History: The Struggle for Liberty

9. The First World War

History the Struggle for Liberty 2003
Tags: Philosophy and Methodology, Political Theory, War and Foreign Policy, World History
Ralph Raico

Intellectuals are pro-power and anti-market. Great presidents are war presidents who glorify power. The Costs of War and Reassessing the Presidency are recommended books on this topic. The First World War was a turning point which vastly extended state power, and vastly destroyed social power.

Bismark united all of the German tribes into one state to preserve a German peace. The understanding in 1907 linking Great Britain, France and Russia was called the Triple Entente. This alliance in 1914 entered WWI as Allies against the Central Powers Germany and Austria-Hungary. The creation of a German navy put them on a collision course with Great Britain.

Germany’s strategy was to quickly knock France out of the war by sending troops through Belgium. The Archduke is killed in Sarajevo. Austria declares war on Serbia. Austrians could then invade Serbia and do away with it. Germany declares war on Russia and France. France convinces Britain that she must declare war against Germany, although no Briton had any clue about the war or any say about it. Yet, war was greeted with enthusiasm. The intellectuals were rapturous.

German U-boats sank British ships, bringing America into the war. The 1915 sinking of the Lusitania with some Americans aboard was used to justify Wilson’s position against Germany. Wilson had a hidden agenda to create a New World Order. The case of Eugene Debs was an example of how vindictive Wilson was and how individual liberties lost more ground in WWI than during WWII.

Lecture 9 of 10 from Ralph Raico’s History: The Struggle for Liberty.

[This transcript is edited for clarity and readability. The Q and A at the end of the lecture has been omitted. Annotations have been added by Ryan McMaken.]

Much more could be said about the intellectuals and their opposition to the market, the soft spot they have in their hearts for communism and for Marxism, and the double standard they apply to the crimes of communism vis-à-vis the crimes of National Socialism. National Socialism they consider—understandably enough—a racist philosophy, but one that is very limited in its application, whereas communism is a universal philosophy holding out hope for all of mankind. These intellectuals consider communism to be a kind of successor to the Enlightenment idea, or an outgrowth of the Enlightenment idea.

Intellectuals, Political Power, and War

Here, what you have is the intellectuals’ typical proclivity for replacing actual reality—the crimes, for instance, that are committed in reality—and preferring to deal with rhetoric and the way people of different ideologies present themselves. But, it’s not only against the market that we find intellectuals reacting. Intellectuals have another proclivity, which in a way is another aspect of the opposition they tend to show to the market: they are pro-power. Intellectuals are drawn to power.

This is very easily demonstrated. One of the best things that Jeff Tucker ever published in The Free Market — and there have been very many very good pieces in The Free Market, and continues to be—is an article by Robert Higgs titled “No More Great Presidents.”1 What Professor Higgs was objecting to were the lists of “great” presidents or “near greats,” that American historians come up with every once in a while. I think you’ve probably come across that at one time or another. The “great” presidents—aside from George Washington—are the war presidents. (Washington who was not a war president in his own day, but had previously had been a war hero.) It’s in war, really, that presidents seem to show their “greatness.” Altogether, the great presidents are the one who tend to centralize power in Washington, and increase the power of the state. Higgs analyzes this: why should this be that historians, an important subset of academic intellectuals, tend to glorify presidential power?

The tendency of intellectuals to identify with power will be evident in the subject I’m going to be discussing today, which is the First World War.

I happen to have an essay on the First World War, and also and essay on Winston Churchill, in a book called The Costs of War.2 The First World War was indeed “a turning point,” which is the subtitle of my essay there. If you can imagine a twentieth century without communists and without Nazis, that’s very probably what we would have had without the First World War. Instead, the war eventuated in a vast extension of state power in every country—in the United Sates in particular—and a great retreat of the social power, of the civil society. Earlier, I talked about Robert Higgs’s book Crisis and Leviathan and his analysis of the role of ideology in general.3 But, as far as the specifics of the growth of American power, and what took place in America during the First World War, it’s extremely valuable book.4

The First World War also produced—in all the belligerent countries—a psychological trauma. There was a break in the Western psyche, you might say, such that things that people generally accepted and believed before could not be accepted and believed in anymore: the idea of progress, the idea of the basic goodness of human beings. That general optimism that had been produced by, with a few exceptions, close to a century of peace—in Europe, at least. This optimism also fostered the tremendous success of science and technology and the great growth in living standards of people. There was a more somber mood after the First World War.

A Unified German State

The single most important fact about Europe in 1914 is the existence of a powerful unified Germany from the French border to Lithuania, and from the Baltic Sea to the Alps. That had come into existence in 1871 mainly through the genius of the Prussian Minister—and subsequently German Chancellor—Otto von Bismarck.

Looking back, we can see that it wasn’t the best solution to the German question. The German question was this: how to unify German lands given that Germany was divided at the Congress of Vienna into 39 different states—some larger like Prussia, some medium-sized like Bavaria, some just city-states like Frankfurt and Hamburg. It was a confederation. Why this came about has its roots in history with the Holy Roman Empire and so on, but many German intellectuals came to the conclusion: that the Germans should have their own state also. The thinking was “my heavens, the English have had their state for so many centuries, the French, the Spaniards, and then by the 1860s even the Italians had a state of their own.” The Germans then had to have a state also. The difference, let’s say, between the Germans and the Italians is that a unified and centralized Germany could very well present, first of all, a temptation to the German leaders and also then a danger to the other countries in Europe. This was unlike a unified Italy, which is a bad idea anyway, but would not present that kind of double-edged problem.

Bismarck was a very intelligent man, although this afternoon I’ll be talking about the origins of the welfare state and he plays a key role there. Ludwig von Mises was totally justified in saying, from the point of view of liberalism, Bismarck was the worst disaster of the nineteenth century in Europe in creating this German Reich.5 (This was the “Second Reich,” as it’s called, and Hitler called his own the Third Reich. The First Reich was the Holy Roman Empire.)

