed! Like schoolboys tossing away their pencils on the last day of school, the American people cast aside the heavy burdens of liberty which they had taken up eight years before and which, for their pains, had gained them nothing and less. What was there to fret about? America was good! America was true! Cuba Libre! In that spirit, generous and giddy, righteous and irresponsible, the American people rallied to war against a fifth-rate power under the leadership of their ostensibly peaceloving President.

It was Henry Adams who put McKinley's role in its proper perspective. "At this distance," he wrote to Hay from Belgrade, "I see none of his tricks-real or assumed-I see only the steady development of a fixed intent, never swerving or hesitating even before the utterly staggering responsibility of war .... He has gone far beyond me and scared me not a little."

The Almighty Hand of God

p98

Lying some seven thousand miles from San Francisco, the Philippines form a vast archipelago. Its seven thousand islands extend across three thousand miles of the western Pacific. Its inhabitants then numbered some 6.5 million, a great many of them rude tribesmen, a large number of whom were headhunters. To seize the Philippine Islands from Spain would be an overt act of conquest. To possess the Philippine Islands would mean outright colonial rule, a subject race, and government by force. To seize and hold the Philippines would do violence to the Constitution, to republican principles, and to the deeply held convictions of the American people. Moreover, it would make America a major power in distant Asia and lead to unprecedented "connections with European complications," as McKinley himself had put it. To conquer and rule Spain's Philippine colony threatened at one stroke to sunder solemn ties with the republican past, to reorder the political life of the country and leave all familiar havens astern. It would mean, as Andrew Carnegie was soon to protest, "a parting of the ways" for the American Republic. To conquer and rule the Philippines as an American colony was William McKinley's war aim.

... Of the audacity of his imperial designs, McKinley himself was acutely aware. Trusting no one to share his audacity, he disclosed his ultimate intentions to no one. Even at his death he was still disclaiming them. Responsibility for the new American Empire he would attribute to the "march of events," to the "Almighty hand of God" ...

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On April 25, the President asked Congress not to declare war but to declare that, since Spain had broken off diplomatic relations, a state of war already existed. McKinley did not even wait for Congress to declare that what he wanted had already happened. The day he delivered his request, the President approved the historic directive to Commodore Dewey: "War has commenced .... Proceed at once to the Philippine Islands. Commence operations at once." Speed was imperative; even a one-day head start for Dewey was imperative. All through the war McKinley feared that Spain would L surrender before America's armed forces laid hands on her colonies, "gifts from the gods," as he would later describe them.

Dewey's victory made history but no martial glory has ever attached to it. The Asiatic Squadron reached Manila Bay on April 30. The next day, in about an hour's time, it destroyed the hapless that passed for the Spanish fleet.

... The day after the battle, with only cabled rumors from Madrid to indicate that a battle had ever taken place, McKinley ordered an army expeditionary force to the Philippines. It was a remarkably bold decision. The situation in Manila was unknown. No blow had been struck as yet for Cuba Libre. Yet here was a President sending ten thousand much needed regular troops-the first American soldiers ever to leave the Western Hemisphere-eleven thousand miles from the cause of humanity. If McKinley wished "old Dewey had just sailed away" on May 1, he gave no sign of it on May 2.

Nor did McKinley stop there. News of Dewey's victory sent the populace into a fit of ecstatic rejoicing. The American sky, it was said, turned red with fireworks from coast to coast. War fever and jingoism were sweeping all before it. Giddy already, the American people, on hearing of the victory, grew giddier still. The iron was hot and McKinley, a master of cautious maneuver when caution was needed, now showed he could strike, if required, with force and dispatch. He moved quickly on yet another expansionist front. Before Dewey's victory, his Hawaiian annexation treaty had languished hopelessly in the Senate. Overnight Dewey's victory gave it new life. It was now, claimed Republicans, a vital military measure. The United States needed Hawaiian bases to give aid to Dewey, the national hero of the hour. Pleading wartime exigency as a pretext, Republicans on May 4 took the unusual step of introducing a joint resolution of annexation in the House, thereby evading the Constitution's treaty-ratifying rule. Hawaii was to be annexed by simple majority vote. Behind the scenes as always, McKinley led the fight for annexation. Its advantages were clear. Annexation of Hawaii, as the Philadelphia Press had observed five years before, would "familiarize the public mind to the acceptance of other territory." McKinley wanted the public mind thus familiarized. Hawaiian annexation would provide a precedent for further overseas acquisitions. McKinley wanted that precedent.

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With Hawaiian annexation safely launched in Congress, McKinley turned next to the Caribbean. On June 4 he asked the commanding general of the United States Army, Nelson Miles; to prepare for an invasion of Puerto Rico at the "earliest moment."

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On July 17, the Spanish troops in Santiago, Cuba, surrendered unconditionally. The next day Spain sued for peace. In response, McKinley promptly ordered the invasion of Puerto Rico. "On your landing," he instructed the army, "you hoist the American flag." This was an essential element in McKinley's strategy of the fait accompli. Speaking of the flag a few months later, the President would ask an Atlanta audience: "Who will withdraw it from the people over whom it floats?"

p106

The real battle over the Philippines was not fought in the islands. It was fought in America. Its weapon was a torrent of propaganda; its objective to weaken, by every possible argument-by sheer noise, if necessary-the electorate's traditional aversion to colonial empire and overseas dominion. It was the task of the press, as McKinley pointed out to a newspaper publisher, to make it "appear desirable" for America to retain the archipelago.

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Above all, the propagandists, again following McKinley, made frantic efforts to deny any imperialist intentions. America's possession of the Philippines-still unachieved-was described from the start as the "fortunes of war," which is to say, mere happenstance. It was attributed to the workings of "destiny." It was deemed not the design of men, but of "Providence." It was ascribed to "the natural outcome of forces constantly at work." Having happened through destiny, happenstance, providence, or historical determinism, America's control of the Philippines, so the propagandists insisted, brought distasteful but unavoidable "duty" in its train, namely the duty to rule the islands. "Destiny," as McKinley liked to say, "determines duty." Could the United States in good conscience "return" the archipelago to Spain and subject Filipinos to its brutal imperial yoke? That the United States did not control the Philippines and had nothing to return did not stand in the way of the propagandists. The incessant pretense that the United States had already captured the Philippines-"having broken down the power in control of them," as Whitelaw Reid of the New York Tribune put it was expressly designed to make ultimate annexation by treaty seem mere recognition de jure of what had already occurred through the fortunes of war.

In the campaign to win popular acceptance of empire two important elements were missing. One was imperialism itself. A full-out imperial creed, the candid laudation of empire, played an insignificant role in the propaganda for an American empire. McKinley himself sternly repudiated the term "imperialism." That was the sort of thing, he said, that only vile European powers practiced. The arguments for America's first colonial venture were put on the most narrow circumstantial grounds: the unintended consequences of Dewey's naval victory and the inescapable "duty" it brought in its train. If America was becoming an imperial power, it was an empire purely by inadvertence. So the propagandists insisted. As McKinley told an Omaha audience, "We must follow duty even if desire opposes." If in the end Americans accepted the annexation of the Philippines, they did so without endorsing the imperial principle, indeed while still rejecting it, which was why straight-out imperialism would soon prove a dead-end for the Republican Party"

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What Republican-sponsored colonialism would mean to southern politics was scarcely lost on southern Democrats. That the once-great Republican Party, the historic party of Negro rights and political equality, was now claiming the right to govern lesser breeds without their consent gave the Democracy what it had hitherto never enjoyed: complete license from Republicans to treat southern Negroes as the McKinley administration intended to treat Filipinos. The Democrats quickly made the most of it. It is no coincidence that the legal disenfranchisement of black people-and poor whites and the elaboration of segregation laws were carried out by southern Democrats in 1898 and the years immediately thereafter. If Republicans even wished to protest the final dismantling of their party's historic achievements they were now utterly compromised. Southern racist politics, as the Boston Evening Transcript sadly observed, is "now the policy of the administration of the very party which carried the country into and through a civil war to free the slave."

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On August 28, McKinley appointed the members of a five-man commission charged with conducting treaty negotiations with Spain in Paris.

... Some weeks later, when negotiations began, McKinley deemed the time ripe to take the final step: He ordered his commissioners to demand the entire archipelago. Public opinion, he informed them, made any other alternative impossible. "It is my judgment," he cabled them on October 25, "that the well-considered opinion of the majority would be that duty requires we should take the archipelago."

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On October 31 the commission, under the President's express order, formally demanded the entire Philippines from Spain. Stunned, the Spanish negotiators balked. Once again Spain pointed out that the United States had no claim to the Philippines by right of conquest since it had not conquered them. Even Manila, captured after the armistice, by rights should be restored to Spain. The victor, however, was adamant. The vanquished were helpless. In the end the Spanish government, thoroughly humiliated, caved in to McKinley demands. On December 8 the treaty of peace was signed. The United States by formal cession from Spain now possessed the Philippine Islands. The fait accompli that the President and Republican propagandists had been proclaiming for six months was now at last a fact.

All McKinley had to do now was secure Senate ratification of the treaty and crush the Filipino insurgents. The former was gained with a heavy dose of virtual bribery by the margin of a single vote. The latter was accomplished with machine guns and was to take three bloody years and more. The love of liberty for foreigners that had warmed the hearts of so many warmongering politicians disappeared in the "march of events." When the President asked Congress for funds to put down Aguinaldo's mischievous troublemakers (for that, of course, was how the administration described them) scarcely a senator from the anti-imperialist Democracy cast a dissenting vote. With the decline of the republican movement at home the "propaganda of republicanism" abroad ceased to stir America's political leaders. The very politicians who had castigated Spain for trying to crush Cuban guerrillas now supported America's military efforts to crush Filipino guerrillas. And they watched without opposition as the party of White Supremacy robbed American citizens of the right to vote and enmeshed the South in an iron net of racist legislation."

With matchless guile and unshakable aplomb, President McKinley had carried America across a great divide. He had ushered in a new age and it was an age of iron.

... A few years before ... Americans of every condition had been demanding republican reforms of one kind of another. Their demands had gone unmet, their hopes had come to naught. The ruling politicians whose power they had threatened now set to work ensuring that another such perilous outburst would never occur again."

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The transformation of the United States, already an imperial republic, into an active world power had been the party's goal since the onset of the political crisis. With jingoism rampant in the country, with American troops stationed five hundred miles from Hong Kong, the means for doing so for the first time lay at hand. To imperialists and anti-imperialists alike it was obvious that the annexation of the Philippines could give America a major voice in the affairs of China, the then-current cockpit of European greed and ambition.

p114

The task of making American intervention in China politically palatable President McKinley assigned to his new secretary of state, John Hay, as soon as the Philippines had been safely annexed. The result of Hay's cogitations was the famous "Open Door" policy, a policy; well-named, by which the Asian door to Europe was to be pried open.

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"In a few short months," McKinley proudly informed a visitor to the White House, "we have become a world power." It was true enough. The chancelleries of Europe, which a few years before had not deigned even to send embassies to Washington, now echoed with nervous talk of the growing "American peril." America's grand renunciation of "dominion and power," one of the nobler aspects of the American Republic's often murky history, was fast becoming, like so much else, a relic of the past. On the slender foundation of our alleged interests in Asia, McKinley and his party pressed for a two-ocean navy, for an Isthmian canal controlled exclusively by the United States, for a Caribbean Sea under American hegemony, and for protectorate rights over Cuba, whose independence, once so ardently cherished, was soon to become little more than a fiction. With America's "emergence as a world power," an oft-repeated cant phrase implying that it happened by itself, the first prop of the new political order was in place by the beginning of the twentieth century.

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In the years after 1898 the collusive exception more and more became the rule as the Democratic Party, retrenching, ceased to offer serious electoral competition to Republicans outside their old southern and urban bastions. If the dominance of foreign affairs was to be the parties' functional equivalent of the no-issue politics of precrisis days, electoral collusion became the parties' functional equivalent of the old Civil War party loyalties. Confining their vote-getting efforts chiefly to their traditional post-Civil War party bastions, the two parties actually succeeded in re-creating the post-Civil War voting patterns in the twentieth century. In hundreds of counties and dozens of states voters behaved more as their grandparents had done in 1870 than their parents had in 1890. The voting patterns were based no longer on the old passionate party attachments. They chiefly reflected the indisposition of voters to elect "figureheads simply put up for the purpose of being knocked down." Unchallenged in their respective bastions, party leaders scarcely had to appeal to the voters to control the politics of their communities or even of entire states. Increasingly, elections became shams; increasingly, voters declined to vote .

In the wake of the Democrats' retirement into a mere party of "outs," machine politics, supported by collusion, grew not only stronger but more extensive than ever. "The domain of the Machine," a foreign student of American politics wrote in 1902, "is daily growing larger. The Machine is gaining ground, especially in the West where it is invading districts which appeared to be free of it." If men opposed boss rule before, a few men by the turn of the century were coming to see it as the chief menace to the American Republic. In March 1900 Charles Francis Adams bluntly told a fellow anti-imperialist that he saw the danger to "republican principles" in the wrong place: "You see it externally in the Philippines; I see it internally in New York City and Pennsylvania-in Croker and Quay and Platt .... We cant about imperialism, and look for the 'man-on-horseback,' and all that nonsense. Our Emperor is here now in embryo; even we don't recognize him, and we scornfully call him a 'boss.' Just exactly as in Rome before the Caesars systematized [matters] a succession of Tweeds, and Crokers, and Quays had their day."

In the immediate aftermath of the Spanish-American War the bosses indeed had their day. On the events of the preceding years they could look back with relief and satisfaction. A grave political crisis had been averted, a major threat to their power repulsed; the reform spirit seemed dead, the voters apathetic. The American Republic, torn from its old continental moorings, was now successfully launched on the broad sea of empire and dominion. "Unexampled political repose," as one newspaper put it, had been ushered in by the postwar years. Both party syndicates were stronger than ever. In the South, Achilles heel of the entire party system, disenfranchisement, racism, and segregation laws-a third major prop of the new order-promised to reduce southern farmers once more to a nullity and prevent any effective revival of the defeated Populist cause.

  • Walter Karp -- Book Excerpt 3
  • Walter Karp -- Book Excerpt 3

"The People Are Through with Party Government",

"A Man of High Ideals but No Principles"

excerpted from the book

The Politics of War

the story of two wars which altered forever the political life of the American republic

by Walter Karp

Franklin Square Press, 1979, paper

Part II

"The People Are Through with Party Government"

p121

What the Republican oligarchy envisioned was an all-encompassing system of mutual aid. A handful of finance capitalists, pre ably led by the prudent J. P. Morgan, were to take command of the national economy with the help of the party oligarchy. They would gain control of the nation's railroads, consolidate its industries into giant trusts, and monopolize control of capital under the aegis of the Republican Party. The financiers, in turn, would use their immense wealth and influence to protect and enhance the oligarchy's power. Working in close personal consultation, the partners expected to divide between them the two chief spoils of the public world. The Republican oligarchy would rule the people; Morgan and his colleagues would manage the economy-with one eye to the needs and interests of the Republican leadership.

p122

The new political order-it was sometimes called "the system ( of '96"-had some of the aspects of a bloodless coup. In the years after the Spanish-American 'War the national Republican Party became the most centralized, the most rigidly disciplined ruling party the American Republic has ever known. In the Senate, where the oligarchy convened, Republican senators took their orders from Aldrich, the "boss of the Senate," and a trio of his appointed lieutenants; they were known collectively as "the four." In the House of Representatives, Speaker Joe Cannon of Illinois could marshal virtually the entire voting strength of the party minions for every arbitrary ruling and every obstructionist tactic he deemed essential for the good of the party.

