Chapter 15

The American Left

and World War I

Dealing not only with American foreign policy but also with British foreign policy in our century, I am obviously addressing readers from English-speaking countries as an alien—as an Austrian who, during all his lifetime has been at the “receiving end” of political decisions which were largely identified with the national interest of the United States and Britain. Certainly not every American, not every Britisher subscribed to every movement his government made during the crucial World War I years and if the party he voted for was in opposition, he had good reason to disassociate himself from his government’s official policy. And yet he could not possibly avoid identifying himself—at least up to a point—with the actions of his country. Writing as an Austrian, nevertheless I have to tell my readers in all candor that I am also writing as a man who still has a “home,” a Heimat, but since my childhood, since November 1918, no longer a fatherland. The Alpine Republic of Austria has made every imaginable effort to deny its historic roots going back to the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. It shed all the symbols recalling the Hapsburg monarchy either in the form of the Danubian monarchy or its real matrix, the Holy Roman Empire. Thus politically I am representing a void. This, however, gives me the courage to criticize the policies of the English-speaking nations vigorously though endeavoring to remain objective. I think that as a citizen of Christendom, as a product of the Western World it is my duty to point to a chain of errors committed by Britain and America in the past, because these countries still have an armed might, a freedom of decision, a responsibility which Austria no longer possesses. This is the reason I am not dwelling on the faults and mistakes of my own people, now a small pawn on a big chessboard. I am not even putting much stress on the sins of omission and commission of the German people or of its masters prior to 1933, a people to whom as an Austrian I feel attached in many ways. Great nations have fallen very low—the Jews when they rejected their Messiah; France, the “Oldest Daughter of the Church,” when it engaged in the Revolution, Pandora’s Box of centuries to come; “Holy Mother Russia,” when she fell for the abstruse ideas of German intellectuals; the “Germanies,” heart of the Holy Roman Empire, when they submitted to Hitler and his evil creed. Of course these peoples have no common guilt. There is no such thing as collective guilt. However, as Theodor Heuss has pointed out, there is collective shame.

Nor, obviously, are the Americans (or the British) collectively guilty of the fateful errors and misdeeds committed by some of them. The words of Count Benckendorff, last Imperial Russian Ambassador in London, about the Germans—“Il n’y a pas ‘les Allemands,’ il n’y a que des Allemands”—are equally valid for the English-speaking nations. The vast majority of my friends in Britain and America never belonged to the left, they rarely subscribed to its errors, they have little, sometimes no responsibility for the tragic situation the modern world is in at present. If I am accusing, I am hardly accusing them and the accusations themselves are made in order to show errors of the past. The only thing we can do now is to learn from them.

Certainly in no domain has the influence of American (and the British) left been more nefarious than in matters of foreign policy. The effects of their interventions were tragic not only in the United States and in Britain but for the world at large. Yet let us also admit that, while the left has actively participated in political and military activities that powerfully contributed to the decline of the West, the more conservative forces in the English-speaking world cannot be entirely absolved from the guilt of omission rather than commission, of inaction rather than intervention.

Here, however, we must bear in mind that, viewed from the angle of American native mythology—this has little to do with factual history!—the United States were born on the flight from Europe. A certain tradition likes to speak about the “American Experiment” (What is it? Can it be “called off” if found “inconvenient”?) and tends to see in America an island of the blessed totally removed from the rest of the world. There can be no doubt that the nascent American Republic needed a rest, needed a period of internal reconstruction and crystallization and that, thanks to two oceans, a policy of isolation was feasible and desirable. In spite of the fact that the foundations of the American Republic are whiggish and aristocratic, we nevertheless soon witness the buildup of another myth on both sides of the Atlantic: the United States as the “big democracy,” as the haven of all persecuted and the downtrodden, as the supranational, global fatherland of equality, and so forth. Nineteenth-century America had many outstanding conservative thinkers and writers—Melville, Brownson, Sumner1—but a countercurrent also existed. Walt Whitman, to quote just one instance, is a typical democratist, invoked qua homosexual as a representative of democratic camaraderie by Thomas Mann in his confession of faith in the Weimar Republic.2 In Leaves of Grass Whitman chanted:

One’s self I sing, a simple separate person

Yet after the word democratic, the word en masse.

This looks like a solidly identitarian program, yet there are passages with a more pompous and less liberal wording. Thus when Whitman says in his Democratic Vistas: “I demand races of orbic bards, with unconditional and uncompromising sway. Come forth, sweet democratic despots of the West!”3 The despots came rather from the East and they were not sweet either. The very foundation of this democratic order was largely in the hands of “literary men” (as in today’s leftism), and indeed, “The priests depart, the divine literatus comes.” (Should this be a prophecy related to Mr. James Baldwin?) Literature, according to Whitman, should be as revolutionary, as traditionless as all other cultural manifestations. “I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences,” says another passage in the same book. Here we have a totalitarian, antitraditionalist program like that of the spokesmen of Proletkult in the Soviet Union. A new race should grow up in America, the “ideal race of the future—divine average!” Almost a Nazi vision.

