'The Great Demobilization' (Part 1)
Prof. Frederic Paxson's remarkable 1938 address to the American Historical Association deserves to be better known, if only for highlighting several heresies today's professors are loath to note
I’ve long wanted to refer you to Frederic L. Paxson’s 1938 speech, which contains quite a few gems (as in: food for thought). Since this is a long address, here’s the briefest of introductions to Prof. Paxson (Wikipedia):
Frederic Logan Paxson (February 23, 1877 in Philadelphia – October 24, 1948 in Berkeley, California) was an American historian. He also served as the President of Mississippi Valley Historical Association. He had undergraduate and PhD degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, as well as a master’s from Harvard University. He taught at Wisconsin (1910 to 1932) as a successor to Frederick Jackson Turner and the University of California-Berkeley from 1932 to 1947.
As a historian, he had an authority on the American frontier. His 1925 Pulitzer Prize was for History of the American Frontier, 1763–1893.[1]
The below text is abbreviated; you can find the full version—which I highly recommend to anyone—over at the website of the American Historical Association or printed in the American Historical Review, vol. 44, no. 2 (1939): pp. 237-51.
For reasons of readability, I have broken the speech in a few pieces.
Emphases and [snark] mine.
The Great Demobilization
Twenty years ago this week the American Historical Association broke the continuity of its annual reunions. It had met in Philadelphia in 1917 and had there adjourned in the expectation of reassembling in 1918 in Minneapolis. It had, however, left discretion with the Council to select a more convenient place or to postpone the meeting. The program for 1918 was fashioned in the usual manner. William Roscoe Thayer fortified himself for the occasion with a presidential address. But in the autumn of 1918 the United States was at war. The minds of our members were in no mood for detached historical retrospect and needed Cheyney’s warning, given at Philadelphia, not to write in 1917 or 1918 what might be regretted in 1927 or 1928. The tentative program for Minneapolis, salvaged in the Annual Report, shows how thoroughly we were involved in mere historical engineering, explaining the issues of the war that we might the better win it [in case you harboured any illusions about earlier protagonists from among expert-dom]. The Council shifted the place of meeting to Cleveland, as involving a shorter haul, and then called the meeting off.
The railroads of the nation, upon which our members would have had to travel to Cleveland, were heavy-laden with freight for France, with the nearly fifty pounds per man per day required to keep the army in the field [that amount has surely increased since]. That unavoidable daily quota of fifty thousand tons for two million men kept the tracks crowded, whether there were bottoms waiting at the ports or not. The arrival of the “flu” [sic] had developed an additional good reason for avoiding nonessential gatherings. To give up our meeting was a small sacrifice to the doctrine of “work or fight”.
So far as war congestion was concerned, it turned out that the Association might have been allowed to meet. So far as issue was concerned, the issue seemed settled, and the Association might have met in triumph. The National Board for Historical Service had lost its job and might as well disband. Germany was stopped. An unaccustomed unity pervaded the United States. The last ex-President was on the stump in support of the program of the President in office. The American Historical Association would have provided a proper congregation to listen to a celebration of the triumph of a body of doctrine whose phrasing had been in the American vernacular, and whose ideology was an offshoot of American historical experience. Self-determination, under a different name, had given birth to the United States and was now about to give birth to a better world. Within the United States this self-determination–Jefferson’s “consent of the governed”—had contributed more to the development of the component parts than had been the case in any other empire. The right of peaceful nations to be allowed to refrain from wars not of their own choice had been cast into English sentences under our first President. The capacity of peaceful nations, driven into war, to change the outcome of the war had just been revealed to the world. The possibility of writing superlaw binding upon governmental entities had been turned into reality as the American states adjusted their lives within a Constitution admitted to be “the supreme law of the land”.
