CHAPTER THREE
THE RISING TIDE OF REVOLUTION

I am proposing, as it were, that the nations should with one accord adopt the doctrine of President Monroe as the doctrine of the world. .  .  .

I am proposing that all nations henceforth avoid entangling alliances. .  .  .

I am proposing government by the consent of the governed .  .  . freedom of the seas .  .  . and that moderation of armaments which makes of armies and navies a power for order. .  .  .

These are American principles, American policies. We could stand for no others. And they are also the principles and policies of forward-looking men and women everywhere, of every modern nation, of every enlightened community. They are the principles of mankind and must prevail.

WOODROW WILSON, JANUARY, 1917

The Peace which we propose must be a people’s peace .  .  . guaranteeing to each nation freedom for economic and cultural development. Such a peace can only be concluded by the direct and courageous struggle of the revolutionary masses against all imperialist plans and aggressive designs.

Overthrow those robbers and enslavers of your country. .  .  . Let them no longer violate your hearths! You must yourselves be masters in your own land! You yourselves must arrange your life as you see fit! You have the right to do this, for your fate is in your own hands!

THE COUNCIL OF PEOPLE’S COMMISSARS, TO THE WORKERS
OF THE WORLD, NOVEMBER–DECEMBER, 1917

PRESIDENT WILSON [remarked that]. .  .  . There was certainly a latent force behind Bolshevism which attracted as much sympathy as its more brutal aspects caused general disgust. There was throughout the world a feeling of revolt against the large vested interests which influenced the world both in the economic and in the political sphere. The way to cure this domination was, in his opinion, constant discussion and a slow process of reform; but the world at large had grown impatient of delay.

FROM THE MINUTES OF A MEETING OF THE BIG FIVE
AT THE PARIS PEACE CONFERENCE, JANUARY, 1919

The question now arose whether we ought to include in the new terms of the armistice other problems, such as that of Poland.

PRESIDENT WILSON suggested it might be unwise to discuss a proposal of this sort on its individual merits, since it formed part of the much larger question of .  .  . how to meet the social danger of Bolshevism.

FROM THE MINUTES OF THE MEETING OF THE SUPREME
WAR COUNCIL IN PARIS, JANUARY, 1919

Woodrow Wilson’s attempt to use America’s great power to make the world safe for democracy, and to establish an international order to maintain that security, was an essentially conservative effort. His definition of democracy, his emphasis on preserving that particular society, and the means he proposed to accomplish the task were rooted in the nineteenth-century liberal conception of the world. And his view of human nature, his political theory and action, and his idea that the United States would take over the international role that Great Britain had played between 1815 and 1915 further characterized him as a man of that outlook and tradition. Wilson was confident that the principles and procedures of nineteenth-century liberalism were just and sound; he felt, therefore, that the basic problem was to establish a framework in which they could produce the well-being of all concerned.

Wilson’s reservations about the existing state of affairs did not include any doubts concerning the fundamental structure of society. He did, however, realize that the rise of the large corporation, and similar organized groups in the political economy, called for some changes in the Weltanschauung of nineteenth-century liberalism. There were three broad approaches that could be followed. One answer was to evolve a new philosophy and program to fit the facts of advanced industrial society. Another involved extensive and probably somewhat ruthless government intervention to recreate the political economy of the individual entrepreneur.

But both of those proposals involved drastic action, and Wilson had no intention of embarking upon such a course. “We shall deal with an economic system as it is and as it may be modified,” he announced as he entered the White House in 1913, “not as it might be if we had a clean sheet of paper to write on.” That strong antipathy to fundamental change limited Wilson to the third alternative. He accepted the corporation and similar groups and tried to modify and adapt, and thereby sustain, his nineteenth-century liberalism in a situation in which the individual had actually lost much of his power to initiate, or even control, affairs that affected him immediately and fundamentally.

Despite the series of specific and general revolutions that occurred throughout the world between his election in 1912 and his death in 1924, Wilson never seriously altered his conception of the world. As indicated in an article in the Atlantic Monthly, he was still looking at the end of his life for “The Road Away From Revolution.” But the impact of these revolutions provoked many Americans formerly in agreement with him to modify their outlook. A majority of those who left Wilson’s position emphasized the need for America to oppose the revolutions with more determination, and to continue its independent expansion with greater vigor. Only a few argued that it was wiser to accept the revolutions and to modify or change America’s traditional conception of the world. Taken together, however, those who disagreed with Wilson were more numerous than those who continued to support him. In the end, therefore, Wilson’s crusade was defeated by revolutions overseas and by the domestic American response to these upheavals.