Reinhold Niebuhr has rightly pointed out in one of his best books that the United States were “God’s American Israel” called upon to save the world.4 It is important to recall, however, that American national Messianism had a decidedly leftist tinge which, for instance, the earliest Russian Messianism did not have. The grandfather of American Messianism is Jefferson and its character was and still is republican (i.e., antimonarchical) and democratic (i.e., antiaristocratic). American nationalist feelings seem very strong to a foreigner and, as all nationalist sentiments, they have a certain “intellectual” character. Unlike patriotism, nationalism is argumentative: The nationalist tries to prove the superiority of his nation by pointing out its unique characteristics, achievements, virtues, qualities, institutions, traditions. The patriot sees in his attachment merely a manifestation of loyalty, just as an intelligent man would never try to argue that his parents were the “best in the world”; he would consider it an accident to have been born as a citizen of a specific country—which he did not choose. He did not choose his parents either, but he will naturally love them, and if he does not love them he will be loyal to them in obedience to the Commandment—even if they are very ordinary, even if they are manifestly inferior people. American nationalism, however, has been conditioned to a large extent by the “indoctrination” of the children of immigrants.5 Naturally a German, an Italian, an American gentleman will defend his country against patently unjust accusations (loyalty demands this), but he will not try to convince us that his nation has the highest qualities in the world, has the most gifted inventors, the best writers, the finest painters, the profoundest philosophers, the fastest trains, the most beautiful women. These boasts are reserved for the drummer after a third highball in a commercial hotel, to the Nazi, the Russian Communist, etc.6

Yet in America moderate leftism and national nativist nationalism have gone well together. Witness Whitman, witness a certain aspect of Carl Sandburg’s writings, witness the poem of Emma Lazarus on the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor. This gigantic symbol of freedom greets the immigrants thus:

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips, “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse from your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
lift my lamp beside the golden door.”7

It is interesting to investigate the ideological background of the Spanish-American War of 1898, a war in which purely nationalistic motives most certainly were mixed with leftist prejudices. The enemy was one of the rotten, ramshackle, “backward,” “priest-ridden” monarchies of the Old World. Obviously there existed at that time in the United States a highly cultivated upper crust which neither participated in folkloric notions about European governments nor was affected by leftist ideas. Yet in the intellectually less ambitious minds a number of dangerous simplifications had already taken root. The United States with its institutions, habits, traditions, and customs was assumed by the masses to be at the top of a ladder of evolution. The more a foreign country was similar to the United States, the more it was considered “progressive”—and friendly. The more dissimilar it was, the more it was seen as “backward” and worthy of contempt. Simple or (sometimes quite consciously) rather odd classifications were used; such items as forms of government, freedom of the press, formality of class differences, emancipation of women, literacy percentages, the number of bathtubs and telephones, religion, church-state relationship, the legal status of denominational minorities, cleanliness of hotels, punctuality of trains, and others functioned as measuring rods. Historical elements also came into play: Britain was remembered for 1776 and Nathan Hale, France’s role in the War of Independence improved its score, Germany’s excellent record in almost all points was offset by its monarchical form of government. And so forth. In the case of Spain in 1898 the balance sheet looked perfectly hopeless. The leyenda negra, the “Black Legend”8 of English fabrication made it even worse. The yellow press of the United States represented the Spanish people as bigoted, fanatical, cruel, treacherous—and the Cubans as their high-minded, heroic, innocent victims.9

Antimonarchism became the driving element in America’s European policy during World War I and its aftermath which helped to crystallize American leftism to an even greater degree. At the so-called extreme left in the United States were the anarchists, but there was also a Socialist party (with a splinter) and a fair amount of “radicalism” without definite political ties. World War I had actually started in Europe as a war between nations but rapidly lost the character of an old-fashioned cabinet war. All participants, with the exception of Great Britain, had conscription and the press was instrumental in engendering broad waves of collective national hatreds. In St. Petersburg a “patriotic” mob even stormed the German Embassy. The lights—in the words of Sir Edward Grey—were really going out all over Europe. Especially in the West collective loathing had reached dangerous levels that marked the decay of the Old World. Dachshunds were killed in Britain, Germans greeted each other with Gott strafe England!,10 “enemy aliens” were brought behind barbed wire in Germany, England, France, and Italy (but not in Austria-Hungary or Russia).11 The Germans tried to starve out Britain, and the Western Allies tried to starve out the Central Powers. Allied propaganda represented the German armies as composed of assassins and sadists: Atrocity stories were faked in droves and were widely believed.12 A fanaticism was roused that had not been known in past ages.13 Still, by the end of 1916, when the senseless butchering almost reached its zenith, there was only one European republic in the Allied camp—France; and with Russia (and Japan) fighting in the Great Coalition, it was difficult to give to that war an ideological character. A small group of Czech nationalists wanting to break away from Austria spoke in their manifesto about a Romanov prince on a Bohemian throne. Who bore the main guilt for this senseless holocaust? Each nation was honestly convinced that the responsibility lay with the other side, but it can be said without danger of refutation that the guilt was divided—not evenly, to be sure, but in a different degree among men and groups and cliques in the various countries.14

By the end of 1916 and early 1917 a compromise peace was still possible and great efforts were made in that direction. In a diminished form hopes still existed until early 1918, when the last Austro-Hungarian peace offensive took place. Of course, Emperor Charles I was not the only person trying desperately to end the frightful butchery. The Vatican, certain German parties, the Socialists, Conservatives, English groups, and Spain were also engaged in major efforts to put an end to the almost universal suffering. By the summer of 1917 the Russian emperor had abdicated, the Kerensky government was tottering, the Italians awaited a major blow, Rumania had been defeated, a stalemate existed on the Western Front, and a partial mutiny had weakened the French army. Lord Lansdowne’s famous letter (rejected by the London Times) had been published by the Daily Telegraph. But the non-Marxist left in Britain and France, represented by Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and Ribot, was relentless. It counted on American aid. And the decision over peace or war really lay with America. As a matter of fact, never was there a greater chance for a genuine Pax Americana. If the United States had then been blessed with an outstanding President, with a great leader endowed with real vision, he could have called a peace conference and treated all those refusing to attend as prima facie partisans of the war.

