One night during the Civil War, Georgina Cecil awoke to find her husband standing, asleep but agitated, before an open second-floor window. He seemed to be expecting invaders, “presumably Federal soldiers or revolutionary mob leaders.” Strangely, though, this happened in England, and the sleepwalker was Lord Robert Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, a descendant of Queen Elizabeth’s trusted counselor Lord Burghley. As the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, this Cecil would go on to serve his own queen, Victoria, three times as prime minister. Never though, his wife recalled, did he suffer “such extremes of depression and nervous misery as at that time.”
For the United States terrified Salisbury, his biographer Andrew Roberts has explained. He’d never been there and disapproved of slavery, but he despised democracy—so deeply that he sympathized with secession, favored the Confederacy, and regarded Lincoln’s assassination as a legitimate last act of resistance. Most of all, Salisbury worried that the Union’s pursuit of ideological ends through vast military means would revive Napoleonic ambitions in Europe. Salisbury died in 1903, not before nightmares, however, anticipating the trenches, tanks, killing fields, and even aerial bombardments of the 1914–18 Great War. “If we had interfered,” he’d written of the Civil War in the last year of his life, it might have been possible “to reduce the power of the United States to manageable proportions. But two such chances are not given to a nation in the course of its career.”1
Americans through most of Salisbury’s life, however, had been anything but Napoleonic. Eager to heal their wounds of war—even if that meant weakening emancipations for which the Union had fought—they’d returned to the states most of the power Lincoln centralized, dismantled their world-class military, and concentrated on populating, developing, and exploiting a continental republic, swollen after 1867 by Seward’s purchase, from the Russians, of what became Alaska.2 National security receded as a concern: the United States, historian Robert Kagan writes, was now “too large, too rich, and too heavily populated to be an inviting target for invasion even by the world’s strongest powers.”3
That in itself alarmed Salisbury the sleepwalker, for where did it leave the British Dominion of Canada, with its long, indefensible southern border? He could hardly rely indefinitely on American self-restraint. Salisbury the strategist, however, distinguished between predation—what strong countries do to weak ones—and baiting—what adolescents do to parents. Putting up with the second might forestall the first. “[O]ur best chance of ordinary civility,” he concluded while foreign minister in 1888, “is to have a thoroughly anti-British Administration in Washington.”4
But even Salisbury, as prime minister, thought it excessive when, in 1895, Grover Cleveland’s secretary of state, Richard Olney, turned an old Venezuelan boundary dispute with British Guiana into a brash reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine. “Europe as a whole is monarchical,” he superfluously announced. “America, on the other hand, is devoted to the exactly opposite principle—to the idea that every people has an inalienable right of self-government. . . . Today the United States is practically sovereign on this continent.”5 Despite its erratic targeting—Confederate rights? Venezuela’s geography?—Olney’s “twenty-inch gun” (Cleveland’s gloat) caught Salisbury at a bad time.
Five years earlier Germany’s inexperienced kaiser, William II, had dismissed his legendary chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, who’d unified the country by provoking wars but then secured peace by balancing resentments.6 William lacked such dexterity: “There is a danger,” Salisbury warned as the Venezuela crisis escalated, “of him going completely off his head.”7 At which point, while Salisbury was trying to calm the Americans, the kaiser congratulated South African Boers for thwarting a raid the British may (or may not) have authorized. Suddenly, it seemed, a nearer gun with Napoleonic pretensions—and a military-industrial potential not seen since the American Civil War—was firing randomly.8
Baited now on two fronts, Salisbury yielded on one. “There is no such thing as a fixed policy,” he observed, “because policy like all organic entities is always in the making.”9 And so he and his successors began methodically and unilaterally eliminating all sources of friction with the United States. They not only gave in on Venezuela (where the Americans promptly lost interest and accepted arbitration), but subsequently and more significantly on the Spanish-American War (Britain stayed neutral), on the Philippines (Salisbury supported American, not German, annexation), on a future Panama Canal (Britain relinquished long-held rights in the region), and on Alaska’s boundary (Canada sacrificed for the greater good).10 It may not have been appeasement,11 but it was lubrication: like Mikhail Gorbachev almost a century later, Salisbury set out to deprive an enemy of its enemy.12
As a careful student of history,13 he’d have known of George Canning’s claim, from 1826, to have “called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old.”14 Self-congratulation wasn’t Salisbury’s style, but he could more credibly own the accomplishment. Which he tactfully did in 1897 by congratulating his queen—his ancestor Burghley would have approved—as she celebrated her sixtieth year on the throne:
The impulse of democracy, which began in another country in other lands, has made itself felt in our time, and vast changes in the centre of power and incidence of responsibility have been made almost imperceptibly without any disturbance or hindrance in the progress of the prosperous development of the nation.15
The sleepwalker still regretted the Confederacy’s defeat, and the consequent loss of a balance of power in North America. The strategist, however, never forgot that “[w]e are fish,” and “alone can do nothing to remedy an inland tyranny.”16 So Great Britain learned to live with a democracy dominating a continent. For that, with whatever ambivalence, Salisbury had Lincoln to thank.
I.
On the evening of January 25, 1904, five months after Salisbury’s death, Halford Mackinder, recently appointed director of the London School of Economics and Political Science, read a paper on “The Geographical Pivot of History” before the Royal Geographical Society. Future historians, he suggested, would regard the past four centuries as “the Columbian epoch,” and conclude that it ended “soon after the year 1900.” The age of maritime exploration was over—there being little left to discover—but that of continental development was only beginning. The technology driving it wasn’t ships but railroads, operating with far greater speed and efficiency. Lincoln’s transcontinental had been completed in 1869, its Canadian counterpart in 1885, and the trans-Siberian line from Moscow to Vladivostok opened over its full six thousand miles in the year Mackinder spoke. Eurasia would soon be “covered with railways,” he predicted, making its vast spaces with their “incalculably great” potential, as in the days of Asiatic hordes, “the pivot region of the world’s politics.”17
England’s maritime superiority had relied, since the Tudors, on rivalries within continents to prevent projections of power beyond their shores. But now, Mackinder was arguing, consolidations of continents were taking place that, if used to build fleets, could empower an “empire of the world.” Probably Russia would run it. Or maybe Germany allied with Russia. Or perhaps a China organized by Japan to overthrow Russia by bringing “the yellow peril to the world’s freedom” through the addition of “an oceanic frontage to the resources of the great continent, an advantage as yet denied to the Russian tenant of the pivot region.”18
With this sudden swerve into racism and real estate, Mackinder ended his presentation, the vagueness of which heightened the anxieties it induced. It didn’t matter that hordes in the past had caused little to pivot beyond their horses. Or that Alfred Thayer Mahan had recently and more systematically shown the importance of sea power in history. Or that Mackinder neglected altogether the potential of air power, precariously demonstrated only a month earlier when, in North Carolina, the Wright brothers first flew. Or that he assumed a Prussian-like purposefulness in a Russia drifting toward military and naval defeats at the hands of Japan and, as a result, a dangerous if inconclusive revolution: St. Petersburg’s “Bloody Sunday” lay just short of a year ahead.