... Under their hegemony, America was fast becoming what Senator Lodge fatuously described as an "aristocratic republic." Firmly in control of the state party organizations, of most of the metropolitan press, of most of the political money in the country, with a jingo foreign policy to divert the electorate, the Republican oligarchy appeared to have nothing to fear, least of all from their token rivals, the Democrats, whose Congressional leaders were in all but open complicity with their Republican counterparts. By 1900 the national Republican machine had achieved the enviable position of serving the narrowest of interests-itself and its big business allies-while enjoying the support of a majority of those who bothered to vote. After the 1896 election fewer and fewer Americans bothered, which only made the oligarchy's task that much easier.

Yet the system had a flaw and that flaw was radical. Instead of serving as the indestructible foundation of party power, the new economy of finance capitalism was in fact a foundation of quicksand. The aging hierarchs of the Republican Party still talked of the "manufacturing interest" and the "propertied classes." Such nineteenth-century terms, however, ill-suited the new economy they had helped to create, an economic system in which a few could control everything without proportionately owning much; in which bankers, not manufacturers, held the fate of industrial enterprise in their hands. The new finance capitalism was as fluid as water. A powerful financier might control a great economic asset one day only to discover on the next that a rival magnate had raided the stock market and wrested away his control. The new finance capitalists were utterly lawless. They bribed, they swindled, they defrauded; they ignored statute law, defied common law, betrayed / fiduciary trusts. Worse, they were headlong, frenetic pursuers of monopoly, for competitive firms were useless to men incapable of running them and who would gain no further accession of economic power even if they could. The finance capitalists could not manage the economy; they could only prey upon it.

... In the failure of the new finance capitalists to serve the interests of their political allies, in the shocking spectacle of their lawless power lay the mainspring for a second national reform movement which was to provide the immediate background to America's entry into the First World War-the revolt of the American middle classes against political and economic oligarchy, a revolt known at the time and ever since as the progressive movement.

For almost three years after the Spanish-American War middleclass Americans-the "respectable classes," as the phrase then went - had watched with no outward signs of dismay the swift and unimpeded transformation of the American economy into huge industrial and railroad combinations controlled by a handful of New York bankers and financial manipulators. In March 1901, however, when a large number of once-independent steel firms disappeared into the bowels of a new billion-dollar corporation put together by J. P. Morgan, complacency turned to alarm and the alarm proved epidemic. From the sudden appearance of the U.S. Steel Corporation the complacent could draw no comfort whatever. Men who saw in free enterprise the national bulwark against socialism could find no solace in the virtual demise of free enterprise in the country's single most important industry. Men who had long admired America's "captains of industry" could find nothing to admire and much to fear in an industry captured by Wall Street financiers. Men who prided themselves on their conservative principles saw the Constitution itself falling prey to the new masters of capital. If the "community" did not restrain men who created corporations such as U.S. Steel, warned the president of Yale, "the alternative is an emperor in Washington within twenty-five years." Even the most ardent supporters of the established order looked upon U.S. Steel as a menace to order: The electorate, they feared, would rise up in revolt. "If a grasping and unrelenting monopoly is the outcome," the Philadelphia Evening Telegraph said of the formation of U.S. Steel, "there will be given an enormous impulse to the growing antagonism to the concentration of capital, which may lead to one of the greatest social and political upheavals that has been witnessed in modern history."

Within eight months of the formation of U.S. Steel the complacent suffered yet another shock On November 12, 1901, two rival groups of railway-banking magnates, James J. Hill and J. P. Morgan on one side, Edward Harriman and the Kuhn, Loeb banking house on the other, having grown tired of fighting each other, announced the creation of a vast holding company that gave the rivals joint control of most of the railways of the West. With the formation of the Northern Securities Company every fear that U.S. Steel had aroused was confirmed and magnified. Did a handful of monopolists run the economy? Two New York banking firms had just bestowed upon themselves financial control of the arteries of commerce. Was a "grasping and unrelenting monopoly" the goal of Wall Street interests? They seemed to have no other goal. Was America governed by an elective government or by a plutocracy of private men? A handful of monopolists clearly had more to say about the economic life of the country than the national government itself. A wave of fury swept through the Middle West. Antitrust agitation revived across the country. Demands for the extirpation of monopoly were once more heard in America. The crust of complacency was broken. Deaf ears were ready to listen, blind eyes to see.

In 1902 the magazine publisher S. S. McClure made a surprising discovery: The middling sort of Americans who bought his magazine actually wanted, indeed were avid, to read about the evils of monopoly, the lawless conduct of the very rich, and the deep corruption of politicians. Ida Tarbell's serialized account of the sordid history of the Standard Oil Company delighted McClure's readers. Lincoln Steffens's serialized report on the "Shame of the Cities" proved equally compelling. Other magazines followed McClure's lead and other writers followed Tarbell and Steffens. The heyday" of the "muckraker" had begun, a brief epoch that was both cause and effect of the central political fact of the progressive era-the rise of the American middle class, for decades a mere bourgeoisie, to civic and political consciousness.

That very awakening was what the best of the muckrakers labored to bring about. As an Atlantic Monthly writer was to complain in 1907, the muckrakers "expose in countless pages the sordid and depressing rottenness of our politics; the hopeless apathy of our good citizens; the remorseless corruption of our great financiers and businessmen who were bribing our legislatures, swindling the public with fraudulent stock schemes, adulterating our food, speculating with trust funds, combining in great monopolies to oppress and destroy small competitors." Again and again, Steffens, for one, hammered away at his main theme: Corruption in America was not the old dreary tale of grafting, small-time politicians-those perennial bêtes noires of middle-class America. The corruption, Steffens showed in city after city and state after state, invariably involved an alliance between machine politicians on one side and respectable businessmen on the other, between the political dispensers of corrupt privilege and businessmen avid for corrupt privilege. The solid pillars of the community were as lawless and corrupt in their own way as the politicians who served their interests. Their alliance, Steffens argued in a 1906 work called The Struggle for Self-Government, was the real reason why "oligarchy is the typical form of the actual government of our states." This was "the System," held together by corrupt privilege, that Americans had to rise up and destroy, that the "good citizens" had to oppose if the American people, in Steffens's words, ever hoped "to make government represent the common interest of a community of human beings, instead of the special interests of one, the business class."

What the muckrakers were trying to do was erase in a torrent of sharp words nothing less than the most cherished political conception of the American middle class, its very picture of political reality itself, a picture in which politics and government were portrayed as inherently evil and commerce and industry as inherently good. To a remarkable extent they succeeded. After four years of exposé journalism few Americans doubted the existence of "the System," or, as the alternative phrase had it, the "invisible government" of Wall Street operators and political wirepullers.

p127

Never before had the party managers faced so massive an incursion of independent citizens into the political arena. Never before, in consequence, was their monopoly of political life-their ability to control nominations, to guard the avenues to renown, to control elected officials, to dictate the very issues to be discussed in the public arena-so severely challenged on so broad a front. From the point of view of the established party leaders the growing resolve of middle-class Americans to take an active part in public affairs posed a problem without precedent and without any visible solution: How were they to flush out of political life scores of thousands of influential citizens in a republic constituted precisely to enable the citizenry to participate in public life?

p128

In the eyes of Republican leaders the problem was not how to remedy the evils of the new finance capitalism. The problem was how to manage the discontent it aroused, particularly in the once-docile middle class. Two methods appeared possible. One was to curb the more irritating excesses of big business in hopes of placating the "good citizens" and restoring them to their former state of political torpor. The other method was to ignore reform sentiment entirely and wait until it waned out of sheer discouragement.

p132

By 1906 Roosevelt feared that the movement for reform was getting out of hand. He sincerely wished to see the American people governed by a liberal oligarchy; he did not want them governing themselves. In April 1906 Roosevelt assailed the exposé journalists collectively as john Bunyan's "raker of muck" in an effort to stem the tide of reform agitation. The effort proved futile; the term "muckraker" becoming, if anything, an honorific. By then the reform movement had reached the ominous stage when every concession it won-even a verbal concession-only sharpened its appetite for more.

... In 1906 ... Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana, ambitious, brilliant, and regular, decided to cast his lot with the reformers. "You have no idea," he explained to a friend in November 1906, "how profound, intense and permanent the feeling among the American people is that this great reform movement shall go on."

... The movement was nowhere more intense nor more intensely republican than in the Republican states of the Middle West. There, farmers did not need the U.S. Steel Corporation to arouse them from complacency; they had never been particularly complacent. They did not need Steffens to tell them about the System: They had been misruled by Republican-cum-railway machines for years. The movement of midwestern businessmen and the smalltown middle class into the ranks of reform did not create reform sentiment in the Middle West. What it did was give it a political strength it had not enjoyed since the days, long past, when farmers had comprised the great majority of the region's population. In the states of the Middle West and West, reform was not merely a diffuse demand for the "salvation of society." It was an open political rebellion, a rebellion that exploded in one state after another like a string of bursting firecrackers.

In 1900 the indomitable Robert La Follette, after years of wearying effort, finally overthrew the old Wisconsin Republican machine and won election as governor. During three successive terms he proceeded to enact the most comprehensive program of reform ever seen in American state history.

p133

Regarding party machines as the enemy of economic reform and the friend of corrupt privilege, the midwestern and western reformers made it their first order of business to improve the machinery of popular government through the statewide direct primary, home rule for cities, the initiative and referendum, and the recall of officeholders by petition.

p138

Having vainly played self-confidence as their trump card, Republican leaders, for the first time in their history, lost their self-confidence entirely. In the winter of 1909-10 the party leaders, with Taft in their camp, decided on a desperate stratagem: an all-out national purge of every insurgent in the party, a war of political extermination. In January 1910, the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee announced that it would support "regulars" against insurgents in every Republican primary. President Taft cut off the reformers' patronage. At the White House plans were drawn up to put pressure on the Republican press, to establish "grassroots" clubs of party regulars, to organize illegal party conventions wherever the regulars lost control of the legal party machinery.

Fourteen states were to be the scene of the purge: Wisconsin, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, California, Washington, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and New York-a list that suggests how widespread the Republican insurgency had grown. To finance the purge, Senator Aldrich drew upon his eastern financial connections to raise a huge war chest. All the power of the national party oligarchy, all the power and prestige of the presidency, all the skills of the state organization were to be deployed against a few score congressional candidates marked off for extinction by Republican leaders. In the Middle West in particular a campaign of wholesale abuse was unleashed against "the factious rats" and "socialist demagogues" who had dared speak for the electorate in defiance of the Republican oligarchy. Incapable of any constructive action, the desperate Republican leaders now demonstrated to the entire country how truly bankrupt they were, and this time there was no foreign adventure to disguise it. Here was the leadership of a once resourceful party incapable of any response to a national movement for reform save a campaign to destroy its Republican spokesmen."

In the spring primaries, Republican voters showed how clearly they grasped the situation. At their hands, Taft and the party oligarchs suffered a complete and humiliating rout. Wherever regulars were pitted against insurgents, in almost every case the insurgents won. "The people," as a contemporary historian observed, "were through with Party government."

p140

As Roosevelt rightly observed in 1910, the Republican oligarchy had become "a leadership which has no following." Its sole supporters, he told Lodge, were "the bulk of the big businessmen, the big professional politicians, the big lawyers who carry on their work in connection with leaders of high finance and the political machine, their representatives among the great papers and so forth." Ninety percent of the Republican rank and file, Roosevelt estimated, gave their erstwhile party leaders no support at all. If the insurgents won them over-the last thing Roosevelt then wanted-"they get control of the organization."

Senator La Follette, the acknowledged leader of the Republican insurgency; saw the opportunity quite as clearly as Roosevelt did. By now, after years of agitation and muckraking, the diffuse sentiment for the "salvation of society" had been translated into a more or less coherent national program of republican reform. Politically, progressives called for more democratic national government through the direct elections of senators, direct election of delegates to national conventions, presidential preference primaries, and legislation to bar corporate influence in politics. Economically, they wanted strict federal regulation of railroads and railroad rates, to ensure that those who controlled the roads could no longer use them to create industrial monopolies. They wanted laws to protect the smaller entrepreneurs. They wanted the New York "money trust" eliminated through public control of banking and credit. They wanted corrupt privileges of all sorts-tax privileges, tariff privileges-eliminated. On these two basic goals, securing what they deemed to be both political and economic democracy, most progressives were in agreement, the moderates among them being those who hoped that moderate means would suffice to achieve them.

On the central issue of the age, however, the issue of industrial consolidation, the progressive movement was far from united. Following Roosevelt, eastern progressives on the whole regarded industrial concentration as inevitable and looked to strict government regulation of big business as the only feasible way to destroy private economic power. Following La Follette, western progressives on the whole regarded big business as an artificial menace to self-government, not merely aided but made possible by a whole system of special privilege. "Monopoly," as Frederick Howe put it in 1910, "is created by law. It is born of law-made privilege." La Follette and his followers wanted monopoly destroyed, not regulated, and industrial combinations, as far as possible, broken up.

p141

Though the progressives were not a party, their leaders by 1911 had become something very like a nationwide committee of correspondence. Steffens himself was the personal friend of such diverse progressive leaders as Judge Ben Lindsey of Denver, Louis Brandeis of Boston-"the people lawyer," Howe of Toledo, Spreckels and William Kent of California, William U'Ren of Oregon, and George Record of New Jersey. La Follette and Brandeis were personal friends. A cross-hatching of friendships, exchanges of letters, and mutual aid in numerous political battles had knit the progressive leaders into a genuine working coalition.

In 1911, moreover, the common cause they shared had reduced itself to one overriding cause-the defeat of the Republican oligarchy.

... What had been utterly impossible a mere three years before had now become considerably more than possible, although it had never been accomplished since the emergence of organized political parties in America: the overthrow by genuine party rebels the ruling magnates of a national party."

At first La Follette was the insurgents' candidate for the Republican nomination. As the first Republican to raise the banner of rebellion in the states and the first one to dare raise it in the Senate, La Follette, more than any other single man, had been responsible for translating the national demand for reform into a national political movement.

p143

Under the leadership of Senator La Follette, the last great republican of consequence in American history, the Republican Party seemed about to become, if not in 1912 then certainly by 1916, the party it had almost but not quite been in the days of Abraham Lincoln."

At that point Colonel Roosevelt, who had grown increasingly radical in his public pronouncements, discreetly inserted himself into the political arena. By half-hints and pregnant nondenials, he let it be known to his followers that he just might be available to head the insurgency now that it looked like succeeding. His many supporters in La Follette's camp began working in t to balk the senator's bid for delegate support. By December, they began deserting their candidate in droves. By February 1912, Roosevelt had captured the entire Republican insurgent movement; La Follette's candidacy was dead. What had proved its undoing, essentially, was precisely what had made it possible-the almost universal belief among reformers that the toppling of the Republican oligarchy was the one great task of the hour. Some progressives followed Roosevelt out of conviction. Others followed him in spite of conviction. It was simply impossible to deny that the popular ex-President was far more likely than La Follette to capture the Republican nomination.

p145

The November elections surprised nobody. Running as the candidate of a hastily organized Progressive Party, Roosevelt decisively outpolled Taft. Running as a reform candidate, the Democrats' Woodrow Wilson easily won the election. The Republican oligarchy had narrowly survived, but the national Republican machine was gone from American politics. Henceforth the party's leaders would be not the spokesmen of a disciplined national party, but merely its dominant faction, desperately clinging to power within it and meanly hopeful that the Democrats would prove still more unfit to govern than they. Lodge's "aristocratic republic" had lasted, in all, about fifteen years.