Now, one might argue that the great errors committed by the German Government—Franz von Papen’s stupidities, the Zimmermann telegram, the sinkings of the Lusitania and the Sussex, and many other provocative acts so severely castigated by Count Bernstorff, last Imperial Ambassador to Washington15—had created a most difficult situation. This is quite true but one need not believe in the inevitability of America’s entry into the war. It is not too rash to assume that the election of the Republican candidate, Charles Evans Hughes, so narrowly defeated by Wilson in 1916 would probably have changed the course of events and with it the fate of the globe.16 (Obviously, one could also argue that Teddy Roosevelt’s stubbornness in 1912, when he split the Republican vote and made Wilson’s first election possible, was the beginning of the end. A reelected Taft in 1917 would have made America’s entry into World War I highly unlikely.)

Certainly 1917 is the fateful year of our century. Woodrow Wilson decided to throw the American sword on the scales without realizing that he lacked the knowledge to win the peace and the power to make it lasting. This started a catastrophic development which is by no means terminated. Actually World War I with its seemingly permanent aftermath is still with us. And the “aftermath” is due to the fact that the monumental ignorance of the left, their absolute nonunderstanding (rather than misunderstanding) of human nature, of the simplest facts of history, geography, psychology, economics, strategy, and politics, have led to one wrong decision after the other. Let us remember only two things: Twice it was a Democratic administration (comprising the greater part of the leftist forces)17 which engaged the United States in a global war, and twice it happened that two hierarchical organizations—the industry and the military—won the wars. But democratically elected or appointed politicians lost the fruits of these costly victories—costly in blood and money—at the conference tables.18 In the long run genuine achievements do not come from mere intuitions, but only through knowledge. The engineers and the captains of industry, the generals and the admirals, had learned their trade. The politicians had their jobs solely because they were popular.19

The collapse of the monarchical government in Russia, the switch to the Republic and the presidency of the relatively temperate social revolutionary Alexander Kerensky sharply changed the ideological picture of Europe. France still continued the revolutionary tradition, though in a moderate and “bourgeois” form. Britain not only had strong sentimental and cultural ties with America but also ranked as a “parliamentary democracy” in which the monarch was a mere figurehead. Japan was considered to be the torchbearer of “progress” in Asia. Italy was a monarchy more or less in name only. Though the Germans were considered industrious, clean, and musical, there existed in America the myth that “after 1848 all decent Germans went to America,” leaving the country open to arrogant, heel-clicking, monocled Junkers and that sinister autocrat, William II.20 The Austro-Hungarian monarchy hardly figured in the popular American mind, but all the more so among leftist intellectuals. They had heard the name of Metternich and agreed with Gladstone that “there is not an instance, there is not a spot upon the whole map, where you can lay your finger and say, ‘There Austria did good.’ ”21 They remembered the tirades of Margaret Fuller against Vienna. No wonder, then, that the upshot of it all, the most tangible result of World War I, was the dismemberment of Austria-Hungary. This really changed the map of Europe and incidentally provided Germany with a geopolitical position of mastery which gave Hitler an ideal start for his nonmilitary and military conquests. For Germany was bordered in the East by a power vacuum. The fall of the monarchy in Russia made Wilson extremely happy. “Here is a fit partner for a League of Honor,” was his reaction to the abdication of Nicholas II.22 Wilson was a genuine ideologue in the narrow sense of the term; his plan, unfortunately, was not to make democracy safe for the world, but rather to make the world safe for democracy. He was working towards a Djihad, a holy war to extend what he considered the American form of government. This was already evident in his dealings with Mexico before America’s entry into World War I. About America’s neighbor south of the Rio Grande he said, “Our friendship is a disinterested friendship, so far as our aggrandizement goes . . . leaving them to work out their own destiny, but watching them narrowly and insisting that they shall take help when help is needed.”23 What sort of help he thought about we can gather from a conversation between Walter Hines Page, his ambassador, and Sir Edward Grey, Britain’s Foreign Secretary. Page recorded it himself:

GREY: Suppose you have to intervene, what then?
PAGE: Make ’em vote and live by their decisions.
GREY: But suppose they will not so live?
PAGE: We’ll go in again and make ’em vote again.
GREY: And keep this up for 200 years?

PAGE: Yes. The United States will be here for 200 years and it
can continue to shoot men for that little space till they learn
to vote and rule themselves.24

This is, in a way, what happened also between the United States and Central Europe. Wilson’s prejudice against monarchy, however, was not only intellectual, it was also “folkloric” and based on the conviction that monarchs loved wars whereas nations were always peaceful. Now, revanchisme was the great popular passion of the Third French Republic until 1914, but evidence is easily ignored. (One need only remember Hegel who, upon being told that the facts contradicted his theories, severely replied: “Umso schlimmer für die Tatsachen”—all the worse for the facts.) The identification of democracy with peace was mirrored in a letter of Wilson’s Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, who wrote to Colonel House: “No people can desire a war, particularly an aggressive war. If the people can exercise their will, they will remain at peace. If a nation possesses democratic institutions, the popular will will be exercised. Consequently, if the principle of democracy prevails in a nation, it can be counted upon to preserve peace and oppose wars. . . . If this view is correct, then the effort should be made to make democracy universal.”25

Wilson’s famous message to Benedict XV, (conveyed to the Pope by Lansing), at a time when America was not yet a belligerent, breathed more or less the same spirit.26 The German people might be fine, the letter said, but its government had to go. As a result Germany and Austria were saddled after the war with regimes whose character had been dictated by the Allies—the alternative being the hunger blockade. Any historian could have told the victors that political forms imposed by the triumphant enemy never last.27 The mistake committed by the Holy Alliance in 1814-1815 was repeated by the Allies in 1918-1919 and by the Unholy Alliance in 1945.