He did create a centralized state whereas there could have been other possibilities. There could have been a stronger confederation of the German states, such that they agreed to go to each other’s defense in the case of attack by some other power like France or Russia. That would have preserved peace in Central Europe, but it would have made it very difficult for Germany to engage in an aggressive policy.

There’s an interesting book on the American Civil War, consisting of Civil War writings, edited and collected and by famous American literary critic Edmund Wilson, called Patriotic Gore. It’s interesting because of its introduction by Wilson, and Wilson here very perceptively compares Bismarck to Abraham Lincoln, as the creators of powerful modern centralized states..6 Lincoln does this in America by crushing the South, and Bismarck by uniting all of the Germans into one state. Once Germany was united, though, Bismarck remained Chancellor or Prime Minister of the German Empire for another 20 years. So, the story doesn’t end with unification of Germany. Bismarck, however, was mainly concerned with preserving a general European peace. His idea was “we’ve just become, for the first time, a united Germany. We have to learn to have all the different parts of Germany—what the Germans thought of as tribes, Bavarians, Saxons and so on—welded together over time.” This does take time, so that if a general war broke out, this could disturb this fragile recently acquired German unity. So, Bismarck tried in every way possible—through a series of defensive alliances—to preserve the peace. They were defensive alliances, that is, they oblige both sides to remain neutral in case one of the other partners was attacked, and did not oblige them to enter into any kind of aggressive alliance with Germany. The first one was between Germany and Austria-Hungary.

Let me tell you something about Austria-Hungary since Austria-Hungary is going to be the immediate scene and cause of the First World War. It had been the Austrian Empire, up until the time of 1866 when Austria lost the war to Prussia. Then in 1867, the Austrians being kicked out of Germany, as it had been kicked out of Italy by the Italians, thought that they had to somehow accommodate what they saw to be the major nationality aside from Germans in the empire. The great characteristic of Austria-Hungary and one reason many people have a strong sentimental attachment to it—as I do, for instance—is that it was a collection of different nationalities.

Here’s an example: when the last person to sit on the throne of Austria-Hungary, the Empress Zita, died a few years ago, there was a great state funeral for her in Vienna. A pure-black hearse-type coach was driven by six black stallions and brought her body to the Great Cathedral at St. Stephen’s. This was a prelude to being buried in the Capuchin abbey, in downtown Vienna.

At St. Stephen’s Cathedral, prayers were set for her in ten major languages of the Old Empire. That doesn’t include all of the languages, but the 10 major ones. First of all, you had the Germans who were in many ways the dominant nationality, the traditional lands of the Hapsburgs: basically Vienna and the Alps. Then there were the Germans in the Sudetenland and Germans spread throughout the Empire. Then there was the whole Hungarian nation in the great plain of Hungary, on the other side of the Carpathian Mountains. Then we have the Slavic peoples. We have the Czechs, the whole Czech nation in Bohemia and Moravia. We have the Slovaks. In Galicia, we have the Poles and the Ruthenians. We have the South Slavs, the Croats, the Serbs, the Slovenes, and Italians in Trieste. There were the Romanians mainly in an area called Transylvania, and those are the major groups.

Near the Serbs there is Bosnia with Slavic-speaking Muslims. (By 1914, there is a country called Serbia, while on the other hand, there are Serbs living within the Austro-Hungarian Empire.) Throughout the Empire, there were hundreds of thousands of gypsies and a couple of million Jews. The Hapsburgs favored the Jews very much because unlike all these other groups of the Empire, the Jews didn’t claim some section of the Empire as their own territory. They were very loyal to the Hapsburgs as the Hapsburgs were to them.

The first treaty that Bismarck brought about was one between Germany and Austria-Hungary. Then in 1882, there was another treaty with Italy creating the Triple Alliance..7 

With Italian unification, they now considered themselves one of the great powers. So, as great powers, they had to have a navy, they had to have an army, and above all, they had to have an empire. The Italians were looking on Arab territory in Tunisia as a future colony. It is quite near Sicily. But in 1881, the French took over in Tunisia. In a fit of pique, the Italians then turned and entered into the alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary, and that became the Triple Alliance. Bismarck worked on the very sensible assumption that there was no way of getting an alliance with France. In fact, France had to be isolated, and a major reason for this was that one major mistake of Bismarck’s: in the 1871 Treaty ending the Franco-Prussian War, the Germans annexed Alsace and part of Lorraine. Those are French provinces and that was not something the French were going to forget. So, we have now the Triple Alliance, and in addition to that, Bismarck had meanwhile made sure that there was an alliance with Russia. He always got along well with Russia. He saw no reason for any conflict between Germany and Russia and England doesn’t count at this time because they are in this period of splendid isolation.

But, Bismarck is then dismissed by the new Kaiser, Wilhelm II, and the treaty between Germany and Russia, when it comes up for renewal, is allowed to expire. The idea was “how could a still-absolutist monarchy like Russia ally with Republican France?”

Well, that’s exactly what ends up happening happens because countries don’t go by the ideology of other countries, but by what they consider as their own self-interest in allying with one country against another and possible danger. So, in the 1890s, there comes into existence, through a series of political and military treaties, the Franco-Russian alliance, now facing the Triple Alliance. (It’s a fact that of all the boy babies born in France in 1892, one-half will die, or will be killed or wounded in the First World War. That’s one of the nasty surprises that history has in mind for the Western peoples.) Now, the French and English come to an agreement although there have been problems between the two of them.

Still, French diplomacy was brilliant at this time and an entente is formed. It’s not a formal alliance, as between France and Russia, but an “entente cordial” alliance between England and France. Nothing is written in a formal treaty and the British people themselves are not aware how over the next few years—after 1904—their government agrees to more and more obligations and duties in case of war. In military conversations between the French and the British military and naval leaders, England begins, at least in the minds of the French, to agree to more and more obligations and duties in case of war. Britain entwines itself more and more with the military and naval policy of France. Then in 1907, England and Russia come to an agreement about the different problems that divide the two countries. What is known to history as the Triple Entente of Great Britain, France, and Russia then comes into existence. 