As for the reform movement in general, it emerged from the 1912 election with the political force of a national mandate. The voters had given the two avowed progressive candidates 70 percent of the total popular vote. They gave Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist candidate, about 900,000 votes. The candidate of the Republican Party, victor in eleven of the previous thirteen presidential elections, gained the electoral votes of just two states. Americans were elated with sanguine hopes. The privileged interests, the "money trust," and the "invisible government" seemed about to receive their deathblow. Government of, by, and for the people was now to be restored to the American Republic. For all practical purposes, however, popular hopes were now in the hands of a President-elect whose conversion to reform was exactly twenty-five months old.

"A Man of High Ideals but No Principles"

p147

War in Europe still lay in the unforeseeable future when President Wilson, in his Inaugural Address, called upon Americans to join him in "the high enterprise of the new day: to lift everything that concerns our life as a Nation to the light that shines from the hearthfire of every man's conscience and vision of the right." Foreign affairs had not seemed so remote in years nor domestic affairs so promising. In fact, except for the American people themselves, all the political elements that would bring America into a European war were already occupying the political arena.'

There was, first, the battered Republican oligarchy, paralyzed as long as domestic issues remained paramount and hungry for any chance opportunity to return safely to power. There was, for another, the major New York bankers, adrift in the wreckage of the national Republican machine, suffering from obloquy so severe that politicians feared to be seen in their company and determined to regain the security they had lost in the progressive upheaval. There was, in addition, the conservative leadership of the Democracy, a party still held together by the do-nothing principle and now compelled by an articulate national reform movement to do something that might pass for comprehensive reforms. Most decisively there was the singular figure of the new President himself, a man driven by vaunting ambition and haunted by a "nightmare," as he himself put it, that the American people, whose aspirations he did not share, would turn against him in their wrath and blight his own aspirations for personal greatness.

p148

[Thomas Woodrow Wilson] had a driving imperious will that readily imposed itself on others, a will made steely by Wilson's conviction that those who blocked his path stood in the way of the light. He had, moreover, a mind that was ceaselessly active and astonishingly quick. In his years as President, White House visitors would come away amazed at Wilson's ability to sum up their own arguments more swiftly and cogently than they could themselves. He had, in addition, a still more remarkable facility with words. Striking phrases, elegant paragraphs, and sonorous perorations seemed to flow effortlessly from Wilson's lips. Indeed, when he thought of himself as a great man he chiefly saw himself as a great orator swaying the masses with the magic power of noble utterance. It would take many years before Wilson's contemporaries realized, in Senator La Follette's bitterly accurate judgment, that "with him, the rhetoric of a thing is the thing itself .... 'Words, phrases, felicity of expression and a blind egotism has been his stock in trade."

... An advocate of the principles of True Democracy, Wilson believed firmly in states' rights, laissez-faire, and minimal government (as well as White Supremacy, racial segregation, and the disenfranchisement of poor Southerners).

p149

Since the 1880s, the task of persuasion had been growing increasingly difficult in America. In consequence, Princeton's professor of political science had wholeheartedly welcomed the launching of the Republican "large policy" during the SpanishAmerican War. In his History of the American People, published in 1902, Wilson described the new policy as the single most heartening event in modern American history. By means of an active foreign policy the American people would gain what Wilson called a "unified will." It would divert them, in other words, from their new habit of "begging," in Wilson's words, for governmental help against the privileged, a "turning away from all the principles which have distinguished America," that Professor Wilson thoroughly deplored. An active foreign policy, in Wilson's view, would thereby protect American democracy itself from the ignorant masses, meaning all those Americans who did not share Professor Wilson's belief that democracy and the Democratic Party were one and the same thing.

... Wilson had still another reason for endorsing the Republican large policy. Quite simply, it would give future American presidents something large and glorious to do. According to Wilson the most important advantage of the Republican "plunge into international politics and into the administration of distant dependencies" was the "greatly increased power and opportunity for constructive statesmanship given the President" by that plunge. This was to be perhaps the most revealing statement Wilson ever made, for it invoked a standard of political judgment that foreshadowed his entire future career. It was not a standard he shared with his countrymen. Americans are not in the habit of judging a national policy by its personal advantage to their president. Nor are they in the habit of considering themselves and their country as mere instruments in a president's quest for glory. It is the last thing that would enter the mind of most Americans, whatever their political views. Yet that judgment, so antithetical to the entire republican tradition in America, came readily to Woodrow Wilson, who was to become the first American president to look upon the United States of America as a stepping-stone to personal greatness.

p160

Seven days after his inauguration the new President began a course of meddling in Mexican politics that would lead the United States to the brink of war by April 1914. To "deal chiefly with foreign affairs" was for 'Wilson the real enterprise of the new day, the only promising escape from the political dangers that confronted him from the moment he gained the presidency.

The danger, quite simply, was that Wilson had no intention of fulfilling the expectations of the national reform movement or even of redeeming the reform pledges he had made as a candidate. Wilson was expected to lead the fight for drastic legislative intervention in the economy, intervention designed, as Wilson had promised, to extirpate the trusts, break Wall Street's control of capital, and liberate free enterprise from the tightening thrall of monopoly. Neither Wilson nor the Democrats in control of Congress shared these expectations. The new President had never been a reformer; he had merely been an office seeker in an age of reform. Privately Wilson regarded big business as beneficial and the national reform movement itself as a dangerous spasm of "ill-humors." Unfortunately for Wilson, the reform movement was too strong to be openly repudiated. Something had to be done to appease the reformers. The danger was that they were unlikely to remain appeased.

Wilson planned to push through Congress a minimal program of unavoidable legislation touching on banking and big business. This, hopefully, would keep the progressives at bay until Wilson felt it politically safe to declare-as he would actually do in November 1914-that all remediable grievances had been remedied and the business of reform was at an end. Wilson's chief concern was that the enacted legislation look like progressive reform; that his banking legislation look as though designed to demolish the money trust; that his antitrust laws look like the comprehensive attack on monopoly that he and the Democrats had promised the voters in 1912.

Wilson had no illusions about his strategy. At best it was a makeshift that could not, by itself, succeed. The reform movement was too powerful, its leaders too well armed with programs, principles, and shibboleths to be contented for long by mere shows of reform. The conservative press of both parties would duly praise Wilson's Federal Reserve Act as a milestone of reform legislation, but reform leaders in Congress would assail it for what it was - a "big bankers' bill," in Senator La Follette's words, that actually legalized the money trust it was supposed to dismember. The conservative press would praise Wilson's antitrust measures as the culmination of thirty years of antitrust agitation, but again reform leaders would not be deceived. "Almost a joke," La Follette would call them. "Not enough teeth to masticate successfully milk toast," Senator Cummins was to remark."

As long as domestic affairs remained predominant, Wilson was on a collision course with the entire reform movement. He knew it, foresaw it, and dreaded it. The American people were going to turn against him, he confided to his friend and adviser Colonel E. M. House of Texas. His administration, he feared, would end in ignominious failure just as his administration of Princeton had done. That fear, he confessed to House, "hung over him sometimes like a nightmare." Unless he could divert the reform movement and distract the American people the nightmare would become a reality. Wilson was no Grover Cleveland: he had no wish to commit political suicide for the creed of True Democracy. The solution to his problem Wilson had arrived at long before he ever faced it, when he praised the domestic political advantages of the Republican "plunge into international politics." If he could make another such plunge and "impel" the nation to "great national triumphs" abroad, he could not only avert failure but reap glory as well. As soon as he took office, therefore, Wilson began trying to persuade the American people that the true spirit of reform was to be expressed not at home, but in a new altruistic foreign policy, a policy, in Wilson's words, of "service to mankind."''

Conditions in Mexico provided Wilson with his first pretext for "service." It was in his Mexican policy that Wilson revealed those singular qualities of character-the self-ennobling ambition, the contempt for the opinions of others, the bottomless self-deceit - that were to help him drag America into the trenches of France. Wilson's Mexican policy, too, revealed the extraordinary lengths Wilson was determined to go to inflict foreign complications on unwilling countrymen.

'The Mexican situation briefly was this: In 1910 Mexican rebels led by Francisco Madero had overthrown the thirty-five-year-old dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz. The Madero government, however, proved feeble and inept. Two weeks before Wilson's inaugural, General Victoriano Huerta, head of the Federalist Army, turned treacherously against Madero. In a swift palace golpe he deposed the fading hero of the 1910 revolution and began setting himself up as Mexico's new strong man. A few days later, probably with Huerta's complicity, certainly in his interest, Madero was murdered. Huerta's usurpation was not one of the more edifying political spectacles in Latin America but it was scarcely unique.

p163

Of their new President's perilous intentions the American people knew nothing. Wilson dared not profess them for, unlike their altruistic President, the American people cared far more about themselves than they did about Mexicans. Cautiously, Wilson tried to wean them from their unfortunate conviction that the foreign policy of the United States ought to serve the interests of the country. That conviction had severely shackled the Republican "large policy." As long as American foreign policy was determined by practical national interests, it was impossible to justify a policy large enough to overwhelm domestic affairs, to pacify the electorate, or to free President Wilson for "constructive statesmanship" abroad.

p164

The President reassured the nation that he was not going to intervene in Mexico to protect either the interests of American investors or the fifty thousand Americans who lived there. Indeed, he said, Americans stayed in Mexico at their own risk. The United States government intended "to pay the most scrupulous regard to the sovereignty and independence of Mexico-that we take as a matter of course to which we are bound by every obligation of right and honor." A stronger promise of nonintervention could scarcely have been made, but there was a catch to it. According to Wilson, the United States had a duty to serve "the best aspirations" of the Mexican people and to do so, moreover, "without first thinking how we shall serve ourselves." America, according to Wilson, was to become the first nation in history to put the interests of other countries ahead of its own. Mankind (minus the American people) would henceforth be the object of our government's active concern and ministration.

The public response to Wilson's address was far from encouraging to the President. His suave assertion of America's duty to help Mexicans sent no thrill of exaltation through the electorate. In truth, the perverse turn that events had taken during the SpanishAmerican 'War had inoculated most Americans against foreign adventures in the name of humanity. Having learned something about the domestic uses of war, Americans were a chastened people in 1913. What they greeted with an audible sigh of relief was Wilson's apparent promise to keep America out of Mexican affairs. The response might have daunted a lesser man, but therein lay 'Wilson's peculiar strengths as a political leader. Once convinced of the nobility of his own intentions-and the conviction always came easily-Wilson could act without scruple, defy men's reproaches, and ignore what to others was plain common sense. The most fanatical idealist does not cling to the principles of a lifetime more tenaciously than Wilson could pursue a noble aim he had just invented to suit his ambitions.

In late October 1913, Wilson, whom historians describe as a President who hated war, decided he would have to use military force against the Mexican usurper. "A real crisis has arisen," Colonel House wrote in his diary on October 30, after speaking with the President. The "crisis" was Huerta's success in consolidating his power. The British government, for one thing, had extended him diplomatic recognition. The Mexican establishment was beginning to rally to his side. Huerta's enemies, the heirs of the Madero revolution, had raised the banner of revolt under Venustiano Carranza, "first chief" of the newly formed "Constitutionalist" movement, but they were still woefully weak. America's President, however, was "alert and unafraid," noted House. He "has in mind to declare war against Mexico." What choice, after all, did Wilson have? To a woman correspondent, the president confided his pious fears of the "terrible" events that were about to ensue. "No man can tell what will happen while we deal with a desperate brute like that traitor, Huerta. God save us from the worst!" Having decided to depose a foreign ruler Wilson now persuaded himself that the "brute's" refusal to go was forcing him to war.

p170

On April 21, a nation that had acclaimed Wilson's nonintervention in Mexico discovered that a thousand U.S. marines were trying to capture a Mexican seaport, were being fired on by Mexican troops, and were firing back; 126 Mexicans and 19 marines were to die in the skirmishing. In the fourteenth month of the "new day," the United States of America had gone well beyond the brink of war and Wilson, the self-appointed servant of the Mexican people, had become overnight the man most hated by the Mexican people.

p170

In all these twists and turns ... Wilson adhered to one consistent principle. For him the "best aspirations" of foreigners would invariably be those that required American intervention, for it was by his wish to intervene that he judged their "best aspirations." Such was the stuff of "Wilsonian idealism," as historians have come to call it. What the best aspirations of the Mexican people actually were and how they might best be served were at bottom of no interest to Woodrow Wilson.

p171

In the spring and summer of 1914, while leading progressives grew increasingly distressed over 'Wilson's failures as a reformer, the President devoted himself more intensely than ever to preaching the glories of an active, altruistic foreign policy. On May 11, at a ceremony in Brooklyn to commemorate the nineteen marines who died in Vera Cruz, Wilson noted that "a war of service is a thing in which it is a proud thing to die." On June 4, at Arlington Cemetery, he proclaimed it America's "duty" and "privilege" to "stand shoulder to shoulder to lift the burdens of mankind in the future and show the paths of freedom to all the world." On June 5, at the U.S. Naval Academy, he informed the assembled officers that "the idea of America is to serve humanity... is that not something to be proud of, that you know how to use force like men of conscience and like gentlemen, serving your fellow men and not trying to overcome them?" On Flag Day, June 15, he proclaimed that the American flag, his recent pretext for military aggression, "is henceforth to stand for self-possession, for dignity, for the assertion of the right of one nation to serve the other nations of the world." On July 4, in yet another foreign policy pronouncement, Wilson demonstrated his truly astonishing indifference to the real concerns of his fellow countrymen-to the debt-ridden farmer, the child laboring kind, and the sweated factory worker, whose relief by remedial legislation he was now openly opposing. To an audience at Philadelphia's Independence Hall, he declared that America was now rich enough and free enough to look abroad for great tasks to perform. The American people, he said, were too prosperous to care only about their "material interests." Our duty is to serve the world without regard for ourselves. "What other great people has devoted itself to this exalted ideal?"

On July 31, in less self-exalted circles, La Follette and Brandeis met to discuss Wilson's all-but-declared retreat from reform. "it just breaks one's heart," Brandeis told La Follette; "to see him throw away chances for good things and swallow bad things with good labels, while the old Republican and the old Democratic devils chuckle." The next day, Europe erupted in war, a war the American people took for granted had nothing to do with them. They could scarcely suspect, it was too monstrous to suppose, that their President would view it as the opportunity of a lifetime, "the greatest, perhaps, that has ever come to any man," as Colonel House remarked [is vainglorious friend in the White House."

"The Noblest Part That Has Ever Come to a Son of Man"

p173

The central political fact about America's en into the European war was that the American people wanted, above all else, to stay out of it. Aversion to joining in the carnage, the determination to remain neutral, was not the opinion of a mere majority, nor even of a large majority. It was virtually unanimous. Even after the sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915, opposition to entering the war, a bellicose Roosevelt ruefully estimated, remained the sentiment of 98 percent of the people. "The great bulk of Americans," an Englishman informed his countrymen in the fifteenth month of the war, "simply do not believe that the present conflict, whatever its upshot, touches their national security or endangers their power to hold fast to their own ideals of politics and society and ethics." To join the fighting, he noted, for "any cause less urgent than the existence or safety of the commonwealth seems to many millions of Americans a counsel of suicidal insanity."

p174

To most Americans the carnage in Europe was simply the corruption of the Old World nations bursting into ghastly fruition, the inevitable outcome of their ancient rivalries and their contemptible appetites for territory and pelf. They could see no special virtue in either side of the conflict. Even after two years of reading little save pro-Allied propaganda in their newspapers (disseminated to the countryside by the New York press and to the New York press by the scribes of Fleet Street) the majority of Americans scarcely progressed beyond the view that Germany was probably more detestable than Britain. In their general grasp of the war's meaning and origins the great majority of Americans were quite correct, although doubtless they had lit upon the truth more by tradition and general principles than by any rational sifting of the evidence.