Needless to say, Wilson suffered from the Great American Malady, the belief that people all over the world are “more alike than unlike,” in other words, that they are just inhibited, underdeveloped could-be Americans saddled with the misfortune that they spoke another language. Once in the past Wilson had been tortured by the suspicion that in other parts of the world a very alien mentality could be found. In an article written for the Atlantic Monthly in 1889 he mentioned the “restless forces of European democratic thought and anarchic turbulence” which were brought to the United States by “alarming masses” of immigrants who were “apt to tell disastrously upon our Saxon habit of government.”28 When it came to the showdown at the conference table in Paris, Lloyd George, himself a Methodist Machiavelli, said that he was wedged in between a man who thought he was Napoleon (Clemenceau) and another one who thought that he was Jesus Christ (Wilson). By that time the Southern racist had developed into a savior of mankind.

The ignorance of the former president of Princeton in matters of history and geography was simply prodigious. The Italians showed him a spurious map on which a mountain in the very heart of Austria appeared fittingly named “Vetta d’Italia”; it served as a proof that “historic Italy” (there never was such a country) extended right to that spot. As a result the Italians received the South29 and the Central Tyrol with the Brenner Pass for the first time (and for the second time in 1946, with the result that the shooting and dynamiting in this restless, tortured area is still going on to this very day). Harold Nicolson, who was at the Peace Conference, wrote about the current feeling that “if Wilson would swallow the Brenner, he would swallow everything.”30 Terrified by his own mistake, Wilson then wanted to prevent the annexation of Fiume (predominantly inhabited by Italians) by Italy, and tried somewhat undiplomatically to appeal to the Italians over the head of their government.

As in the arrangements and treaties after 1945, almost everybody was deprived of something that was legitimately his and got something else to which he really had no right. Nations were thus prevented from living again peacefully with neighbors whom they had wronged or who had wronged them.31 The era of Pan-Democracy and Peace, in fact, started an endless series of wars—cold, lukewarm, and hot. Wilson, however, was in a way as “lost” at the Peace Conference as he had been lost before in the thick fog of factual ignorance and mythological concepts. John Maynard Keynes, who as a young man had been present at the Paris Conference, gave a shattering picture of his qualities: “He not only had no proposals in detail, but he was in many respects, perhaps inevitably, ill-informed as to European conditions. And not only was he ill-informed—that was true of Mr. Lloyd George also—but his mind was slow and unadaptable. . . . There can seldom have been a statesman of the first rank more incompetent than the President in the agilities of the council chamber.”32 Of course, thanks to the “democratization” of the Western World ever since the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815) and the Congress of Berlin (1878), a tragic lowering of general standards had taken place. The representatives of the nations no longer spoke a common vernacular and the era of interpreters had started. In Paris Clemenceau “alone among the Four could speak and understand both languages, Orlando knowing only French and the Prime Minister and President only English, and it is of historic importance that Orlando and the President had no direct means of communication.”33

Woodrow Wilson’s greater guilt, nevertheless, lay in his attitude during the war, in his flat refusal to cooperate in any peace efforts and in his determination to carry the war to the bitter end, thus laying the foundations for the next one. (Human lives? The number of mercenaries is limited by cash and their natural willingness to join, but draft boards can squeeze out an almost endless number of unwilling death candidates.) World War I, surely, is a far more crucial historic event than most Americans think. Modern man is overoccupied with stems and leaves, he wilfully disregards the roots. George F. Kennan is perfectly right when he says, “All the lines of inquiry lead back to World War I.”34 Had World War I been terminated earlier, the old Germany with certain modifications would have survived. About this by now impossibility Kennan wrote in 1951, “Yet, today, if one were offered the chance of having back again the Germany of 1913, a Germany run by conservative but relatively moderate people, no Nazis and no Communists, a vigorous Germany, united and unoccupied, full of energy and confidence, able to play a part again in the balancing-off of Russian power in Europe—well, there would be objections to it from many quarters, and it wouldn’t make everybody happy; but in many ways it wouldn’t be so bad, in comparison with our problem of today. Now, think what this means. When you tally up the total score of the two wars, in terms of their ostensible objectives, you find if there has been any gain at all, it is pretty hard to discern.”35

This sort of reflection is not necessarily the outcome of two major disappointments. One ought to have been sufficient for an unprejudiced mind. Lord Newton, indeed, could write in 1929 in connection with the failure of Lansdowne’s letter in the Daily Telegraph: “If peace had been made at the end of 1917, it is clear that the Germans would have escaped their legitimate punishment. On the other hand, the failure of their criminal aggression would have been inconcealable, the Kaiser and the military caste would have been discredited and disposition to embark upon another similar enterprise would have vanished. A negotiated peace, although it might have disappointed many aspirations, would certainly have effected a more permanent European settlement than exists at the present day. Millions of lives would have been saved and the load of human misery substantially reduced. We ourselves at a moderate computation would have been spared hundreds of thousands of casualties, and more than 1,500 millions of expenditure.”36