The Colonial Empires, the Arms Race, and Pan-Slavism

Let’s now consider the role of colonial empires. The Russian Empire does not have overseas colonies but it’s a tremendous imperialist enterprise. The Tsarist Russian Empire goes through 11 time zones. In 1914, the British Empire is mighty, but not even at its height because it gets larger after the First World War. But at the beginning of the war, it includes about one-quarter of the land surface of the globe and one-quarter of the population of the human race. America has certain colonies, as you can see, by 1914. We could include Alaska, but especially the Philippines which was taken over after the Spanish American War where America then becomes an Asiatic power. By then, already in the imagination of some Japanese and American military people, America is on a collision course to an eventual war with Japan.

But, it’s European powers that are most interesting. Spain still has colonies in 1914 such as Rio de Oro, as do the Germans. But, the Germans have very poor pickings such as German South West Africa which includes the Kalahari Desert. There is also Tanganyika, part of the Cameroons, one-quarter—or less than a quarter—of New Guinea, and a few islands in the Pacific. The Germans don’t have very much of an empire at all, which annoys them very much.

The French have a vast empire in West Africa, also Madagascar, and also French Indochina which includes Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. There are other smaller empires. The Italians by this time are doing their thing: they’re collecting deserts. This includes areas such as Somalia, Eritrea, and Libya. From the Italian perspective it’s better to have deserts than nothing at all—although this costs money and human lives. But, it makes the Italian leaders feel really good. So, we have Germany and we have Austria-Hungary, wracked with all kinds of nationalistic tensions. In the minds of most Europeans, it’s about to fall to pieces, really. It’s not going to outlast the old emperor Franz Joseph. Italy, since it entered into the Triple Alliance, has been negotiating behind the scenes with France for advantages which would enable it to lead the Triple Alliance. 

Here is the way things look from Berlin: if you’re talking about any possible future conflict the Germans are faced with the world’s single superpower, and that’s Great Britain, the center of a vast empire, and the center of finance. Berlin also faces France and its empire, and the second-best army in the world. Berlin also faces the vast Russian Empire with the largest army in the world, by far.

The question of imperialism is of importance in a certain way. World War I does not come about because of imperialist conflicts of the European powers in the third world—in Africa or anywhere else. In that area, the French and the British, the Russians and the British, have more conflicts with each other than the British and the Germans have. However, imperialism is, in a way, at the root of, or one of the roots, of the First World War. A historian named Niall Ferguson has recently written a book about how great the British Empire was and saying that the American Empire could be great also.8 For Ferguson, the Americans have an empire and they could make it into a great empire, the successor of the British Empire—but the Americans probably don’t have the heart for it to go on for years and decades and to build up an empire the way the British did. For Ferguson, that’s a flaw on the part of the American people.

However, what Ferguson does not take into consideration is this: leaving aside the debits and credits of the British Empire in the third world, one thing the British Empire did was to give the impression to all other Europeans that British greatness and British wealth was based on their empire. So, British imperialism encouraged imperialism among other European people. This very much in particular encouraged imperialism on the part of the German leaders and Kaiser Wilhelm II, the man who dismissed Bismarck and was going to be the last German Kaiser. The Kaiser undertakes to stir things up, as he says, to win Germany’s place in the sun. Unfortunately for the Germans, most of the world is taken up, although there is still China that’s being eaten alive by the Europeans, and other possible areas.

But, in order to create a worldwide German empire, what would be necessary? What is the sine qua non of a German empire overseas? It requires an oceangoing German navy, and that’s what the Kaiser undertakes to build for the first time in German history. That’s what, more than anything else, puts Germany on a collision course with England. In the British Foreign Office, high officials write memos to the effect that the world cannot endure a country which possesses the most powerful army in the world and also an immensely powerful navy. This is a threat that will have to be dealt with. There is then a British-German rivalry over the navy that goes on and it is a major eventual cause of the war. That’s one of the aspects of the arms race that’s going on among all the major powers.

You were born into an arms race. I pretty much grew up in an arms race. Arms races were not normal in the nineteenth century. You had a certain military capacity and if war broke out, then you’d have to expand it. From 1900 on, all countries are constantly expanding their military and naval capacities and they’re using all of the fruits of modern technology incorporating them into their military arsenal. This includes airplanes and the telegraph, but then also new armaments of all kinds: more powerful artillery, more powerful explosives. These arms programs are naturally enough promoted by the arms industries in all countries. Everybody knows about Krupp in Germany, but there was Schneider-Creusot in France and Vickers in England, Škoda in Austria, and in America Bethlehem Steel, more than anything else, built the oceangoing American Navy. Dupont was also involved.

So, there’s this arms race and countries are becoming more and more ready to go to war. There were diplomatic crises that occurred between 1900 and 1914, over Morocco, over Bosnia. There’s the Balkan Wars which meant that by 1914 the Balkans had a much different configuration than they had in 1900. There were two Balkan wars between the small Christian powers and the Ottoman Empire, which to begin with had a big chunk of the Balkans in 1900. But these two Balkan wars then produced a new configuration of states in the region. The Ottomans were nearly thrown out of Europe, and they were left with pretty much what they have today. There was a larger Bulgaria with access to the Aegean, and a much larger Serbia which just about doubled in size. Thanks to these crises, when the crisis of summer of 1914 breaks out, Serbia was a particular problem.

At one time in the nineteenth Century, the Austrians actually possessed Lombardi and Venezia and in the course of the unification of Italy, the Italians, mainly with the help of the Germans and then afterwards with the help of Bismarck, took those provinces away from Austria and added them to the united Italy. At one time, the Austrians were in charge of the German Confederation, that had been set up in 1815 and in that sense, Austria was a major German power. Well, Bismarck in unifying Germany threw the Austrians out of Germany. In Belgrade, there are leaders in Serbian society, and there are intellectual leaders who say, “if it’s good for the Italians, if it’s good for the Germans, why can’t it be good for the South Slavs? We’ll defeat Austria also and create a Greater Serbia. What are you a racist? Why can’t the Serbs do it if the Germans and the Italians did it? We will create a Greater Serbia or maybe even, with the Serbs over here and the Serbs in Bosnia, or maybe even unite them with the Croats and the Slovenes, and other South Slavs, and create a South Slav state or a ‘Yugoslavia.’”