Only a few of their more thoughtful "betters" disagreed with the common verdict and concluded instead that the war's meaning and origin were fully explained by the official propaganda of the British government. That Germany alone had started the war, that the Entente was fighting for "democracy" against "autocracy" that Allied victory would put an end to "militarism" and secure "permanent peace" in the world were the views of a handful of anglophile extremists, chiefly literary gentlemen, college presidents, fashionable parsons, and upper-class inhabitants of the cities and towns of the eastern seaboard. Society matrons who fawned over Britain's hereditary aristocracy would be among the most ardent supporters of Britain's alleged fight for "democracy."

There was only one place in America where the extreme anglophile views of a minute fraction of the American people enjoyed the support of an overwhelming majority-in the upper reaches of the Wilson administration.

"I Cannot Understand His Attitude"

p192

It was not until September 1915 that the President confided to Colonel House that he had long wished to see America take part in the European war. Wilson's willingness was readily understandable. What the American people regarded as "suicidal insanity" made perfect sense to their President in the light of the "noblest part." 'What did not make sense was neutrality.

p196

Given the depth and strength of antiwar sentiment, given the depth and strength of the venerable tradition of avoiding European entanglements, given that a frail "right to travel"-for which no American had the slightest wish to die-was to be 'Wilson's chief instrument of war provocation, the wonder is not that Wilson got his war, but that he even dared to seek it. It was to be the lasting misfortune of the American Republic that Woodrow Wilson had the courage to match his vainglory.

p206

As long as Americans were not warned off belligerent merchantmen, as long as they continued to book passage on British liners laden with munitions of war, a far better occasion was certain to arise soon enough. As Ambassador Page remarked to a friend on May 2, "If a British liner full of American passengers be blown up, what will Uncle Sam do? That's what's going to happen."

p206

"What's going to happen" happened with stunning effect on the afternoon of May 7. At 2:10 P.M. in the war zone, a German submarine, without warning, fired a torpedo into the Lusitania, a Cunard liner carrying 1,257 passengers (including 159 Americans), 702 crew members, and 4,200 cases of rifle ammunition. In the remarkably brief span of eighteen minutes the mighty vessel sank. Among the 1,195 lives lost, 124 were American. It was the first-and it was to be the only-serious loss of American lives at the hands of the submarine. The pro-Allied American press, which grew indignant over trifles, understandably boiled over in fury. The Lusitania sinking was undoubtedly German war ruthlessness at its absolute worst. Theodore Roosevelt, who was already leading a corporal's guard of crypto-interventionists, denounced the sinking as "piracy on a vaster scale of murder than old-time pirates ever practiced." The entire country was thrown into a state of shock. The European war, which hitherto had seemed so remote, had suddenly reached out without warning and seized America by the throat.

... Within a few days of the sinking, as the initial shock began to wear off, public sentiment in the country began taking a turn that would soon give even Wilson pause on his road to war. Instead of being indignant over the sinking of the Lusitania, Americans began voicing sharp disapproval of the Americans who had chosen to travel on it.

p215

Among the vast majority of Americans the perilous implications of Wilson's diplomacy were slowly sinking in. The prospect of serious trouble, perhaps even war, over the dubious right of a few heedless Americans to travel on belligerent ships was beginning to alarm the people at large. Previously they had taken peace for granted. They could take it for granted no longer. Peace sentiment-antiwar sentiment-was becoming active and vocal.* As early as June 4, two powerful Virginia Democrats, Senator Thomas Martin, the boss of the state, and Representative Hal Flood, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, wrote to Bryan warning him that the administration was pushing the Lusitania affair far beyond what the electorate would tolerate. That was only a harbinger. By early July active antiwar sentiment, almost entirely spontaneous, would become a force to be reckoned with."

  • Walter Karp -- Book Excerpt 4
  • Walter Karp -- Book Excerpt 4

"Never Before Were More Lies Told.",

"We Do Not Covet Peace At The Cost Of Honor",

"A Hopelessly False Position"

excerpted from the book

The Politics of War

the story of two wars which altered forever the political life of the American republic

by Walter Karp

Franklin Square Press, 1979, paper

"Never Before Were More Lies Told."

p223

"Americans must be taught, said ... Henry Stimson, secretary of war under Taft, to think more of their duties toward the government and less of what they can "get." A drilled and disciplined electorate, submissive toward its rulers, expecting nothing of its government, was the civic condition the Republican Party needed and sought. Nothing in the domestic politics of the United States could possibly bring it about. Only the cataclysm of a major foreign war could undo the deep damage of the preceding ten years. Out of power the Republican oligarchy had few, if any, scruples.(Imperial Germany was not decadent Spain, the right to travel was not a battle cry on a par with "Cuba Libre," the trenches of France were not ninety miles from our shores)It is a measure of how desperate the Republican oligarchy had grown under the impact of defeat that once Wilson opened up the prospect of war Republican leaders were prepared, in the face of overwhelming public sentiment, to muster all their political power to bring war about.

The Republican oligarchs' resolve to push for war was strengthened by support they had not enjoyed in 1898-the major Wall Street capitalists, the futile peace faction in the days of "Cuba Libre." Contemporary Americans believed that Wall Street interests wanted war because only an Allied victory would redeem their holdings in Allied securities. However, since they avidly supported Wilson's war course several months before they invested in British government securities, the true explanation lies elsewhere. In fact their motives were far deeper, far stronger, and far more comprehensive than mere concern for repayment of loans. What they wanted, in essence, was what the Republican oligarchy wanted: the restoration of their former place in the councils of government, the restoration of their lost prestige, and the recovery of their lost political security. In the days of McKinley they had been open partners in rule; within a dozen years they had become mere privileged clients of government, dependent on unreliable politicians and hated by the public at large. As Bourne shrewdly observed in his wartime writings, the financial and industrial magnates had not been hurt financially by the reform era. What they had lost was their place, their legitimacy, and their "glory." They wanted war, said Bourne, because they saw in war the opportunity to become the great captains of an industrial war machine and partners, once in the governance of the country.

p226

As long as Americans remained almost universally opposed to war ... even the most vigorous support of Wilson's diplomacy could not bring about war, for public opinion severely hampered that diplomacy. From the President on down the question every crypto-interventionist faced was how to weaken and nullify that opposition. If straightforward war agitation was impossible, if even straightforward jingoism was ruled out, some other kind of propaganda was needed. The crypto-interventionists found their answer in the relatively safe issue of national defense to which they gave the enticing name of "preparedness ...

... The preparedness movement had nothing to do with the nation's defenses. It was crypto-war agitation intended, as Roosevelt frankly put it to a British correspondent, "to get my fellow countrymen into the proper mental attitude" for war without j actually calling for it openly. The American people, Roosevelt explained, were too timid and pacifistic to tolerate frank talk of intervention. The goal of the movement was put even more graphically by Robert Bacon, a former assistant secretary of state and a Republican leader of the preparedness agitation. "In America," Bacon explained to a Frenchman, "there are 50,000 people who understand the necessity of the United States entering the war immediately on your side. But there are 100,000,000 Americans who have not even thought of it. Our task is to see that the figures are reversed."

Reactionary in its leaders, reactionary in its ultimate goals, the preparedness movement was almost explicitly an organized anti-reform movement, a counterrevolt of the powerful and the privileged "to undo," as California's reform governor Hiram Johnson put it, "the progressive achievements of the past decade." At the movement's peak in 1916, when it had behind it the power, prestige, and eloquence of President Wilson himself, preparedness advocates scarcely bothered to conceal their ultimate political goals. What America needed, they said, was not merely military preparedness but "moral preparedness." This was to be achieved through universal military training, through "patriotic education," through military drill in the public schools. They called for a new militarized polity-a "Prussianized" America ...

... Though universal military training (a virtual code word for war since peacetime conscription had not the slightest chance of being enacted by Congress) Americans would be taught a new "religion of vital patriotism-that is, of consecration to the State." Through proper education and military training, a population of selfish cowards-which was how preparedness agitators commonly described their fellow countrymen-would learn "not to sit supinely under insult, injury and violation of right and law," meaning the right to travel on belligerent merchantmen; learn not to sing disgraceful songs such as the all-too-popular "I Didn't Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier"; learn that opposition to war meant "national loss of self-respect"; learn through the "discipline of the camp" and the schoolhouse drill period "what it means to be an American"; learn, last but not least, that "we have a part to play in the redemption of humanity and the future organization of the world." Openly appealing to every reactionary element in the country, to every businessman frightened of industrial unrest, to every machine politician hoping to revamp his machine, to every infatuated upper class anglophile, the preparedness propaganda held forth the promise of a new nation, conceived in "preparedness" (meaning war), whose citizenry, radically transformed, would ask for nothing from their government save the chance to serve its international goals.

p229

The first theme of the agitation was a frenzied propaganda of bogies and alarms. Germany, according to the "prepareders," was bent on world domination. Germany, at war's end, would turn next on America. Dire peril lay ahead. "Wake up, America!" cried the agitators. The Hun was on the march; America lay supine. Our navy was worthless, our army a nullity, our coastal defenses mere toys. The public air suddenly rang with talk of "landing parties" and "surprise attacks." Amphibious landings across three thousand miles of ocean suddenly became a commonplace military feat, which men wholly ignorant of military matters described with factitious precision. James Beck, for example, a former assistant U.S. attorney general and a leading Republican interventionist, solemnly assured Philadelphians that it would take Germany exactly sixteen days to land precisely 387,000 men on our shores. No absurdity was too great for the crypto-interventionists to propose. In the summer of 1915 Americans learned for the first time that they were virtually doomed by 1921 to become "another Belgium," as if nothing were more plausible than a comparison between a tiny country abutting Germany and a nation of 100 million a broad ocean away. No absurdity of the preparedness agitation, however, was too great for the American press to swallow. Big city newspapers took up the preparedness line with obliging fervor. In vain did reputable military men point out the fatuity of the alarmist talk and the military ignorance of the alarmists. When a genuine military expert stands in the way of political propaganda, the party press can make itself L remarkably deaf to eminent generals.

While the press made Hunnish designs and American weakness the daily fare of millions of readers, a platoon of eager scribblers turned the propaganda into book-length treatises: Are We Americans Cowards or Fools?; America and the German Peril; The Game of Empires: A Warning to the United States (preface by Roosevelt); Are We Ready? (preface by General Wood); The Conquest of America: USA, AD 1921. In America Fallen: A Sequel to the European War, the author, an editor of Scientific American, described how a German armada would capture Philadelphia and Washington and force a hapless United States to pay a $20 billion indemnity to retrieve them. Like so many other preparedness effusions, it was bought up and distributed free by the Navy League. In Defenseless America, Hudson Maxim, brother of the Maxim gun's inventor, provided an enterprising New York film company with subject matter for a sensational movie, The Battle Cry of Peace. Opening in New York City on September 9, 1915, the movie showed in alluring detail a sinister, Hunnish-looking enemy laying waste to New York. True to the crypto-interventionist pretense that they were trying only to preserve peace, the movie was advertised in the press as "A Call to Arms-Against War." Day after day, week after week, for months the deluge of alarmist propaganda poured over the country from New York City. "Not a mail pouch is opened in a second-class post office," said a Texas member of Congress, "that does not carry hundreds of letters, circulars, magazines and newspapers urging us to hurry up our preparations before the bogie man gets us."

By midsummer the crypto-interventionists, taking advantage of the feminist movement, began recruiting their own wives and daughters for the preparedness cause. On July 10, for example, the Navy League created a "woman's section" of "prominent women" who were to organize "patriotic national defense pageants" ...

p232

Yet for all the noise and the shouting, for all the shows, pageants, and "prominent women," the preparedness movement made few converts to preparedness. Confined chiefly to lower Manhattan and upper Fifth Avenue, the handiwork of stand-pat Republicans and corporate "patriots for profit (as the movement's Wall Street adherents were widely known), the movement utterly lacked popular support. That Germany had either the will or the means to invade America at the close of a supremely exhausting war was, as an Ohio legislator put it, "the most preposterous proposition that was ever exploited." Most Americans agreed. The preparedness agitators, however, scarcely expected to convince Americans that Germany was soon to invade us. Their propaganda had quite other aims in mind. Under the pretense of discussing national defense, they were trying, first, to label Germany as America's endemic enemy, and the Allies, by implication, as America's first line of defense. Far more important, the crypto-interventionists were trying to change the question before the nation. Men who tried to discuss the issues of war and peace were to be compelled in the preparedness frenzy to discuss questions of national defense instead. Men who criticized Wilson's diplomacy-Bryan most conspicuously themselves forced to defend unpreparedness and suffer ready defamation for trying.

p233

To bring America into the war, truth had to be defamed, honest critics silenced, and free speech suppressed. The crypto-interventionists were equal to the task. "Preparedness" had as many heads as the Hydra. In the summer of the Lusitania crisis, the preparedness agitators added a second theme to their original cry for military defense against Teutonic invasion. They discovered "Americanism" and portentously warned the country that America was not a nation at all but merely a weak, disunited hodge-podge of unreliable immigrants.

p234

The reformers in the country were almost universally opposed to a military buildup. They saw in preparedness not so much a movement for war (which still seemed remote to most reformers) as a movement led by their inveterate political enemies to defeat reform. "War preparations and emphasis upon militarism," as Frederick Howe put it, "is national suicide to all the things I am interested in."

p235

Wilson's press outlet, the New York World, encouraged the preparedness agitators with inspired stories from the White House: The President favored a navy second to none; the President was personally drawing up military defense plans; the President intended to make national defense the main theme of his December message to Congress. At the Governors' Conference in August, Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels interrupted the usual discussion of state-level affairs by calling for a greatly enlarged navy. At the end of the conference, a half dozen governors, taking the obvious cue from the White House, rose up to urge their fellow governors to return home and organize "a propaganda for preparedness." In the crypto-interventionist agitation to get Americans into "the proper mental attitude" for war, the hand of the President was everywhere; only his powerful voice had yet to be heard."

Like his fellow proponents of war, Wilson, too, was determined to defame the foreign-born in order to silence all who dared speak for the overwhelming majority of Americans.

p237

On Sunday, August 15, the World spread across its front page the first of its five-installment report on Germany's "elaborate scheme to control and influence the press of the United States." Editors who took their war news and opinions directly from England professed horror at Germany's nefarious designs. On August 16, the World, determined to portray the subventions as a limitless plot, branded them a "Conspiracy Against the United States." Other New York newspapers took up the cry. The Sun called the subventions "sowing the seeds of treason." The Herald divined in them "a plot to ruin America." The Evening Sun likened Germany's propaganda efforts to "political assassination," the assassination by just criticism of President Wilson. The Evening World called it a "conspiracy on a colossal scale .

p238

For outspoken native Americans there was no safety either. In a vicious organized whispering campaign launched in August, Georgia's Senator Smith was accused of being on the German government payroll. The senator had dared to assert in public that the British blockade violated international law. When Bryan criticized 'Wilson's views on preparedness, the entire party press savagely assailed the former secretary of state for being "un-American." Stunned by the charge, Bryan asked in a press statement, "When did it become unpatriotic for a citizen to differ from a President?" The answer to that was simple, too. Ever since the powerful and the privileged had united behind Wilson to drag an unwilling people into an unnecessary war.

p238

Determined to break the "bonds" of American antiwar sentiment, Wilson decided in early October that it was politically safe to take public charge of the crypto-war agitation. On October 6, the President, in an address before the Civilian Advisory Board of the Navy, came out strongly for a military buildup; overwhelming public sentiment (which was nonexistent) had persuaded him: "I think the whole Nation is convinced that we ought to be prepared, not for war, but for defense, and very adequately prepared." America needed a mighty military establishment, said Wilson, to "command the respect of the world" and safeguard America's "mission."

