Reappraisals (updated)

You seemed to have wandered off from looking for political heroes to looking for political villains. That’s fine by me, as political figures are to be pitied at best, and never admired, except in the sense that perhaps one of them can be seen to have been somewhat less fool or knave than the mean.

So if you’re looking for US presidents who really screwed up, but have reputations exceeding the excoriation they actually deserve, look no further than John Adams. For the Alien and Sedition Acts alone, he deserves to be considered the very worst US president. Harding and Dubya were merely incompetent. Adams actually intended to to outlaw political dissent. That, and xenophobia based on a conspiracy theory about the French immigrant threat.

@gt I’ve thought that about Adams also, but forgot to mention him

Wilson is definitely overrated. The US probably could have avoided involvement in WWI and the subsequent intervention in Russia. It might have been even able to avoid its earlier incursion into Mexico ordered by Wilson. It certainly could have avoided using military force in Tulsa. Also there is no doubt that Debs was a political prisoner and not the only one.

Also supremely overrated is JFK who still has a Kim Jong Il like cult around him in certain parts of the US. I attribute this to the fact that like Kurt Cobain he died during the height of his popularity. Had he lived out his term it most likely would have been him not LBJ that would have been saddled with the Vietnam quagmire.

Deleted From now on, one comment per day, and a limit of 100 words

Forgot to note my comment is drawn from the Pentagon Papers. See the very helpful Avalon website.

Deleted From now on, one comment per day, and a limit of 100 words

Also supremely overrated is JFK who still has a Kim Jong Il like cult around him in certain parts of the US.

While JFK is indeed overrated, this really takes hyperbole well past 11.

Much as it goes against the grain to agree with Will on anything, he surely has the goods on Wilson

That may be true, but the only reason Will is mounting the campaign against Wilson in the first place is to use the word “progressive” to tar present-day progressives with all Wilson’s sins. Considering that (a) modern progressives disagree with the exact positions Will bashes Wilson for and (b) Will, as one of the few remaining conservatives with real intellectual credentials, has been around the block long enough to know darn well that comparing any pre-Southern-Strategy political coalition with any post-Southern-Strategy coalition, same name or not, is a mediocre fit at best, it’s hard to conclude that this is anything other than deliberate dishonesty.

So I don’t give him many points for accurately pointing out Wilson’s flaws, when he’s only doing it as part of a dishonest propaganda campaign against someone else.

As for the main topic, Diogenes is still looking. Hagiography has always been a mug’s game when it wasn’t a deliberate con. And settling for “not as bad as the other guy” is the normal condition of politics; it’s not productive to stomp off in disgust every time you discover a flaw in one of your allies.

M @11,

“Love affair” seems a very charitable interpretation.

Indeed. If anything, too charitable. “Love affair, as imagined by a girlfriendless wanker who reads Tarl Cabot novels non-ironically” would be charitable; “using a human being owned as chattel property under a barbaric legal system to relieve one’s urges” more realistic.

Will uses Wilson’s racism to score points, but I’m pretty sure that he shares it — he worked for Jesse Helms, after all. He understands very well how many of his actual opinions he can openly express. From time to time he lets slip his belief that turning the clock back to the 19th century would be a good thing, but he doesn’t spell everything out. He’s on record as believing that low voter participation is a good thing.

who lied America into the Great War

Beg pardon?

I don’t understand the impulse to treat all figures from earlier times as evil people. The entire society of antiquity was built on slave labor, for example; a majority of the people in the Roman empire were slaves and women had essentially no rights. It’s a cheap and smug form of history to dismiss everyone who lived in that society.

Jefferson was living in an era where people took the divine right of kings seriously. His writings, taken to their logical conclusion, have served as a tremendous inspiration towards universal rights. His theology would be radical even today. And he owned slaves. One can acknowledge the power of the former while seeing the evil of the latter.

As far as Wilson is concerned, the progressive era included a series of tremendously important reforms – including the constitutional amendment permitting a federal income tax. I agree with Chris – Will is engaged in the same game as Jonah Goldberg. It’s essentially trying to tar long-dead progressives and liberals as Bad People, erasing the good that they did. This is not an intellectually honest game. Plenty of early feminists were explicit and loud racists, for example; plenty of early advocates of racial equality were explicit sexists. What purpose is served if you play the game of dismissing all of them?

As far as I can remember, GW Bush didn’t.

He did speak strongly against “nation building.”

I’m no giant fan of Wilson, but chris @ 14 is exactly right. Which makes it difficult to take Will’s criticisms seriously.

And I might be wrong about this, but isn’t Jefferson celebrated more as the premier theorist of the revolution than for anything he did in office?

“Corruption is a very positive sign of government. You should always be in favor of corruption. ” — This has worked out very well in post-WW2 Italy (not to mention Albania and Africa)!

Wilson was both an authoritarian and an idealist, a racist and an intellectual, a conservative and a progressive. These juxtapositions constitute an odd and contradictory package for us, not least, because FDR began separating them in the New Deal and World II. I think FDR took Wilson as both a personal hero and an instructive, bad example.

Wilson’s is the single Democratic interregnum in the long stretch of overwhelming Republican dominance of national politics, which followed from Grover Cleveland getting blamed, in his second term, for the Depression that ensued after the Panic of 1893. Wilson’s anemic popular vote percentage in 1912 rivalled Lincoln’s in 1860, though, thankfully, his electoral college support was geographically broader.

The institution of the Federal Reserve, as a progressive measure, by Wilson, was a singular achievement, which turned on his being a Democrat, able to reconcile Bryan and the Populists to the version of the Federal Reserve, proposed by Carter Glass, (as opposed to the version proposed by arch-Republican and plutocrat, Nelson Aldrich). Except for the timely foundation of the Federal Reserve, the advent of World War I might have had quite a different impact on the United States. In the event, the new-born Federal Reserve was able to stem the inevitable initial panic.