At the hour of its entry into the war, however, America broadly shared the assumptions of Wilson’s liberalism and responded to his definition of America’s war aims. Though it admitted that there were exceptions in reality, American liberalism was a philosophy derived from the axiom and belief that a harmony of interests actually existed and could be secured. Such an underlying community of interest was held to eventuate in community well-being if it was not distorted or thwarted. As a consequence of their ideological childhood within the tradition of natural law, their enormous natural resources, and the absence of any serious opponents in the New World, Americans had followed the line of least resistance in developing their political economy. Founded on a simple (if not crude) concept of natural law, its theory was as neat a circle as ever was drawn freehand. Conflicts of interest were asserted to be mere appearances, or the result of misguided action by others, because the doctrine of a harmony of interests defined them in that fashion. Hence intervention in the social process was necessary and justified only to remove the obstacles placed there by others who did not understand or honor the truth.

Though negative in form, such intervention became very positive in practice, for the theory defined every opponent of the United States as being misadvised about the nature of the world. In a way that John Locke had tended to do in his own philosophical writings which provided the master text for liberalism, Americans became very prone to define their rivals as unnatural men. They were thus beyond the pale and almost, if not wholly, beyond redemption. Reinforced by an expansionist, or frontier, interpretation of history that explained nationalistic expansion as a necessary and justified part of natural law, the theory was further supported by ethnic and religious prejudices. The final result was that domestic problems became international problems, for it was necessary to remove the restrictions upon America’s natural right to resolve its domestic difficulties by natural expansion.

This outlook was literally an all-encompassing conception of the world. Americans could not only conquer nature, but they could put their self-interest to work to produce the well-being and the harmony of the world. Their theory not only held that they could do these things; it asserted the natural necessity of action. Any other course violated natural law and thus subverted the harmony of interests. Throughout the twentieth century, and particularly after World War I, the thesis was advanced with great force by various American experts in casuistry. But the logic of the theory itself led most Americans to the conclusions in complete innocence. They were neither hypocrites nor sophists; they simply accepted and believed the idea that American expansion naturally improved the world—as well as being necessary for their own democracy and prosperity.

Turning from these general characteristics of American liberalism, it is helpful to outline the more specific nature of the society which Wilson and other Americans had in mind when they asserted that the world must be made safe for democracy. Supported by an examination of the means proposed to accomplish that task, such a review will provide considerable insight into the international and domestic opposition which developed between 1917 and 1920. There are several ways to approach this task of definition, but one of the most fruitful is to consider American liberalism from the vantage point of its outlook on key issues: economics, politics, social questions such as race, color, and religion, and the international phenomena of nationalism, colonialism, and imperialism.

As defined by Wilson and other Americans, the economic aspect of democracy was based on the classical liberal assumption of a society composed of free, independent, and enlightened individuals who acted in their own self-interest as producers and consumers. For the consumer, price was the criterion of self-interest. For the producer, it was profit—or the wage contract that the worker negotiated with the owner. Since all of these indicators could be measured in money, the interplay of the various self-interests in the market place produced an automatic and perpetual functioning of the system. Hence the profit motive, if allowed to operate freely through the individual, produced the maximum benefit for the community as well as the welfare of the individual.

Given a natural system of this character, the government had neither cause nor justification to intervene in economic affairs except for a few well-defined purposes. Almost all were negative in nature: protecting the validity of the money, or measuring, system; maintaining order; enforcing the definition of economic malpractices; and clearing out any remnants of mercantilism. Its one positive responsibility was nevertheless vitally important to the functioning of the system: the protection and extension of the market in which the principle of free competition could operate. As with mercantilism, classical liberal economics led to an expansionist foreign policy.^*

In most cases, therefore, the liberal state maintained and extended the practice of colonialism. In others, it modified the pattern of expansion into what British historians have called “informal empire” or “free-trade imperialism,” where the liberal state relied upon its industrial and general economic power to structure and control weaker or less developed nations.^† Local or native peoples often ruled, but they did so within limits (and rules) defined by their economic ties with the imperial power. As far as the weaker country was concerned, this meant in practice that one segment of society ruled. When this pattern of events was called democracy, as it often was, the rest of the population tended to conclude that democracy was not what it wanted. For this reason, as well as in consequence of the more obvious economic results of the policy, such peoples were inclined to respond to radical leadership that offered them a greater share in running affairs, as well as a more general distribution of wealth.

