31 - The war to end war--footnote to a lie
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How Capitalists Rule/31
The Republocrats Series
Part 31:
THE WAR TO END WAR--FOOTNOTE TO A LIE
By Vince Copeland
Every big war of aggrandizement and oppression must be justified on both sides in order to make the masses fight for the cause of their oppressors. This does not apply, of course, to oppressed countries drawn into a war with a view to colonizing them or robbing them directly of their wealth and produce. But in a war between oppressing countries, each of the warring parties tries to occupy the moral high ground of being the innocent victim of a murderous attack by the other. So it was in the First World War.
The causes for such war lie deep in the economic and political relations between the rulers of the belligerent countries.
AN EMPIRE TO DEFEND
The four-month war with Spain in 1898 had ended with the U.S. acquiring an empire (in some areas, a potential empire) in the Atlantic, South Atlantic and Western Pacific. In the First World War this empire had to be defended from a newly rising Germany, and in the Second World War from a dynamic new Japan.
It was theoretically possible that the U.S. could stay out of World War I and simply pick up the pieces of the old empires if the war ended in a stalemate, as appeared likely at first. But Germany proved much stronger militarily than old England, while the Czarist empire (fighting on the English side) literally fell apart in the middle of the war.
So Woodrow Wilson, while talking like a pacifist, kept maneuvering the country toward war. His maneuvers were mostly based on the concept of "freedom of the seas."
By this he meant that the U.S. should have the right to use the seas to send arms to England, England should have the right to blockade Germany, but Germany should not have the right to interfere with this process, particularly not by submarine warfare--at that time the newest and considered the most horrendous face of war.
Germany took big ads in the New York newspapers exposing this false "neutrality" and explaining Wilson's illogic, if not hypocrisy, but with little effect.
Wall Street's aid to England and France not only exposed Wilson's real position; it was also a material drive that itself pushed the U.S. toward war.
The war had broken out in Europe in August 1914. The media, although not as monopolized by the biggest money powers as today, nevertheless was basically pro-war and on the side of the British and French. It had a field day with the German invasion of "poor little Belgium," although it completely ignored Belgian crimes in the Congo that had been going on for a generation.
HUMANS AGAINST MACHINE GUNS
The struggle in Europe was so bitter and intense that the whole British army was cut down to half its original size in the first three months. The battles of the Marne, the Somme and Verdun eliminated hundreds of thousands of soldiers from combat.
In this war of "position," featuring long trenches and sudden charges, usually of humans against machine guns, the territory won and lost at times was confined to a half-dozen square miles.
Readers of "Hamlet" will remember a scene in which the prince, stopping on a north European promontory on his way to England, sees Norwegian soldiers invading Poland to take a similar small area. He says: "... I see the imminent death of twenty thousand men, that ... go to their graves like beds in a fight for a plot wherein the numbers cannot try the cause, which is not tomb enough and continent to hide the slain." ("Hamlet," Act IV, Scene 4)
In World War I, of course, they were fighting for much more than a plot of land. They were fighting for a redivision of the world among the great colonial powers. But this was concealed from the fighters themselves, who always have to be inspired with the highest sort of idealism to sacrifice their young lives in the mutual, mad destruction of modern war.
FALLING INTO LINE
Even though the opposition to war was still very strong in 1916 and 1917, Wilson seized on every incident to maneuver the country into the conflict. And when he got Congress to declare war on Germany in April 1917, brushing aside all moves for a referendum or popular vote, he said it was a "war for democracy" and a "war to end war."
The spigots of war propaganda were turned on full blast. There was no TV in those days, but the newspapers, magazines, churches and educational institutions, including the Boy Scouts and the public schools, all fell into line. Young women were instructed to pin white feathers denoting cowardice on the lapels of any men of enlistment age they saw in civilian clothes.
DEBS' PLEA TO WORKER-SOLDIERS
But a large number of individuals, especially those in the Socialist Party (there was no Communist Party yet), refused to be cowed. Rose Pastor Stokes and Eugene Victor Debs were among hundreds of Socialists sent to jail for opposing the war. Debs made a public speech in Canton, Ohio, during the war explaining what it was really all about.
"It is one thing, ye uniformed slaves," said he, "to fight for your country and another thing to fight for Rockefeller's oil demands.
"You never had a country to fight for and never will have so much as an inch of one so long as you are fool enough to make a target of your bodies for the profit and glory of your masters.
"Let the capitalists do their own fighting and furnish their corpses and there never will be another war on the face of the earth."(Ray Ginger, "Eugene V. Debs," p. 346)
While Debs was stumping the country talking to anti-war, working-class audiences, the U.S. was making large sales of arms to Britain and France. There was a question of how they would be financed. The Morgan banks formed a coalition of dozens of big banks and even more small ones throughout the country to make a $500-million loan to the British government. This money--and more!--was used exclusively to buy war materiel from the United States. Even more exclusively, the purchases were from corporations dominated, owned by or allied to the Morgans and Morgan-related interests.
Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan had advised the Morgans not to make this huge loan, on the basis that it would surely bring the U.S. closer to war. But Wilson overruled his secretary.