Wilson’s determination to lead the U.S. into World War I on the side of the Allies, and his rhetorical power, in defining the meaning of that intervention as a fight for Democracy, for Americans and the world, is his most salient achievement. The U.S. spent much of the 19th century as the Last Best Hope, in a world still dominated by European Empires and feudal aristocracies. Wilson saw, correctly, that World War I was the final crash, and championed the conjunction of popular, democratic government fused to the nation-state.

In our present-day division of ideologies, the conservatives look back and secretly mourn the passing of hereditary aristocracy in WWI, while much of what passes for the left, disdains nationalism and populism along with racism, and not without reason. The sense of political solidarity, which rests on a shared cultural identity, is suspicious to the idealistic left, today, as smelling of racism, and its consequences in the violent exclusion or extermination of whole peoples, in the pursuit of nation-building, makes Wilson’s vision seem dubious to us. It is easy for technocrats to discount the importance of populism and solidarity in the building of the welfare state.

Today, a politics, without political solidarity, and without representation for the interests of the 99%, seems unable to use technocracy alone to sustain institutions, against the plutocracy. As the institutions of liberal internationalism and institutionalism — of which Wilson is the grandfather, if FDR is the father — crumble from corruption as the American hegemony Wilson tried to initiate, and the American democracy he tried to re-invigorate, erodes away, we might be more sympathetic with his having fought some good fights.

“Corruption is a very positive sign of government” is probably in the top ten stupidest statements I’ve read on Crooked Timber, Henri. The Nazis were both power mad; often they were corrupt as well, like Göring. Trying to argue these faults as exclusives (as whoever-it-is you were quoting) is not just dumb, it’s ahistoric.

The only way your statement is true is as follows: once you have signs of a corrupt government, you can arrest them – hopefully replacing them with someone else more competent, more benevolent and less indolent. That’s positive. That’s a rough description of Queensland politics in the late eighties.

@Down and Out of Sài Gòn
That’s a Noam Chomsky quote. Say what you will about good old Noam, and personally I have a lot of time for him, but he’s got this extreme visceral hatred of JFK that blinds him even in the face of documentary evidence to the contrary. I remember a number of years ago when a bunch of documents from his administration were declassified which showed JFK considering backing out of the then limited commitment of “advisors” to Vietnam and Chompsky was having none of it on some kind of anti-JFK a priori grounds or so it seemed. I still dig the man but after that I no longer take his facts at face value.

JQ @33: Will and Wilson belong to the party of Jefferson (Thomas and Davis)

I’m with Marc @ 23, the dear deleted Jack Strocchi, and others in thinking that this sells Wilson and Thomas Jefferson seriously short. The achievements the above commenters have listed are solid ones.

But again I think your posing of the question involves — forgive this resurrection of an earlier hobbyhorse — a failure to disaggregate. To rank sufficiently large and complex phenomena, like presidential administrations, along a linear scale is an invitation to fruitless quibbling. Now if you had proposed that “Wilsonian idealism” — meaning the frequently alleged tendency of United States foreign policy to promote democracy and self-determination for other peoples, regardless of American economic or strategic interests — was a fraud and a myth, and that Will or anyone else who takes “Wilsonian idealism” at face value is speaking nonsense, then I’d cheer you on.

As for Jefferson, he is (along with Lincoln) our American civic Shakespeare: the author of imperishable works that are the literary lodestone of American political culture. Suppose it were discovered tomorrow that Shakespeare had committed some crime equivalent to Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings (to which JQ, I recognize, prudently refrained from referring) or failure to free his slaves. Would anyone suggest, the day after tomorrow, that Shakespeare’s achievement was “overrated”?

I’d like to dispute Quiggin’s discussion of Wilson. I don’t think it’s at all reasonable to say that Wilson “lied America into the Great War.” I don’t even know what that is supposed to mean. Wilson’s neutrality policy was certainly tilted towards the Entente. But it was tilted towards the Entente because it was pretty strongly in US interests to be able to trade with the Entente powers, and that meant taking a hard line stance against German submarine warfare.

But the real issue here is that the key decisions which led to war between the United States and Germany in 1917 were made by Germany. They were made by Germany in full knowledge that they would almost certainly lead to American entry into the war, and they were made in order to pursue a policy (unrestricted submarine warfare) which did not and could not achieve its political objectives. The Kaiser, Ludendorff, and Holtzendorff made the key decisions that brought the US into the war, and it’s hard to see, say, a President Taft or Hughes (to say nothing of Teddy Roosevelt) behaving all that differently from Taft. Even the policy advocated by Bryan probably wouldn’t have prevented American entry. The Germans decided to have a war with the United States, and they knew this was what they were doing.

The sort of knee jerk assumption that non-intervention would have been the right decision for the US irritates me, too. There were legitimate reasons for the US to prefer an Entente victory to a German one. We can’t judge the actions of statesmen in the teens based on what we all know happened in the 30s.

Wilson’s domestic legislative achievement was also much more impressive than Quiggin suggests. The creation of the Federal Reserve; the Clayton Act, which legalized labor unions, among other things; and the Underwood Tariff, which introduced the income tax, were all important achievements. The idea of comparing Wilson’s domestic policy achievement unfavorably to TR’s is ridiculous – Wilson was far more successful in getting Congress to pass important progressive legislation than TR was, and Wilson’s achievements in that field were probably the most impressive of any president between Lincoln and FDR.

He was, indeed, a racist and an enemy of civil liberties. And his policy at the Paris Peace Conference was high-handed and often foolish (although one can go too far in criticizing the Treaty of Versailles and its accompanying treaties, which may well have been about the best that anyone could have expected). But his achievements were also real, and claiming that he lied the US into World War I is deeply unfair.

Yeah, JQ, there’s been a longstanding wingnut campaign in the U.S., spearheaded by Glenn Beck and other Fox News personalities and spread through various conservative study groups around the country, to denounce “progressives” by associating them with the evils of Woodrow Wilson: Will’s really late to the party on this one.