Wilson’s original program was designed to perform the domestic and international functions of the liberal state. As with Theodore Roosevelt before him, however, Wilson was confronted by the fact that free competition worked to restrict free competition. As implied by its very name, the system of natural law tended to establish a balance among the powerful or cunning survivors of competition. It was impractical, if not impossible, to destroy the successful competitors. And neither Wilson nor the majority of Americans even considered substituting a different system. To cope with the domestic side of the dilemma, Wilson moved toward a modification of the classical liberal position. He accepted the existence of certain large groups, particularly the corporation and the labor union, and attempted to fit them into traditional liberal economic and social theory.

While at first glance this may seem to offer a rational and perceptive solution, even a modest amount of reflection reveals at least two fundamental weaknesses. In the first place, the result of equating the organized and institutionalized group with the individual is to create a kind of syndicalism or corporatism in which the groups (or blocs) compete with each other. The individual, unless he is one of the very few to attain a position of great power or high authority within such blocs, has almost no role in the formulation of alternatives, and only moderate and occasional influence in choosing between programs or policies developed by the top leaders. The second weakness concerns the way in which this ostensible solution promotes discouragement, disillusionment, and finally apathy or a particularly narrow and selfish kind of cynicism, as the discrepancy between the theory and the reality becomes increasingly apparent.^‡

Despite such weaknesses in that outlook, of which he was not totally unaware, Wilson nevertheless transferred his approach to domestic affairs to the problems of foreign policy. His conception of the League of Nations, for example, was clearly evolved in that fashion. And for Wilson, as for his predecessors and successors, the Open Door Policy was America’s version of the liberal policy of informal empire or free-trade imperialism. None of them had the slightest idea of organizing the co-operative, planned, balanced economic development of world resources. Wilson aimed to use American power, inside and outside the League of Nations, merely to order the world so that such classical competition could proceed in peace. If this could be done, he was confident that American economic power could take care of the United States—and of the world.

Wilson’s political ideas and objectives were equally traditional. Based on the same principle of natural law which underwrote liberal economic theory, liberal political theory asserted that each individual participated in the process of decision-making on the basis of his own self-interest. Given the existence of natural political freedoms, such as those of speech and association, the individual’s exercise of his positive freedom to participate in the political process would lead to democratic decisions. The theory asserted, in short, that the enjoyment and exercise of natural political rights assured the individual of his share of power.

More than was the case in economic matters, however, Americans were aware of the discrepancy between this theory of political liberalism and the reality of their political experience. For a generation before entering World War I they had grappled, through the instrument of the bipartisan Progressive movement, with the imbalance created by the impact of consolidated economic power on the political process. They grew ever more aware that such economic power exercised disproportionate political influence—directly by organized pressure on elected representatives and indirectly by the broad political and social consequences of economic decisions. As one American of the time expressed it, “the dollar votes more times than the man.” Some Americans, probably Wilson among them, ultimately sensed that the Mexican Revolution was in part a violent protest against a similar discrepancy between theory and reality. This experience helped them understand a bit more the general revolt against political liberalism and was a restraining factor in their response to the challenge, but it did not lead them to formulate and act upon a new conception of democracy.

This reluctance to embark upon a thoroughgoing re-examination of the existing order was the result of many factors. Some of them were negative. By comparison with the depression years of the 1890s, for example, the period after 1900 seemed bright and rosy. In addition, the war intensified the general psychological propensity to go along with the existing order despite its weaknesses and failures. A more important consideration, and one that was positive in character, was the renewed confidence that came with recovery from the depression.

Reforms such as the initiative and the referendum, the direct election of senators, and numerous antitrust prosecutions encouraged the belief that classical liberalism could be modified to work under new conditions. And the convergence of the reformist and economic expansionism generated enthusiasm for America’s mission in the world. The frontier interpretation of American history, having been modernized to fit an industrial society, was once again becoming an article of faith—just as its agrarian version had become in the 1830s and 1840s. Americans increasingly considered themselves once more on the move to “extend the area of freedom.”