Now, Serbia itself is not going to be able to do anything. Austria-Hungary is not militarily very powerful. On the other hand, it can handle Serbia. But, keep in mind that by the time of the conclusion of the second Balkan war in 1913, Serbia has doubled in size and they figure that in case of need, they can put 500,000 men in the field. Beyond that, they have a powerful friend, the big brother of all the Slavic people—except the Poles who don’t really consider them a big brother—the Russians. There is pan-Slavism, the idea that there should be a unity among all the Slavic people who are, in terms of population, the largest group in Europe. The idea is there should be a union of all the Slavic people, led of course, by the major Slavic power—and in fact, aside from Montenegro and Serbia, the only independent Slavic power—Great Russia. This is the doctrine of pan-Slavism. Many of the leaders of Russian society and in the government and elsewhere were adherents of this view, that there should be such a unity.

Unfortunately for Europe, a movement such as the pan-Slavic movement—or let’s say the creation of a Yugoslavia—would mean the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In other words, it would mean the destruction of one of the great powers, which is a very, very serious thing. It means the destruction of Austria-Hungary because If the South Slavs are going to secede, then the Czechs and the Slovaks are going to demand something, and the Romanians probably would take advantage too. Transylvania is populated to a degree by Hungarians, but mainly by Romanians. Pan-Slavism would be the breakup of the Empire and among other things, militarily speaking, it means that the whole Southern flank of Germany is now exposed.

This is the problem of Austria-Hungary in connection with Serbia. Well, there was a crisis and the crises were weathered up until the summer of 1914. It’s a very dramatic story, a very interesting story. I tell part of it in my essay in The Costs of War. 9

War Breaks Out

At this point, there have been tensions in Europe for a long time. Everybody knows about the two different alliance systems that are facing each other. Everybody has contingency plans in the event of war. The most famous major contingency plan is the one that the Germans have and that’s called the von Schlieffen Plan. (Von Schlieffen was the head of the German General Staff.)

The Germans are concerned with what to do in the event of a war against Russia and France at the same time. In other words: what to do in the event of a two-front war? The basic idea of the Schlieffen Plan is that you can’t simply divide the German forces in half. Cut in half, the part in France would be inferior to the French forces. The other half in the east would be inferior to Russia.

So, the concentration would have to be in France first because you really can’t knock Russia out of the war quickly—they have all that territory to retreat to. So, concentration would be in France to knock France out of the war as quickly as possible. Then, while the Russians are laboriously mobilizing—it was kind of still a backwards society in many ways— and the French are effectively defeated, then the German army is shuttled east with the excellent system of German railroads. The Germans engage the Russians at the eastern front, beating the Russian Army probably somewhere in East Prussia and defeating them. In order to defeat France quickly—because the Vosges Mountains are not a favorable territory for an invasion—a decision is made to go through Belgium. (Belgium’s neutrality was guaranteed by the European powers, and that becomes the excuse that the British used to get into the war.)

The Archduke is assassinated in Bosnia at Sarajevo by “terrorists”—or “freedom fighters,” it depends on which side you’re on—by people who want to strike a blow against Austria-Hungary by assassinating the heir to the throne. It was known that the throne would very quickly become vacant because Francis Joseph was so old. So, Bosnian Serb students are recruited by a secret society inside Serbia to assassinate the Archduke, which is what they do. The Austrians say this is the last straw, the Serbs have been aiming at the destruction of the Austrian Empire for a while with previous assassinations of lesser officials. The Austrians decide to put an end to the Serbian threat. They get the okay and the support of Kaiser Wilhelm, and then things start happening very quickly, in the last days of July 1914.

We know a lot about it. Everybody published their memoirs afterwards, everybody was sending telegrams from one place to another, so those are on the record. Many of the secret conferences in the governments have been made public. We know a lot about what happens which is essentially that Austria declares war on Serbia, after Austria sent an ultimatum to Serbia demanding concessions that the Serbs couldn’t possibly give without basically giving up their sovereignty. The ultimatum is phrased in such a way that the Serbs would turn it down, so that the Austrians would have an excuse to invade and to do away with Serbia once and for all—and divide it up. When, in St. Petersburg, the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Sazanov sees the text of the Austrian ultimatum, he turns to the Austrian Ambassador and says, “C’est la guerre européenne.”—”This is the European war.” This is a war that we’ve feared for so long, and as he said, “You’ve set fire to Europe.”10

The Austrian position is that the conflict “is a question of our survival.” The thinking was that if Serbia can get away with this, very soon it will be the end of a very ancient empire and a country, a nation, is entitled to fight for its survival. What are the Russians fighting for? They’re fighting for prestige and for one of their proteges. So, the Russians begin to mobilize and in Berlin, the admirals and the generals approached the Kaiser and say “look, the von Schlieffen Plan depends on the rapid deployment of German forces into France before the Russians can mobilize and then invade from the East. So, we have to start the army in motion.” The Kaiser delays as much as possible and sends letters to his cousin, the Tsar “Nicky,” seeking Russian demobilization, and signing them “Willy.”11

Nonetheless, the Russian mobilization goes ahead, the Germans then send an ultimatum to Russia and to France. The ultimatum to France says, “tell us if you will guarantee that you’ll stay out of this war that’s looming between us and Russia and if you’re going to guarantee that, then would you kindly hand over the fortresses of Verdun and Toul, to our forces to occupy, as a warrant of your good faith?”12 (The fortresses control the eastern approaches to Paris.) The French don’t provide an answer. The Russians don’t stop their mobilization, and on August 1, Germany declares war on Russia, and on August 3 on France, and the Great War started.

England enters the war in this way. It cannot be emphasized too much that the British public knows nothing about any obligations or guarantees to France. The British Parliament knows nothing about that. The majority of the British Cabinet knows nothing about that. But, the French now go to the English and say, “look, all these years, you’ve made it very clear to us that if we got into war with Germany, you were going to come to our aid. You told us that you would take over the protection of the English Channel so that we could concentrate our forces in the Mediterranean against a possible war with Italy. You said that you were going to be landing an expeditionary force. Where’s your declaration of war against Germany?” The British government we’re talking about is a very small elite. For all practical purposes, it could have been Nazi Germany or any dictatorship at this moment. The public had no say in whether they were going to go to war. They knew nothing about the situation. Parliament knew nothing about the situation. The Cabinet was only told now that they were about to go to war.