... Nor did the President neglect the new repressive theme of / "Americanism." Five days after his preparedness speech 'Wilson, in an address to the Daughters of the American Revolution, called upon "loyal" Americans to assail all "disloyal" critics of his foreign policy. "Hazing," Wilson slyly pointed out, was an old college custom and an excellent one for adults to practice. And who was to be "hazed" by the "loyal" at Wilson's behest? "Everybody," said the President, "who is not to the very core of his heart an American." In detecting the disloyal "heart," Wilson advised the D.A.R., there was one acid test to apply: "Is it America first or is it not?" A President who put both the interests of a belligerent and his own ambitions ahead of the good of America, was calling for vigilante action against anyone who dared say so-in the name of "America first."

On November 4, the President, in a major address, made a still more urgent appeal for preparedness and vigilante "Americanism."

... "Unfortunately, warned the President, "voices have been raised in America" which disagreed, voices "which spoke alien sympathies." He called upon "the Nation" to "rebuke" all such people and drown out their voices "in the deep unison of a common, unhesitating national feeling." Having once again invited the war faction to browbeat his critics, Wilson concluded, "Let us lift our eyes to the great tracts of life yet to be conquered in the interests of a righteous peace."

'Ugly and repressive though the atmosphere was growing, "great tracts of life" in America remained stubbornly unconquered by Wilson and the war party. The President's speech aroused a storm of opposition around the country. In mass meetings and angry editorials, reformers of every kind thundered their opposition to preparedness. Farm organizations, almost unanimously, registered their adamant opposition to a military buildup.

... The public outcry drove home a painful truth to Wilson. Despite the "hazing" and "rebukes," despite the risk, as Senator La Follette said, of being denounced "as a fool, a coward or a traitor," liberty in America still menaced the President's ambitions. Too many Americans were still unafraid to speak in behalf of the great majority of the American people. Wilson felt forced to take sterner measures. What those measures should be Wilson outlined on December 7, 1915, in his annual message to Congress, one of the most astonishing speeches ever delivered by an American President. Its sole theme, as the World had rightly reported, was preparedness, which now embraced, according to the President, not merely "military efficiency and security" but "industrial and vocational education" as well. Once again Wilson took pains to assure progressives that he had in mind "no thought of any immediate or particular danger arising out of our relations with other nations. We are at peace with all the nations of the world." The real danger to America was not military but political, not external but internal.

"The gravest threats against our national peace and safety have been uttered within our own borders. There are citizens of the United States, I blush to admit, born under other flags... who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life." Yet the government, said the President, stood by helpless to deal with those threatening the nation's security from within. He wanted Congress to pass legislation to enable him to "close down over them at once." On December 7, 1915, one hundred fifteen years after the infamous Sedition Act had helped destroy the Federalist Party forever, Woodrow Wilson was suggesting n vain) that Congress make criticism of his foreign policy a criminal act."

"We Do Not Covet Peace At The Cost Of Honor"

p253

Not everyone was deceived, for common sense is not so easily confounded. On January 5, 1916, Wesley Jones of Washington took the floor of the Senate to point out that the President's actions were not responsible for peace and to suggest, albeit delicately, that his intentions might be other than pacific. "The President," said Senator Jones, "has been highly commended for keeping us out of the war in Europe. I want to give him all the praise he deserves, but it has not been a question of keeping us out of this struggle. The people have not wanted to get into it. The question has been not to lead us into it, and I beseech the President now to be careful, to proceed slowly, to make no harsh or arbitrary demands, to keep in view the rights of 99,999,000 people at home rather than of the 1,000 reckless, inconsiderate and unpatriotic citizens who insist on going abroad in belligerent ships and that he do not lead us into a position that means trouble or humiliation." The American traveler on a belligerent ship, said Senator Jones, "is entitled to no consideration whatever, and for this country to become embroiled in this trouble on his account would be a colossal crime against humanity"

Unfortunately for the peace of the country, Senator Jones was a member of a congressional minority, an ill-sorted collection of insurgent Republicans, progressive reformers, and rural Democrats, for the most part, who genuinely believed that American intervention in the European war was suicidally insane ...

... Wilson was understandably "disturbed" that he still had strong vocal critics in Congress, for his war course depended on the American people's enjoying virtually no voice whatever in the councils of government.

...Behind the silence lay an elementary fact of congressional politics. The prowar legislators simply could not say in the free political space of a congressional chamber what they said with impunity outside it. The crypto-war propaganda consisted chiefly of lies and f distortions. Wilson's supporters triumphed over his critics chiefly L by slandering their character, impugning their patriotism, and drowning them out "in the deep unison of a common, unhesitating" contempt for the "national feeling." The free and formal atmosphere of parliamentary debate, however, placed the crypto-interventionist majority at a severe disadvantage. Outside Congress they could defend the British blockade, for example, by praising the idealism of the Allies. To do so inside Congress was grossly unneutral not discreet," as one Ohio Republican admonished a pro-British colleague. Outside Congress, the interventionists could shout "America first" at a critic of 'Wilson's partiality to Britain. Inside Congress that lying retort invited the all-too-obvious rejoinder that those who shouted "America first" really meant "England first." Outside Congress, the prowar faction could call 'Wilson's defense of safe travel a sacred obligation of "national honor" and defame skeptics as "peace-at-any-price men." On the floor of a legislative chamber, however, it was not so easy to answer a legislator who asked-as blind Senator Thomas Gore of Oklahoma asked in early January-why a "single citizen should be allowed to run the risk of drenching this Nation in blood merely in order that he may travel upon a belligerent rather than a neutral vessel." And of course it was forbidden to impugn the motives of a fellow legislator. Wilson's policy in "the European matter" simply did not bear up under calm scrutiny in a free political atmosphere. The President's legislative understrappers prudently preferred not to discuss it at all.

What was true of Wilson's foreign policy was equally true of the crypto-war agitation in general. Outside Congress it was easy enough to sound the alarm about German invasions of New York. Inside Congress, however, antipreparedness legislators readily mocked such preposterous bogies and had no trouble deriding the dubious "patriotism of the Dupont Powder Company" and all the other profiteers for preparedness. Outside Congress it was, easy enough to impugn the patriotism of "hyphenated Americans." However, when Augustus Gardner did so on the floor of the House in early January his fellow Republicans soundly rebuked him for using "intemperate and reckless" language and for trying to "fan the flame of racial hatred." The political atmosphere inside Congress and outside it were as distinctive as two different countries. Whatever prowar legislators did outside the legislative chambers, in Congress assembled they dared do no more than give the President as free a hand as possible until he succeeded in making war seem "inevitable" to the American people. Until then they preferred keeping Congress out of European affairs entirely.

p271

... the House of Representatives ... had demonstrated - in fact, for the first time - that not even overwhelming public sentiment could compel a majority of House members to hamper him in any way regardless of how dubious the position he took, regardless of how questionable his motives had become, regardless of how modest, how sensible, and how reasonable a popular gesture of dissent might be.

p273

... on February 25 [1914] [the Senate] took an unusual step to silence its small but redoubtable antiwar minority. Faced with a travel warning introduced that day by Senator Gore, the Senate voted to go into continuous legislative session, a parliamentary device by which each succeeding day was deemed to be February 25, thereby preventing antiwar senators from introducing the travel question into the business of the "day," which was to last until March 2. "Every effort was made to prevent discussion" of armed merchantmen, said a Republican senator shortly after the gag was removed. Determined to protect a vulnerable President from public opinion and those elected officials who still gave it voice, the war party in Congress had thrown up a cordon of silence around Wilson while the party press prated noisily about "Germans" in Congress, "conspiracy" against the President, and "America First."

p274

"Divided counsels in Congress" were not to be borne; unanimity of opinion was essential. But how does a parliamentary body demonstrate unanimity by a vote that could not possibly be unanimous? There was only one way to do so: by voting its opinion that it had no right to an opinion-the unanimity of silence. This was well understood by everyone in Congress. What Wilson wanted, said an angry Senator La Follette, was "nothing less than a complete denial of any intent or purpose to express an opinion or offer advice." The President, said La Follette, wanted Congress to "unconditionally surrender all right to voice the popular will," to grant him "unprecedented" and unconstitutional "one-man power" over foreign policy while Congress "was to keep silent in all that pertains to foreign affairs."

On the face of it, the Senate should have risen up in fury against Wilson's arrogant presumption. A strong voice in foreign affairs had been the Senate's jealously guarded prerogative since the founding of the Republic. In the past, when it chose to assert its power, the Senate had not scrupled to entrench upon even the rightful diplomatic prerogatives of a President. It would soon do so again-at the expense of Woodrow Wilson. On the face of it, Senator Lodge should have led the revolt against Wilson's unprecedented claims, for no senator was more zealous than Lodge in asserting the Senate's prerogatives in foreign affairs. He had done so in the past and he would do so again-at the expense of Woodrow Wilson. For the present, however, the war party in Congress could ill afford constitutional scruples. Extraordinary as Wilson's claims were, they perfectly suited the war party's extraordinary needs. To bring America into the war the popular will had) to go unvoiced in Congress; congressional criticism of Wilson's policies had to be branded as improper "interference" with a President. To bring a people who opposed war into war, Wilson had to be given exactly what he asked for-complete and unhampered control over foreign affairs. Such being the need of the hour, the war party in Congress, led by Lodge himself, agreed at once to declare that Congress had no right to a voice in the European matter.

The parliamentary procedure for doing so was to vote not on the merits of a travel resolution-McLemore's in the House, Gore's in the Senate-but on a motion to table it, a vote, that is, which registered the required opinion that Congress considered itself without right to an opinion. The motion to table had the additional merit of permitting no prior debate. On March 2, the Senate, in an extraordinary act of voluntary self-abasement, agreed to turn itself temporarily into an impotent self-gagged body.

p276

If opponents of war were angry, the crypto-interventionists were elated. According to the New York Times, the vote demonstrated that there were only fourteen "Germans" in the Senate, a "sorry lot," and that "there is still an America, instinct with national patriotism, hot to resent and prevent the sacrifice of the least tittle of American rights, calm and majestically strong in upholding the President who is striving in stormy times to maintain peace but with no diminution of national right, no stain upon national honor."

p278

For months, prowar spokesmen had been insisting that "loyalty" to the president was the paramount duty of a patriot, that criticizing Wilson in the European matter was "un-American" and "pro-German," that a President who was patently borrowing trouble was striving nobly to keep America out of trouble, that subservience to Britain proved devotion to "America first." Until Congress voted, those propositions had been put forth by agitators, the party press, and individual politicians. Now, for the first time, by formal vote, the Congress of the United States had lent its immense authority to the crypto-war propaganda.

... When Congress rallied around Wilson, he was weaker and more vulnerable than he had been since the outbreak of the European war. Far from bowing to the President's power, Congress had restored his power and increased it greatly, while refurbishing his tarnished reputation and saving him, in point of fact, from certain defeat in the forthcoming election. At a moment of dire peril for Wilson and his war course, Congress, dominated by the war party, had rescued both.

"A Hopelessly False Position"

p282

On March 24, a German submarine commander, prowling in the English Channel, spied through his periscope a somewhat ambiguous-looking enemy steamer. Possibly a small passenger ship, it lacked, as he noted in his log, the usual passenger ship markings. Painted black, with a bridge resembling that of a warship, it was sailing outside the routes prescribed by the British Admiralty for passenger vessels. The German commander, probably eager for a score, decided it was an enemy mine layer and sent a torpedo into its hull. Although damaged the ship was towed safely to port. Unfortunately it was not a mine layer. It was the unarmed French Channel steamer Sussex, bound for Dieppe with 325 passengers including 25 Americans, four of whom were injured in the attack. As a sensational outrage the Sussex affray was scarcely in the Lusitanian's class. It became clear soon enough that a mistake had been made. To Americans who thought as did the senator from Washington that it was a "colossal crime against humanity" for America to go to war for the sake of a few heedless travelers, the attack was a further argument for warning Americans that they sailed at their own risk on belligerent ships in the war zone. Had 'Wilson wished to avoid a major crisis he could have demanded-and he certainly would have gotten-a German disavowal of the sinking and a legal indemnity for the four injured Americans.

Wilson had no wish to avoid a major crisis. He was intent upon precipitating one.

p285

To sound out his cabinet members, Wilson read them his draft note to Germany on the pretense that it was merely a possibility he was putting forward for discussion. Cabinet members were cautioned to tell nobody about it. Speaking on April 13 at a Jefferson Day dinner, Wilson proclaimed to a throng of Democratic Party notables that "the interests of America are coincident with the interests of mankind." By now even the dimmest party fugleman could grasp that the President was referring to the sacred rights of neutral travelers and German submarine warfare. What the President wanted to know was, did the Democrats assembled at the dinner have the "courage" to go to war to defend "the interests of humanity"? The audience cheered and shouted "Yes!" On April 18 Wilson finally sent his ultimatum to Germany'

p286

Before a joint session of Congress ... Wilson explained to the country that he had taken the drastic step of an ultimatum with great reluctance. After assailing the "wanton" nature of submarine warfare and giving the gist of his note to Germany, the President insisted, as usual, that he had had no choice. "By the force of circumstances," said Wilson, America had become "the responsible spokesman for the rights of humanity" (except when Norway asked America to champion the right of neutrals not to be sunk by British mines in the North Sea). There could be no shirking our duty to humanity; dangerous though its discharge might be. As always under 'Wilson, neutral America lay haplessly ensnared in a net of inescapable obligations that perpetually imperiled our peace and neutrality."

In the bastions of "America First," 'Wilson's grim call to international duty received a predictably warm welcome. The Senate strongly approved the ultimatum. The metropolitan press favored it overwhelmingly.

p287

Americans were growing reluctant to voice "disloyal" and "un-American" opinions in a moment of crisis. Sullen submission to an odious fate, so marked in the American people after the United States entered the war, was already beginning to infect the country. The war party was winning the civil war over war."

p291

In 1916 the American people were once again called upon to elect a President. The crypto-interventionists, a bipartisan faction, were once again compelled to resume their expected partisan roles. It was an awkward situation both for Wilson and for the leaders of the Republican Party, the ostensible opposition. The Republicans could scarcely campaign on a platform of "standing by" a Democratic President: It would have made the election an open farce. Opposition of some kind was required and there was no doubt what kind would make a Republican victory certain. Republican leaders had only to nominate a candidate who stood convincingly for peace. Let him campaign with full party backing on a policy of genuine neutrality; let him contrast that policy with Wilson's partiality to Britain; let him point out to the electorate that such partiality endangered our neutrality and invited embroilment in the European war. The Republican candidate who offered that opposition would have won the presidency in a landslide. The Democratic Party was weak in the country. Wilson himself was widely disliked or distrusted despite his bipartisan support.

p292

For Republican leaders, however, running an antiwar candidate on a platform of genuine neutrality presented a fatal difficulty. They would win the election but lose the war. To endorse antiwar sentiment in America, to assert that Wilson's foreign policy rather than German villainy endangered the peace, would destroy all chance of dragging America into an "inevitable" conflict. Once pry loose the lid on American public opinion and there was no calculating the force of the eruption. So far from winning the presidency at so steep a price certain Republican leaders, Lodge and Root in particular, urged Republicans to go before the country as an all but open war party.

p293

Between their fear of losing the war and their fear of sundering the party, the Republican oligarchy adopted a two-step compromise strategy. At the national convention in Chicago the oligarchy, for the sake of party unity, nominated a man free of any interventionist taint and put through a moderate platform which actually called for "honest neutrality." They then turned around during the ensuing campaign and virtually forced their chosen candidate to take an unpopular, bellicose line.