I can’t agree with Glen Tomkins that Harding was just incompetent. He was thoroughly corrupt, but on a mean and petty scale, unlike the more grandiose type of corruption demonstrated by some of the others.

Can we admire Jefferson for stating that the legitimacy of government derives from the consent of the governed, and at the same time condemn him for imposing an unwanted system of government on the reluctant inhabitants of the Louisiana territory without seeking their opinion on the matter?

If we reserve our admiration for people who have been totally consistent throughout their entire lifetimes, we would be starting with a very short list, I think.

geo’s discussion of Shakespeare, is interesting, in that if we look at modern writers’ personal lives, some of them are not very nice at all, but in general we judge their works separately. (Bill Knott’s comment on Ezra Pound, “at least he made the quatrains run on time”.) Should politicians be judged on their private lives too?

With Jefferson you could argue that keeping slaves was more of a public issue, although it was also an economic issue for him as he was not very good at personal money management. If he had spent less on books, architecture and other projects, he might have been able to pay off his debts and free his slaves. But he didn’t.

The slaves were making the money he was not saving to free them.

I doubt Jefferson would consider the transfer of Louisiana from the sovereignty of the self-crowned French Emperor to a country, whose constitution and traditions provided a regular means of organizing and establishing democratic self-government, to be a practical contradiction of his principles. On the other hand, holding his slaves, from whom he never asked consent for his governance of them, must have seemed a powerful contradiction, both of his personal principles and those he had assigned to his country.

On the other hand, many historians believe that had the US not entered the war in 1917, the war might have likely ended in something of a stalemate by the end of that year.

What historians are those? This seems unlikely to me – neither side wanted to quit until it was sure it had either lost or won, and neither of those outcomes would have occurred by the end of 1917.

And there’s no particular reason to think the Germans would have won, either – American troops weren’t essential to stopping the last German offensive in 1918. So the most likely outcome would seem to be renewed stalemate.

And this is why he is overrated. This may have been the greatest strategic blunder in American history. It is hard to come up with a worse outcome for WWI than the one that actually occurred. Counter-factual’s are extremely difficult but if Germany wins WW1, there is no Hitler, no holocaust, probably no Stalin (I doubt Germany would have allowed the Soviets to stay in power in Russia and Germany controlled much of the East prior to armistice) and no general world war II in Europe.

Two points need to be kept in mind. One is that hindsight is 20/20 – and that we can’t really have a sense of how bad a Europe run by a victorious Wilhelmine Germany might have been. But we can be certain it would have been quite bad. No Hitler and no Holocaust, most likely. But Erich Ludendorff was an extreme right-wing anti-Semite, and he was the guy running Germany in 1918. Nor is there any reason to assume that the rise of Nazism was an inevitable result of the WWI defeat – the defeat was necessary, but not sufficient, for Hitler’s rule in Germany. But the biggest problem is that none of this was foreseeable to any of the actors during the war. It is enormously problematic to judge historical actors on the basis of later events they could not possibly have anticipated.

The second point, again, is that Wilson didn’t make the key decisions that brought the United States into the war. Germany did, quite consciously and deliberately. Virtually any plausible American government in 1917 would have ended up at war with Germany – certainly a Republican administration would have.

@40 Saigon, but what can be sillier than ‘this king was a nice guy and that king wasn’t’? If you’re an anarchist, the only question, with respect to concentration of power, is how much damage it’s likely to cause.

@42
Given the track record of Imperial Germany in regards to peacemaking – Brest Litovsk – I can’t be quite so sanguine about a victory for them. Certainly France would have been dismembered, so, so much for European stability.

I rate Wilson highly in spite of his foul personal beliefs. He tried to make a better world with the LoN and even if it was not effective diplomatically in the end, the idea was good enough to keep after WW2.
His record of progressivism in domestic issues has , as other posters have noted, lasted.

Kennedy signed off on the “Strategic Hamlet Program” (forced relocation) and “Operation Ranch Hand” (Agent Orange) – both constitute war crimes and certainly an escalation of the war.

“And there’s no particular reason to think the Germans would have won, either – American troops weren’t essential to stopping the last German offensive in 1918. So the most likely outcome would seem to be renewed stalemate.”

Which might have led to a greater Soviet conquest in the aftermath of WWI, due to the fact that Germany would have been weakened by another year or two of war and blockade. In addition, there’d have been an increased chance of a communist revolution in Germany.

“Given the track record of Imperial Germany in regards to peacemaking – Brest Litovsk – I can’t be quite so sanguine about a victory for them. Certainly France would have been dismembered, so, so much for European stability.”

Assuming a ‘successful’ German conclusion to WWI, they’d have a flat-out empire stretching from the Channel [and chunks of France] to Ukraine and Belarus. With lots of continued suffering in Ukraine, Belarus and the rump of Russia/USSR due to the ‘consolidation’ of Imperial rule. This, of course, would have set things up for a repeat of the Napoleonic wars against Great Britain.

It’s hard to imagine anything worse could have resulted from such a scenario than what actually occurred in the decades after.

Pretty easy to imagine. War continues another 2 years after the French surrender, as Germany has no practical way of forcing the UK to stop fighting a Napoleonic-style worldwide war. Perhaps ten million more people die, many in colonial campaigns in Africa. Eventual terms, at the peace conference sponsored by Wilson, are controversial, in that despite it’s evident victory, Germany only gets 2 out of 3 of European land, African colonies and financial tribute.

Capitalism being what it is, something very like the Wall street crash and Depression happen on cue. Crippled by the costs of African colonies/rebuilding trench-ravaged land/reliance on paper financial inflows, the German economy collapses into hyperinflation. The new techniques of mass propaganda and party membership, pioneered by the communists, are used to blame those problems on the peace terms (whatever they were). Hitler’s speech about the ‘stolen fruits of victory’ is considered a classic of it’s kind. With direct Imperial rule seeming an outdated relic heading for the same fate as the Romanov’s, he marches on Berlin and secures the public backing of the new Kaiser for fascism. A few years later in Italy, Mussolini comes third behind two flavours of Socialism in an election, and so ends up in power too.

