Untimely papers

by Randolph Silliman Bourne

In the eyes of all but the most skeptical radicals, American entrance into the war seemed to be marked by a singularly perfect union of these three factors. The President’s address to Congress on April 2, supported by the December Peace note and the principles of the famous Senate address, gave the Government and American “liberalism” an apparently unimpeachable case. A nation which had resisted for so long a time the undertow of war, which had remained passive before so many provocations and incitements, needed the clearest assurance of unselfish purpose to carry it through the inevitable chaos and disillusionment of adopting a war-technique. That moment seemed to give this assurance. But it needed not only a clear, but a steady and unwavering assurance. It had to see day by day, in each move of war-policy which the Administration made, an unmistakable step toward the realization of the ideals for which the American people had consented to come into the war. American hesitation was overcome only by an apparently persuasive demonstration that priceless values of civilization were at stake. The American people could only be prevented from relapsing into their first hesitation, and so demoralizing the conduct of the war, by the sustained conviction that the Administration and the Allied governments were fighting single-mindedly for the conservation of those values. It is therefore pertinent to ask how this conviction has been sustained and how accurately American strategy has been held to the justifying of our participation in the war. It is pertinent to ask whether the prevailing apathy may not be due to the progressive weakening of the assurance that our war is being in any way decisive in the securing of the values for which we are presumably fighting.

It will not be forgotten that the original logic of American participation hung primarily upon the menace of Germany’s renewed submarine campaign. The case for America’s entrance became presumably irresistible only when the safety of the British Commonwealth and of the Allies and neutrals who use the Atlantic highway was at stake. American liberal opinion had long ago decided that the logic of our moral neutrality had passed. American isolation was discredited as it became increasingly evident how urgent was our duty to participate in the covenant of nations which it was hoped would come out of the settlement. We were bound to contribute our resources and our good-will to this enterprise. Our position made it certain that however we acted we should be the deciding factor. But up to February first, 1917, it was still an arguable question in the minds of “liberals” whether we could best make that contribution through throwing in our lot with the more pacific nations or by continuing a neutrality benevolent toward their better cause. For this benevolent neutrality, however strained, was still endurable, particularly when supplemented by the hope of mediation contained in the “peace without victory” maneuvers and the principles of the Senate speech.

This attempt to bring about a negotiated peace, while the United States was still nominally neutral, but able to bring its colossal resources against the side which refused to declare its terms, marked the high-water level of American strategy.

For a negotiated peace, achieved before either side had reached exhaustion and the moral disaster was not irremediable, would have been the most hopeful possible basis for the covenant of nations. And the United States, as the effective agent in such a negotiated peace and as the most powerful neutral, might have assumed undisputed leadership in such a covenant.

The strategy of “peace without victory” failed because of the refusal of Germany to state her terms. The war went on from sheer lack of a common basis upon which to work out a settlement. American strategy then involved the persistent pressure of mediation. The submarine menace, however, suddenly forced the issue. The safety of the seas, the whole Allied cause, seemed suddenly in deadly peril. In the emergency benevolent neutrality collapsed. Liberal opinion could find no other answer to the aggression than war. In the light of the sequel those radicals who advocated a policy of “armed neutrality” seem now to have a better case. For American action obtained momentum from the imminence of the peril. The need was for the immediate guarantee of food and ships to the menaced nations and for the destruction of the attacking submarines. “Armed neutrality” suggested a way of dealing promptly and effectively with the situation. The providing of loans, food, ships, convoys, could ostensibly have taken place without a declaration of war, and without developing the country’s morale or creating a vast military establishment. It was generally believed that time was the decisive factor. The decision for war has therefore meant an inevitable and perhaps fatal course of delay. It was obvious that with our well-known unpreparedness of administrative technique, the lack of coördination in industry, and the unreadiness of the people and Congress for coercion, war meant the practical postponement of action for months. In such an emergency that threatened us, our only chance to serve was in concentrating our powers. Until the disorganization inherent in a pacific democracy was remedied, our only hope of effective aid would come from focusing the country’s energies on a ship and food programme, supplemented by a naval programme devised realistically to the direct business at hand. The war could be most promptly ended by convincing the German government that the submarine had no chance of prevailing against the endless American succor which was beginning to raise the siege and clear the seas.

The decision, however, was for war, and for a “thorough” war. This meant the immediate throwing upon the national machinery of far more activity than it could handle. It meant attaching to a food and ship programme a military programme, a loan programme, a censorship programme. All these latter have involved a vast amount of advertising, of agitation, of discussion, and dissension. The country’s energies and attention have been drained away from the simple exigencies of the situation and from the technique of countering the submarine menace and ending the war. Five months have passed since the beginning of unrestricted submarine warfare. We have done nothing to overcome the submarine. The food and ship programmes are still unconsolidated. The absorption of Congress and the country in the loan and the conscript army and the censorship has meant just so much less absorption in the vital and urgent technique to provide which we entered the war. The country has been put to work at a vast number of activities which are consonant to the abstract condition of war, but which may have little relation to the particular situation in which this country found itself and to the particular strategy required. The immediate task was to prevent German victory in order to restore the outlines of our strategy toward a negotiated peace. War has been impotent in that immediate task. Paradoxically, therefore, our very participation was a means of weakening our strategy. We have not overcome the submarine or freed the Atlantic world. Our entrance has apparently made not a dent in the morale of the German people. The effect of our entrance, it was anticipated by liberals, would be the shortening of the war. Our entrance has rather tended to prolong it. Liberals were mistaken about the immediate collapse of the British Commonwealth. It continued to endure the submarine challenge without our material aid. We find ourselves, therefore, saddled with a war-technique which has compromised rather than furthered our strategy.