Well, the Germans came to the aid of Britain and marched into Belgium and that was the excuse the British government used: that Britain has always fought for the rights of small peoples. In the House of Commons there was somebody in the back who said “what about Ireland?” and he was arrested and shot.13

I have to say something about this: do you know the word “cant”? It’s untranslatable, really, into any other language. It’s Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-American. “Cant” is what you use when you talk as if not only is God on your side, but he’s whispering into your ear everything that’s good, everything that’s virtuous, and that’s what you stand for. For the user of cant, the enemy stands for the opposite of everything that’s good. The use of cant is an old tradition in England, taken over then by the American governments and the Americans continually through the twentieth century.

England sends an ultimatum to Germany about Belgium. Now the British are in the war.

The Intellectuals and the First World War

In these days, war was greeted with jubilation by the people. Eyewitness accounts tell of huge crowds in Berlin and St. Petersburg and Vienna and Paris and London. People were wild with enthusiasm because war has broken out. Many were critical of all of this namby-pamby peace that had been going on so long. It was peace that capitalism flourished under and allowed millions, and hundreds of millions, of new human beings to come into existence because of the development of the market and capitalism. Well, that’s really kind of boring, isn’t it?

The famous philosopher Bertrand Russell, when war was about to be declared, wandered around the streets of London looking into people’s faces. He couldn’t believe it, how happy they were that war was going to come. A million Englishmen are going to die, but the intellectuals were rapturous about war—which connects us back to our earlier discussion on the intellectuals. There were a few who were very skeptical and saddened by the war—Bertrand Russell, for instance, and Albert Einstein who was in Switzerland at the time. There were others also, but even Sigmund Freud in Vienna at first was enthusiastic for the war. As for Ludwig von Mises, I don’t know his personal opinion about the war. He served in the Austrian army, but afterwards he thought that the Germans had been responsible for pushing the Austrians into it.

There’s a very interesting book by Roland Stromberg called Redemption by War and it’s particularly about the intellectuals of the European countries and the United States.14 It’s interesting to read these few pages because we’re talking about the most famous intellectuals of the time in France and in Belgium. There’s Henri Pirenne, one of the great pioneers of the idea of the European Miracle, a great economic historian, and savagely anti-German. In England there is R.H. Tawney. There is Arnold Toynbee who afterwards regretted that he had written atrocity propaganda against the Germans just to help the British war effort.15 In Germany there was Friedrich Tönnies, the most famous sociologist of his time. In France there was Émile Durkheim, another famous sociologist. They were each bitterly hurling insults at the other side, talking in favor of their own government. They were joined in Paris by the two great historians of the French Revolution: Albert Mathiez, whose hero was Robespierre, and Alphonse Aulard, a moderate whose hero was Danton. Both, of course, were in favor of the war.

Stromberg has some interesting comments on this phenomenon of intellectual support for the war. He said that what war did, when it came, was enable the intellectual to feel powerful and to articulate his feelings in powerful and aggressive ways.16 He could now identify totally with his community and with his government, now marching armies and fighting navies. That gave him a great personal sense of power, which intellectuals generally don’t have. This held not only for intellectuals, but by the people in general. Stromberg talks about

These exciting expressions in an age of unparalleled expansion of individual consciousness reduced to the same thing. The effort of this individual consciousness to come to terms with the collective mentality from which it was being separated, the most basic factor was the resurrection of community.17

In 2003, Chris Hedges published a book on war with the title War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.18 Hedges is a war correspondent who has been all over the world. He says that some wars have not been terrible in the sense that they put down aggressors. But, he also notices the psychological effect of war, as we perhaps are noticing ourselves now. Nobody could have missed the millions and millions of flapping flags, and how you couldn’t get anywhere without seeing them, in mass, in any American city. With the war, the average individual is able to identify with something higher and feel a power of all the other individuals with their flapping flags on their car antennas.19 The people can also identify with the might of the American government that was going to smash to smithereens these enemies of the United States. This sense of community fostered by military might becomes quite evident at the time of the First World War.

Woodrow Wilson and The Rise of the American Warfare State

The Schlieffen Plan doesn’t work, and the French, as decadent and worthless as they are in the eyes of the Germans, were able to knock the heads of the Germans together at the First Battle of the Marne. This stopped the Germans, but then created the Western Front and the trench warfare that went on for three and a half years.

The British, of course, used their unsurpassed navy and declared a blockade of Germany. One of many problems with this was that by international law, a blockade has to be close in to the coast and enforced by surface ships. What the British did instead was to lay mines at the entrance to the North Sea and also at the entrance to the English Channel. These were semi-permanent mines, of which the British had maps. If you were on their side, you could get your ship through, and the British would tell you how to get it through. But the mines would stop anybody that the English wanted to stop. They also declared a whole list of things to be contraband that could not reach Germany or even reach neutral Dutch ports. The British claimed that goods could easily get to Germany from Dutch ports, so the British blocked passage to Rotterdam also. Among the items on the list of “contraband” was food, and in this we see the beginning of the British hunger blockade of the Germans, against which the Germans retaliated. The surface ships were swept away pretty quickly. The Germans retaliated with U-boats and the sinking of British ships. This brings America into the issue.

Many historians have lists of great presidents. Joe Stromberg, Bob Higgs, Don Livingston, and I have our lists of the worst presidents. We argue about this in a good-natured kind of way because the same presidents are pretty much on our lists. It’s just a question of which one was really the worst president. Because of this element of cant—of self-righteousness that makes your skin crawl—at the top of my list is Woodrow Wilson.