Mackinder’s paper was a professorial equivalent of Olney’s “twenty-inch gun,” aimed badly, argued illogically, but startling enough to expose what few had yet seen: that railroads, over the past half century, had made Europe and Asia a single continent; that Britain, over the next half century, might lose control of the sea; and that from these patterns of rise and fall a new struggle for the world could emerge between distinctively different forms of government, and potentially incompatible ways of life.19
II.
How, though, and why? It fell to Eyre Crowe, a Foreign Office mandarin, to cut through Mackinder’s murk in a report to King Edward VII in 1907, quickly circulated and discussed at the highest levels. Like George F. Kennan’s “long telegram” from Moscow at the beginning of the Cold War, the “Crowe memorandum” became famous before it became public. Both shook scales from official eyes.20
Crowe began where Mackinder left off. Great Britain was an island off the coast of a continent, but with “vast overseas colonies and dependencies.”21 Its survival required the “preponderant sea power” it had long maintained. This had made it “the neighbour of every [other] country accessible by sea,” a status that could have provoked “jealousy and fear”—Crowe knew his Thucydides—had Britain not “harmonize[d]” its interests with “desires and ideals common to all mankind.”
Now, the first interest of all countries is the preservation of national independence. It follows that England, more than any other non-insular Power, has a direct and positive interest in the maintenance of the independence of nations, and therefore must be the natural enemy of any country threatening the independence of others, and the natural protector of the weaker communities.
Maritime supremacy, then, demanded not just the balancing of power on continents that Mackinder had emphasized, but also the reassurance of states bordering seas that the single dominant power at sea respected their interests, as well as its own.
The British had accomplished this, Crowe argued, by promoting “the right of free intercourse and trade in the world’s markets.” That served their interests, given the rejection of mercantilism that had accompanied industrialization. But it also strengthened Britain’s “hold on the interested friendship of other nations” by making them “less apprehensive” of its naval preeminence. For if these states couldn’t themselves rule the sea, they preferred having “a free trade England” do it instead of “a predominant protectionist Power.” Crowe, like Pericles, saw no contradiction in securing, as well as earning, overseas friendships.22
Why, though, would a continental state projecting its power at sea not nurture such relationships? Because, Crowe maintained, it could have gained that capability only by consolidating a continent: what gave Salisbury his nightmares and Mackinder his artillery. And it couldn’t have done that without absorbing, or at least terrifying, its neighbors.23 Very few states, lacking the power themselves to control a continent, would wish to have someone else do it through blood, iron, and intimidation.
Which the younger Bismarck had memorably promised.24 Crowe had been born in Prussia, knew German well, and saw in the emergence of a modern Teutonic empire in Europe a pattern of “systemic territorial aggrandizement achieved mainly at the point of a sword.” To borrow a phrase from the future, Germany’s had hardly been a “peaceful rise.” Knowing this, Bismarck sought to assure surviving neighbors that, having achieved hegemony, his new great power would harmonize its interests with theirs. But appetites turned on weren’t as easily turned off.25
Bismarck’s solution had been to scavenge for colonies other great powers hadn’t wanted: could an empire really content itself, though, as do vultures, with leftovers? Now he was gone, and his successors were still hungry. Crowe voiced their views:
We must have real Colonies, where German emigrants can settle and spread the national ideals of the Fatherland, and we must have a fleet and coaling stations to keep together the Colonies which we are bound to acquire. . . . A healthy and powerful State like Germany, with its 60,000,000 inhabitants, must expand, it cannot stand still, and it must have territories to which its overflowing population can emigrate without giving up its nationality.
Unsure—perhaps not wanting to be sure—of where to stop, Germany under William II seemed willfully to be welcoming “a world set at defiance.” For “the union of the greatest military with the greatest naval Power in one State would compel the world to combine for the riddance of such an incubus.”26
III.
Or so the theory in Crowe’s thinking suggested. What happened in history, however, neither he nor anyone else in authority foresaw. Bismarck’s reassurances—a web of shifting political alliances with him at the center—hardened after his death into two competing military alliances, so unreassuringly tied to mobilization and transportation timetables that, once activated, they disconnected the causes of war from its conduct.27 That’s how the killing of two royals in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, led to the slaughter, by November 11, 1918, of between eight and ten million combatants and another seven to eight million civilians.28 Crowe’s world united against an “incubus” became a Europe divided, devastatingly, against itself.
The Great War saw instances at all levels of intentions projected beyond capabilities, a frequent cause of past military calamities. But capabilities, this time, also outran intentions. Those in command, Henry Kissinger has explained, grossly underestimated the lethality they commanded.
They seemed oblivious to the huge casualties of the still relatively recent American Civil War, and expected a short, decisive conflict. It never occurred to them that the failure to make their alliances correspond to rational political objectives would lead to the destruction of civilization as they knew it. . . . Instead the Great Powers managed to construct a diplomatic doomsday machine, though they were unaware of what they had done.29
Americans had at least known, in their Civil War, what they were fighting for. This new war’s participants had to find purposes for which to die as it was killing them.
Great Britain’s progression from Salisbury’s “we are fish” through Mackinder’s “Eurasian hordes” to Crowe’s “world set at defiance” suggests why. For if war must reflect policy, as Clausewitz had insisted, with what policy had Britain entered this one? Retaining supremacy at sea? Balancing power on land? Removing incubi everywhere? The 1907 “triple entente” with France and Russia carried no clear obligation, when the fighting began in July 1914, to enter a war against Germany.30 And yet, the Germans’ invasion of Belgium on August 4—their plan for war against France having ignored long-standing international guarantees of Belgian neutrality—caused the British not only to declare war, but to abandon a centuries-old aversion to combat on the continent. Where Britain would lose, over the next four years, more men killed than the Union and the Confederacy together in 1861–65.31
This “continental commitment” seems almost to have been made, as was once said of the British empire, “in a fit of absence of mind.”32 But if one links the concerns of Crowe, Mackinder, and Salisbury, then a larger logic emerges. Crowe’s claim of a connection between sea power and self-determination on the one hand, and between land power and authoritarianism on the other, would mean that the continental consolidation of which Mackinder had warned could endanger more than just control of the sea: the future of freedom itself might be at stake.33 Which gets to what Salisbury may have meant when he said that Britain couldn’t alone “remedy an inland tyranny.”