Perhaps France defaults on its tribute payments, or some UK military officers are found advising Haile Selassie’s revolt. Starting from a much stronger military starting point, Hitler wins.

20 years after Mengele’s pioneering experiments, the discovery of modern genetics starts turning Nazi racial science into an objective description of the new human subspecies the breeding and culling program has created.

Or maybe we are lucky and just get a nuclear war instead.

In general, the outcome of a war decades previously is not going to have any remotely predicable influence on economics, technologies and politics in the mid-1930s. Judge things on their own terms, not on the results of 20 more years of events and choices.

Novakant says Kennedy signed off on the Strategic Hamlet Program. It was not his to sign off on.
In August 1962, GVN produced its long awaited national pacification plan with four priority areas and specified priorities within each area. At the same time, however, it indicated that over 2,500 strategic hamlets had already been completed and that work was already underway on more than 2,500 more. Although it was not until October 1962, that GVN explicitly announced the Strategic Hamlet Program to be the unifying concept of its pacification and counterinsurgent effort it was clear earlier that the program had assumed this central position.
Three important implications of this early progress (or, more precisely, reported progress) are also clear in retrospect. These implications seem not to have impressed themselves acutely upon U.S. observers at the time. First, the program was truly one of GVN initiative rather than one embodying priorities and time phasing recommended by the U.S. Diem was running with his own ball in programmatic terms, no matter who articulated the theory of the approach

From the Pentagon Papers. Defendant is innocent on count 1.

@63
well, this excerpt from the PP is certainly in some conflict with other accounts

From David Milne, America’s Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War (2008), p.105:
“The director of the State Department’s bureau of intelligence and research, Roger Hilsman, presented the [strategic hamlet] program’s blueprint — ‘A Strategic Concept for South Vietnam’ — to Kennedy on February 2, 1962.”

p.104: strategic hamlet program was “the Kennedy administration’s central strategy for defeating Communism in South Vietnam”

Others have already said many of the things I wanted to say, so I’m not going to bother repeating them. One thing I’m not sure has been said with enough force is that there is a big difference between historical figures who passively go along with injustice, and those who actively perpetrate and further injustice. Therefore, to use examples from the original post, there is a big difference between Clay and Webster on one hand and Calhoun on the other. To the extent that Clay and Webster sinned, it was in not fighting hard enough against Calhoun and the powers and principalities he represented. Likewise, Woodrow Wilson can’t plead ignorance and upbringing as an excuse for his racism. Previous administrations had hired African-Americans into the civil service; Wilson fired them, an actively regressive step and not simply a maintenance of the status quo.

Regarding World War I: I’m rather baffled by some of the claims made in this thread. Most notably, John’s claim @ 41 that US entry into the war (on the Entente side) was more or less inevitable. Why? Because of unrestricted submarine warfare? That wasn’t something that Germany came up with just for the evulz; it was a response to the unrestricted surface-ship warfare that had been conducted by the UK Royal Navy for some time previously. Britain was no more solicitous of neutral rights than Germany was. And if Wilson hadn’t consciously and deliberately backed Germany into a corner, USW might never have happened in the first place. Then, too, several posters (John @ 49, gray @ 52, Anderson @ 58) seem to think that Wilhelmine Germany was somehow morally worse than contemporary Britain. Again, I’m just not seeing it. Britain was basically the Nazi Germany of the 19th century, waging aggressive war throughout the world without provocation or apology, murdering countless millions via starvation, inventing the concentration camp. While the Germans were certainly no angels in the pre-WWI era, it would be quite a stretch to say that they were worse than the Brits. Perhaps the worst colonists of all were the Belgians – another Entente power.

To Bruce Wilder @ 50: Moral responsibility is not mathematical. If two men conspire to murder a third, and then carry out that murder, they are not each 50% guilty; they are each 100% guilty, notwithstanding that there was still only one murder committed. Saying that Wilson was responsible at least to some extent for Hitler, WWII, and the Holocaust does not in any way imply that the Nazis themselves are not responsible.

Regarding Wilson’s alleged progressive record: The Federal Reserve? Really? Have you guys been asleep these past few years?

Sorry for rambling on so long. Moderators, please let me know if I’m being too verbose.

Chris Williams: “I’m not a massive fan of the British Empire, which did indeed kill millions – but it didn’t invent the concentration camp: that was a Spanish innovation.”

The sources don’t seem to be consistent on this point. I was relying on accounts that say that the concentration camp was invented for the Boer War (Brad DeLong discusses the sequence of events here). Google Books shows some sources which repeat this account, some which say concentration camps were invented by Spain in occupied Cuba, and a few which claim that the Boer War claim is German propaganda! I suspect there is no clear answer because the dubious honor of having the first “concentration camp” depends on how the person using that term chooses to define it.

It does appear that the Spanish beat the British by a few years in pioneering the use of the concentration camp. The Spanish used them in 1896-1897 before the start of the Boer War in 1899. The US then used them in the Philippines and the Germans in Namibia.

Actually, of course, the practice of rounding people up and interring them en masse didn’t take humans until the late 19th Century to invent. The Russians, for example, interred Polish civilians in camps during the 18th Century.

Anderson @ 70: “I wish you had put this at the beginning of your comment, to save me the trouble of reading further.”

Dismissal isn’t a substitute for reasoned argument.

The way I see it, Nazi Germany’s evil was embodied in several different policy programs. Foremost among these were aggressive warfare for territorial gain, a dog-eat-dog policy in which the poor and weak were denigrated, state-sponsored racism (including modern anti-Semitism), and genocide.