The Rockefeller-connected banker Frank A. Vanderlip wrote in his autobiography, "In the Morgan establishment, for a long time [during the war and immediately afterward] there was an almost godlike knowledge of what the future held in store for those industrial corporations that were in a position to make goods needed overseas." (Frank A. Vanderlip, "From Farm Boy to Financier," p. 248)
THE MORGAN LOANS
The godlike Morgans, however, like the demigod Achilles, had a heel. They were mortally restricted by England's ability to pay back this loan. And the potential English loan payers were even more mortally restricted by the mortality rate of a war that was going against them. If England should lose the war, the godlike Morgans would lose their money and the "industrial corporations" concerned would lose their profits--and their shirts, besides. There would be depression, panic and general financial breakdown (which happened in Germany after it lost the war).
And not incidentally, in the minds of the leading politicians, the Democratic Party would be blamed for it all.
Eugene Debs did not know about it, but he would not have been surprised to read the following cablegram that Walter Hines Page, the U.S. Ambassador to England, had sent from London to Wilson just before the U.S. president called upon Congress to declare war.
The wire, dated March 5, 1917, read:
"France and England must have a large enough credit in the United States to prevent the collapse of world trade and of the whole of European finance. If we should go to war with Germany the greatest help we could give the allies would be such a credit.... Trade would be continued and enlarged until the war ends, and after the war, Europe would continue to buy food and would buy from us also an enormous supply of things with which to re-equip her peace industries. We should thus reap the profit of an uninterrupted, perhaps an enlarging trade, over a number of years.... Perhaps our going to war is the only way in which our present prominent trade position can be maintained and a panic averted."
Thousands of U.S. corpses and mutilated bodies later, this cablegram was still kept from public eyes. It was only made public on Oct. 14, 1934, by the thoroughly capitalist but anti-Morgan Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, which ran it first in the New York World Telegram. Later, in 1936 in the middle of the New Deal period, Page's message was re-examined by a U.S. Senate investigating committee--known as the Nye committee--which brought out a number of other startling details illustrating the cynicism of the warmakers.
ONE PAYS, THE OTHER IS PAID
Eugene Debs paid for his "free speech" against the war with a 10-year sentence in federal prison. Walter Hines Page was paid for his cablegram in the following way:
Page had been close to the Rockefellers as publisher of a newspaper in Garden City, N.Y. It was with their help (and agreement from the Morgans) that he became ambassador to Britain. But not being an especially rich man, he complained to Wilson that the ambassador's salary was not enough to entertain the notables of London on the lavish scale necessary for his position.
The very wealthy Cleveland Dodge, backer of Wilson and semi-partner of Morgan, came through with $25,000 a year out of his own pocket. This seems to have put Page firmly in the Morgan "family," both figuratively and literally. (By the 1980s, the chairman of J.P. Morgan & Co. was no less than a direct descendant of our entertaining ambassador of the First World War years. He, too, was named Walter Hines Page.)
LAFOLLETTE'S TEARS
The opposition within Congress still asserted itself on the day that Wilson asked for a declaration of war. Six senators joined Sen. Robert M. LaFollette and a larger number of representatives in a vote against the war.
LaFollette had been a leading figure in the Progressive Party formed in 1912. He made an eloquent speech pointing out the inequalities inherent in the war--the horrors of the front for the poor and the superprofits of the rear for the rich. LaFollette had proved himself a man of courage on several occasions. But such was the pressure of the war psychosis and the power of the war propaganda by this time that he was weeping over his speech by the time he finished it. Nearly all the members of the "dear old rotten Senate," as he later termed it, walked out on him one by one.
The allegedly liberal Wilson never forgave anybody for opposing his war policy or questioning the supposed democratic character of the war. As late as Feb. 1, 1921, nearly at the end of his term and more than two years after the war, he once again refused to pardon Debs. Yet he had pardoned a German spy and also had admitted in effect that the war was neither a war to end war nor a war for democracy.
Less than a year after the war, in a speech at the St. Louis Coliseum on Sept. 5, 1919, while advocating a League of Nations, Wilson had declaimed quite clearly on what the war had really been all about.
If we do not establish this organization of nations, he said, "then the reaction will change the whole heart and attitude of the world toward this great, free, justice-loving people [i.e., the U.S.], and after you have changed the attitude of the world, what have you produced? Peace? Why, my fellow citizens, is there any man here or any woman, let me say, is there any child, who does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry? ...
"This war was an industrial and commercial war. ... Under the League plan, the financial leadership will be ours, the industrial supremacy will be ours, the commercial advantage will be ours, and the other countries of the world will look to us, and shall I say, are looking to us for leadership and direction."
Thus Wilson fully understood that not only was war the continuation of politics by other means, but peace should be the continuation of the war--by economic and political means. Yet, to this day, Wilson stands in the Pantheon of misunderstood statesmen because he tried to prevent the next world war by muzzling Europe with a weaker version of the United Nations. To this day, he is mistakenly regarded as the man who was "too proud to fight" and "neutral in thought and deed."
As for Debs, he had to wait until the Republican Warren Harding became president before he could get a pardon for having said the same things as Wilson, but from the working class point of view.
Harding, whose administration became soaked in oil and corruption, was human enough and responsive enough to the feelings of the masses in his postwar "back to normalcy" campaign that he did pardon Debs as one of his first official acts. Debs, of course, was loved by the masses, including many millions who had not voted for him. When Harding pardoned him, the great defense attorney Clarence Darrow was moved to say something good about Harding (which was not easy!).
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(Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted if source is cited. For more info contact Workers World, 46 W. 21 St., New York, NY 10010; via e-mail: ww%nyxfer@igc.apc.org or workers@mcimail.com.)
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