Perhaps that the old British distrust of alliances must end: Salisbury’s final diplomatic accomplishment had been the first departure from that tradition, the Anglo-Japanese treaty of 1902.34 Or that some similar European alignment, like what became the “triple entente,” might become necessary. Or that Britain could no longer afford its “splendid isolation,” an epithet from the Venezuelan crisis of 1895–96.35 Certainly that despotism on continents, in an interconnected world, required containment. And this, for those who remembered him, circled back to Canning.
For if Salisbury could balance a democracy’s domination of North America against an autocracy that might control Europe, then he was, in effect, relying on a “new world” to redress the balance of power in the “old.” If Mackinder could alarm audiences with images of hordes trading horses for trans-Eurasian trains while seeing no such danger in their American equivalents, then he was in a different way doing the same. And if Crowe could foresee a coalition of satisfied states countering a voracious one—a prospect an American president would soon make more explicit—then it would rest on foundations Mackinder, Salisbury, and Canning had prepared. All were speculating in futures as yet ill-defined.
IV.
Which at some point, they all assumed, the United States would significantly shape. Its manufacturing output, by 1914, exceeded that of Britain and Germany together. Its steel production was almost twice Germany’s, which was itself twice that of Britain, France, and Russia. Its technological innovations were unrivaled; its food surpluses fed much of Europe; its favorable trade balances had earned it a third of the world’s gold reserves. And although their navy was still smaller than those of Britain and Germany, the Americans had, in the month Europe went to war, opened the Panama Canal, allowing quicker transits between the two largest oceans than were available to anyone else. The United States had become a great power, the historian Paul Kennedy has observed—but it wasn’t yet part of the great power system.36
The continental hegemony Americans won in the 1840s and retained in the 1860s left them, as the twentieth century began, with little apparent need for wider responsibilities. External threats were still neither clear nor present. Colonialism, they’d found in the Philippines, was more trouble than it was worth. Diplomacy allowed posturing without commitments, as in the 1899–1900 “Open Door” notes on China. The United States could even make peace—Theodore Roosevelt’s Treaty of Portsmouth (New Hampshire) did that for the Russo-Japanese War in 1905—while maintaining an army no larger than Bulgaria’s or Serbia’s.37 All of which absolved the Americans of any responsibility whatever for the outbreak, in 1914, of the European Great War.
It, however, had more than they’d anticipated to do with them. The nine decades following Monroe’s proclamation and Canning’s paternity claim fell within the century of Europe’s freedom from great wars extending from 1815 to 1914. But in three previous instances—the Seven Years’ War, the wars of the French Revolution, and those of Napoleon—Americans had been drawn in: through the French and Indian War of 1754–63, the Quasi-War with France of 1798–1800, and the War of 1812 with Great Britain, which ended in 1815. The same would happen in 1917–18 and in 1941–45. The Cold War, which never became a hot war, brought the longest of all American overseas involvements—which may be why it, unlike the Great War, never had to be renamed.
Like fish who fail to notice the expansion and contraction of oceans, the Americans weren’t so much outside a great power system between 1823 and 1914 as oblivious to it—and even that generalization needs qualification for Lincoln and Seward.38 The system was this: that from the age of Elizabeth, England had planted its culture more widely in the world than in Europe.39 That made it necessary to balance potentially hostile Europeans—and hence to fear what Crowe called “systemic” sword-based “territorial aggrandizement.” Which, when it did occur, also alarmed British transoceanic offspring, for where might they be without the protection provided by the world’s largest navy? However rudely Americans might mock their aged parent, they could no more reject what they’d inherited of its language, institutions, religions, enterprise, and security than they could unwind and re-entwine their own DNA. So when Britain made its “continental commitment,” it was also, for better or for worse, committing them.
V.
Woodrow Wilson’s first response was to call, redundantly, for neutrality “in fact as well as in name,” impartiality “in thought as well as in action,” and “a curb upon our sentiments.”40 But if Germany won, he warned his confidential adviser, “Colonel” Edward M. House, “it would change the course of our civilization and make the United States a military nation.” It had been Germans, after all—not the British or French—who’d violated Belgian neutrality, sacking cities, universities, and even ancient irreplaceable libraries. That kind of brutality, the former president of Princeton feared, could “throw the world back three or four centuries.”41
As president of the United States, however, Wilson saw no immediate need to take sides. There was no national consensus for doing so. Food and war matériel exports to Britain and France were booming, so much so that when the importers could no longer pay, Wilson rescinded the ban he’d initially imposed on extending credit. With the British navy denying Germany equal opportunities, he could profess neutrality in public while privately welcoming its absence.42 Delaying entry would also allow Wilson to choose the moment: if he did this carefully, House assured him, then he’d be in a position to determine the war’s outcome, not just through military deployments, but by designing a new international system to replace the one that had failed by allowing war.43
With House’s guidance, Wilson set up an overhang of presumptions under which the belligerents would have to fight. One was that if the United States did enter the war, it would do so decisively: the scale of its Civil War more than hinted at the military capabilities it could now deploy. Another was that the likelihood of American entry would increase the longer the war lasted, because stalemates on battlefields would bring progressively more provocative maritime blockades. A third was that submarines were proving as disruptive to older methods of war at sea as railroads had been to the previous deterrence of continental consolidations.44
Germany saw U-boats as a legitimate response to British surface superiority: the problem was that they couldn’t easily search ships, take prizes, or determine passengers’ nationality, all standard practices in earlier blockades. They thus endangered the right of neutrals to trade with belligerents, a privilege staunchly defended (even belatedly by Lincoln) in previous American wars. They threatened profits from wartime exports to Britain and France, and from anticipated postwar repayments of loans extended. Worst of all, they killed noncombatants: Wilson almost went to war when 128 Americans perished, in May 1915, on the torpedoed British liner Lusitania.45
When Wilson finally did ask for a declaration of war, on April 2, 1917, he was chiefly responding to the Germans’ removal of restrictions they’d imposed on U-boats after the Lusitania crisis: this would, they’d gambled, force Britain and France to make peace before the United States could get an army to Europe. Wilson doubted, though, that public opinion would support going to war “no matter how many Americans were lost at sea.”46 Something more would be necessary, and in the weeks preceding his war message, the Germans provided it.