But if you examine the historical record, it becomes apparent that 19th century Britain was guilty of each of these same things. Aggressive warfare for territorial gain? Of course – the UK spent most of the 19th century painting large swathes of the map red at the point of a gun. Dog-eat-dog ideology? Check – this was the society of the Poor Law and the workhouse, the brutal and pitiless industrial society against which Karl Marx saw no remedy but revolution. Racism? There were few societies in history more racist than 19th century Britain (“the wogs begin at Calais”). Almost as soon as Darwin penned his seminal work, it was abused by his countrymen as a justification for racism. (To his credit, Darwin himself largely refrained from such speculations, but his colleagues, including Huxley, were not thus restrained.) As for genocide, if Britain’s deliberate and callous starvation of millions in Ireland and India during the 19th century does not qualify, then the word has no meaning.

Anderson @ 70: “Do you have a list of American ships sunk by the Royal Navy during WW1?”

The British generally seized neutral ships rather than sinking them. Under international law, though, this doesn’t matter; both were equally in violation of the USA’s rights as a neutral power. (Neither, however, was worth going to war over.)

The purpose and intent of Britain’s blockade was to cause starvation (the UK’s favorite method of execution) in Germany. Was this really a more morally praiseworthy aim?

Slightly OT, but suggested by the reference to unheroic Australian political leaders, I think it would be fun to put together a list of small-country leaders who might have been the second coming of Bismarck-Disraeli-Lincoln if put in charge of a nation large enough to give their talents free reign, for good or ill. Who cares, for example, if the leader of Holland or Finland is a strait-jacketed giant among statespersons? But give them, say, Germany or the United States and then what? To be clear, I’m talking about a list of persons of ability, like, say, Lee Kuan Yew, not madmen like Kim Jong Il.

As for genocide, if Britain’s deliberate and callous starvation of millions in Ireland and India during the 19th century does not qualify, then the word has no meaning.

That’s odd, because I own a book of words — a “dictionary” — and it defines “genocide” as “the systematic and planned extermination of an entire national, racial, political, or ethnic group.” (You can find similar resources online.) If you think Britain did anything of the kind to Ireland or to India, then I think you are under-educated on the topics you’re addressing.

The British generally seized neutral ships rather than sinking them. Under international law, though, this doesn’t matter

It matters considerably, however, to the people who don’t drown. And you don’t know what you’re talking about; international law required all reasonable efforts to rescue the passengers. U-boats simply could not do this for any sizable number of people, so they could not comply with international law.

The purpose and intent of Britain’s blockade was to cause starvation (the UK’s favorite method of execution) in Germany. Was this really a more morally praiseworthy aim?

“The UK’s favorite method of execution.” You sound like the Stormfront character whose comments I sometimes have to delete from my blog. Germany had an option to avoid its population’s hunger: surrender. Its gov’t (none of whom were going hungry) chose to advance their political aims instead.

Anderson 12.27.11 at 5:50 pm

Britain was basically the Nazi Germany of the 19th century

I wish you had put this at the beginning of your comment, to save me the trouble of reading further.

If I wanted to continue in the same note that Anderson has struck, I might point out that, unlike Josh G.’s remarks about 19th c. Britain, Anderson’s name stands right at the beginning of all his posts, thus sparing most of us a great deal of time and trouble; but as I understand the proprietors have been striving of late to raise the tone down here in the comments, I shall not do so, but will instead echo Josh’s not unreasonable suggestion that, if Anderson has an argument to make, he make it rather then simply sputtering.

Anderson’s name stands right at the beginning of all his posts, thus sparing most of us a great deal of time and trouble

Handy, ain’t it?

I suppose we inhabit different interpretive communities, but in mine, equating the British Empire to Nazi Germany is just nuts. I’m waiting for someone to explain to me how I’m mistaken about that, but it hasn’t happened yet.

(And is anyone ever going to explain how Wilson “lied the U.S. into war”? I mean, yeah, he was an arrogant racist jackass, but that doesn’t quite work as an explanation of the U.S.’s entry in WW1. Leaving aside that Congress had something or other to do with it.)

“Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

And this applies to Ireland … how? It won’t do as an explanation of the great famine. And malevolently “encouraging” emigration, while wicked in itself, does not aim at “physical destruction.” Come on: Treblinka?

Except here it appears that you’re the one denying that your favorite nation committed genocide.

Hm .. do I have a favorite nation? Must ponder that. Regardless, there is a lot to criticize about the British Empire, but screeching about how it was equivalent to Nazi Germany does not make any useful contribution to that criticism.

Britain had the same option if they didn’t like Germany’s U-boat warfare.

Well, I left out another option: win the war. Britain succeeded in that. And I am well aware of the fashion for claiming that WW1

… Oops, hit wrong key. Completing # 82:

just happened of itself, but the fact remains that Germany invaded Belgium and France, and planned to keep Belgium and to reduce most of the continent to subjection to Germany. Britain did not start the war. France may’ve encouraged Russia to mobilize vs. Germany, but Germany did not then have to blunder and go to war with France. It was scarcely France’s fault, or Britain’s, that the German general staff had only one plan in the cupboard.

On Bismarck unifying Germany, was that really such a good thing?

Bismarck must’ve had days where he asked himself the same thing, riding as he was on the tiger of German nationalism ….

@78:

IIRC it was especially the French that wanted to buy time for rearmament at Munich, since they actually had a mutual defense treaty with Czechoslovakia, as did the Soviet Union. And it was the failure of the French to honor their treaty commitment that convinced Stalin that the West was unreliable and so he looked about elsewhere…

Moral responsibility requires both intent and proximate cause. It is not enough to wish a man dead, nor is sticking pins in a voodoo doll. Actually killing a man, with a suitable tool, such as a gun or a motor vehicle, in a moment of passion, or carelessness, or inebriation, or madness, carries a degree of moral culpability, less than that associated with killing a man as part of some malevolent plan to further one’s own ends. At least that’s how the civil law treats the matter, and I presume that reflects our general, shared moral sense reasonably well. We could argue about culpability in a military context, and I’m not sure what my opinion would be.