This war-technique compromises the outlines of American strategy because instead of making for a negotiated peace it has had the entirely unexpected result of encouraging those forces in the Allied countries who desire la victoire intégrale, the “knockout blow.” In the President’s war-message the country was assured that the principles of the negotiated peace remained quite unimpaired. The strategy that underlay this, it will be remembered, was to appeal to the Teutonic peoples over the heads of their rulers with terms so liberal that the peoples would force their governments to make peace. The strategy of the American government was, while prosecuting the war, to announce its war-aims and to persuade the Allies to announce their war-aims in such terms as would split the peoples of the Central Powers from their governments, thus bringing more democratic régimes that would provide a fruitful basis for a covenant of nations. We entered the war with no grievances of our own. It was our peculiar rôle to continue the initiative for peace, both by unmistakably showing our own purpose for a just peace based on some kind of international organization and by wielding a steady pressure on the Entente governments to ratify our programme. If we lost this initiative for peace, or if we were unable or unwilling to press the Entente toward an unmistakable liberalism, our strategy broke down and our justification for entering the war became seriously impaired. For we could then be charged with merely aiding the Entente’s ambiguous scheme of European reorganization.

The success of this strategy of peace depended on a stern disavowal of the illiberal programmes of groups within the Allied countries and a sympathetic attitude toward the most democratic programmes of groups within the enemy Powers. Anything which weakened either this disavowal or this sympathy would imperil our American case. As potential allies in this strategy the American government had within the enemies’ gates the followers of Scheidemann who said at the last sitting of the Reichstag: “If the Entente Powers should renounce all claims for annexation and indemnity and if the Central Powers should insist on continuing the war, a revolution will certainly result in Germany.” It is not inconceivable that the American government and the German socialists had at the back of their minds the same kind of a just peace. The fact that the German socialists were not opposing the German government did not mean that any peace move in which the former were interested was necessarily a sinister Hohenzollern intrigue. The bitterest enemies of Hollweg were not the radicals but the Pan-Germans themselves. It is they who were said to be circulating manifestoes through the army threatening revolution unless their programme of wholesale annexations is carried out. Whatever liberal reservoir of power there is in Germany, therefore, remains in the socialist ranks. If there is any chance of liberal headway against the sinister Pan-German campaign it is through this nucleus of liberal power. American strategy, if it has to find a liberal leverage in Germany, will have to choose the socialist group as against the Pan-Germans. It is not absolutely necessary to assume that the support of the Chancellor by the socialist majority is permanent. It is unplausible that the Scheidemann group coöperates with the Government for peace merely to consolidate the Junker and military class in power after the war. It is quite conceivable that the socialist majority desires peace in order to have a safe basis for a liberal overturn. Revolution, impossible while the Fatherland is in danger, becomes a practicable issue as soon as war is ended. A policy of aiding the Government in its pressure toward peace, in order to be in a tactical position to control the Government when the war-peril was ended, would be an extremely astute piece of statesmanship. There is no evidence that the German socialists are incapable of such far-sighted strategy. Certainly the “German peace” of a Scheidemann is bound to be entirely different from the “German peace” of a Hindenburg. This difference is one of the decisive factors of the American strategy. To ignore it is to run the risk of postponing and perhaps obstructing the settlement of the war.

It is these considerations that make the refusal of passports to the American socialists seem a serious weakening of the American strategy. A conference of responsible socialists from the different countries might have clarified the question how far a Russian peace or a Scheidemann peace differed from the structure of a Wilson peace. By denying American participation in the conference, the Administration apparently renounced the opportunity to make contact with liberal leverage in Germany. It refused to take that aggressive step in cleaving German opinion which was demanded by its own strategy. It tended to discourage liberal opinion in Germany and particularly it discouraged the Russian democracy which was enthusiastic for a socialist conference.

This incident was symptomatic of the lessened adjustment which the Administration has shown toward the changing situation. It was the hope of the American liberals who advocated American entrance into the war that this country would not lose thereby its initiative for peace. They believed that our entrance would make our mediating power actually stronger. That hope has been disappointed through the unexpected radicalism of the new Russian government. The initiative for peace was bound to lie with the people that most wanted peace and was willing to make the most peremptory demands upon the Allied governments that they state the war-aims that would bring it. This tactic was an integral part of the original American strategy. The American liberals trusted the President to use American participation as an instrument in liberalizing the war-aims of all the Allied governments. In the event, however, it has not been America that has wanted peace sufficiently to be peremptory about it. It has been Russia. The initiative for peace has passed from President Wilson into the hands of the Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Deputies. It is the latter who have brought the pressure to declare democratic war-aims. It is their dissatisfaction with the original Allied statement that has brought these new, if scarcely more satisfactory, declarations. In this discussion between the Governments regarding the restatement of war-aims, it was not upon Russia’s side that this country found itself. The President’s note to Russia had all the tone of a rebuke. It sounded like the reaction of a Government which—supposedly itself the leader in the campaign for a just peace—found itself uncomfortably challenged to state its own sincerity. The key to our American strategy has been surrendered to Russia. The plain fact is that the President has lost that position of leader which a Russian candor would have retained for him.