But this new enthusiasm in the United States developed at a time when classical liberalism was coming under heavy criticism in much of the world. Thus there were many doubts about the kind of freedom that America was extending, as well as about the morality of doing so. In addition to questions about the economic effects of such overseas expansion, there was also skepticism about some of its political and social characteristics. An increasing number of foreigners was aware, for example, that political and social democracy in the United States were largely limited to white Anglo-Saxons.

When transferred to the world scene, those color and ethnic restrictions became even more apparent. Democracy tended in practice to be replaced by an outlook summarized in the familiar phrase about the white man’s burden. That approach was based on the quite different thesis that colored people were somehow never ready for democracy and self-government. It was possible, of course, to defend various limitations on democracy and representative government on logical as well as historical and practical grounds. Indeed, a very great deal of intellectual and emotional energy was invested in that effort by Americans, as well as by Europeans with colonial empires to defend.

Such arguments were not very strong, however, because political democracy had begun, even in the white Western countries, as a process in which only a small segment of the adult population participated. Colored peoples pointed out, quite plausibly, that their societies were already structured for such a form of democracy. And when, as was the case with American liberalism, it was further implied, if not vehemently asserted, that democracy really worked only for white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant Christians, the appeal of democracy suffered even more. For this argument led rather rapidly to the conclusion that even at best democracy meant little more than the modification of colonialism in the direction of less harsh protectorates or open-door imperialism.

For these reasons, American liberalism’s definition of democracy as it pertained to self-determination and colonialism lost much of its democratic content once it moved beyond Western Europe. Colonial societies began to realize that America’s anticolonialism neither implied nor offered freedom from extensive and intensive foreign influence. Whatever the evidence that Wilson ever entertained any idea of actually trying to limit such absentee authority to its absolute minimum of voluntary respect and emulation, and the data is neither extensive nor convincing, it is clear that he never developed or pushed such a program.

At best, Wilson’s actions were in keeping with the principles of a moralistic and paternalistic open-door imperialism. At worst, he intervened with force in the affairs of other nations. America’s verbal support for the principle of self-determination became in practice the reordering of national boundaries in Europe on the basis of ethnic and linguistic criteria. Though it had considerable relevance for Western Europe, this principle and practice of nationality had less meaning in Eastern Europe—and still less throughout the rest of the world. But it was not even applied to many areas. Japan was treated as an inferior, for example, and the colonial empires were hardly touched. They were most certainly not broken up into independent states according to the principle of self-determination. And even though some improvements did result from the mandate system where it was applied, that approach was characterized by minimum changes in the existing pattern of colonialism.

Taken seriously, a commitment to the principle of self-determination means a policy of standing aside for peoples to make their own choices, economic as well as political and cultural. It is based on a willingness to live and let live—a broad tolerance for other peoples’ preferences and a willingness, if the opportunity is offered, to help them achieve their own goals in their own fashion. It is the philosophy of an integrated personality, and it might be defined as the foreign policy of a mature society.^§ Though it avowed this principle, the actions of America in the realm of foreign affairs did not follow this pattern. Hence it was not surprising, as Wilson’s actions became apparent, that many peoples of the world felt misled by Wilson’s slogans about self-determination. It was one thing to shape one’s own culture, but quite another to be pushed aside while others haggled over ethnic statistics and then drew lines on a map.

As suggested by many of his actions in Mexico, and by his call for war without quarter until Germany erected a government that “we can trust,” Wilson’s liberal practice was not in keeping with his liberal principles. This became even more apparent as he began to reveal his ideals about a League of Nations. That program amounted to a direct and almost literal application of the principles of America’s domestic liberalism to the world at large. The League of Nations became the state, and its function was to maintain order and enforce the rules of the game at the international level. Given such security, the national pursuit of self-interest would, according to the doctrine of a harmony of interests, produce peace and prosperity throughout the world.

Beyond that point, however, the attempt to formulate an international system on the principles of such liberalism encountered a difficult issue. It was simple to say that the League corresponded to the state, but it was not at all easy to specify the power structure of the international state. The logical answer defined it as a Parliament of Man, but that did not answer the question; it only asked it in a different way. It was still necessary to specify such mundane but vital things as the nature of the franchise and the institutional structure of the government. Wilson answered these questions by combining his concept of America’s supremacy with the political theory of classical liberalism. Every nation could vote, but nothing could be done without the prior existence of a concert of power (or harmony of interests) among the big nations. That was as weighted a franchise as ever proposed under the name of liberalism, particularly since Wilson assumed that America (in association with Great Britain) would lead the concert of major powers.