My point, here, would be that to blame Woodrow Wilson for the emergence of Hitler and the Rise of Nazi Germany, in a moral sense, with analogy to persons committing crimes, encounters two obstacles: intention and proximate cause. I have never heard anyone make the claim that the idealistic, narrow-minded, authoritarian Wilson had a deliberate intent to cause the Second World War, so I presume that the claim with regard to intent, is some sort carelessness or negligence or stupidity. Great “strategic error” was a term bandied about, up-thread, though I cannot quite distinguish a clear referent to an associated proximate cause. That’s what interests me most in this discussion: proximate cause.

Wilson, Allied Victory, the Paris Peace Conference and the Versailles Treaty -> to the emergence of Nazi Germany and the Second World War seems a long, chaotic stretch of intervening cause-and-effect to be claiming that Wilson “caused” the latter.

I can think of various specific points, on which the beginning of a long chain of cause-and-effect might be persuasively argued. Reparations. Occupation of the Ruhr. The “design” of Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia, qua nation-states. And, several others.

The quixotic tendencies in French policy stand out in my mind, as misguided, but that was Clemenceau and other Frenchmen, no? The size of reparations, de-militarizing the Rhineland, occupying the Ruhr coal mines, and outside the scope of the Treaty — the failure to reform the French military command structure and personnel, reliance on the Maginot Line, the failure to intervene in Spain, etc., etc.

The Germans failed to build legitimacy for a democratic state. Part of this was the difficulty of reparations, part the difficulties associated with signing a treaty at all, compounded by irresolution in dealing with those in military command, who had lost an ill-advised war.

Wilson’s insistence on a principle of self-determination, applied to the mess left by the Hapsburg Empire, wasn’t very practical. But, nationalist aspirations were hardly of his creation; they had histories and leaders of their own.

Anyway, I just do not see a the smoking gun of proximate cause that would make sense of branding Woodrow Wilson, or his policies, as some sort of supremely bad example of something.

Josh G – you don’t see any moral distinction between stopping ships and seizing contraband, on the one hand, and sinking ships full of civilians without warning?

Whatever the immorality of the British blockade against Germany, it didn’t affect American citizens in the same way that unrestricted submarine warfare did. And it is, of course, a government’s responsibility to protect its own citizens, not to rectify injustice to foreign civilians (whose government was engaging in a war of aggression).

It’s certainly arguable that Wilson’s policies backed the Germans into a corner. But it was still the Germans who made the decision to institute a policy they knew would result in war with the United States, and, more importantly, that policy did not and could not achieve its stated objectives. Unrestricted submarine warfare did not and could not win the war for the Germans, or drive Britain out of the war, or economically cripple it. The Germans made a decision to go to war with the United States (something every German policymaker knew would result from the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare), and they made that decision for no good reason. Should Wilson have drawn the line in the sand where he did? That’s arguable, but it’s hard to see any plausible American leader in this period doing otherwise. Even a President Bryan would have been hard pressed to avoid war under those circumstances. The basic problem is one-sidedness – it makes little sense to blame United States leaders for a war which was largely provoked by Germany.

As to whether the British Empire was the “Nazi Germany of the 19th century,” this kind of thing quickly becomes tedious. If we want to, we can come up with a pretty compelling moral condemnation of every government that has ever existed. But what’s the point? The British committed their share of atrocities in building their empire. If you want to argue that this makes them as bad as the Nazis, I suppose you can go ahead, although you’ll not find many takers. But certainly the German treatment of the Herero was worse than anything the British did, and that’s in a context where the Germans had far fewer opportunities to commit colonial atrocities than the British did. Looking out Germany and Britain as a whole, it’s really hard not to view the British as more sympathetic. Germany was an anachronistic quasi-authoritarian state run by backwards reactionary aristocrats. Its goals in the war were essentially the domination of the European continent, and perhaps the world. The British were an increasingly democratic polity and their goals in the war were essentially the preservation of the status quo. I think it’s pointless to take side in century old political arguments, but it’s pretty clear and understandable why Wilson (and most other Americans not of Irish or German descent) was more sympathetic to Britain and its allies than to Germany.

On another note…

Wilson’s insistence on a principle of self-determination, applied to the mess left by the Hapsburg Empire, wasn’t very practical.

Wilson didn’t cause the break-up of the Habsburg Empire, and it was an accomplished fact by the time he got to Paris. I’m not sure what, exactly, Wilson is supposed to have done so wrong in adjudicating the numerous border disputes among the already existing successor states in 1919. The Big Three couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again even if they had wanted to, and while the settlement they worked out wasn’t perfect, what better alternative was available to them?

On Wilson and segregation – firing black Federal employees definitely counts against him, but I’d want to know a lot more before condemning him generally. All political leaders have to weigh priorities – maybe he thought that making desegregation a hot topic would make it impossible to pass labour laws? You can’t judge on later outcomes, you have to look at what people saw their choices as, in the frame of the times.

Chamberlain’s great mistake was not to pick up Soviet offers of a general guarantee of European borders in 1938 – as so often, dislike of communism outweighed fear of fascism.

Wilson, in my opinion, is much worse than anyone here has adequately described. I believe he, and Bernays et al, essentially used WWI as a means of rationalizing the American political economy into the Fordist consumerist institutionalized oppression of the working class that we have known ever since. The Palmer raids and jailing of Debs were just the incidental final touches of the permanent elimination of socialist possibility in America.

This was very intentional and well understood. The racism, nationalism, and militarism is directly connected to the capitalist progressivism. Freaking proto-fascist.

WWI was a tool for Wilson as Iraq was a tool in the last decade.

Very little of the analysis here actually addresses the situations facing the people at the time. Were Allied leaders to acquiesce in Germany war aims? Fail to blockade Germany when in a war instigated by Germany? Was Wilson to let pass unrestricted submarine warfare and with it, US trade with both allied and neutral Europe? Did he have to deal politically with a Southern political bloc (probably the largest single political bloc in Congress, with firm bases in the Southern states and counties)? His presidency would surely have been judged a failure if he alienated the Southern bloc and, as a result, failed to pass any progressive measures while still getting nothing done about segregation. Hand-wringing is not an adequate substitute for choice.