The oligarchy's chosen nominee-he had no serious rivals-was Charles Evans Hughes, Supreme Court justice since 1910 and the perfect "available man" for national convention purposes. Remembered as mildly progressive, Hughes, as a member of the Court, had taken no part in the bitter intraparty struggles of 1912 nor had he uttered a single public word about the European matter. Respected and above all untainted, Hughes enjoyed enormous initial advantages over the President, whom Americans by a considerable margin were strongly inclined to be rid of. Among the Republican nominee's assets was Roosevelt's well-known dislike of him. The former President, returning to the Republican fold after killing off his dying Progressive Party, was so desperately truculent that anyone he publicly disapproved of enjoyed a virtual certificate of pacific intentions. Nor was Hughes an interventionist in 1916. In a private interview with Oswald Villard, the New York publisher, he sharply attacked Wilson for, in his own words, "maneuvering the country into a position where war may be a necessity."

Had Hughes said that plainly and clearly in public, 'Wilson's chances for reelection would have been nil. Unfortunately for Hughes, the Republican oligarchy did not want their candidate telling the electorate home truths that imperiled the war. They wanted Wilson attacked as a pacifist, not as a warhawk disguised, and their demands could not be disregarded. If Hughes defied the oligarchy the party organization would knife his candidacy and the results would be fatal: No nonincumbent candidate for the presidency ever won the office over his own party's opposition.

p296

Wilson placed his own hopes for reelection on grounds other than peace. His only chance for victory lay in winning the support of millions of independent progressive Republicans who were now virtually partyless. They wanted peace and they wanted further reforms, which in themselves seemed to betoken peace. The President, who had declared the "bad dream" of reform at an end in 1914 and who had opposed every reform measure since then, decided he had no choice but to become a progressive reformer once again. In the winter of 1915 'Wilson had opposed as "class legislation" federally backed credits for farmers. In 1916 he switched and supported it-it became law on July 17. Previously he had opposed on states' rights grounds federal child-labor legislation. He now switched and supported it-it became law on September 1. Under intense pressure from reformers Wilson supported the first genuinely graduated income tax in American history to finance the costs of preparedness. He pushed through legislation that mandated the eight-hour workday on the nation's railroads-it became law on September 3. He claimed in his first formal campaign speech that he was now the champion of "social justice," which is to say, of everything he had opposed six months before.

Wilson's 1916 reforms were an impressive, if expedient, performance. Yet despite the reforms, despite Hughes's compromised campaign, despite the vote-repelling rant of Roosevelt, a clear majority of the voters were still inclined as of late September to get rid of Woodrow Wilson. The President's reversion to reform had helped him greatly, but the paramount issue in the country was peace.

p297

To kill Hughes with Roosevelt became the Democrats' closing campaign theme. Roosevelt, quite obviously, was a warmonger; Roosevelt spoke for a bellicose Republican leadership. Who then was the Republican candidate? The answer, said the Democrats, was obvious: He was a man in "complete accord with Roosevelt," a warmonger thinly disguised. For Hughes it was a painful accusation and a bitterly ironic one, for Roosevelt detested him, wanted him to lose, and thought his very nomination proof that America was "yellow." To the Democrats' accusation, however, Hughes had no adequate reply. Struggle and squirm though he tried, he dared not repudiate Roosevelt. Approving Roosevelt's violent speeches was one of the Republican oligarchy's ground rules, and Hughes feared to breach them. Unless party leaders got out every regular Republican vote on election day, he no longer had a chance to win. Indeed, the more he had curried their favor at the cost of votes the more urgently he needed their favor. With his once formidable lead melting away, the hapless Hughes was reduced in the final days of the campaign to crying up the virtues of the protective tariff, the only safe issue Republican leaders allowed him. As Wilson himself rightly observed, Hughes was "in a hopelessly false position."

While Hughes spread the Republican gospel of 1884, the Democrats hammered away at the Hughes-is-Roosevelt theme to the end.

p299

Until the California votes were tabulated the day after the election, the outcome remained in doubt. By the slender margin of 3,773 votes, Wilson carried the normally Republican state and with it the election. Contemporaries cited Hughes's preference for California's stand-pat Republicans over the dominant progressive Republicans for his loss of the state and the presidency. If so, it was the perfect epitome of his entire campaign. Running strongly in the Middle West and West, where Democrats usually fared poorly, Wilson had actually eked out his victory by capturing the antiwar reform wing of the national Republican Party, whom Republican leaders had spurned throughout the campaign. Wilson's reelection has often been regarded as a great personal triumph, but it was nothing of the kind. Had the Republican oligarchy allowed its candidate to campaign as he wished, Wilson would have gone down to a decisive, humiliating defeat. His reelection was the gift of a Republican oligarchy that preferred to see a Democrat lead the country into war rather than risk having no war at all.

  • Walter Karp -- Book Excerpt 5

Walter Karp -- Book Excerpt 5

"The National Conscience Is Clear",

"The Old America That Was Free and Is Now Dead"

excerpted from the book

The Politics of War

the story of two wars which altered forever the political life of the American republic

by Walter Karp

Franklin Square Press, 1979, paper

"The National Conscience Is Clear"

p300

For twenty months Wilson had been maneuvering America toward war without any troublesome misgivings. Insulated by a carapace of catch phrases-"service to mankind," "democracy against autocracy," "German militarism," "immutable law," "the dictates of humanity" "permanent peace," "association of nations"-the President had disregarded everything save the noble vision of himself delivering mankind from the scourge of war.

p308

On January 15 when the Germans, in a last-ditch effort to avert war, proposed moderate terms in a second reply to Wilson's note, the President did not even bother to inform the Allies, although they opened up prospects for a negotiated settlement. He regarded the offer as a mere German ruse to gain the good will of Americans and thereby forestall war with the United States. That Wilson could not possibly allow.

p310

On January 10, with German hopes for a negotiated peace reduced to the merest flicker, German military leaders finally persuaded a reluctant, rattled Kaiser Wilhelm to gamble the future of his country on submarine warfare conducted without restriction of any kind. German submarines were to sink on sight every merchantman found in the war zone, neutral as well as belligerent. According to the German Admiralty, only through an absolute blockade could German submarines deliver the swift fatal blow to the enemy on which the whole immense gamble depended. The German high command no longer seriously cared about keeping America neutral. The price had become too high, for it was Wilson's protection of the British munitions traffic and his support of the British blockade that made possible the Allies' deadly war of attrition.

p311

For Wilson the war "to end war" was now clearly in view. He had only to sit back, it seemed, and wait for German submarines to give him no choice. With understandable optimism, the President, on February 6, informed his bellicose cabinet that he was "passionately" resolved to avoid any act of hostility toward Germany or to commit even the smallest breach in punctilious neutrality. "If we are to have war," said Wilson, "we must go in with our hands clean." With Germany planning to sink neutral ships on sight, Wilson decided not to make an issue of American travelers killed on belligerent vessels. The exalted "human right" to travel safely on belligerent merchantmen had never seemed very important to most Americans. Since it was only Wilson's pretext for conflict with Germany, the President preferred to make the sinking of an American freighter, rather than the death of an American traveler, the "overt act" that necessitated war. Having served its purpose, the "sacred" right to safe travel was quietly shelved by the President had been exalting it for so long.

By now the large antiwar majority in America was virtually impotent to block 'Wilson's war course. Eventually some American ships, drawn by the lure of high profits, would leave their home ports. Eventually one of them would be sunk. The President would ask Congress for a declaration of war and Congress would enthusiastically oblige. Short of a spontaneous national insurrection there was nothing the American people could do to alter that inevitable sequence of events. Nevertheless, it was they who would have to do the fighting. It was they who would have to be persuaded, once war was declared, that German submarine attacks on American freighters justified a mass conscript army, total mobilization of the national economy, and the dispatch of an armed host to the blood-soaked battlefields of Europe. That prospect was so alien to all American experience, so contrary to all American tradition, that it was to remain beyond the imagining of most Americans until the reality itself burst in upon them. That millions of Americans, even in wartime, might resist conscription and prevent the dispatch of an expeditionary army was a possibility that filled Wilson with dread To protect his future war from popular dissent the administration was already drafting an "espionage" bill that 'Wilson was shortly to use in the severest assault on political liberty ever launched by an American President. In short, if Americans were going to fight the massive land war Wilson intended to wage, it was not only imperative that he get American freighters sunk it was equally imperative to convince Americans that the sinkings were a causus belli sufficiently provocative to justify reprisal on an unprecedented scale.

On February 17, a mere eleven days after vowing "passionately" to act peacefully and punctiliously, Wilson disclosed to a number of Senate Democrats his bold solution to the dual problem facing him: getting American freighters in the war zone to be sunk and persuading the electorate that the sinkings constituted an act of war against America itself. The President intended to arm American freighters with U.S. Navy guns, man them with U.S. Navy gun crews, and authorize them to attack submarines in the war zone. By putting America's private commerce with a belligerent under official military protection, Wilson meant to declare as emphatically as possible that such commerce, so far from being a private affair, involved a government obligation so binding that the sinking of an American freighter could only be regarded as an act of war against the United States itself. The chief purpose of Wilson's plan-"armed neutrality," he called it-was to persuade the American people that what they stubbornly regarded as private was inescapably public, which is to say, its chief purpose was domestic war propaganda.

p315

Had the President intended only to arm freighters trading in noncontraband with England he had strong justification for doing I so, given Germany's submarine declaration. Wilson, however, was determined to put navy guns on American ships carrying munitions to England. The President had neither the obligation nor the warrant to arm such ships. The very opposite was true. Neutral ships carrying contraband to a belligerent sail for their own private profit and assume their own private risks; they are legally subject to capture and destruction. For the neutral America to protect by force a private munitions trade with a belligerent was far worse than a gross breach of neutrality. It constituted an act of war in itself. Worse yet, it was a wholly gratuitous act. So far from assuming a time-honored obligation Wilson hoped to evade a time-honored obligation, the obligation President Washington recognized in 1793 when he publicly proclaimed that Americans shipping contraband of war to belligerents "will not receive the protection of the United States." Even Wilson's secretary of the navy, Josephus Daniels, warned the President that if he armed ships carrying war contraband and authorized them to attack submarines he would be violating Germany's acknowledged right to seize and destroy them.

To all such legal considerations the President turned a deaf ear. International law was "sacred" to Wilson only if it led to war with Germany.

p319

On February 27 Wilson introduced into Congress an armed neutrality bill, drafted by himself, authorizing him not only to arm American freighters but "to employ such other instrumentalities and methods.. . to protect such vessels and the citizens of the United States in their lawful and peaceful pursuits on the high seas." Under the proposed legislation Wilson could, if he chose, use American battleships to protect American traffic in munitions and start a war at sea at once. That Congress would approve the measure swiftly and overwhelmingly Wilson had no reason to doubt. Congress was avid for war. One cloud only loomed up on the President's horizon: the formidable figure of Senator La Follette himself. Like a battlescarred lion rudely awakened from his slumbers, an aroused La Follette, grim and angry, was determined to give battle to Wilson and stop him, if possible, in his tracks. As in the days of the tariff fight against Aldrich, the Wisconsin senator quickly rounded up insurgent Republican members of the dwindling peace faction Norris, Cummins, Gronna of North Dakota, Works of California - for a concerted assault on the armed ship bill. With the 64th Congress scheduled to expire at noon, March 4, La Follette's immediate objective was to block a final vote on the measure. More important, La Follette was fighting for time-time to expose the perils and shams of armed neutrality, time to marshal the antiwar sentiments of the American people. Then let Wilson call the new Congress into special session if he dared. In the long roster of American senators, few, if any, could match La Follette's fighting courage and tenacity. It was a man of heroic stature who was now about to stand up with a handful of allies to challenge the President and the legions of the war party."

p322

On the afternoon of March 4 the President released to the press a scathing statement virtually accusing La Follette and his colleagues of treason to their country. "A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great Government of the United States helpless and contemptible." The statement was itself an extraordinary act, for never before had a President singled out members of the Senate for such savage public denunciation. Wilson's purport was unmistakable: "This President who abhors war" wanted the nation's chief antiwar spokesmen politically destroyed.

p326

If it was too late to avert war, it was not too late for La Follette to expose the lies and false dealings by which a sovereign people were now being j, pushed into the bloodiest war in history."

At 4 P.M. on April 4, Senator La Follette took the floor of the upper chamber to deliver one of the bravest speeches ever made in the United States Senate. The speech, a long one, began slowly with a close discussion of armed neutrality, the now-forgotten cause célébre of the previous month. The President, La Follette pointed out, had been utterly wrong about the arming of American freighters. He had now admitted as much himself. Yet with what confidence had he held up to scorn those who had dared say he was wrong. Two days ago the President again came before Congress equally confident of his judgment. Was he, asked La Follette, perhaps equally wrong again? "Let us with the earnestness and singleness of purpose which the momentous nature of the question involves be calm enough and brave enough to examine further the President's address of April 2." Then, with a cold and noble fury, La Follette proceeded to tear to shreds, pretense by pretense, distortion by distortion, the glib propagandist's appeal for war that the President of the United States had seen fit to put before an ostensibly free people.

The President had emphasized, said La Follette, Germany's broken submarine "promise." The diplomatic record showed otherwise. "The promise, so-called, of the German government was conditional upon England's being brought to obedience of international law in her naval warfare." Nobody would contend that this had been done. "Was it quite fair to lay before the country a statement which implies that Germany had made an unconditional promise which she had dishonestly violated?... The public mind should be calm, not inflamed" by its President. The President had dwelt long on Germany's violation of international law. "Would it not be well to say also that it was England, not Germany, who refused to obey the Declaration of London?... Keep that in mind. Would it not have been fair to say, and to keep in mind, that Germany offered to abide by those principles and England refused?" The President had said that German submarine warfare against commerce was "a war against all nations," but "is it not a little peculiar that if Germany's warfare is against all nations the United States is the only nation that regards it necessary to declare war on that account?" Does that fact not suggest in itself that "Germany's conduct under the circumstances does not merit from any nation which is determined to preserve its neutrality a declaration of war?"

The President had said he was a "sincere friend" of the German people. How, asked La Follette, did he now propose to demonstrate his friendship? He had told us: by "the utmost practicable cooperation" with Germany's enemies. "Practicable cooperation with England and her allies in starving to death the old men and women, the children, the sick and the maimed of Germany." Let us, said La Follette, mocking Wilson's own phrase, "throw pretense to the winds." The President wanted the United States to wage war on the side of the "hereditary enemies of Germany." When we did so, their purpose would "become our purpose." Did the President think that when the war was over Great Britain would be unable "to bend us to her purposes and compel compliance with her demands?"