There was a great American writer of the time, H.L. Mencken, who really is worth reading, even now.20 Mencken said that Wilson had a very high opinion of himself, and thought, in fact, that he was a natural candidate for “the first vacancy in the Trinity.”21 That was not really too far from the truth. Wilson was the son of a Presbyterian minister and a person who always thought himself right. You can read about Wilson and the references to literature on Wilson in my essay.22 A very good book—not by a professional historian, but by a scholar who was also a journalist—is The Politics of War by Walter Karp. What Karp does in a really very enjoyable style—much more enjoyable than most academic historian’s style—is first discuss William McKinley and the Spanish-American War, and then he mainly concentrates on Wilson. Karp looks at how Wilson got us into this war even though Wilson, from the start, says “this war is so terrible.” This is compassionate, humanitarian “liberal” in the new sense of the new liberals. Wilson said he “hates war” just as Roosevelt said, “I hate war, I despise war.”23

Karp shows how Wilson, by his actual actions and what he said privately behind the scenes to his confidants, Wilson was moving steadily to war with Germany.24

An excuse for the framework for inevitable war—but not yet war itself—came in May of 1915 with the sinking of the Lusitania. Lusitania was a British passenger liner, which happened to be carrying munitions of war at the time, and was sunk by a German submarine. About 128 Americans died in that incident. The American government’s position immediately was that the Germans would be held strictly accountable for any loss of life by Americans on the high seas due to the action of German forces, regardless of any other consideration. The American Secretary of State at the time, William Jennings Bryan, resigned in protest. He said it’s the British who are mixing together babies and bullets… you can’t have this one-sided attitude towards Germany.25 But, Wilson and his advisors and confidants took a different line. The Germans said “okay, we’re going to try not to do that,” but told the Americans they have to tell the British to do something about their hunger blockade and the stopping of neutral ships that are bringing food to the Germans. There were other British interferences with neutral rights, as well. From time to time, the American government did send notes to the British saying “you should stop doing this because of international law, and you are violating the rights of neutral countries.”

Wilson, though, very much had a hidden agenda. This was the Great War. The people who lived through it called it the Great War and it was called the Great War for a long time to come. Wilson understood that if the Great War was settled in one way or another without the United States being part of it, America would have no say in the creation of the new world order. Wilson had very definite ideas about what the new world order would entail.

These ideas were the ideas of the so-called liberal—now we could say “so-called” liberal—ideologists and writers of the time. These writers—whom Murray Rothbard called “progressives” very often—were the writers around The New Republic and similar publications which basically wanted to impose democracy on the rest of the world, and to make the world safe for democracy. So that’s why, when we talk about the announced policy of the George W. Bush Administration, we talk about “neo-Wilsonianism.” The Bush policy is a revival of this idea that it is the duty—and certainly the right—of the American government to remake the whole world and bring democracy to all peoples. Well, eventually we did under Wilson. We helped bring down the German monarchy by insisting that we were not going to make peace with the Germans, and instead we were going to spread democracy—but not, of course, to the British and French colonies and not to Egypt or Palestine or Iraq. When 1918 came, we were not going to make peace with the German militarists, and we insisted that the Germans get rid of the monarchy. This meant getting rid of not just the Kaiser—who wasn’t popular by the end of the war. It meant the Hohenzollern dynasty must be gotten rid of. Germany became a republic, the Weimar Republic, which didn’t last very long, from 1919 to 1933.

In 1933, a very evil man—a very evil politician named Adolf Hitler—through constitutional means, in accordance with the Weimar constitution, became the Chancellor of Germany. In Italy, Mussolini became the Prime Minister. However, by 1943 when it was obvious Mussolini was destroying Italy—the allies had just landed in Sicily—there was still a king in Italy. So it was possible for the king to dismiss Mussolini as Prime Minister. In Germany, there was no one higher than Hitler because the monarchy had been done away with. If a monarchy had remained in effect in Germany, it would have been a very different situation. That is, Hitler would have had a superior. It’s impossible to believe that any Hohenzollern would put up with the policies that Hitler finally instituted, and in any case it was clear that Hitler had lost the war for Germany. He could have been gotten rid of in the same way that Mussolini had been. But this was not possible because German democracy had abolished the monarchy.

The idea was “monarchy bad,”—except if it’s a British monarchy—“republic good” and “German monarchy very bad.” A little simpliste, perhaps? Why did this idea prevail? Because of a professor at Princeton, a president of Princeton, an American genius.26

So, we finally get into the war. By the end of 1916, the hunger blockade is really hurting Germany and the Germans decide they have to break it one way or another. They declare unrestricted submarine warfare around the British Isles and then America finally gets into the war in April of 1917.

Before we got into the war, public opinion had been concentrated on problems not just with Germany, but also with our problems with England. England was, in many ways, interfering with our neutral rights. American ships carrying food would have been allowed into German ports under international law. But, American ships carrying anything between New York and Rotterdam—two neutral ports—were stopped by the British and prevented from going on. Mail was taken off American ships because it, in some way, would be helping the German war effort. So, in many ways that had been traditionally understood, Britain was violating American neutral rights, and the Americans from time to time complained about it. The public’s view was, “well okay, Germany’s doing bad things. We’re dealing with that. The British are doing illegal things also, and we’re dealing with that.”

The man who replaces Bryan as Secretary of State is Robert Lansing, another Wall Street lawyer. After the war, Lansing wrote his memoirs and this is what he wrote:

[I]n dealing with the British government there was always in my mind the conviction that we would ultimately become an ally of Great Britain and that it would not do, therefore, to let our controversies reach a point where diplomatic correspondence gave place to action.27

Once we joined the British, we would presumably wish to adopt some of the policies and practices which the British adopted because our aim also would be to destroy the morale of the German people by economic isolation. This would cause them to lack the very necessaries of life, admitting that the point of the British blockade was to starve the civilian population into surrender. This is what Lansing, the former Secretary of State—the man who was Wilson’s Secretary of State when we entered the war, and at the Paris Peace Conference—said:

Everything was submerged in verbosity. It was done with deliberate purpose. It insured continuance of the controversies and left the questions [between Britain and the United States] unsettled, which was necessary in order to leave this country free to act and even act illegally when it entered the war.28

That’s a pretty candid, stunning admission. When you read that in the years before the Second World War the American people had become terrible isolationists and xenophobic, hiding their head in the sand, remember that this is what the leaders had admitted to doing to the American people during the First World War. This is the equivalent of modern American leaders admitting today to lying about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Given that the Secretary of State had himself openly admitted what had been done, it was maybe natural that the American people were suspicious about another crusade in Europe on the part of another liberal Democratic president.