They’d accompanied their resumption of all-out submarine warfare with a secret proposal to Mexico that if, as expected, the Americans entered the European war, it seize the opportunity to retake lost territories in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona—with German and perhaps Japanese assistance. British code breakers intercepted the cable, leaked it to Washington, and Wilson made it public. That put Germany at odds not only with neutral rights, but with the territorial integrity of the United States, a far more inflammatory sensitivity.47
Then, in March, an unexpected revolution in Russia, the third member of the Anglo-French coalition, toppled the Romanov dynasty, appearing to end autocracy in a nation about to become an American ally. That freed Wilson, in his war message, to embrace the still loftier mission of making the world “safe for democracy.” He wasn’t suggesting that the United States alone could accomplish this task.48 But he was now claiming, for a nation that had seen no need to behave as a great power when the Great War broke out, a determining influence over its conduct, outcome, and aftermath. As Wilson had announced in his second inaugural address: “We are provincials no longer.”49
VI.
So far, he’d managed well. By portraying preparedness as avoiding war, Wilson had begun building an army without provoking the antiwar opposition that might have denied him reelection in 1916. He waited for the Germans’ military priorities again to subvert, as with Belgian neutrality, their political interests: unleashing U-boats and ill-advisedly courting Mexico did that. He transformed a revolution in Russia into a war aim for America, leaving allies no chance to object. Wilson then got his army to France in time to turn Germany’s failed spring 1918 offensive into the collapse that brought victory that fall. And after securing an armistice in November, the president himself crossed the Atlantic—the first to do so while in office—where he accepted triumphs worthy of ancient Romans in Paris, London, and (fittingly) Rome itself.50
House had warned Wilson, though, that his influence would peak as the war was ending. The negotiation of peace, in which he planned to participate, would require more diplomacy than management, and for that Wilson was less prepared. The long absence of the United States from the international system had left it few foreign policy professionals: Wilson had no Bismarck, Salisbury, or even an Eyre Crowe on whose expertise he could draw. Instead he had House, who’d sharpened his skills only in Texas politics but now found himself, alongside the president, “remaking the map of the world, as we would have it.”51
They did have help from “The Inquiry,” academic consultants they’d recruited to suggest principles for a postwar settlement: Wilson distilled these into his “Fourteen Points” address to Congress on January 8, 1918. But neither he nor they gave sufficient thought to how “points,” however well-intentioned, might align with histories, cultures, and precedents. “Unversed in European politics,” a French diplomat recalled, Wilson devoted himself “to the pursuit of theories which had little relation to the emergencies of the hour.”52
What would it mean, for example, to conduct diplomacy “always frankly and in the public view”? Or to secure “[a]bsolute freedom of navigation,” except as seas “may be closed in whole or in part by international action”? Or to reduce arms “to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety”? Or to give “equal weight,” in colonial disputes, to “the interests of the populations concerned” and “the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined”? Wilson’s ends floated too freely above means, nowhere more so than in his claim that the resolution of Balkan rivalries—like the one, presumably, that had ignited the Great War—required only “friendly counsel along historically determined lines of allegiance and nationality.” In such “rectifications of wrong and assertions of right,” he grandly concluded, “we feel ourselves to be intimate partners of all the governments and peoples associated together against the imperialists. . . . We stand together until the end.”53
There was more than a whiff of expediency here, for Wilson’s speech—like an earlier one by British prime minister David Lloyd George—came two months after another Russian revolutionary surprise: the Bolshevik coup of November 1917, which threatened withdrawal from the Anglo-American-French “imperialist” war, while urging “proletarians” everywhere to overthrow their capitalist masters.54 Wilson responded with a fog bank, through which he called for
[t]he evacuation of all Russian territory and such a settlement of all questions affecting Russia as will secure the best and freest cooperation of the other nations of the world in obtaining for her an unhampered and unembarrassed opportunity for the independent determination of her own political development and national policy and assure her of a sincere welcome into the society of free nations under institutions of her own choosing; and, more than a welcome, assistance also of every kind that she may need and may herself desire.
Who, one might wonder, did he think “the imperialists” were? Lenin and Trotsky, at least, said what they really thought.
Whereupon Wilson confused matters further by sending American troops into Siberia and northern Russia as part of a multinational effort aimed ostensibly at keeping Russia in the war, but in fact at deposing the Bolsheviks.55 After which he saved the Bolsheviks by defeating the Germans in France, thereby undoing their victory on the eastern front and the Carthaginian peace they’d imposed in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.56 The skills with which Wilson brought America into the war eluded him totally when Russia left it. That foreshadowed a larger problem, which was that Wilson’s principles for peace, which he meant to be timeless, turned out not only to have been time-bound, but bowled over by times so quickly changing around them. For as Wilson was trying to make the world safe for democracy, democracy was making war unsafe for the world.57
VII.
When Clausewitz insisted that war reflect policy, he set a standard from which exceptions like the Thirty Years’ War or the wars of Napoleon—wars detached from discernible purposes—weren’t supposed to recur. None did for eight decades after On War appeared: interstate wars took place, but with specific objectives and on limited scales. The bloodiest post-Napoleonic conflicts were inside the United States and, with the Taiping Rebellion, in China.58 The Great War, however, was a pre-Clausewitzian regression: would any of its original participants have entered it if they’d foreseen its costs?59
And yet crowds throughout Europe welcomed war, in August 1914, with all the democratic spontaneity of the Athenian assembly: when Pericles tried to rekindle that spirit in his funeral address, it wasn’t for the purpose of making peace. We can’t know what losses he’d have been prepared to accept—the plague took him before he could learn what Lincoln knew in 1865. But we do know that Athens, the model for all subsequent democracies, defeated itself in the end because it bore deaths more easily than questions about the purposes of its wars.60
Wilson’s “Peace Without Victory” speech to Congress, made three months before he entered his war,61 raised several such questions. Weren’t wars supposed to secure states, not exhaust or extinguish them? Might compromises recover that role? Was the killing accomplishing anything? His and other mediation efforts failed, though, because no leader dared tell his “democracy”62 that its war had achieved so little. Each hoped that one more new weapon, one more offensive, one more lunge “over the top” from one more trench, would provide the meaning so evidently lacking.
After the United States went to war, Wilson gave up on mediation: the nation wouldn’t fight, he was sure, for anything other than total victory. But it wouldn’t support either an unjust peace. So he tried writing victory and justice into the “Fourteen Points,” at the cost of making most of them contradictory. His last point, however, proposed an instrument of adjudication: a “general association of nations,” formed “under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”63
The idea had multiple roots,64 one of which was Eyre Crowe’s 1907 vision of a “world” combining against an “incubus.” Sir Edward Grey, then foreign secretary, had endorsed Crowe’s memorandum when it first appeared. Still in that position in 1915, he’d offered Wilson, through House, a postwar league of nations instead of mediation: only entry into the current war, he maintained, could prevent wars in the future.65 “Grey knew his man,” Kissinger has observed. “From the days of his youth, Wilson had believed that American federal institutions should serve as a model for an eventual ‘parliament of man.’”66
If so, though, Wilson overlooked an ambivalence in American democracy that went back to its English Whig origins: was the purpose of such institutions to wield power, or to guard against its abuses?67 Americans convinced themselves willingly enough, in April of 1917, that only war could restore their security—even their honor and self-respect. That didn’t mean, though, that after winning the war they’d commit to guaranteeing security for everyone else. Democracy in America sought power, but also deeply distrusted it.