The President, of course, professed higher goals. The President said this was a war "for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own government." That, said La Follette, was indeed an "exalted sentiment." In accordance with it, the President looked forward to the overthrow of German autocracy. Why not the dissolution of the British Empire? "The President has not suggested that we make our support of Great Britain conditional to her granting home rule to Ireland, or Egypt or India." Russia's tsar had been overthrown two weeks ago, "but it will hardly be contended that if Russia was still an autocratic Government, we would not be asked to enter this alliance with her just the same." Indeed, a President who told the people of Germany they could have peace only by "giving up their Government" had a very strange notion of self-government. The President made "a profession of democracy that is linked in action with the most brutal and domineering use of autocratic power. Are the people of this country being so well represented in this war movement that we need to go abroad to give other people control of their governments?... It ill becomes us to offer as an excuse for our entry into the war the unsupported claim that this war was forced upon the German people by their government 'without their previous knowledge or approval.' Who has registered the knowledge or approval of the American people of the course this Congress is called upon to take in declaring war upon Germany?... The espionage bills, the conscription bills and other forcible military measures which we understand are being ground out of the war machine in this country is the complete proof that those responsible for this war fear that it has no popular support." So much for Wilson's "profession of democracy" and his devotion to government by the consent of the governed.

Leaving Wilson's war message where it lay, Senator La Follette then turned to Wilson's diplomatic record of false neutrality. It was not Germany, La Follette noted, who first disregarded the rules of international law. It was England. It was not Germany who refused to accede to our protests. It was England. It was not Germany who first sank neutral ships without warning. It was England, when she sowed the entire North Sea with submarine mines. Yet what did the Wilson administration do in the face of that act "unheard of before in the history of the world"? It "agreed to the lawless act of Great Britain .... The present administration has never uttered a word of protest .... The only reason why we have not suffered the sacrifice of just as many ships and just as many lives from the violation of our rights by the war zone and submarine mines of Great Britain as we have through the unlawful acts of Germany in making her war zone in violation of our neutral rights is simply because we have submitted to Great Britain's dictation." Having "acquiesced in England's action without protest, it is proposed that we now go to war with Germany for identically the same action on her part." Worse yet, it was proposed that we do so by the President in utter disregard for his own "moral responsibility for the position in which Germany has been placed by our collusion and cooperation with Great Britain. By suppressing the rule with regard to neutral rights in Great Britain's case, we have been actively aiding her in starving the civil population of Germany. We have helped to drive Germany into a corner, her back to the wall, to fight with what weapons she can lay hands on..."

Because of Wilson's policy of "collusion and cooperation" with one of the belligerents, America's neutral rights were no longer a just ground for war. "We from early in the war threw our neutrality to the winds by permitting England to make a mockery of it to her advantage against her chief enemy." That had been the President's policy. He had claimed the right as a neutral to enforce the rules of war against one belligerent and not against its enemy. He made that claim formally and explicitly, noted La Follette, in his May 8, 1916, Sussex note to Germany when he insisted that Britain's violation of America's neutral rights was no concern of its enemy. That note "misstates the law; it asserts a principle that can not be maintained for one moment with a decent regard for equal rights between nations with whom we are dealing upon a basis of equality." The President had no right to make such an assertion, for no neutral enjoys such a right. "There can be no greater violation of our neutrality than the requirement that one of two belligerents shall adhere to the settled principles of law and that the other shall have the advantage of not doing so." Because of Wilson's false neutrality, America had lost the character of a neutral; America could no longer claim absolute neutral rights. Because of Wilson's violation of neutrality, our neutral rights were no longer absolute but "relative." Yet the President who worked in "collusion" for two years with one of the belligerents now was asking Congress to declare war against its enemy in defense of the very neutral rights he himself had wantonly compromised. Such were the false and dishonest grounds of the President's proposal for hurling America "into the bottomless pit of the European conflict."

As La Follette spoke, senators one by one left their seats and headed for the cloakroom. It was not a pleasant speech for most senators to hear, but La Follette was not really speaking to his fellow senators. In a sense he was not even speaking to the American people. More than anything else, he was speaking for the record on which he hoped one day they might act. "There is always lodged, and always will be, thank the God above us, power in the people supreme. Sometimes it sleeps, sometimes it seems the sleep of death; but, sir, the sovereign power of the people never dies. It may be suppressed for a time, it may be misled, be fooled, silenced. I think, Mr. President, that it is being denied expression now. I think there will come a day when it will have expression. The poor, sir, who are the ones called upon to rot in the trenches, have no organized power, have no press to voice their will on this question of war and peace; but, oh, Mr. President, at some time they will be heard .... There will come an awakening; they will have their day and they will be heard." On that day of awakening, hopefully, they would remember not the glib, dishonest phrases of a hypocrite President, but the dense honest utterance of the valiant senator from Wisconsin."

When La Follette finished his speech at 6:45 P.M., with tears of grief and unspent anger streaming down his face, one reporter in the press gallery turned to his friend and said: "That is the greatest speech we will either of us ever hear. It will not be answered because it is unanswerable." A few hours later the Senate voted for war 82 to 6-Norris, Stone, Gronna, Vardaman, and Henry Lane of Oregon joining La Follette in a final courageous dissent. The next day the House voted with the Senate, 373 to 50. Woodrow Wilson at last had his war.

"The Old America That Was Free and Is Now Dead"

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The triumph of Wilson and the war party struck the American Republic a blow from which it has never recovered. If the mainspring of a republican commonwealth-its "active principle," in Jefferson's words-is the perpetual struggle against oligarchy and privilege, against private monopoly and arbitrary power, then that mainspring was snapped and deliberately snapped by the victors in the civil war over war.

The sheer fact of war was shattering in itself. Deaf to the trumpets and the fanfare, the great mass of Americans entered the war apathetic, submissive, and bitter. Their honest sentiments had been trodden to the ground, their judgment derided, their interests ignored. Representative government had failed them at every turn. A President, newly reelected, had betrayed his promise to keep the peace. Congress, self-emasculated, had neither checked nor balanced nor even seriously questioned the pretexts and pretensions of the nation's chief executive. The free press had shown itself to be manifestly unfree-a tool of the powerful and a voice of the "interests." Every vaunted progressive reform had failed as well. Wall Street bankers, supposedly humbled by the Wilsonian reforms, had impudently clamored for preparedness and war. The Senate, ostensibly made more democratic through the direct election of senators, had proven as impervious as ever to public opinion. The party machines, supposedly weakened by the popular primary, still held elected officials in their thrall. Never did the powerful in America seem so willful, so wanton, or so remote from popular control as they did the day war with Germany began. On that day Americans learned a profoundly embittering lesson: They did not count. Their very lives hung in the balance and still they did not count. That bitter lesson was itself profoundly corrupting, for it transformed citizens into cynics, filled free men with self-loathing, and drove millions into privacy, apathy, and despair.

Deep as it was, the wound of war might have healed in time had Wilson and the war party rested content with their war. With that war alone, however, they were by no means content. Well before the war, the war party had made its aims clear. It looked forward to a new political order distinguished by "complete internal peace" and by the people's "consecration to the State." It wanted an electorate that looked upon "loyalty" to the powerful as the highest political virtue and the exercise of liberty as proof of "disloyalty." The war party wanted a free people made servile and a free republic made safe for oligarchy and privilege, for the few who ruled and the few who grew rich; in a word, for itself. The goals had been announced in peacetime. They were to be achieved under cover of war. While American troops learned to survive in the trenches, Americans at home learned to live with repression and its odious creatures-with the government spy and the government burglar, with the neighborhood stool pigeon and the official vigilante, with and the lawlessness of bigot judges, with the midnight police raid and the dragnet arrest.

In this domestic war to make America safe for oligarchy, Woodrow Wilson forged all the main weapons. Cherisher of the "unified will" in peacetime, Wilson proved himself implacable in war. Despising in peacetime all who disturbed the "unity of our national counsel," Wilson in wartime wreaked vengeance on them all. Exalted by his global mission, the ex-Princeton professor, whom one party machine had groomed for high office and whom another had been protecting for years, esteemed himself above all men and their puling cavils. He could no longer tolerate, he was determined to silence, every impertinent voice of criticism, however small and however harmless. Nothing was to be said or read in America that Wilson himself might find disagreeable. Nothing was to be said or read in America that cast doubt on the nobility of Wilson's goals, the sublimity of his motives, or the efficacy of his statecraft. Wilson's self-elating catch phrases were to be on every man's lips or those lips would be sealed by a prison term. "He seemed determined that there should be no questioning of his will," wrote Frederick Howe after personally pleading with Wilson to relent. "I felt that he was eager for the punishment of men who differed from him, that there was something vindictive in his eyes as he spoke."

By the time Wilson reached Paris in December 1918, political liberty had been snuffed out in America. "One by one the right of freedom of speech, the right of assembly, the right to petition, the right to protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, the right against arbitrary arrest, the right to a fair trial... the principle that guilt is personal, the principle that punishment should bear some proportion to the offense, had been sacrificed and ignored." So an eminent Harvard professor of law, Zechariah Chafee, reported in 1920. The war served merely as pretext. Of that there can be little doubt. In a searing civil conflict that threatened the very survival of the Republic, Americans, under Lincoln, enjoyed every liberty that could possibly be spared. In a war safely fought three thousand miles from our shores, Americans, under Wilson, lost every liberty they could possibly be deprived of.

Under the Espionage Act of June 1917, it became a felony punishable by twenty years' imprisonment to say anything that might "postpone for a single moment," as one federal judge put it, an American victory in the struggle for democracy. With biased federal judges openly soliciting convictions from the bench and federal juries brazenly packed to ensure those convictions, Americans rotted in prison for advocating heavier taxation rather than the issuance of war bonds, for stating that conscription was unconstitutional, for saying that sinking armed merchantmen had not been illegal, for criticizing the Red Cross and the YMCA. A woman who wrote to her newspaper that "I am for the people and the government is for the profiteers," was tried, convicted, and sentenced to ten years in prison. The son of the chief justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court became a convicted felon for sending out a chain letter that said the Sussex Pledge had not been unconditional. Under the Espionage Act American history itself became outlawed. When a Hollywood filmmaker released his movie epic The Spirit of '76, federal agents seized it and arrested the producer: his portrayal of the American Revolution had cast British redcoats in an unfavorable light. The film, said the court, was criminally "calculated... to make us a little bit slack in our loyalty to Great Britain in this great catastrophe." A story that had nourished love of liberty and hatred of tyranny in the hearts of American schoolchildren had become a crime to retell in Wilson's America. The filmmaker was sentenced to ten years in prison for recalling the inconvenient past.

Fear and repression worked its way into every nook and cranny of ordinary life. Free speech was at hazard everywhere. Americans were arrested for remarks made at a boarding house table, in a hotel lobby, on a train, in a private club, during private conversations overheard by the government's spies. Almost every branch of Wilson's government sprouted its own "intelligence bureau" to snoop and threaten and arrest. By 1920 the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a swaddling fattened on war, had files on two million people and organizations deemed dangerously disloyal. At the Post Office Department, Albert Burleson set up a secret index of "illegal ideas"-such as criticizing Gompers, the patriotic union leader-and banned from the mails any publication guilty of expressing one. Even if an independent paper avoided an "illegal idea," it could still be banned from the mails for betraying an "audible undertone of disloyalty," as one Post Office censor put it, in otherwise nonfelonious remarks. Under the tyranny of the Post Office, Socialist papers were suppressed outright and country editors sent to jail. Freedom of the press ceased to exist.

' Nor did the administration rely on its own bureaucratic resources alone. To cast the net of repression wider and draw the mesh finer, the Justice Department called on the "preparedness" clubs, shock troops of the war party, for help. Authorized by the Justice Department to question anyone and detain them for arrest, the prepareders fell eagerly to their task of teaching "consecration to the State" by hounding free men into jail. Where the "preparedness" clubs were thin on the ground, the Justice Department recruited its own vigilante groups-the Minute Men and the American Protective League - to enforce with the police power "the unity of our national counsel." By August 1917 Attorney General Thomas Gregory boasted that he had "several hundred thousand private citizens" working for him, "most of them as members of patriotic bodies.. . keeping an eye on disloyal individuals and making reports of disloyal utterances, and seeing that the people of the country are not deceived."'

Truth and falsity were defined by the courts. According to judicial decisions, public statements were criminally false under the Espionage Act when they contradicted the President's April 2 war message, which became, at gunpoint, the national creed, the touchstone of loyalty, and the measure of "sedition," a crime that Wilson and the war party resuscitated 118 years after it had destroyed forever the old Federalist oligarchy. This time it did not destroy oligarchy. It helped destroy "the old America that was free and is now dead," as one civil libertarian was to put it in 1920. Under the Espionage Act no one was safe except espionage agents, for under the Act not a single enemy spy was ever convicted.

The War Enemy Division of the Justice Department had more important war enemies in mind. Every element in the country that had ever disturbed the privileged or challenged the powerful Wilson and the war party were determined to crush. They were the enemy. "Both the old parties are in power," Lincoln Steffens wrote a friend during wartime. "They are the real traitors these days. They are using the emergency to get even with their enemies and fight for their cause." Radicals were ruthlessly persecuted. The International Workers of the World was virtually destroyed in September 1917 when Justice Department agents arrested 166 I.W.W. leaders for heading a strike the previous June. Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist Party's candidate for President, was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment for attributing the World War to economic interests in a speech before a Socialist gathering. Under the cloak of "patriotic bodies" and armed with the federal police power, reactionary local businessmen and machine politicians crushed local radicals and prewar insurgents. The wartime tyranny in Washington spawned and encouraged a thousand municipal tyrannies.

"It was quite apparent," Howe recalled in his memoirs, "that the alleged offenses for which people were being prosecuted were not the real offenses. The prosecution was directed against liberals, radicals, persons who had been identified with municipal ownership fights, with labor movements, with forums, with liberal papers that were under the ban." The entire prewar reform movement was destroyed in the war, said Howe, "and I could not reconcile myself to its destruction, to its voice being stilled, its integrity assailed, its patriotism questioned." The reformers "had stood for variety; for individuality; for freedom. They discovered a political state that seemed to hate these things; it wanted a servile society .... I hated the new state that had arisen, hated its brutalities, its ignorance, its unpatriotic patriotism."

Most of all, Wilson and the war party were determined to corrupt the entire body of the American people, to root out the old habits of freedom and to teach it new habits of obedience. Day after day, arrest after arrest, bond rally after bond rally, they drove home with overwhelming force the new logic of "the new state that had arisen": Dissent is disloyalty, disloyalty a crime; loyalty is servility, and servility is true patriotism. The new logic was new only in America; it is the perennial logic of every tyranny that ever was. The new state affected men differently, but it corrupted them all one way or another. The official repression drove millions of independent-minded Americans deep into private life and political solitude. Isolated, they nursed in private their bitterness and contempt - the corrupting consolation of cynicism. Millions more could not withstand the force of the new state that had risen. It was easier, by far, to surrender to the powerful and embrace their new masters, to despise with the powerful the very opinions they themselves had once held and to hound with the powerful their fellow citizens who still held them-the corrupting consolation of submission. Millions more simply bowed to the ways of oppression, to official lies and false arrests, to "slacker raids" and censored newspapers, to saying nothing, feeling nothing, and caring nothing-the corrupting consolation of apathy.

"The war has set back the people for a generation," said Hiram Johnson. "They have become slaves to the government." Yet the tolling of the bells for armistice brought no release to a corrupted and tyrannized people. To rule a free republic through hatred and fear, through censorship and repression, proved a luxury that the victors in the civil war over war refused to relinquish with the outbreak of peace. On Thanksgiving Day 1918, two weeks after the) armistice, the war party, as if on signal, began crying up a new danger to replace the Hun, a new internal menace to replace the German spy, a new object of fear and hatred, a new pretext for censorship and repression. "Bolshevism" menaced the country, declared William Howard Taft, although Communist Party members constituted a minuscule .001 percent of the American population. Bolshevik propaganda menaced America, declared a Senate committee in the middle of winding down its investigation of the nonexistent German propaganda menace. Purge the nation of "Reds," declared the National Security League, opening up its campaign against "Bolshevism" a month after completing its hunt for "pro-Germans" and three and a half years after launching its campaign for "preparedness." In Washington, the Wilson administration, too, joined in the new outcry against Bolshevism and continued to wage war unchecked against the liberties of the American people. The Post Office censorship machine continued to tyrannize the independent press. The Justice Department began deporting aliens suspected of belonging to "the anarchistic and similar classes," to cite the federal statute authorizing the mass deportations. For the first time in American history, guilt by association became a formal principle of law.