The Effects of the War in America

In his book Crisis and Leviathan, Robert Higgs covers much of what happened to the American economy during the war. The railroads were nationalized, and there were price and wage controls for the first time. Rent controls were put in, in Washington DC, for the first time in American history. A War Industries Board was set up that controlled most of the production of the United States under Bernard Baruch. There was also mass conscription.

To my mind, these humanitarian liberals are, in fact, very humane and compassionate—until you get in their way and then there’s no stopping them. There’s nothing they’re not going to do to you.

Joseph Stromberg has mentioned that the First World War was worse, from the point of view of civil liberties, than the Second World War—with the exception, of course, of the internment of the Japanese-Americans. 120,000 Japanese-Americans—80,000 of them citizens— were put into concentration camps. (They weren’t death camps, but they were concentration camps in the traditional understanding of concentration camps.) Most of the resident aliens wanted to become citizens, but Japanese born in Japan were not permitted to become citizens. Why were they put in camps? On suspicion that they might provoke or commit acts of espionage and sabotage.

The Supreme Court upheld this.29 All the liberals on the Supreme Court, Felix Frankfurter and Hugo Black and so on, thought that was perfectly okay. The thinking was “where does the Constitution say that you cannot take 80,000 American citizens because of their ethnic background—citizens accused of no crime, not even suspected of any crime, individually speaking—and put them into concentration camps? That’s ridiculous. Of course the Constitution allows something like that.” Or, as they say nowadays: “the Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact.” So, if you want to throw all these Japanese grocers and florists and fisherman and fish mongers into camps in Arizona and Arkansas, you have the perfect right to do it.

That was the worst thing that happened in the Second World War.30

The general suppression of civil liberties was not as bad as in the First World War. In the First World War, thousands were arrested for violating the Espionage and Sedition acts on the basis of nothing, as in the case of Eugene Debs. But the reason why it was relatively mild in the Second World War, I think is this: in the First World War, the men who got us into the war were really afraid of what might happen at home. We’d never sent a conscript army overseas. The army in the Philippines was a volunteer army. We’d never sent a mass army to Europe. The Germans were a very large part of the American population and many were relatively recent immigrants. There were mainly German towns like Cincinnati and St. Louis and Milwaukee. They were people who were proud—and understandably proud—of their culture, their heritage, and attachments to Germany. With no way of knowing what was going to happen in America in this war, Wilson’s allies came down as hard as they possibly could—as severely as they possibly could.

There were the official “patriots,” and Mencken talked about George Creel who was the head of the first American government propaganda agency. Creel hired historians to write propagandist accounts of the whole history of Germany and how the war began, and so on. Mencken referred to Creel and his “herd of 2,000 American historians,” which is a good way of putting it.31 There were also the volunteer “patriots,” such as the directors of symphony orchestras in New York and Philadelphia and elsewhere. They declared that they would not play any work by any German composer for the duration of the war. Some of the things are laughable. Speaking German in public was prohibited in whole states like Iowa. In other states, using German on the phone was prohibited. Just craziness. It’s like “freedom fries” today.32 The poor American people.

The case of Eugene V. Debs is particularly interesting. We all know that Woodrow Wilson was a “humane and compassionate” man and a saint and a martyr. We know that, don’t we? However, there was this interesting case—besides the thousands of other people who were arrested. (Lutheran ministers were arrested on no rational grounds.) The case of Eugene Debs was particularly interesting because he was a very prominent figure. He was the head of the American Socialist Party. The Socialist Party had gotten hundreds of thousands of votes in elections. It was a very big factor in the west, especially. In a speech in Ohio, Debs told a convention of socialists that the reason we got into this war was because of the bankers.33 What he had in mind was this: as soon as the European war broke out, JP Morgan—the House of Morgan—became the suppliers of the British, and arranged for financing of British needs in the war. As one of the vice presidents of the House of Morgan testified after the war, “we felt ourselves to be agents of Britain from the beginning.”34

Well, whether or not that was the major reason we got into war, that’s what the socialist leader, Debs, said—that it’s the bankers who got us into war. Somebody in the audience took down what he said, and sent it to the federal authorities who said that Debs violated the Espionage and Sedition acts, which prohibited interfering with recruitment for the armed forces. Debs had said nothing about violence, and nothing provoking violence in his talk. I don’t think he said anything about the conscription one way or the other. In any case, there were no young men of eligible age in the audience who complained about it or were pointed to as people whose patriotism was possibly subverted by this talk. 

Debs was put on trial and sentenced to ten years in the federal penitentiary in Georgia. When the war was over, there had been prisoners of conscience in every country—dissidents who were arrested. One by one, they are pardoned in other countries, but not in America. Wilson was sick at this time and people came to him and said, “you know, Debs is ailing, he might die in federal prison. Why don’t you pardon him and pardon some of the others as well?” As clear as anything, we have the testimony from his Attorney General, Alexander Palmer, who was a fanatic trampler on civil rights with the famous Palmer Raids. Palmer said “why don’t you pardon Debs?” Wilson said “I will never pardon Debs. He stabbed our soldiers in the back by his speech.”35

Debs was not pardoned by Wilson. He was pardoned by Warren Harding. Was Warren Harding a great president? Is he considered a great president by historians, or as a “near great’ president as Wilson is? No. He’s considered maybe next to Nixon, the worst president, or something close. But, Harding was not the vindictive self-righteous cant-spouting type of person that Wilson was. Harding pardoned Debs, and other people who were in prison, saying that they didn’t mean any harm, and they were pretty good guys. So, if you hear or read of Woodrow Wilson being praised as a great liberal, as a compassionate humane individual, the case of Eugene Debs is something maybe to keep in mind.