Anglo-French democracy had its own contradictions. Haunted by sacrifices the war had required, it insisted that the Germans admit “guilt” and pay reparations—even if this precluded the peace through reconciliation the Congress of Vienna had achieved, under undemocratic circumstances, in 1815. Nor was self-determination reconcilable, in all respects, with the boundary “rectifications” Wilson had specified in the “Fourteen Points”—or with the perpetuation of British and French colonial empires.68 Nor was anyone, including Wilson, prepared to admit Germany or Soviet Russia as founding members of the new League of Nations, despite his reliance on it to correct the Versailles treaty’s inequities.69
Wilson had again aroused expectations, this time without ways to meet them. Maybe, like the Athenians after Pericles, he confused strengths with hopes.70 Or he was too inclined to postpone what he couldn’t resolve. Or he missed the irony of trying to turn democracies against their elected representatives. Or his increasing infirmity deadened his political sensitivity: he fell ill while barnstorming America in support of the League in the fall of 1919, and never recovered. Or he didn’t understand democracy in the first place, despite years spent at Princeton studying and teaching it. Or perhaps he just lost, with his rise to greatness, the gravitational tether of common sense.
Whatever the explanation, the Senate’s refusal to approve the Versailles treaty—and thus to authorize United States membership in the League of Nations—not only broke Wilson: it also broke off the enlargement of hopes, running from Canning through Lincoln, Salisbury, Mackinder, Crowe, Grey, House, and Wilson himself, that the “new world” might one day correct imbalances in the “old.” Contrary to what the Athenians told the Melians,71 “the strong” this time didn’t do what they could have, which freed “the weak” to do what they wanted—even, in Russia and Germany, to reshape reality to fit theory, and from this to construct tyrannies.
VIII.
Vladimir Ilich Lenin had been an exile in Zurich when the Russian Revolution started without him in March 1917, but that was its mistake, not his. For Lenin’s specialty was transforming the unexpected into the predetermined.72 His certainty came from Marx, who’d claimed that capitalism carried within itself the seeds of its own destruction: the Great War, begun, fought, and sure to be won by capitalists, confirmed the conclusion. The surprise came in Russia, where Marx and most subsequent Marxists had expected the revolution not to occur. Lenin alone saw opportunity in the anomaly. “So long as we have not won the entire world,” he later explained,
so long as, from the economic and military point of view, we remain weaker than the rest of the capitalist world, we must know how to exploit the contradictions and antagonisms among the imperialists. If we had not kept to that rule, we should long ago have all been hanging from the lamp-posts.73
Instead of a lamppost Lenin got his own train, on which the Germans sent him back to St. Petersburg, recently renamed Petrograd. From there, as they’d intended, he overthrew the Provisional Government and took Russia out of the war. But he’d also predicted, while on the way, that “[t]he Bolshevik leadership of the revolution [will be] much more dangerous for German imperialist power and capitalism than the leadership of Kerensky and Miliukov.”74
Lenin understood more clearly even than Marx that the capitalists’ addiction to immediate gains diverted them from more distant destinations. As Lincoln might have put it—at least in Spielberg’s movie75—they focused so compulsively on compasses that they sank into swamps and fell off cliffs. That’s how American, British, and French pressure on Russia not to leave the war discredited its new leaders, opening, for Lenin, his revolutionary path. Nor did capitalists learn from mistakes: why otherwise would the Americans have saved the Bolsheviks by undoing the Germans’ eviscerations, at Brest-Litovsk, of the new Soviet state?
The same thing happened again when famine threatened Russia in 1921–22: the American arch-capitalist Herbert Hoover admitted that the international relief effort, which he’d led, had wound up strengthening the Bolshevik regime. And when Lenin’s New Economic Policy, meant to plant the revolution more robustly in Russia, dangled concessions before American entrepreneurs, they eagerly snapped them up. “[N]o country in the world is better fitted to help Russia,” Stalin concluded after Lenin’s death in 1924. “The unsurpassed technology of America and the needs and tremendous population of Russia would yield large profits for Americans, if they cooperated.”76
Which some of them continued to do on a grand scale. Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan imported entire factories from the United States, along with the appropriate mass-production techniques—Henry Ford himself led the way. American exports to the Soviet Union exceeded those of any other country by the end of the 1920s, and the Russians were becoming the largest foreign purchaser of American agricultural and industrial equipment.77 But the Harding and Coolidge administrations surprised Stalin by retaining Wilson’s policy of diplomatic non-recognition, warning—with no evident irony—of international communism’s subversive objectives. Material interests didn’t always determine capitalist behavior.
The United States was, in one sense, more powerful than ever: its industrial output now exceeded that of Britain, Germany, France, Russia, Italy, and Japan combined. But the distrust of power written into its Constitution deprived its leaders of the authority—at least in peacetime—to deploy that power. Lenin would have seen this as another of democracy’s failures: without a dictatorship there could be no vanguard, whether of proletarians or of anyone else. As if to confirm this, most Americans at the time saw little need for foreign policies of any kind.78
The world, though, wouldn’t indefinitely allow them that luxury: the potential power of the United States was already shaping events in unexpected ways.79 One was a cross-fertilization, in a single strange place, of old German ambitions with new German resentments. Unlike Lenin, Adolf Hitler had experienced the Great War in the trenches. The combination of British sea power with American land power, he was sure—under the direction of an international Jewish conspiracy, he was even surer—had brought about Germany’s defeat. Convinced that the United States would again seek, from North America, to crowd out all rivals, Hitler saw its post-Wilsonian withdrawal from Europe as Germany’s last chance to secure the space and resources it would need to compete, survive, and prevail. “War was inevitable,” historian Adam Tooze says Hitler believed. “The question was not if, but when.”80
None of this would have mattered if Hitler had stuck to amateur putsches, like the one he staged at Munich in 1923. But after an easy imprisonment, he settled into a steady political rise within the increasingly strained democracy of Weimar Germany. Its problems worsened when the New York stock market crashed in October 1929, dragging the American economy and those of other industrial capitalisms into a catastrophic depression. The Hoover administration, in office less than a year with at least three to go, was, like leadership in most democracies, clueless as to what to do.81
“[T]he capitalist system of economy is bankrupt and unstable,” Stalin assured the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on January 7, 1933, reporting on the success—over just four years—of his first Five-Year Plan. Capitalism had “outlived its day and must give way to another, a higher, Soviet, socialist system of economy,” which “has no fear of crises and is able to overcome the difficulties which capitalism cannot solve.”82 Three weeks later and by constitutional means, Hitler became chancellor of Germany—whereupon he set about dismantling that constitution. Five weeks after that, Franklin D. Roosevelt took the oath of office as president of the United States, having trounced Hoover in the 1932 election. The long shadow of Lincoln loomed over them all, for they would now test his greatest gamble—that liberty and power could coexist—as it had never been tested before.