“Objections from many quarters,” “disappointed aspirations”—these would have been exclusively on the left eager to slaughter in order to achieve its aims, the nationalistic left, the radically democratic left, the Socialist-Communist left looking for an opportunity to enact a major revolution. President Wilson’s thinking, however, was somewhat determined by his religious tradition (he was the son of a Presbyterian minister in Virginia)37 which earned him Calvinist sympathies in Europe, and predominantly, by his antimonarchical bias. Nevertheless, it is questionable whether his religious position was one of affirmation or merely of negation. His Calvinism (if it genuinely existed in a theological sense) hardly shows in his speeches or in his writings, whereas his anti-Catholic attitude was quite obvious. In this one respect he fully concurred with Lloyd George and Clemenceau. His hatred for Rome was strong enough to make him sacrifice his other shibboleths, such as self-determination. He said that “German Austria should go to Germany, as all were of one language and one race, but this would mean the establishment of a great central Roman Catholic nation which would be under the control of the Papacy.”38

In his antimonarchism, in other words, in his endeavors to foster in Europe a form of government bound to fail (as a semihierocratic, semiaristocratic Catholic monarchy would in Alabama), he was perhaps not really a scholarly professor of government, but just a “plain American.” He was convinced that the key to his success in the United States lay in the repetition of American popular notions, relating them to the rest of the world. He once said that “the best leaders are those with ordinary opinions and extraordinary abilities, those who hold the opinion of the generation in which they live, outhold it with such vitality, perceive it with such excessive insight, that they can walk at the front and show the paths by which the things generally purposed can be accomplished.”39 This is nothing but the despicable principle of that great demagogue, Ledru-Rollin: “I am their leader, so I have to follow them!”40

All this is not surprising since so few Americans were indifferent to the accusation of lacking patriotism—and unfortunately the blind belief in “democracy” (which in an altruistic nation fosters the urge for its exportation) is only too often identified (even if falsely) with patriotism. Hugo Münsterberg could rightly say about America two generations ago, “I believe sincerely that no European country knows a patriotism of such fervor and explosiveness.”41 Actually we are in this respect faced with nationalism rather than with patriotism. Patriotism is never aggressive in relation to other nations, but nationalism, which was reborn in the French Revolution, curiously enough “knows no borders.” It incites nations to force other nations to adopt their pattern of political “happiness.”

Münsterberg also pointed out the deep-seated antimonarchism of Americans. It is extremely difficult to make them see a monarchy’s advantages and virtues in specific situations since they consider it a “rotten” institution.42 (In the youth-worshipping American mind there is a far-reaching identification between “old” and “rotten.”) Another German, Ernst Bruncken, remarked that in America “every teacher of comparative government will discover what an enormous effort is required to impart a clear notion of European monarchical institutions to even quite mature students. A Napoleonic tyranny, a dictatorship—that is easily within the realm of their comprehension. But a legitimate monarchy seems to the Americans a simple absurdity, and he cannot understand how otherwise quite intelligent people can have faith in such a thing.43 For too many Americans there is a mysterious-mystical connection between the monarchical and the religious concept, bolstered by the misunderstood slogan of the ‘divine right of kings.’ ”44 Still, there are exceptions to the rule. Reinhold Niebuhr, who does not belong to the conservative camps, has written with great awareness of the intrinsic merits of constitutional monarchy, the traditional form of European monarchical government:45 “The institution of monarchy, shorn of its absolute power, was found to possess virtues which neither the proponents nor the opponents of the original form anticipated. It became the symbol of the continuing will and unity of a nation as distinguished from the momentary will, embodied in specific governments.”46

During World War I American leftism in action was probably embodied not so much by Wilson himself as by his left hand (in every sense left hand!) in foreign relations—by George Davis Herron. (His right hand was, naturally, Colonel House, though this friendship finally foundered and failed.) Herron is hardly mentioned in the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, but he is featured in one-third of a column in the Encyclopedia Americana. To assess correctly Herron’s actual importance is extremely difficult. It is quite probable that “he took himself more seriously than he was taken by Wilson.”47 And yet Herron’s part in preventing an early peace in 1917, and much more so in February-March 1918, should not be underestimated. Our interest in Herron is almost equally divided between his historic role and his significance as a person, as a typical representative of “progressive” and leftist thinking which caused such enormous harm in our century. His ideological affinity with Wilson was complete. Both belonged to the post-Protestant age48 and it was easy for Herron to persuade Wilson to establish the proposed League of Nations in Geneva,49 the city near which Herron finally made his headquarters.50 Wilson was delighted and enthusiastic about this proposition.51 Geneva was, after all, the city of Calvin and Rousseau, whom Herron in his confusion adored simultaneously. Though Calvin can hardly be imagined without Luther, Herron completely rejected the German Reformer. Herron was a “national Messianist” (of which he was fully aware) and therefore these two Genevans with their great, even if mutually contradictory influence on America attracted his mind. After the war he wrote from Geneva to William Allen White, “I labored unceasingly to make America a really messianic nation in this world crisis and to help the President in his divinely appointed stature.”52