Considered on its own merits, the idea of a concert of power among the strongest nations had much to recommend it on the grounds that it assigned responsibility to those with the ability to make basic decisions. But when judged against the rhetoric and principles of classical liberalism it was quite clearly a contradiction in terms. For by the key tenet of liberalism, namely the existence of a harmony of interests, it was possible to produce the general welfare only under conditions of free competition. Yet by establishing an oligopoly of power, and formalizing it in an unconditional guarantee of “the territorial integrity and existing political independence” of the nations admitted to the League (on criteria prescribed by the oligopoly itself), Wilson’s proposal destroyed the possibility of free competition. And it was precisely on this point that the League of Nations was attacked by some American liberals themselves, as well as by radicals and conservatives in the United States and throughout the world.

Both at home and abroad, the radicals made the most fundamental criticism because they challenged all of Wilson’s definitions of liberal democracy. Their assault was supported, particularly in the early years of the revolutionary upsurge throughout the world, by a heretical movement within liberalism itself which strengthened the radicals by weakening Wilson’s position. Left-wing liberalism developed from the same philosophy of natural law which classical liberalism cited as the sanction for its own program. But while they accepted the doctrine of a natural harmony of interests, the heretical liberals went on to raise the question as to why the existing society did not correspond to the ideal society. In reply, they argued that certain institutions, particularly that of private property in its large, concentrated, and consolidated forms, prevented the natural harmony from emerging from the free interplay of individuals pursuing their self-interest. That analysis led the heretics to the conclusion that it was necessary to make structural changes in the existing society before the workings of natural law could produce the general welfare. In sharp contrast, Wilson (and the conservatives) would support nothing more than a “slow process of reform” in which they saw no need, and most certainly had no intention, of shaking the foundations of the status quo. Hence the heretics proposed many measures, particularly in economic, social, and international matters, which approximated some of those advanced by the radicals. But the heretic liberals were drastic reformers, not revolutionaries. This was a vital distinction, for in time it led the heretics to oppose the radicals as vigorously as did the classical liberals or even the conservatives.

For their part, the radicals started from a fundamentally different premise. They denied the existence—save perhaps in some mythical past—of a natural harmony of interests. They held that conflict was the essence of life and that it would never end short of death. Yet they also argued that each broad conflict within society was resolved on a higher level and thus produced a better life in the new society. And, in some of their most free-wheeling arguments and prophecies, they asserted that later conflicts would be nonviolent and would concern ideas and broad cultural issues. Men would dispute the best means of becoming more human, not the distribution of wealth and power. In its own way, therefore, the radical theory promised a society not too different from the one prophesied by the heretical liberals on the quite different basis of a harmony of interests inherent in natural law. But the radicals not only thought it necessary to go further in changing society, they also accepted revolution as a justifiable and honorable method.

In economic matters, for example, they denied the validity of the liberals’ market economy. They judged it neither fair nor truly efficient. They advocated instead the idea of planned production for use and welfare. To accomplish this, they proposed that the government should take title to resources and direct the production of goods and services for all the society on an equitable basis. Such economic decisions would not only facilitate development in other areas of life, they would also become the stuff of politics, and in that fashion politics would once again become relevant and meaningful to each citizen. This mode of production and distribution would not only make work itself meaningful to the individual and the group, but would end the struggle for raw existence and hence free men for personal and cultural development.

Radicals made no discrimination as to which men would enjoy the fruits of the revolution, except that they excluded those who fought to retain their privileges of the past. They handled the question of religion in two ways. In the broadest sense they secularized it, converting it into a faith in the ability of man to realize his full potential in this world. More immediately, either they attacked it as a façade for privilege and power or interpreted its idealism as support for their program. As for color or ethnic origins, they denied the validity of such criteria as the basis of any decision, an attitude that enabled them to avoid Wilson’s contradiction between self-determination and nationality and the exclusiveness of his Protestant Christianity and Anglo-Saxonism. In this way, radicals appealed to all men across all existing—or proposed—boundaries.