IX.
“If one was young in the 1930s, and lived in a democracy,” Isaiah Berlin later recalled, “then, whatever one’s politics, if one had human feelings at all, the faintest spark of social idealism, or any love of life whatever, one must have felt . . . that all was dark and quiet, a great reaction was abroad: and little stirred, and nothing resisted.” The choices seemed to be narrowing to “bleak extremes, Communism and Fascism—the red or the black” with the only light left Roosevelt’s New Deal. It didn’t matter that he ran it “with an isolationist disregard of the outside world,” for that was America’s tradition, and probably its strength. What counted was that he “had all the character and energy and skill of the dictators, and he was on our side.”83
FDR wasn’t really an isolationist. As Theodore Roosevelt’s simultaneous fifth cousin and nephew-in-law, Wilson’s assistant secretary of the navy, and the Democratic Party’s vice presidential candidate on a pro–League of Nations platform in 1920, that would have been unlikely. After becoming president in 1933, however, this Roosevelt did insist on putting America first. With its banks collapsing, a fourth of its workforce unemployed, and its self-confidence badly shaken, recovery took precedence over everything else. Despite Hitler’s descent into authoritarianism in Germany—and Japan’s conquest of Manchuria two years earlier, and Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia two years later—the United States remained, through FDR’s first term, if anything more reluctant to take on international responsibilities than it had been under Hoover.84
Except—that in November 1933, Roosevelt extended diplomatic recognition to what had been, for over a decade, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Non-recognition, he pointed out, had failed to overthrow or isolate the Bolsheviks. American investments and exports had flourished under them, and Stalin had now promised to rein in the activities—mostly ineffective anyway—of the minuscule Communist Party of the United States. That was all the new president said publicly, but he had one other quieter objective: normalizing relations with the Soviet Union might one day allow alignment with it against the aggressions of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan.85
Ideological purity was less important to FDR than geography, balances of power, and the requirements of navies: he’d worked for Wilson but his model had always been TR. Both Roosevelts read Mahan, and the younger one delighted in inspecting—as often as possible—the Panama Canal.86 Through British wartime contacts, he’d have absorbed the substance, if not the provenance, of Mackinder’s and Crowe’s warnings about Eurasian continental consolidations. One of FDR’s first actions as president was to upgrade the United States Navy—but as a job-creating public works project, he thought it prudent to claim.87 For Roosevelt also doubted his country’s willingness again to make overseas commitments. That, he knew, had been Wilson’s unintended legacy: an overhang of American incapacity under which the weakened European democracies would, for the foreseeable future, be on their own.
If, as seemed likely, Germany and Japan rearmed—both left the League of Nations in 193388—then they could be in a position soon to dominate most of Europe, much of China, and even to challenge American naval supremacy in the Western Hemisphere.89 Because the Soviet Union, like the old Russian empire, lacked easy access to oceans, the possibility that it might control Eurasia seemed less alarming to Roosevelt: he’d even approved a proposal from Stalin in 1936—eventually torpedoed by the United States Navy—to build a Soviet battleship in an American shipyard.90 An authoritarian ally wedged massively between the resource-hungry Germans and Japanese, therefore, might not be a bad thing. If they moved outward, the Red Army could wear them down from the rear. If they moved inward, it would, like Kutuzov, wear them out. Either way, democracies on both sides of the Atlantic would benefit.
Roosevelt never explained this: he cloaked his intentions more expertly even than Lincoln. But if that president, whose prior military experience had been limited to the Black Hawk War of 1832, could outdo his West Point generals in devising Civil War strategy,91 then it’s not implausible to credit FDR, who’d mostly run the American navy during the Great War,92 with comparable skills. Lenin, I’m sure, would have done so. For he’d have recognized, as soon as he saw it, an exploitation of “contradictions and antagonisms” among authoritarians. Dictators, to be sure, would still be “vanguards.” But Roosevelt saw how infrequent and impermanent their agreements would be.
X.
He wasn’t running a dictatorship, so he couldn’t fit his country to his ideology, as Stalin had done and as Hitler was doing: given how little FDR’s economists knew about the Great Depression’s causes, they wouldn’t have agreed on a five-year plan if he’d asked them for one.93 Instead he improvised, edging forward where possible, falling back when necessary, always appearing to do something, never giving in to despair, and in everything remembering what Wilson forgot—that nothing would succeed without widespread continuing public support. “It is a terrible thing,” Roosevelt once admitted, “to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead—and to find no one there.”94
His caution carried over into foreign policy. Despite concerns about Germany and Japan, FDR didn’t try to thwart congressional efforts to legislate the neutrality Wilson had only professed: he knew he’d lose the battle. He’d speak firmly on one day of the need to “quarantine” aggressors, but on the next retract what he’d just said. His flexibility exhausted his credibility in London and Paris, limiting his ability to oppose the Anglo-French appeasement of Hitler. And in 1937, he sent Joseph E. Davies, the campaign-contributing trophy spouse of a breakfast-food heiress, to Moscow as his second ambassador, provoking a near revolt among foreign service officers who under the first, William C. Bullitt, had begun meticulously documenting Stalin’s increasingly arbitrary purges of his alleged internal enemies.95
So was Roosevelt an appeaser? Certainly he thought himself weak: he could hardly be stronger than the country was, and its power seemed not to extend beyond his ingenuity. Capabilities might, at some point, catch up with interests: that couldn’t happen, though, until Americans again perceived dangers, revived their economy, and regained faith in themselves. Meanwhile, he’d position the geopolitics as best he could. That’s why he appointed Davies.