Both Wilson and Herron were naturally more susceptible to a dislike, if not a real hatred for Austria-Hungary rather than for Germany. William James in the 1860s also sided with Prussia against Austria and in his case too there were religious motives: His was the typical attitude of the son of a Swedenborgian minister.53 Now, with America engaged in a war which Sir Denis Brogan rightly called the Second War of Austrian Succession (a third was to follow in 1939), Herron no less than Wilson was exceedingly prone to anti-Austrian feelings and to anti-Austrian propaganda. Hence we should not be surprised about Masaryk’s swift victory in his encounters with Wilson. He quickly won over the President to the idea of a radical breakup of the evil, “backward” Danubian monarchy54 and convinced him that Austria, by declaring the war against Serbia, had acted on her own and not under German pressure.55 The enthusiasm of the Czechs for their self-appointed leaders in exile was by no means great.56 Yet there can be no doubt that the American left leaped into action. “American democracy,” as Masaryk wrote, “buried the Hapsburg Monarchy and the Hapsburgs with it.”57 (But thus also helped bury hundreds of thousands of young Americans in World War II.) Masaryk worked hand in glove with Herron: They shared common quasireligious ideological prejudices and thus we had a truly “triangular” situation. We also owe it to Herron’s pressure and persuasion that Woodrow Wilson brought Congress to declare war against Austria-Hungary,58 an action not at all in the interests of the United States.59 To the American leftists, we must strongly bear in mind, Austria was far more wicked than Germany: It existed in contradiction to the Mazzinian principle of the national state, it had inherited many traditions as well as symbols from the Holy Roman Empire (doubleheaded eagle, black-gold colors, etc.), its dynasty had once ruled over Spain (another bête noire), had been leading in the Counterreformation, had headed the Holy Alliance, had fought against the Risorgimento, had suppressed the Magyar rebellion under Kossuth (who has a monument in New York), had morally supported the monarchical experiment in Mexico.60 Hapsburg—this evoked memories of “Roman Catholicism,” of the Armada, the Inquisition,61 of Metternich, of Lafayette jailed in Olmütz, and Silvio Pellico in Brünn’s Spielberg fortress. Such a state had to be broken up, such a dynasty had to disappear. So finally the House of Austria went into exile and was replaced by a simple common man from Austria, allegedly a “house painter,” who drowned the world in a flood of blood and tears.

Now, who was George Davis Herron, one of the gravediggers of old Europe? Who was this curious bearded, bespectacled poet, mentioned in some documents as “Reverend,” in others as “Professor” or more rarely as plain Mr. Herron? Romain Rolland, the great pacifist, once referred to him. The reason? Herron had written an article against Rolland in Geneva’s La Revue Mensuelle (April 1917) entitled “Pacifist Immorality.” At that time Herron was tortured by the fear of a compromise peace and spoke out in ringing words: “Darkness is rising rapidly over the skies of the nations. It is as if the soul of the human race were gripped by the crushing fear of a prehistoric night. Yes, it is Thor and Wotan who are now about to establish a reign of spiritual death. . . .” Romain Rolland replied by calling him a “virtuous hypocrite” and a “gigantic idiot.” Herron was the latter rather than the former, an eternally confused youthful enthusiast, rather than a scoundrel, steeped in deepest ignorance and drunk with words. Part of the key to his behavior and his thinking was his idealistic-romantic leftism.

He was born on January 21, 1862 in Montezuma, Indiana, the son of a humble couple of Scottish descent, William Herron and Isabella Davis. In 1879-1882 he went to Ripon College (Ripon, Wisconsin), a rather “progressive,” coeducational, nondenominational school. In 1883, only 21 years old, he married Mary Everhard.62 Herron already had decided to become a minister: It was practical humanitarianism rather than a mystical or a spiritual urge that determined his choice.

Herron became a minister when he was still a student of theology. He was made doctor of theology by Tabor College, then was ordained minister of the First Congregational Church in Lake City, Minnesota, and finally was appointed minister in Burlington, Iowa. Apparently he found no fulfillment in his pastoral work and turned to an academic career. He also embraced socialism as a secular creed. He received a professorship at Iowa (later Grinnell)63 College, where the very wealthy Mrs. Rand64 founded a chair for “Applied Christianity” which Herron kept until 1899. Theoretically he belonged to the ministry but was unfrocked when his wife (who bore him five children) sued for divorce which was granted to her on the grounds of “cruelty, culminating in desertion.” The reasons for this separation, however, seem to have been more romantic, because very soon afterward he married Carrie Rand, a girl of rather delicate health, the daughter of his kind patron. (The first Mrs. Herron received $60,000 from her former husband’s new mother-in-law, a considerable sum in those days and an interesting financial transaction.) Herron was not happy about the attitude of his Church and he tried to counter the decision of the disciplinary committee with an “Open Letter,” dated May 24, 1901, but his protest was to no avail.

The day after his suspension a secular celebration of his new marriage took place in New York’s Gotham Hotel; America’s leading Socialists (Norman Thomas among them) were invited. Poems were recited and dramatic speeches delivered. In order to get an idea of the atmosphere of this wedding a sentence from one of the addresses might suffice: “Our Comrade George D. Herron arose, careworn and sorrowful as one who had passed through the Valley of the Shadows of Death, yet stronghearted and gladsome withal, and beside him stood Carrie Rand, clad in pure vestal white and bearing lilies-of-the-valley in her hand.”65 This marriage lasted until 1914 in which year the second Mrs. Herron died, whereupon he left the more orthodox forms of socialism and pacifism, and he also married Miss Frieda B. Schoeberle.