Their approach to self-determination gave the radicals a double-edged weapon against colonialism and the less overt forms of imperial expansion such as the Open Door Policy. For by asserting the right of self-determination, they identified themselves with anticolonialism, which was the lowest common denominator of nationalism, yet also aligned themselves with the more developed and specific expressions of nationalism. Thus they offered leadership to those who wished to end formal colonialism, as well as to others who sought to assert their full sovereignty against spheres of influence and similar restrictions established under the Open Door Policy.

In the broadest sense, therefore, the radicals offered the peoples of the world an explanation of their existing hardships, a program to end such difficulties arid build a better world, and leadership in that common effort. This radical assault on classical liberalism and conservatism was a direct challenge to Wilson and to the United States. And through the communist victory of November 1917, in Russia, all those separate revolutions—in economics, politics, social values, and international affairs—seemed to become institutionalized in a nation of tremendous potential.

Though obviously of great importance to an understanding of American diplomacy in the twentieth century, the Bolshevik Revolution and the subsequent rise of the Soviet Union as a thermonuclear power can nevertheless be overemphasized to the point of creating serious errors of analysis and interpretation. Indeed, that very preoccupation (and the warped perspective that it created) does a great deal to explain many otherwise perplexing actions by American leaders. It helps tremendously, for example, to account for the near-panic manifested by otherwise perceptive, intelligent, and sober men when Castro sustained his power in Cuba.^¶ And in a broader sense, it offers considerable insight into the reasons why American leaders persistently interpreted political and social unrest throughout the world as a consequence of the Bolshevik Revolution, and why they steadily expanded the nation’s overseas commitments beyond any rational calculation (even by the axioms of their expansionist Weltanschauung) of the country’s resources. This myopic and self-defeating preoccupation with the Bolshevik Revolution existed long before the Soviet Union orbited a man in space. Fundamentally, and from the outset, American leaders were for many, many years more afraid of the implicit and indirect challenge of the revolution than they were of the actual power of the Soviet Union.

The great majority of American leaders were so deeply concerned with the Bolshevik Revolution because they were so uneasy about what President Wilson called the “general feeling of revolt” against the existing order, and about the increasing intensity of that dissatisfaction. The Bolshevik Revolution became in their minds the symbol of all the revolutions that grew out of that discontent. And that is perhaps the crucial insight into the tragedy of American diplomacy.

Those other specific and general revolutions would have continued and reached their climaxes even if the Bolsheviks had never seized power in Russia. They were revolutions that had been fed and sustained by the policies of the West itself for more than a century. American policy was fundamentally no more than a sophisticated version of those same policies.

The underlying nature of the tragedy is defined by the confrontation between those two elements, not just or primarily by the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. The tragedy was of course dramatized, and unquestionably made more intense, by the way that American leaders reduced all such revolutions to the Bolshevik Revolution. Indeed, their behavior could be offered as a textbook example of the reductionist fallacy. Or, to use a metaphor from daily life, they blinded themselves at the outset of their search for an answer to the “general feeling of revolt” that disturbed them so much.

It is vital to realize, therefore, that the radical and revolutionary impact was not limited—even between 1917 and 1921—to events in Russia. On the European scene, communists came to power in Hungary and showed strength in Germany; ^# and the heretical liberals attacked the status quo in England and other countries. The Arab Revolution in the Middle East, while it was predominantly anticolonial and nationalistic and was led by liberals and conservatives, nevertheless represented the international elements of the broad radical movement. A similar pattern emerged in the Far East. Chinese revolutionaries, some of whom did look to Russia for advice and leadership, asserted their rapport with the radical challenge—on domestic as well as international issues. And Japanese conservatives (and liberals), who asserted their nationalistic and ethnic equality with the West, pre-empted certain radical policies as weapons for their own purposes. All of these developments, considered individually and en masse, posed serious problems for American leadership at the end of World War I.

Confronted directly by the opposition overseas, Wilson faced still other difficulties. His original hope to establish a concert of power with Great Britain and France was weakened by their initial opposition to certain of his proposals. The revolutionary ferment in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East only intensified the determination of the imperial powers to retain and strengthen their existing empires. A similar reaction occurred in America, and Wilson’s coalition for the crusade to make the world safe for democracy disintegrated into a great internal struggle over what policy would enable America to assert its power most effectively in dealing with Japanese and European competitors and the wave of revolutions engulfing the world.