But the program which had been prepared for 1918 would not have fitted the occasion had the Association met, and the program of rejoicing which would have seemed to fit the moment was never drafted. It is, however, possible to reconstruct something of the spirit which the latter would have expressed, for the air was full of oratory. The enemy, before our normal week of meeting, had yielded in the field, its government had yielded up its life, its emperor had become an exile. A glad world faced the holiday, with even the enemy peoples welcoming the peace. There was rejoicing at the thought of the new world order, outlined already in principle and needing only to be implemented to prevent more wars. And at Christmas-tide, when this Association might have shared in the rejoicing, the President of the United States, bearing the gospel of triumphant peace, was spreading his message over Western Europe. The world, without knowing it, was on one of those unhappy peaks whence, if I may mix a metaphor, mirages may be seen. It was dazzled by a mirage because it hoped; it had not yet reminded itself that, lacking wings, the only course away from any peak runs down.
There was no presidential address for us that year. But Woodrow Wilson, who was a little later to miss his chance to speak to us as president, was delivering its equivalent as he toured the capitals. “Inarticulate America”, as Dodd has said–forgetting how articulate our people were–had bidden him God-speed upon his mission. Inarticulate Europe, “peasantry, shop-keepers, and day laborers looked forward to his arrival in Europe as man looked in medieval times to the second coming of Christ”. Bernard Shaw, skeptic by advertisement, took from Hearst a commission to describe the President as a Messiah; and the Hearst papers printed the tribute.
In the very week of our abandoned meeting Woodrow Wilson slept in Buckingham Palace, spoke at the Guildhall and in Manchester, and sounded the language of a war well won. He felt the “pulse of sympathy” wherever he appeared; sensed a passion no longer for any balance of interests but in “common devotion to the right”; and told the lord mayor of London, as well as all the world in whatever tongue it knew, that no such “sudden and potent union of purpose has ever been witnessed … the ground is clear and the foundations laid … we have already accepted the same body of principles”.
It will be one of the enduring tasks of the younger members of our fraternity to explain the paradox of that strange winter, now twenty years gone by, when the Allied world thought the war was won, and when the chief soldier of the Allies himself said it was won sufficiently and stopped the slaughter. Strange it was too, when the President of the United States, forgetful of his years spent in teaching the principles of congressional government, conceived that he was still the authentic spokesman of his country and when Theodore Roosevelt, near to his deathbed, bitterly blurted out the truth as he declaimed that in any other civilized country in the world Woodrow Wilson would be out of office.
If we had held our meeting, with a program so readjusted as to sound the note of victory which was In our hearts and had taken from the President of the United States our cue that as a consequence of the victory the world was on the threshold of a happier era, we should have proved to be as completely out of step with reality as Woodrow Wilson was when he sailed for Europe. Even the partisan critics of the President failed to see the fact; even those who shouted for an American free hand forever failed to see it. Neither league to enforce peace nor league of Allied nations to keep Germany suppressed was to prevail. Instead of Paradise, the world–and the United States, which is my concern at the moment–had already entered upon a clouded period to which no word implying an outcome can yet be properly applied.
We have confused our thinking for two generations by using the word “reconstruction” in connection with the years of readjustment following the Civil War. For reconstruction, if the word is to mean anything, carries a promise of some rebuilding of an old structure without razing it to the ground. The more we have imagined that the antebellum United States was rebuilt, the more we have deceived ourselves. We are as yet spared this particular form of self-deception in connection with the decades following 1918. No word has yet been coined to mislead the innocent. The aptest word as yet is colorless, making no promise: demobilization. Demobilization it was and is; a demobilization all the greater because the war effort had carried the world far off any normal course; demobilization so thoroughgoing as perhaps to deserve the adjective of great. My theme for the short time allowed me by our corporate habit is this Great Demobilization, as the historian of the United States will one day have to face it.
Bottom Lines (Part 1)
As much as I hate to interrupt the flow, I feel it is important to share a few more nuggets of insight here:
Whatever ‘the Great War’ was, it was a massive conflict whose origins are perhaps even more shrouded in myth today than they were a century ago.