Until World War I Herron was active in the ranks of America’s Socialist party to which many men of German descent belonged. Herron, financially independent, was a public orator and pamphleteer. One of his speeches, “From Revolution to Revolution: Lessons Drawn From the Paris Commune,” delivered at the Boston Socialist Club on March 21, 1903, was republished in St. Petersburg.66 His pacifism was coupled with socialism, and in those years Herron also developed the exceedingly florid style which stamped him as ex-preacher, a seer, a demagogue, and a hysteric. His writings abounded in hyperbolic enunciations. For example: “Capitalism is but the survival of animal in man.”67

World War I surprised Herron in Italy. In the beginning Washington tried vainly to ascertain the character of this struggle and even Wilson was still hesitant to commit himself,68 but Herron’s mind was made up quickly. The Italian Socialists were just as blind as the American Socialists. This was a Holy War of all the forces of progress, enlightenment, and tolerance against the most unholy alliance of the Vatican, “Mother of Harlots,” the Prussian Junkers, the wicked Hapsburgs and the Lutheran gun manufacturers of the Ruhr Valley!

The precise nature of Herron’s status in American and British Service, (he also “informed” the Foreign Office) especially before 1916, seems rather ambiguous. In the voluminous Herron Papers we find only two meager documents concerning his financial dealings with London and Washington and his official position. One contains an admission that he was recognized by Washington as representative of the American Socialist Mission—which certainly had no ties with the American Socialist party, whose leader Eugene V. Debs, a great idealist, was sent to penitentiary in September 1918 for his pacifist views.

The Herron Papers, kept in the Hoover Institute in Stanford, California, are a unique collection. They were given as a present to the “Hoover Library” by Herron during his lifetime in 1924, yet these papers cover only the years from 1917 to 1924, not the previous period. A few letters, papers, and pamphlets are in possession of the U.S. Department of State and of the Public Library in New York City. I have read not only the Herron Papers but nearly forty books and pamphlets either written by Herron or dealing with him.69

Wading through this mass of material one is simply terrified by the mixture of misinformation, naiveté, hubris, and goodwill which characterize the activity of this fantastic person. Wilson seems to have taken serious notice of him only as late as 1917 and their contacts remained epistolary until the Paris Peace Conference, when they finally met. There is little doubt that Wilson was deeply impressed by the information imparted to him by Herron—and perhaps also by the fulsome praise which Herron bestowed upon him.70

The books which pleased Wilson so much were Germanism and the American Crusade, Woodrow Wilson and the World’s Peace, and The Menace of the Peace71 in which Herron cried out his desperate fear that the senseless slaughter might be shortened. Some of his words—memorable for their style and content—merit recording:

As one who hopes passionately for the victory of the Allies, I would say that a complete Prussian triumph would be preferable to a compromise between the contending peoples and principles. For even under the baleful bondage of a German dominion mankind might still through high rebellion, through hard suffering awaken to its mission in the universe—to cosmic intimacy and infinite choice. But if the war end in universal evasion, if the race refuse its great hour of decision, then downward into long and impenetrable darkness we shall surely go. One can imagine such an issue as the very despair of the heart of God, vainly broken for a dastard and derelict humanity. (The Menace of the Peace, pp. 9-10.)

The President wrote to Mr. Kennerley, publisher of Woodrow Wilson and the World’s Peace, a highly congratulatory letter in which he said that he read the book with “the deepest appreciation of Mr. Herron’s singular insight into all the elements of the complicated situation and into my own motives and purposes.”72

By late 1917 Herron sat like a spider in the center of an information network with admittedly ill-defined powers of negotiating. It is certain, however, that he met a very large number of people, emissaries from Central Europe as well as from other nations. In a way this poor, ambitious man was lost in a maze: He had the greatest trouble in sizing up the character or the importance of his visitors, yet he continued to write his reports in the usual high-flown prose, issuing relentlessly one oracle and one judgment after the other.73 His great moment, however, came when he was empowered to receive Professor Heinrich Lammasch on a confidential peace mission from Vienna. Lammasch was a personal friend of the Emperor Charles, a first-rate scholar and three times president of the International Court of Arbitration in the Hague. It is easy to imagine what exaggerated prestige Herron enjoyed in Germany and Austria-Hungary where professors are demigods, and what importance one attached to getting the ear of a man whose opinion weighed so heavily in the White House. (Herron, according to his mood, claimed or disclaimed this importance.)

The meeting between Herron and Lammasch took place on February 3-4, 1918, on an estate near Berne, belonging to Dr. Muehlon, a self-exiled and embittered German industrialist. During a whole afternoon and evening Lammasch explained to Herron the plans of Emperor Charles, plans which were identical with those of his uncle, the murdered Archduke Francis Ferdinand. Lammasch described the envisaged transformation of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy into a federated political body in which, entirely in keeping with one of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, the individual nations (ethnic groups) should be “accorded the freest opportunity of autonomous development.”74 Actually, the picture painted by Lammasch was such that Herron at first saw no reason to reject the proposal and, without giving an answer, reflected over it during the night. Then he began to wrestle with this “temptation” as “Jacob wrestled with God near Yabbok.”75 In the morning he knew that he had gained a complete victory over himself: Lammasch had been only an evil tempter. No, the Hapsburg monarchy had to go because the Hapsburgs as such were an obstacle to progress, democracy, and liberty. Lammasch returned to Austria a broken man. Herron wrote a negative report for the President which he immediately transmitted to Hugh Wilson, American chargé d’affaires in Berne, and on February 11 the President made a speech which implicitly rejected the Austrian peace overtures.76