Wilson’s personal dilemma symbolized the broader difficulties faced by classical liberalism. According to the basic principles of natural law, he should have accepted the revolutions as competing units which would contribute their share to a broader and deeper harmony of interests. But his expansionist philosophy of history, his crusading zeal and his nationalism—which also were integral parts of his liberalism—prompted him to oppose the revolutions as barricades on America’s road to domestic well-being and world leadership. The tragedy was defined by his attempt to resolve the dilemma by preserving and extending democracy through a policy of open-door expansion.

His approach satisfied neither his own followers nor the foreigners who looked to America (and to Wilson in particular) for a creative alternative to the revolutionaries. Instead, it left the battleground to the conservatives and the radicals. By attempting to achieve security through the traditional policy of the open door, America’s conservatives emphasized the weakest aspects of Wilson’s own program. And the liberals, having failed to offer a positive and effective alternative of their own, had in the end no place to go but into a bipartisan alignment with the conservatives.

* Liberalism’s intervention in domestic affairs should not, however, be misconceived as another similarity with mercantilism. Mercantilists intervened on the assumption that there was not any natural harmony of interests, and that men had therefore to create such harmony as there was by conscious, rational effort. The liberal, in contrast, intervened to establish conditions under which competition would—through the power of Adam Smith’s famous Hidden Hand—allow the natural harmony of interests to assert itself. The distinction is crucial.

† Here see: H. S. Ferns, “Britain’s Informal Empire in Argentina, 1806–1914,” Past and Present (1953); and J. Gallagher and R. Robinson, “The Imperialism of Free Trade,” The Economic History Review (1953).

‡ For further discussion of this development see, The Contours of American History (New York: World Publishing Co., 1961). The best known (but nevertheless unsuccessful) attempt to squeeze such syndicalism into the framework of liberalism is J. K. Galbraith, American Capitalism. The Theory of Countervailing Power (Boston: Harper & Bros., 1952).

§ It could of course be maintained with considerable power that the philosophy of self-determination actually leads, if followed rigorously, to pacifism, and to anarchism practiced within small communities. Both Wilson and the Bolsheviks declined to pursue the logic that far.

¶ Perhaps the most striking example of this is provided by Adolf A. Berle, Jr. Berle, prior to the Cuban Revolution, was one of the most astute and rigorous minds seeking to resolve the tragedy of American diplomacy in a creative manner. For that matter, his analyses of the domestic political economy continue to exhibit those exceptional characteristics. But Castro so provoked and frightened Berle that he was unable (along with others) even to interpret the Cuban crisis within the limits of his formerly sophisticated expansionism.
    Before the Cuban Revolution, for example, I had the good fortune to hear Berle expound for two hours in an exceedingly brilliant manner on the dangerous consequences of America’s expansion within the strategy of the Open Door Policy. He spoke knowingly and candidly about the way that the expansion of corporations into Latin America influenced the politics of those countries, and of the manner in which they returned an unfair share of their gross profits to the United States—and thereby intensified tensions even further. He concluded his analysis with a remark so simple and eloquent, as well as true, that it visibly and deeply affected the twenty-odd men and women who heard it: “Either we build a true and brilliant community in the Western Hemisphere—or we go under.”
    Now the central point of all this should not be misunderstood. Let the whole issue of expansionism stand moot. What remains, and what cannot be rationalized away, is the inability of Berle to act on his own aphorism. For the Cuban Revolution offered the United States an almost unique opportunity to get on with the work of building a community in the Western Hemisphere. Yet Berle very soon interpreted that revolution as part of a conspiracy by the Soviet Union to spread communism. Neither Berle nor the others of the large group he symbolizes made any serious or sustained effort to jump in, even within the assumptions of their expansionist outlook, and help the moderate elements begin that work—which would in turn have given them a very strong position within the revolutionary coalition. A more saddening example of the unhappy consequences of reading world history since 1917 in terms of the Bolshevik Revolution would be very difficult to find.

# The reader should remember that the army of the Soviet Union had nothing to do with this communist revolution in Hungary at the end of World War I. As will be seen, it was the West, under the leadership of President Wilson and Herbert Hoover, which intervened to overturn the earlier communist revolution.