What pro-war historiography?

Since we’re playing the “whose the most evull!” game, I’d note that the imperial expansion of the United States westwards during the 19th century, accompanied as it was by multiple genocides, surely puts that country into contention. (Noting also that Hitler had his own clear answer to who “the Nazis of the 19th century” were.) As for 19th century Britain being especially racist, by the standards of the times, well I doubt it. The willingness of British voters to return MPs of Indian ethnicity being relevant evidence here.

Chris Bertram @ 107: “Since we’re playing the “whose the most evull!” game, I’d note that the imperial expansion of the United States westwards during the 19th century, accompanied as it was by multiple genocides, surely puts that country into contention.”

Fair enough. The 19th-century USA was a deeply unpleasant place in many ways.

“(Noting also that Hitler had his own clear answer to who “the Nazis of the 19th century” were.)”

True enough. I wonder how many Americans know that Hitler loved Westerns, and approvingly cited the US destruction of Native societies as a precedent for his own attempted conquests in the East? Things like this should be taught in history class.

I think one reason that the Nazis are such enduring villains in popular history and popular culture is that they were in many ways a reflection of our own worst nature. Their sins, committed in the 20th century, were our sins committed in the 19th.

@jch 89: And it was the failure of the French to honor their treaty commitment that convinced Stalin that the West was unreliable and so he looked about elsewhere…

No, it wasn’t a matter of ‘the West being unreliable’. If anything, too reliable. Recently declassified documents confirm that “the Munich conspiracy”, as they call it, was perceived (correctly, imo) as a deliberate policy of egging Germany on to march east and attack the USSR.

http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20080929/117271264.html

Later, on November 25, Grippenberg [Finnish Ambassador in London] reported his conversation with a British government member who assured him that Britain and France would not interfere in Germany’s eastward expansion.

“Britain’s position is as follows: let’s wait until Germany and the U.S.S.R. get involved in a big conflict,” the document reads.

@LFC 106

I still believe that ww1, as well as ww2, was caused by the end of “cool” (sarcastic) places to colonize.
IMHO Europe, since the last half of the 19th century, was a place ridden by wars waged by small/medium powers that each fought for “expansion” at the expence of their (usually less industrialized) neighbours.
The example that I have in mind is that of the expansion of the comparatively well industrialized Piedmont to southern Italy, the subsequent unification of Italy, the Italian expansionistic policy before and during ww1, the fascist expansionistic policy between the war, fascist colonial wars (note that, even at the time, some Italian observers believed that Libya, for example, was not worth conquest because too poor, a “box of sand”), the expansionist wishes of Mussolini for ww2 (making the Mediterranean an Italian sea).
Those policies didn’t change during time; in facts Mussolini’s policy was just a prosecution of the Savoia’s policy of the 19th century.
In the same sense, to a certain degree German expansionistic policy in ww1 and ww2 was just a prosecution of prussian expansionistic policy in the 19th century.
When, on the other hand, we look to the policy of the “estabilished” european powers (France and Britain), we see that them too pursued an expansionistic policy, but in the colonies mone than in Europe: in Europe, they mostly pursued a policy of mantaining the status quo and propping up “cushion” ministates.
However France and Britain took power before Italy (Piedmont) and Germany (Prussia), so Italy and Germany coudn’t pursue the same colonial expansion, and had to resort to “colonize” the european cushion ministates (like the rest of Italy from the point of view of Piedmont) or to prey on weakened old powers like Russia and the Hapsburg empire (for the Prussians).
In the end, this rush for expansion caused ww1 and, later, ww2.

Why did all those european powers wish so much colonial or territorial expansion? I’m not able to understand it clearly, but it seems to me that the only two possible answers are: need of natural resources or need to secure export markets. This second possible answer seems more interesting to me and, although I agree that it’s an old theory, I think that in most discussions of colonialism this point gets lost.

“Germany certainly wasn’t the only country looking for war. Russia was nursing resentments after being forced to disgorge some of its Balkan conquests, and lusting after the Straits as usual. (There’s a dubious little book out, The Russian Origins of the First World War, that seems to make a rather overstated case.) Russia didn’t have to mobilize vs. both Austria and Germany, and should bear some guilt for that.”

This is interesting, because it’s clear that German mobilization plans were for a two-front war, and Germany had been successful in the mid/late 1800’s due to being able to mobilize large numbers of troops quickly. It’d have been (even more) foolish for Russia to attempt to deal with Austria alone.

Random Lurker @113
One problem is that you’re lumping together colonial expansion w territorial expansion in general. There were various motives for acquiring colonies, including status/prestige. And some decisionmakers, notably Bismarck, resisted these lures and didn’t care much about colonies at all. Another problem is that you’re positing expansion as a kind of inevitable drive fueled by economics. But (at least some) natural resources can also be obtained by trade, of course, and levels of int’l trade (at least intra-European trade) were very high in the years before WW1. I remain skeptical that WW1 can be explained by the drive for markets (or by an inevitable urge to expand). There are other, considerably more plausible, ’causes’ incl. contingency (what if Franz Ferdinand had not been shot?). As for WW2, I’m going to plead lack of time right now.

WWI has always been known as [an] “imperialist war”

In some circles. Not in others.

I wouldn’t put “the contents of your wallet” and “the contents of your empire” in the same moral category, though perhaps a Marxist would.

OK, so you agree all the major participant governments except that of the UK were out for war from the start, and seeking (utterly foolishly, as Angell had already pointed out) territorial gains, colonies and so forth. That alone makes it clear that Wilson was joining a war between rival imperialists.

France was seeking to recover territories Germany had taken from it in 1870. That is “imperialism”?

If the UK had entered the war, then, after the German advance was halted at the Marne, demanded a peace without annexations or indemnities

Uh, what? You are so confident that the Germans would’ve been halted at the Marne without the BEF? Why?