Roosevelt didn’t so much distrust experts as lament their limited horizons. It irked him that his own agents—the diplomats and military attachés in the Moscow embassy, the Washington officials who read their reports, even his beloved navy—were close to considering Stalin worse than Hitler: they failed to see the larger possibilities that came with a wider view. If the Soviet autocracy was to help the American democracy reduce dangers to them both, then Roosevelt would need deal makers like Davies with more breadth than depth, not specialists who knew too much to make deals.96
Not even Davies, though, could deflect Stalin from his geopolitical trajectory. Seeing little on offer from any democracy, he cut his own deal with Hitler on August 23, 1939, setting off what immediately became World War II. The Nazi-Soviet “nonaggression” pact didn’t surprise Roosevelt: Davies, before leaving Moscow, had seen it coming, and the embassy, after his departure, had tracked its approach through a well-placed spy.97 It was hard now, however, not to regard the Soviet Union, the president admitted early in 1940, as “a dictatorship as absolute as any other dictatorship in the world.”98
And when, in the spring of that year, Hitler’s Blitzkrieg accomplished in three months what the kaiser’s armies hadn’t in four years—conquering Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France—it looked as though the ultimate Mackinder-Crowe nightmare had arrived: a single “incubus” controlling a super continent. Hitler and Stalin ruled now “from Manchuria to the Rhine,” one distraught aide warned FDR, “much as Genghis Khan once ruled and nothing to stop the combined Russo-German force at any point, with the possible exception of the Himalayan Mountains.”99
Roosevelt, though, remained calm. He knew that Stalin had long seen Hitler as a capitalist-imperialist, and that Hitler had long seen Stalin as an agent of the global Jewish conspiracy. Germany’s military successes in the west, FDR suspected, had surprised the Soviet dictator, who could readily imagine where they might be sought next. The authoritarians’ respect for each other, therefore, couldn’t be deep and wouldn’t be durable: they’d sooner or later devour each other. And so Roosevelt left a door open for Stalin whenever he was ready to walk through it.100 Somewhat as Salisbury had done, four decades earlier, for the Americans.
XI.
Roosevelt’s anticipation of an autocratic ally, I think, helps to explain why his self-confidence rose as one European democracy after another fell in the spring of 1940. He’d promised, when the war broke out, to try to keep the United States out of it, but he hadn’t asked for Wilson’s neutrality in fact, impartiality in thought, and a curb upon sentiments. He’d already set up secret military contacts with the British and, until their collapse, the French. He’d started a rearmament program that seemed at last to be creating jobs. He let the Democrats “draft” him that summer—the charade showed but didn’t matter—for an unprecedented third term. He welcomed the Republicans’ nomination of the dark-horse internationalist Wendell Willkie, against whom he nonetheless vigorously campaigned in the fall. And on the day before his third inauguration in January 1941, Roosevelt received his defeated rival, whom he was sending to London on a special mission, at the White House.
There he wrote out by hand, and apparently from memory, this passage from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1849 poem “The Building of the Ship”:
Sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hope of future years
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!
It was a “wonderful gift,” Lincoln remarked when he read those lines early in the Civil War, “to be able to stir men like that.”101 They were FDR’s gift, by way of Willkie, for Winston Churchill.102
Who’d become prime minister eight months earlier with France about to fall, Britain about to be bombed, and the English language about to be enriched on a Shakespearian scale over the recently perfected technology of shortwave radio. “What is the answer that I shall give in your name,” Churchill asked his country after reading the poem aloud with the Americans listening in, “to this great man, the thrice-chosen head of a nation of a hundred and thirty million?” And then, in a slow, snarled, spine-chilling crescendo: “Give us the tools and we will finish the job!”103
The most important tool, he and Roosevelt agreed, would be “Lend-Lease,” which Congress approved in March 1941. The legislation authorized military assistance to any country whose defense the president deemed vital to that of the United States. Great Britain would be the principal beneficiary, but FDR insisted on not specifying recipients. This could, critics complained, allow aid even to the Soviet Union: that seemed so unlikely, however, that the objection hardly registered. But Roosevelt was already getting reports—this time through the American embassy in Berlin—that Hitler would invade the USSR in the spring. After checking with Churchill, FDR had Stalin’s ambassador in Washington alerted, but if he or his master were grateful, they didn’t show it. Instead Stalin himself, still wishfully thinking, signed yet another nonaggression pact, this time with Japan.
That’s how, at great cost and wholly unnecessarily, he let himself be surprised when Germany attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Roosevelt and Churchill, unsurprised, began contemplating the ultimate ideological impurity: a deal with the devil—perhaps recalling how Wilson and Lloyd George must have come to regret abandoning a lesser demon, Nicholas II, after March 1917. At first immobilized by the shock, Stalin soon rallied sufficiently to demand what his ideology told him should be his due: help from his devils, the capitalist democracies, as if the Nazi-Soviet pact had never happened.
Brushing aside still more diplomatic and military misgivings, Roosevelt dispatched two deal makers to Moscow: Harry Hopkins, who’d become his Colonel House, and W. Averell Harriman, the railroad magnate who’d run manganese concessions in the Caucasus in the 1920s. Meanwhile, Davies, at the president’s request, rushed into print Mission to Moscow, a sanitized but widely read account of his 1937–38 ambassadorship. After satisfying himself, from these and other sources, that Stalin wasn’t about to surrender, Roosevelt on November 7, 1941—twenty-four years to the day after the Bolsheviks’ coup and one month to the day before Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor—proclaimed the security of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics vital to that of the United States. Enough had happened by then that hardly anyone noticed.104
XII.
“So we had won after all!” Churchill remembered exulting on getting the news from Hawaii. “[T]he United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death.” “[S]illy people” had thought Americans too soft, too talkative, too paralyzed by their politics to be anything more than “a vague blur on the horizon to friend or foe.”
But I had studied the American Civil War, fought out to the last desperate inch. American blood flowed in my veins. I thought of a remark which Edward Grey had made to me more than thirty years before—that the United States is like “a gigantic boiler. Once the fire is lighted under it there is no limit to the power it can generate.”
And so, “[b]eing satiated with emotion and sensation, I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.”105
Churchill was too tactful to mention the fire lit, in Grey’s time, that after winning a war unexpectedly had gone out. Re-ignition required a quarter century, a more dangerous crisis than that of 1917, and a more careful coordination of means with ends than Wilson had achieved. So Roosevelt took his time. Churchill could only wait—however magnificently—for twenty-seven of the sixty-eight months in which Britain was at war.
Roosevelt was waiting for three things: First, an American rearmament that would restore prosperity, allow selective support to selected allies, and still hold out the hope—never the promise—of not going to war. Second, assurance that the Soviet Union would survive, and hence serve as a continental ally between the larger threats posed by smaller peripheries, Germany and Japan: left, by Stalin’s bad choices, with no choice at all, his autocracy would do most of the fighting needed to save the American and British democracies. Finally, FDR wanted his own Fort Sumter, the moral high ground of having been attacked, which would at once silence all domestic demands to remain at peace. In the end he got two: the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s declaration of war four days later.