When the guns finally fell silent in November 1918, the belligerents were horrified, and the leaders of all countries—victors and vanquished alike—quickly published massive tomes of diplomatic and other previously secret gov’t papers to prove their respective innocence as regards the origins of the bloodshed. Flanked, as they were, by equally numerous memoirs and autobiographies by the ‘Great Men’ who directed the fate of nations during the war, this flurry of publications stands in marked contrast to the aftermath (sic) of the Second World War; yes, there are also such works, but the latter conflict is different as the culprit was quite easily identifiable.
Another strange issue is that the First World War’s lingering question—really: an act of self-absolution on part of the victors—of the ‘war guilt’ was enshrined in the Versailles Treaty’s infamous Art. 231:
The Allied and Associated Governments affirm and Germany accepts the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies.
Setting aside the emotionally-laden, as well as the historical baggage, of that particular clause, here’s another question we shall rather ponder: the strange-ness of the First World War derives from something else—why is it that this conflict, unlike any other war in the annals of mankind’s history, begins with declarations of war yet is commonly held to end on Armistice Day (11 Nov.)?
All wars that had transpired before that particular conflict are recorded by the historical profession with both their inception and (formal) conclusion, i.e., the peace treaty.
The First World War, by contrast, marks a clear break with that time-honoured practice; every conflict that came thereafter, by the way, is similarly a tad off these historical precedents: either there is no declaration of war (which is, strictly speaking, a legally defined, if not circumscribed, state of affairs between nations) and/or there is no peace treaty that formally puts an end to the former state.
Prime examples include, of course, the Korean War (sic), the conflict in/over Vietnam, the so-called Gulf War (pick any of them), the entire ‘Cold War’, and, of course, the ‘War on Global Terrorism’, to cite but a few instances.
Needless to say, we should briefly mention the Second World War, which either began with Germany’s attack on Poland (1 Sept. 1939) and/or the French and British declarations of war vs. Germany (3 Sept. 1939). Berlin, incidentally, declared war on both the Soviet Union (22 June 1941) and the United States in the aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
Yet, at this point, we must note that a de facto state of war between esp. Germany and the US had already existed well before that point, and that the latter’s escalatory steps towards armed engagement had begun well before the Japanese planes roared towards Hawai’i (via Wikipedia):
By 1941, the United States was taking an increasing part in the war, despite its nominal neutrality. In April 1941 President Roosevelt extended the Pan-American Security Zone east almost as far as Iceland. British forces occupied Iceland when Denmark fell to the Germans in 1940; the US was persuaded to provide forces to relieve British troops on the island. American warships began escorting Allied convoys in the western Atlantic as far as Iceland, and had several hostile encounters with U-boats.
We shall not (yet) get into these weeds (concerning the Second World War), and the reason I’m bringing up these things is this:
The First World War ended at the earliest in summer 1919 with the Treaties of Versailles (Germany) and Saint-Germain (Austria); it was followed by the Treaty of Neuilly (Bulgaria, Nov. 1919). The Treaty of and Trianon (Hungary) was signed ‘only’ in 1920, as was the Treaty of Sèvres between the Allies and the Ottoman Empire (which was revised substantially in the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923).
If the First World War’s fighting took a bit over four years (July 1914 through 11 Nov. 1918), it took (even) longer to formally conclude the conflict.
Yet, all textbooks, professors, and experts (sic) drone on over the war being over in November 1918.
So, when we turn to the second instalment of Prof. Paxson’s 1938 speech talking about the consequences in (for) the United States, keep this in mind.
And consider the fact that while there’s plenty of fighting that went (goes) on ever since the First World War, declarations of war may still be issued here and there—the last formal such instrument was the US declaration of war vs. Japan after the attack on Pearl Harbor—there are no more peace treaties. Yes, conflicts eventually wind down, including the Second World War, but there were no dedicated peace conferences like the one in Paris 1919-20.
Join me tomorrow for the highly pertinent consequences of this strange and momentous series of events that ended the Great War.