Had Austria-Hungary been taken out of the war, Germany could not possibly have fought on (as in 1943, after Italy’s defection) and hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved. But Herron was a leftist bellicist: Human lives meant nothing to him. His reaction to Lansdowne’s one-man peace offensive had also been strong in the extreme. To Mr. Bland of the Foreign Office he wrote, “It had an almost shattering effect upon me. I have been sick at heart for a week—sick unto death almost. . . . I have never been as fearful of an ultimate peace and a lost world as I am now. And behind my fears are portentous forces—not merely echoes like Lansdowne, but the occultism of the international financiers in alliance with the Vatican.”77 Curiously enough, Herron liked Lammasch personally and gave him (to Lammasch’s immense surprise) two of his own books against peace.78 Herron’s schizophrenia knew no limits. Later, at the Peace Conference at St. German-en-Laye, when Lammasch was treated as a criminal, Herron’s indignation was overpowering.79 After all, he was the man who had “really believed that we would come out of this war into something like an approach to the kingdom of Heaven.”80 Nothing came of it (as after World War II, when similar hopes were voiced) and Herron’s ire now turned mainly against the French in wild invectives81 paralleling Wilson’s outcry: “I should like to see Germany clean up France, and I should like to see Jusserand [the French Ambassador] and tell him so to his face.”82

Herron’s remark about the “occultism of the international financiers” had, as the sensitive reader might perhaps surmise, an anti-Jewish bias. Socialism and the Jewish mind in its more sophisticated form do not easily get together. The Jewish outlook is rather individualistic and only in specific sociological situations and under great exogenous pressures will Jews join wholeheartedly the Socialist (or Communist) camp.83 It was therefore quite natural for Herron with his Socialist background to have anti-Semitic leanings and in his Papers the anti-Jewish references (usually in an anticapitalist spirit) abound.84 Frequently these assume the character of the vague and wild accusations we heard from National Socialists.85 Typical for his mind are baseless remarks such as these: “Béla Khun [sic] was the most flagrant agent of French Jew financiers and was put there by them.”86

Herron’s revulsion and disgust for the actual peace treaties, however, were certainly sincere and not a result of his split personality. The disappointment may not have come immediately but evolved within a year or so. Mr. Wilson’s failure to rally the country in favor of the League of Nations undoubtedly had much to do with it. Herron’s Umsturz und Aufbau was published in German in 1920,87 since such a violent diatribe against the Paris Treaties could not have been brought out in the United States or in England. His book, The Greater War (New York, 1919), still shows him worried about the danger of a “Prussian Germanization of Europe from Calais to the Gates of India,”88 but his German pamphlet, dedicated to the youth of Europe, proves that at times he was not devoid of prophetic gifts. He foretold an “age of murder and slaughter, if not a century of Tartar tortures,” of the “worst wars the world has ever seen.” Hitler could not have been more extreme in the denunciation of the Versailles Treaty whose “paragraphs abounding in ferocity, lust of conquest, contempt for the law, and lack of honor are as cruel, as shameless, as senseless, as vulgar. . . .”89 And sorrowfully he admitted that it was “Wilson’s word [the Fourteen Points] which had undermined the German Reich and prepared the victory which Foch, finally, reaped with the sword.”90 In this analysis he pronounced the same judgment as a certain Captain Charles de Gaulle who spent several years as a prisoner of war in Germany and described in his first book, La discorde chez l’ennemi,91 in ringing words Germany’s demoralization through enemy propaganda. There can be no doubt that the Germans and Austrians firmly believed in the sincerity and official character of the Fourteen Points. If the Germans had not accepted the Fourteen Points at their face value, they probably would have fought on;92 Max Weber had faith in Wilson but advised continuation of the war in the fall of 1918 because he thought that otherwise the wild chauvinists among the Allies would sidetrack the President.93 And this is precisely what happened.

Herron returned to Italy after the war but visited Germany a few times. He died in Munich on October 7, 1925, on the way back to Florence. He had become disgusted with the European Socialists, not only because they had tried to make an “early peace,” but also because they—men such as Ramsey MacDonald and Henderson—were spending up to $25 a day in exclusive hotels. About events in Russia Herron was less sure. He wrote to Norman Thomas in 1920 that the “bolsheviks” were bad, but that the “future civilization of Europe is coming out of Russia and it will be at least an approach to the Kingdom of Heaven when it comes.”94 The old leftist Utopia of the Kingdom of Heaven just around the corner! To another Socialist he wrote late in 1919, “I am inclined to think that the Soviet system will ultimately prevail. But you are making a very great confusion between bolshevism and the Soviet system. . . . The Soviet system does not differ economically from the Old England town meeting, or politically from the early Christian communities.”95 We have here a foretaste to the “translation” of Mao’s murderous minions into peaceful “agrarian reformers.”

Slowly Herron began to see that the Italian Communists were ruining Italy economically and politically. His hopes now turned to the use of force against force. His Socialist friend, Roberto Michels,96 had embraced fascism which, after all, had started as a deviation in the Socialist camp. In a book about Italy, published in 1922, Herron already expressed highest praise for the Fascists,97 and, after Mussolini had taken over, his enthusiasm, as his correspondence shows, became almost limitless.98 After all, there was nothing extraordinary about his evolution. It had been duplicated in many other cases—from socialism and communism to fascism and National Socialism—and back again.