Everything seemed possible to the powerful and the privileged, so cowed by fear, so broken to repression had the American people become. Wilson even took time out from his messianic labors in Paris to urge passage of a peacetime federal sedition law, "unprecedented legislation," as Harvard's Professor Chafee put it at the time, "whose enforcement will let loose a horde of spies and informers, official and unofficial, swarming into our private life, stirring up suspicion without end." The war was over but Wilson did not want the American people to regain their freedom of speech and disturb once more "the unity of our national counsel." Although Congress never voted on the bill, the state party machines followed the President's lead. After the armistice almost every state in the Union passed laws abridging free speech. The statutes were sweeping enough in some states to satisfy a dictator's requirements. In Connecticut it became a crime to say anything that in the words of the statute, "intended to injuriously affect the Government" of Connecticut or of the United States. Striking while the iron was hot, Wilson and the war party were determined, in the immediate aftermath of war, to set up the legal machinery of permanent repression and to reconquer for oligarchy the venerable terrain of liberty in America. Fourteen months after the armistice, the New York World, awakening from its Wilsonian raptures, cried out in alarm over the new "despotism of professional politicians." The newspaper wondered why the prewar reform spirit and the prewar insurgents had died away so completely. It wondered, too, why "no other country in the world is suffering so much from professional politics" as America. There was no cause whatever to wonder. The professional politicians had won the only war they cared about, the war against a free republic that Wilson had begun in 1915 in the name of America's "mission."

Defeated in so many ways, Americans in 1919 enjoyed one grim victory of sorts. They witnessed and joined in the personal and political destruction of Woodrow Wilson, whose fall from the heights of glory was swifter and steeper than any other in our history. Ten months after an ecstatic Paris turned out to welcome the savior of the world, ten months after Europe paid him its fulsome homage, Woodrow Wilson was an utterly broken man, crippled in mind and spirit, thoroughly discredited and publicly reviled, his name a stench in his countrymen's nostrils, his deeds publicly denounced as crimes. Popular hatred, party interest, and the unbearable knowledge of what he had done to his country combined to encompass his ruin.

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While 'Wilson was still at the peace conference, Republicans, led by Senator Lodge, launched their attack on the President through a concerted attack on his League. That a large majority of Republican senators favored a League of Nations in principle, that 'Wall Street supported Wilson almost unanimously, did not deter Republican leaders. For ventilating popular hatred, Wilson's League made the perfect outlet, and the party was not about to pass it up.

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To attack Wilson's League was to assault Wilson himself. Of the actual merits and defects of the League of Nations, millions of Americans cared little. They knew only that Wilson wanted it and that was reason enough to oppose it. As the Philadelphia Public Ledger complained: "The mere fact that President Wilson wants something is not an argument against it." Wilson was reaping what he sowed. The President had robbed Americans of what they had cherished most. Now, spitefully and vindictively, millions of Americans wanted him deprived of what he cherished most. "Nine out of ten letters I get in protest against this treaty" a pro-League senator complained, "breathe a spirit of intense hatred of Woodrow 'Wilson .... That feeling forms a very large element in the opposition to this treaty." Licensed, as it were, by the Republican oligarchy, pent-up hatred of Wilson poured into the political arena. "No autocracy," shouted Republican foes of the League and audiences booed "the autocrat's" name to the rafters. "Impeach him! Impeach him!" a Chicago Coliseum audience screamed after Senator William Borah of Idaho finished assailing Wilson's League. It was no edifying spectacle, this picture of free men deliberating grave issues with little thought save personal vengeance. Yet here again Wilson reaped what he sowed. He had been the chief instrument of the Republic's degradation. Now hate-ridden millions howled for a graded revenge."

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A madman and a criminal, that was what millions of Americans now thought of their President [Wilson].

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The United States was never to ratify the Treaty of Versailles nor to enter the League of Nations. This was Wilson's final achievement. After wreaking havoc on his country for the sake of the League of Nations, Wilson strangled the League at its birth. It was a noble catch phrase once more, untarnished, sublime, justifying everything."

Contemporaries saw matters more clearly. The President was now discredited almost everywhere. His selfish, destructive course had disgraced him even in the eyes of admirers. With one year left of his term, he was utterly without power. In May Congress passed a joint resolution terminating the war with Germany. Wilson vetoed it and Congress overrode his veto. A few weeks later, the ailing, half-mad President watched in disappointment as his party nominated Governor James Cox, a party hack from Ohio, to run for his office against Senator Warren G. Harding, a party hack from the same state.

Cox never stood a chance of winning. Just as millions of Americans had cared nothing about the merits of the League of Nations, so in 1920 they cared nothing about the merits of the candidates.

The chief issue of the 1920 election was Thomas Woodrow Wilson. Wilson's enemies poured their support into Harding's campaign headquarters and it flowed in a torrent. Hatred of the President dominated the campaign. In the denunciations of Wilson the "dictator" and Wilson the "autocrat," Cox himself was virtually forgotten, buried, as the Springfield Republican put it, under a "mountain of malice." With nothing to recommend him save the fact that he was not a Democrat, Harding won the election with 16.2 million votes to Cox's 9.1 million It was the most crushing election victory ever won by a presidential candidate of no distinction whatever. The 1920 election was indeed the "great and solemn referendum" Wilson had called for, and it rendered its judgment on Wilson: guilty as charged. So ended the political career of a President whom Americans for years had been compelled to "stand by," whose lies had been deemed in the courts to be truth itself, whose honest critics had been denounced as "conspirators" and arrested as felons. On his last morning in office this terrible ruin of a man was asked to pardon Eugene Debs, rotting his life away in a federal penitentiary. Unforgiving, Wilson refused. He had pity only for himself. Today American children are taught in our schools that Wilson was one of our greatest Presidents. That is proof in itself that the American Republic has never recovered from the blow he inflicted upon it.

In 1920 Americans yearned for the "good old days" before Wilson and war, before everything had gone so wrong. They yearned in vain. The war and the war party had altered America permanently and since the war party had shaped America to serve its own interests, the change was a change for the worse. In postwar America the "despotism of professional politicians" went unchallenged. Independent citizens ceased to pester the party machines. The "good citizens" whose rise to civic consciousness had spawned the progressive movement now spurned the public arena in disgust. Wilson's hymns to "service" had made public service seem despicable. 'Wilson's self-serving "idealism" made devotion to the public good seem a sham and a fool's game. "The private life became the all in all," a chronicler of the 1920s has written. "The most diverse Americans of the twenties agreed in detestation of public life." The Babbitt replaced the political insurgent and what was left of the free public arena was a Kiwanis club lunch. In 1924 three-quarters of the electorate thought it useless to vote."

The nation's Republican rulers governed with impudence and impunity. A major administration scandal scarcely cost them a vote. They not only served the interests of the trusts, they boasted openly of doing so, for the "captains of industry" were now restored to their former glory as if the prewar reform movement had never existed. The Republican rulers even set about creating multicorporate cartels to enable the monopolists to govern themselves and the American people as well. This refurbished monopoly economy the rulers and their publicists praised fulsomely as the "American System," although it was a system prewar Americans had fought for thirty years and which the very laws prohibited. Herbert Hoover, the chief architect of the cartels, described the new economy as "rugged individualism," which was very like calling the sunset the dawn or describing Wilson's neutrality as "America First," for official lies and catch phrases dominated the country after Wilson's demise as much as they had in his heyday. The catch phrases were crass rather than lofty. That was the chief difference.

Magazines that once thrived on exposing the corrupt privileges of the trusts now retailed gushing stories of business "success," supplied recipes for attaining "executive" status, and wrote paeans in praise of big business, although it was even more corruptly privileged in the 1920s than it had been in the days of the muckraker. America basked in unexampled prosperity, the publicists wrote, although half the country was poor and the farmers desperate. In the 1920s the poor became prosperous by fiat. America had entered an endless economic golden age, proclaimed the magnates of Wall Street whose ignorant pronouncements were now treated with reverence and made front-page news. Peace had returned to America, but the braying of bankers, not the voice of the turtle, was heard in the land. There were other diversions, too, for the populace: Babe Ruth, Red Grange, Al Capone, and an endless stream of songs and movies extolling the charms of college life, although most Americans had never graduated from high school. In postwar America the entire country lived on fantasy and breathed propaganda.

Against the fictions and the lies, where were the voices of dissent? There were few to be heard. What had happened to America's deep enmity toward monopoly and private economic power? It had virtually ceased to exist. It was just strong enough to call forth a few euphemisms. Republicans labeled the cartels "trade associations" and that was that. When the indomitable La Follette ran for President in 1924 as a third-party candidate, it was hardly more than the swansong of a cause long lost. Outside a few of the old insurgent states (now known collectively as the "farm bloc," a mere special interest) the country fell silent. Apathy and cynicism were the universal state. The official propaganda of the 1920s meant little to most Americans, but by now they were inured to a public life that made no sense and to public men who never spoke to their condition. Like any defeated people, they expected their rulers to consider them irrelevant. Even when the Great Depression struck down the postwar economy (it was a house of cards) and toppled the tin gods of the 1920s, Americans remained as if dumbstruck. Foreign visitors to America in the early 1930s were astonished by the American people's docility, for we had never been docile before. In the 1893 depression America had looked like the Rome of the Gracchi; forty years later people whose life savings had been wiped out by the "American System" stood quietly on breadlines as if they had known breadlines all their lives.

Not all of this postwar degradation was destined to last. Some hope, in time, would return to the defeated and a semblance of civic courage to the servile. What did not return was the struggle for republican reform. That was the lasting achievement of Wilson and the war party. That was the irreparable damage they had done to the American Republic. They had destroyed once and for all the republican cause. Never again would the citizenry of this Republic enter the political arena determined to overthrow oligarchy (as Lincoln bid his countrymen do), to extirpate private power and eliminate special privilege.

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Over the long years since 1917 the "despotism of professional politicians" has suffered its own ups and downs, but it has never been menaced-as it was menaced for so long-by free men struggling to protect their own freedom and regain a voice in their own affairs. From the ruins of the war, the republican cause has never revived to rally free men. It has ceased to make a difference in our politics. What the Spanish American War deflected and weakened, the World War obliterated. And who can measure the cost of that loss, both to ourselves and to humanity, in whose name both wars had been fought.

This is an episode from the A&E/CBS News series The 20th Century, hosted by CBS newsman Mike Wallace.

More than 50 years after the fact, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy remains a topic of intense debate. Did Lee Harvey Oswald act alone? Was the Warren Commission pressured into releasing a false report? Is it possible that the CIA had Kennedy killed? Join Mike Wallace for a point-by-point investigation of these and other questions surrounding the events of November 22, 1963.

Extensive footage from the CBS News archives plus clips from the world-famous Zapruder home movie bring the tragedy to life, while interviews with those who were there including reporters and government officials capture the chaos and grief of one of the most terrible moments in American history.

The 20th Century also examines the controversial findings of the Warren Report, and talks to many people who believe that the report was manipulated by forces within the government.

Describe how important information in this video challenges factual details of the Warren Commission Report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Here is the History Channels' 2003 production of LBJ's secret war with the Kennedys', Chasing Demons: LBJ VS The Kennedy's. This documentary was aired during the 40th anniversary week that the HC dedicated to the legacy of John F. Kennedy, it then promptly disappeared after the barrage of backlash from LBJ's powerful widow, "lady bird" Johnson and others over the channels portrayal of Lyndon Johnson during the week of the 40th anniversary of JFK's assassination.

The film is a psychological examination of the behind-the-scene confrontation between Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and its impact on America in the period following John Kennedy’s assassination. The film utilizes actual recorded phone calls between the principals, with insightful commentary by key historical persons/witnesses involved in these matters.We now know from recently published books and taped interviews that the “elephant in the room” which is never discussed or mentioned in the program was the firm belief by both Robert Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy that Lyndon Johnson was involved in JFK’s murder in a coup d’état (see the discussion of Kennedy trusted confidant and loyalist William Walton's trip to the Soviet Union one week after Kennedy's assassination in David Talbot's book Brothers.)

The film dramatically portrays Lyndon Johnson’s increasing paranoia and dark suspicions concerning Robert Kennedy and his ulterior motives against him, fueled by covert intelligence reports given to him by his long-time close associate (and next door neighbor) FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, enemy of both John and Robert Kennedy.

One of my previous students remarked that the documentary resembled the plot intrigue in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. I pointed out that this was an outstanding and very perceptive observation, for there had actually been a very controversial play, Mac Bird, written on this theme. All the other students then began to see parallels between the two stories from what they had remembered from studying Macbeth in their English Language Arts class.

This production was basically hidden away as it was pulled from circulation when powerful persons close to the legacy of Lyndon Johnson objected to how he was portrayed during that week over several shows, as much as certain persons might complain that his legacy was tarnished, keep in mind that this program uses archival audio recordings, and that most of the people interviewed for this 2003 program were his peers. It is quite odd that the HC would air this show that had so many persons who lived during the Kennedy and Johnson years in the White House talk of intimate details and then to have the show discarded from their lineup of related programs. Obviously this Chasing Demons special was removed along with the 2003 The Men Who Killed Kennedy series episodes, partially at the powerful insistence of LBJ's widow, Claudia "Lady Bird" Taylor Johnson.

"A Time for Choosing", also known as "The Speech", was a speech presented during the 1964 U.S. presidential election campaign by future president Ronald Reagan on behalf of Republican candidate Barry Goldwater. To this day, "The Speech" is considered one of the most effective ever made on behalf of a candidate. Nevertheless, Barry Goldwater lost the election by one of the largest margins in history. Soon afterwards, Reagan was asked to run for Governor of California; he ran for office and won election in 1966. Reagan was later dubbed the "Great Communicator" in recognition of his effective oratory skills. He was elected President of the United States in 1980 and 1984.

The "Daisy Ad": 1964 Presidential Commercial: Democrat Lyndon Johnson versus Republican Barry Goldwater

The most famous of all political campaign commercials, known as the “Daisy Girl” ad, ran only once as a paid advertisement, during an NBC broadcast of Monday Night at the Movies on September 7, 1964. Without any explanatory words, the ad uses a simple and powerful cinematic device, juxtaposing a scene of a little girl happily picking petals off of a flower (actually a black-eyed Susan), and an ominous countdown to a nuclear explosion. The ad was created by the innovative agency Doyle Dane Bernbach, known for its conceptual, minimal, and modern approach to advertising. The memorable soundtrack was created by Tony Schwartz, an advertising pioneer famous for his work with sound, including anthropological recordings of audio from cultures around the world. The frightening ad was instantly perceived as a portrayal of Barry Goldwater as an extremist. In fact, the Republican National Committee spelled this out by saying, “This ad implies that Senator Goldwater is a reckless man and Lyndon Johnson is a careful man.” This was precisely the intent; in a memo to President Johnson on September 13, Bill Moyers wrote, “The idea was not to let him get away with building a moderate image and to put him on the defensive before the campaign is old.” The ad was replayed in its entirety on ABC’s and CBS’s nightly news shows, amplifying its impact.

The 2000 election, the most controversial in history, is revisited with testimony from key players who helped decide the outcome after botched results. CNN Special Report – Bush vs. Gore: The Endless Election. November 2, 2015.