I am not particularly interested in defending Wilson (I finished Cooper’s bio of him recently, and it didn’t improve my opinion of him), but I would like to get some explanation eventually of how Wilson “lied” the U.S. into the war, as you asserted two days ago.

I wouldn’t put “the contents of your wallet” and “the contents of your empire” in the same moral category, though perhaps a Marxist would.

Depends on what you do for a living, doesn’t it? A Marxist may classify more occupations as immoral, but nearly everyone agrees that *some* people’s wallet contents are ill-gotten.

Yes, and in WWI, at least five Empires (count ’em!) were involved.

Wilson tried to make it a war to end war, but he gets so little credit for the trying. Why is that?

The wars put an end to the Empires, more or less, and that wasn’t enough, either.

Shorter Quiggin: the Great Powers were morally corrupt because they were not governed by Gandhi-like pacifists.

Well, okay, sure, if that’s your standard. In related news, the ancients were despicable monsters for owning slaves and fighting wars, Medieval Europe exploited the peasantry, and Shakespeare was an anti-Semite.

In fact, given that history is just teeming with people who failed to hold the correct moral and political beliefs, perhaps its study should be left to the field of pathology, and morally correct people like Quiggin should stick to economics.

I agree with a fair amount of what Peter T wrote @134.

And I think it might be wise to separate, to a degree, the argument about Wilson from the argument about the origins/nature of WW1.

On the latter issue, Henri Vieuxtemps’ view that WW1 was simply a matter of the established empires ‘ganging up’ on the ‘new hungry ones’ ignores that the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires weren’t ‘newer’, certainly the Ottoman wasn’t. More importantly, HV might want to acquaint himself, for starters, with a bit of the vast literature on the assumptions of elites (and mass publics) in all the belligerent countries before the war broke out. (Might start with James Joll, “1914: The Unspoken Assumptions.”) Militaristic strains of elite and mass opinion were especially strong in Germany but also present in all the other European countries.

The experience of World War 1, it’s been quite convincingly argued (e.g. by John Mueller among others) changed the way publics in much of the ‘developed’ world viewed war. After WW 1, war was no longer seen by large majorities as a natural or acceptable part of state conduct or as a ‘normal’ extension of politics or as an inevitable consequence of competition among the great powers for status. Before WW1, however, that was not the case. Yes, there were principled opponents of war in 1914 but they were a minority.

Assertions about this subject that fail to take into account what the prevalent assumptions about war and great-power competition were before 1914 (and how they changed after WW1) are ahistorical.

CJColucci@77:

Slightly OT, but suggested by the reference to unheroic Australian political leaders, I think it would be fun to put together a list of small-country leaders who might have been the second coming of Bismarck-Disraeli-Lincoln if put in charge of a nation large enough to give their talents free reign, for good or ill.

Possibly Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim. Helped Finland leave Russia on disintegration of the empire, and helped Finland stay free of the Soviet Union 20 some years later without losing too much territory in the process. Fought and won a nasty civil war against the Reds (where 11,000–13,500 of the latter died in prison camps), but never attempted to be a dictator, and was willing to leave the country to promote stability. He set up the circumstances for Finland not only to be a democracy, but to remain one too; that makes it unique among the countries of Eastern Europe / Former Russian Empire.

On the other hand, Curtin (arguably Australia’s greatest PM) might have not thrived in a larger country. The man died of heart disease after just four years (during WWII). I couldn’t see him lasting half as long if he were a US president or UK PM. The stress would have been too much for him.

JQ@133: “how does picking the side of the (arguably) less bad empires help?”

It brought the otherwise stalemated war to an end.

And, Wilson managed to bring the war to an end on terms and within a framework of values, which promoted nationalism and democracy, and opened the possibility of new institutions in international relations. The Fourteen Points were hugely important in the transformation of assumptions, both of elites and mass publics, which LFC references @137.

As a sometime whig, I don’t have any trouble cheering Wilson, or understanding his claim on “greatness” among statesman. In a moment of great self-destructiveness in European affairs, he acted, with great breadth of vision and purpose. What your point would be, after this long thread, I still have scarcely any idea.

My 142 is directed to HV @140

Pr Q said:

Thomas Jefferson? He was good in theoretical terms

Jefferson was good in theory, but better in practice. His “theoretical” achievements (Declaration of Independence) were worthy enough. But his practical achievements were monumental. He founded the world’s most successful corporation (USA). He negotiated the world’s most profitable real estate deal (Louisiana Purchase). Did anyone mention his sponsoring of Lewis & Clark? In his spare time he invented Monticello, the world’s first house designed as a “machine for living”. I wonder what this giant would make of our era, knee-deep as we are in intellectual midgets.

Nothing could be further from the truth than the assertion that Wilhelmine Germany needed imperial expansion to secure its economic prosperity

Ok, but my thesis is that Germany needed expansion to secure its economic “growth”, which is not the same than prosperity (the marxian idea of crisis of overproduction).
This is an important difference because if the preceding decades were decades of worldwide growth, “starvation” is ruled off, but “overproduction” is not.
Plus, maybe the Germans didn’t really need expansion to have a thriving economy, but if they believed they did, this doesn’t make much difference.

German colonies absorbed less than 1 percent of Germany’s foreign trade and 2 percent of its foreign investment.

This means that German investment in colonies was more than twice the trade with them: this really sounds like “crisis of overproduction” to my marxist ear.
Also the low numbers might relate to the fact that German colonies were not “cool” (that is, economically profitable) colonies.

Now I see that I can abstain from reading George Will’s sidewinders against imaginary opponents for another year. Happy 2012!

@ Bruce Wilder

At least one famous writer (as you may know) would agree with you:
Joseph Schumpeter, “The Sociology of Imperialisms” (orig. pub. 1919) in Imperialism/Social Classes (New Am. Lib. pbk. ed., 1974).