Over the next four years, it was Roosevelt, more than anyone else, who rescued democracy and capitalism—not everywhere and in all respects, but sufficiently to stabilize both so that the setbacks they’d suffered in the first half of the twentieth century could reverse themselves in the second. He brought two great wars fought on opposite sides of the earth to almost simultaneous victories at a cost in American lives of less than 2 percent of the total for all the participants in those wars.106 His country emerged from them with half the world’s manufacturing capability, two-thirds of its gold reserves, three-fourths of its invested capital, its largest navy and air force, and its first atomic bombs.107 There were, to be sure, pacts with devils in all of these: strategies, like politics, are never pure. But as historians Hal Brands and Patrick Porter have pointed out, “If this wasn’t a successful grand strategy,” then “nothing would be.”108
XIII.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, Isaiah Berlin wrote ten years after the president’s death, had been “a handsome, charming, gay, very intelligent, very delightful, very audacious man” accused, by his critics, of many weaknesses. He was, they claimed, “ignorant, unscrupulous, irresponsible,” and had “betrayed his class.” Surrounded by “adventurers, slick opportunists, [and] intriguers,” he’d been “ruthless in playing with . . . lives and careers.” He made “conflicting promises, cynically and brazenly.” He used his “vast and irresistible public charm” to make up for his irresponsibility. “All of this was said and some of it may indeed have been just.” But Roosevelt had “countervailing qualities of a rare and inspiring order.”
[H]e was large-hearted and possessed wide political horizons, imaginative sweep, understanding of the time in which he lived and of the direction of the great new forces at work in the twentieth century—technological, racial, imperialist, anti-imperialist; he was in favour of life and movement, the promotion of the most generous possible fulfillment of the largest possible number of human wishes, and not in favour of caution and retrenchment and sitting still. Above all, he was absolutely fearless.
As a result—and unusually for leaders of his or any other country—he seemed to have “no fear at all of the future.”
Wilson, at his postwar triumphs in Paris, London, and Rome, had conveyed something like this, but only briefly: “[I]t disappeared quickly and left a terrible feeling of disenchantment.” He’d been the kind of leader who, possessed by a “bright, coherent dream, . . . understands neither people nor events,” and hence is able “to ignore a good deal of what goes on outside him.” The weak and the vacillating may find “relief and peace and strength” in following such a person, “to whom all issues are clear, whose universe consists entirely of primary colors, mostly black and white, and who marches toward his goal looking neither to right nor to left.” But there are also, within this category, “fearful evildoers, like Hitler.”
Roosevelt, in striking contrast, was one of those politicians equipped with “antennae of the greatest possible delicacy, which convey to them . . . the perpetually changing contours of events and feelings and human activities.” Gifted with the capacity “to take in minute impressions,” they absorb and extract purpose from—as do artists—vast multitudes of “small evanescent unseizable detail.”
Statesmen of this type know what to do and when to do it, if they are to achieve their ends, which themselves are usually not born within some private world of inner thought, or introverted feeling, but are the crystallisation, the raising to great intensity and clarity, of what a large number of their fellow citizens are thinking and feeling in some dim, inarticulate but nevertheless persistent fashion.
Which allows such leaders then to convey, to those citizens, “a sense of understanding their inner needs, of responding to their own deepest impulses, above all of being alone capable of organising the world along lines [for] which [they] are instinctively groping.” In this way, Berlin concluded, Roosevelt made Americans “prouder to be Americans than they had been before. He raised their status in their own eyes—[and] immensely in those of the rest of the world.”
For he showed “that power and order are not . . . a straitjacket of doctrine, . . . that it is possible to reconcile individual liberty—a loose texture of society—with the indispensable minimum of organising and authority.” In which coexistence of opposites resides “what Roosevelt’s greatest predecessor once described as ‘the last best hope of earth.’”109
XIV.
The date is May 26, 1940. The place is just outside Trinidad, Colorado, on the route of the old Santa Fe Trail. The time is dusk, and the sun is setting behind the mountains. A car has pulled over, and in it sit two men, tuning a radio. One is thirty-nine, the other twenty-two, and they’re driving across America.110 A few locals approach, asking if they can listen too: for the men in the car they’re “Mexicans”—even though their ancestors may once have owned everything in sight. All light cigarettes as the voice they know breaks through the static: “My friends . . .”
The men are Bernard DeVoto, a Harvard English lecturer who’d prospered as a bootlegger, failed as a novelist, and would soon succeed as a historian: with him is his assistant and driver, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Having grown up in Utah, DeVoto is reacquainting himself with the American West prior to finishing his epic The Year of Decision: 1846, which will appear in 1943. But on this evening they, like the “Mexicans,” have much else on their minds.
For France is about to fall, England may be next, and as Schlesinger writes to his parents a few days later: “[T]he kind of world I have been preparing to live in is gone.” DeVoto, who’d served in France in the Great War, has seen it all before: “We were the war generation and then some called us the lost generation and then we were the depression generation and now we regress to our first estate.” Both have read, and discussed, an article in the June issue of Harper’s Magazine—for which DeVoto writes a column—entitled “Enter Atomic Power.”111 It mentions no military applications, but the men in the car can’t help but wonder “whether a cupful . . . could be used to run a tank.”
And yet, the country has reassured as they’ve crossed it. There’ve been two thousand miles of sturdy houses, well-kept lawns, and bright flowers—“a windbreak . . . against the erosion of the times; each one a place where roots go down to hold the soil.” The schools look better than ever before. The people, “habituated to peace,” are unfailingly kind. And never again, DeVoto vows, “would I speak condescendingly of the radio.” For suddenly, “out of advertisements for cereals and shaving lotions, you get an instrument of democracy.” No one this time will be able to say “that the Americans did not know what they were in for, or why.”
Roosevelt’s address isn’t one of his best. There’re too many statistics on rearmament achieved so far, soon to be eclipsed exponentially by what the country will achieve when it does go to war. What the president most wants Americans to know, though, is that their security can’t come any longer solely from ocean distances. The new technologies of “ships”—the kind that move under and above water as well as on its surface—have made isolation impossible. But from within its boundaries, the country will make whatever it will take to keep it safe.
For more than three centuries we Americans have been building on this continent a free society, a society in which the promise of the human spirit may find fulfillment. . . . We have built well.112
When he finishes, the car is filled with cigarette smoke and a brief silence, after which one of the “Mexicans” says: “I guess maybe America declare war pretty soon now.” “I guess maybe,” DeVoto acknowledges. Then “[w]e waved good-by and drove on to Trinidad.”