  • 1

    Robert Higgs, “No More Great Presidents,” The Free Market 15, no. 3 (March 1997). 

  • 2

    Ralph Raico, “World War I: The Turning Point” in The Costs of War: America’s Pyrrhic Victories (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1999) pp. 203-248. See also Raico’s essay “Rethinking Churchill” in the same book, pp. 321-360.

  • 3

    Robert Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 

  • 4

    Raico here also recommends his essay “Harry S. Truman: Advancing the Revolution” in Reassessing the Presidency: The Rise of the Executive State and the Decline of Freedom, ed. John V. Denson (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2001) pp. 547-586.

  • 5

    See Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1944). Mises repeatedly criticizes Bismarck in the pages of Omnipotent Government, and writes:  “Bismarck and his military and aristocratic friends hated the liberals so thoroughly that they would have been ready to help the socialists get control of the country if they themselves had proved too weak to preserve their own rule.” (p.31). Mises also condemns Bismarck in Planning for Freedom, writing that Bismarck’s Sozialpolitik program has “a fair claim to the epithet Marxisn. See Ludwig von Mises, Planning for Freedom, p. 96. Mises also described the modern “progressive” and interventionist ideology as “the Bismarck orthodoxy” to be contrasted with the free-market, liberal “Jefferson orthodoxy.” P. 2.  Ludwig von Mises, Planning for Freedom (South Holland, IL: Libertarian Press, 1974). 

  • 6

    Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962) pp. xvi-xvii. 

  • 7

    Raico was not a fan of the Italian ruling dynasty. In an aside here he mentions the House of Savoy, which he calls a “vicious, corrupt, unspeakably evil government in Rome” which “must be the stupidest house and ruling family in European history—one loser after another.”

  • 8

    See Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (New York: Penguin, 2004) and Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (New York: Penguin, 2005). 

  • 9

    In an aside here, Raico recommends Thomas Fleming, The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I (New York: Basic Books, 2004).

  • 10

    G.J. Meyer, A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (New York: Delta, 2007) p. 44. 

  • 11

    The two monarchs corresponded in English and used these nicknames. These letters and telegrams would later be called the “Willy-Nicky correspondence.”  

  • 12

    D.H. Cole and E.C. Priestly, An Outline of British Military History, 1660-1936 (London: Sifton Praed and Co., 1936) p. 305. The German ultimatum was delivered July 31 and called on France “to surrender her frontier fortresses of Verdun and Toul to German occupation.” The demand that France surrender portions of its line of fortifications to the Germans was likely included as a means of ensuring the French would refuse, therefore giving the German regime an additional reason to invade France. 

  • 13

    This is a joke, but it illustrates the dishonesty in British claims about fighting for “small peoples.” 

  • 14

    Roland Stromberg, Redemption by War: The Intellectuals and 1914 (Lawrence, KS: The Regents Press of Kansas, 1982).

  • 15

    Ibid., p. 53. 

  • 16

    Ibid., pp. 61-84. 

  • 17

    Ibid., p. 198.

  • 18

    Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (New York: Anchor Books, 2003).

  • 19

    Raico is speaking of American culture surrounding the US war in Iraq, which began in 2003. 

  • 20

    According to Merritt W. Moseley, Jr., Wilson was the “American president whom [Mencken] hated above all others.” Merritt W. Moseley, Jr,  “H.L. Mencken and the First World War,” Menckeniana 58, (Summer 1976): 8.

  • 21

    Quoted in Terry Teachout, A Second Mencken Chrestomathy: A New Selection from the Writings of America’s Legendary Editor, Critic, and Wit (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994) p. 33. Mencken writes: “…Dr. Wilson, at the end of his second term, was simultaneously a candidate for a third term, for the presidency of the League of Nations, and for the first vacancy in the Trinity.” 

  • 22

    Raico, “World War I: The Turning Point.”

  • 23

    Franklin Roosevelt famously makes this claim in his “I Hate War” speech delivered at the Chautauqua Amphitheater in Chautauqua N.Y. on Aug. 14, 1936.

  • 24

    Walter Karp, The Politics of War: A Story of Two Wars Which Altered Forever the Political Life of the American Republic, 1890-1920 (New York: Franklin Square Press, 2003). See Chapter 12, “A Hopelessly False Position,” pp. 279-299. 

  • 25

    Variations of this phrase were used to describe the problem of carrying civilians on seagoing vessels that also carried munitions. A State Department Memo dated July 16, 1915 mentions the danger to passengers traveling on ships that carry “mixed cargoes of babies and bullets.” See “Hearings Before the Special Committee Investigating the Munitions Industry” in the US Senate. Part 25, January 7 and 8, 1936, US Government Printing Office, p. 8483.

  • 26

    Woodrow Wilson had been a political scientist and president at Princeton University before his time as an elected official. 

  • 27

    Robert Lansing, War Memoirs of Robert Lansing, Secretary of State (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1935) p. 128. 

  • 28

    Ibid.

  • 29

    Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944).

  • 30

    Raico means this only in the context of American civil liberties. Raico has commented in detail elsewhere on the extensive human rights violations and war crimes—committed by both sides—in the course of the war in Europe and the Pacific. 

  • 31

    H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy (New York: Vintage Books, 1982) pp. 602-603.

  • 32

    Some American activists in favor of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq disparaged the French when the French regime refused to endorse the US invasion. Some of these activists insisted that French fries be renamed “freedom fries.” This mirrors similar efforts during the First World War when American activists demanded that hamburgers and sauerkraut be renamed “liberty steak” and “liberty cabbage,” respectively.  

  • 33

    Debs delivered this speech in Canton, Ohio on June 16, 1918. 

  • 34

    See Martin Horn, “A Private Bank at War: J.P. Morgan & Co. and France, 1914-1918,” The Business History Review 74, no. 1, (Spring, 2000): pp. 91-93. 

  • 35

    Quoted in Lucy Robbins Lang, War Shadows: A Documental Story of the Struggle for Amnesty (New York: Central Labor Bodies Conference, 1922) p. 281. The exact quotation is “I will never consent to the pardon of this man. …This man was a traitor to his country, and he will never be pardoned during my administration.”