Abstract
Soon after the November 1918 armistice, U.S. politicians, writers, historians, soldiers, and others began debating the question of how the nation should end the Great War by reconciling with the former enemy. The negotiations that took place between the cease-fire and the 1921 Treaty of Berlin that ended the conflict between the United States and Germany marked the first time in history that American officials helped orchestrate treaties among several of the world’s major powers. Historians’ accounts and interpretations of these events are as complicated as the proceedings themselves. A noted scholar of German-American relations, Lloyd E. Ambrosius, has traced the historiography of President Woodrow Wilson’s ideas and policies relating to postwar reconciliation. As the first U.S. President to engage in a post—world war settlement, Wilson shaped foreign relations for the remainder of the century, and even the events following the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings of September 11, 2001.1 Ambrosius argued that while historians have primarily viewed Wilson’s legacies of collective security, multilateralism, and the infusion of morality into international policymaking as the globalization of American political ideology and as a crowning achievement of the presumed American mission in the world, he and a select few have proved less than enthusiastic about Wilson’s bequests.2
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Notes
Lloyd E. Ambrosius, “Wilson, Alliances, and the League of Nations,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 5 no. 2 (April 2006): 139–66, 160–61.
Lloyd E. Ambrosius, Wilsonian Statecraft: Theory and Practice of Liberal Internationalism During World War I (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 1991); Lloyd E. Ambrosius, Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition: The Treaty Fight in Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Lloyd E. Ambrosius, Wilsonianism: Woodrow Wilson and His Legacy in American Foreign Relations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); G. John Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Walter A. McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).
Elizabeth McKillen, “The Unending Debate over Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations Fight,” Diplomatic History 27, no. 5 (November 2003) 711–14; Ambrosius, “Wilson, Alliances, and the League of Nations,” 159–60; Glenda Sluga, The Nation, Psychology, and International Politics, 1870–1919 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 19; Marc Gallicchio, The African American Encounter with Japan and China: Black Internationalism in Asia, 1895–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 23–24.
Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, Changing Differences: Women and the Shaping of American Foreign Policy, 1917–1994 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 26–27.
Lloyd E. Ambrosius, “Wilson, the Republicans, and French Security,” Journal of American History 59, no. 2 (September 1972): 351; Ambrosius, Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition, 47.
Annika Mombauer, The Origins of the First World War: Controversies and Consensus (London: Longman, 2002), 4–5, notes that the alliance system threatened to escalate any potential conflicts that might arise among the European powers.
Deborah Cohen, “Will to Work: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany after the First World War,” in Disabled Veterans in History, ed. David A. Gerber (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 295.
Michael J. Hogan and Thomas G. Patterson, “Introduction,” in Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, 2nd ed., ed. Hogan and Thomas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 2.
Jill Stearns, Gender and International Relations: An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 2.
John Milton Cooper, Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Jennifer D. Keene, Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 179–204, and Alfred E. Cornebise, The Amaroc News: The Daily Newspaper of the American Forces in Germany, 1919–1923 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981), 76–81, both discuss postwar political activism among veterans.
Sheldon Hackney, “Initial Shock: A Conversation with Paul Fussell,” Humanities 17, no. 5 (November/December 1996), 6; Eugen Weber, The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 12–13.
Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 3–35.
Quoted in Martha Hanna, Your Death Would be Mine: Paul and Marie Pireaud in the Great War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 78.
Edmund Blunden, The Mind’s Eye: Essays (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1934; repr. 1967), 38; Fussell, Great War and Modern Memory, 317, notes French historian Marc Ferro’s contention that the U.S. could be considered the war’s only winner.
Gail Bederman, “’The Women Have Had Charge of the Church’s Work Long Enough’: The Men and Religion Forward Movement of 1911–1912,” American Quarterly 41, no. 3 (September 1989): 432–40.
Woodrow Wilson, “Address to the U.S. Senate, January 22, 1917,” in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Arthur S. Link (Princeton. NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966–1993), 40:533–39.
David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (1980; New York, 2004), 179–84, explores the medieval theme in these works and other wartime American literature; Fussell, Great War and Modern Memory, 21–23, examines the same themes in English literature.
Martin E. Marty, Modern American Religion, Volume 1: The Irony of it All, 1893–1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 301.
Woodrow Wilson, “An Address to a Joint Session of Congress,” April 2, 1917, The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 41, 527; for an analysis of the Congressional debate over intervention see Erika Kuhlman, Petticoats and White Feathers: Gender Conformity, Race, the Progressive Peace Movement, and the Debate Over War, 1895–1919 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1997), 73–100.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 36, 144.
Edward J. Blum, Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865–1898 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 4.
Rolf Lundén, “The Protestant Churches and the Business Spirit of the Twenties,” European Contributions to American Studies, 10 (1986): 47, argues that the 1920s were among the most secularized and business oriented in U.S. history.
Sidney Mead, “American Protestantism: From Denominationalism to Americanism,” in Essays on the Age of Enterprise, 1870–1900, ed. David Brody (Hinsdale, IL: Dryden, 1974), 315.
Ann Braude, “Women’s History is American Religious History,” in Religion and American Culture: A Reader, 2nd ed., ed. David G. Hackett (New York: Routledge, 2003), 163.
Michael Kimmel, “Men’s Responses to Feminism,” Gender & Society 1 (September 1987): 269, claimed that at the turn of the twentieth century some men responded to feminism by seeking to dislodge women from the “private” sphere; Bederman, “‘The Women Have Had Charge of the Church’s Work Long Enough,’” 432–40.
Vanessa B. Beasley, “Engendering Democratic Change: How Three U.S. Presidents Discussed Female Suffrage,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 5 no. 1 (2002): 85.
Ibid., 88.
Woodrow Wilson, “Sixth Annual Message,” in The State of the Union Messages of the Presidents (New York: Chelsea House, 1967), 3:2590.
Emily Greene Balch, Approaches to the Great Settlement (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1918), 129.
George Harvey, “Beware the Peace Drive!” North American Review 208 (October 1918): 494.
James R. McGovern, “David Graham Phillips and the Virility Impulse of the Progressives,” New England Quarterly 39 (1966) 334–55.
Quoted in Donald Day, Woodrow Wilson’s Own Story (Boston: Little, Brown, 1952), 289; Schwabe, Woodrow Wilson, 51.
Vernon Kellogg, “Unclean, Unclean,” North American Review 208 (October 1918): 536–39.
C. A. Bronstrup, “When Willie Comes Marching Home,” Current History 9 (October 1918): 188 (reprinted from San Francisco Chronicle).
Raffael Scheck, “Women Against Versailles: Maternalism and Nationalism of Female Bourgeois Politicians in the Early Weimar Republic,” German Studies Review 22, no. 1 (February 1999): 24.
Kenneth Stephen Zagacki, “Rhetoric, Redemption, and Reconciliation: A Study of Twentieth-Century Postwar Rhetoric,” (PhD diss., University of Texas-Austin, 1986), 75–77.
Woodrow Wilson, “For the League of Nations,” in American Public Addresses, 1740–1952, ed. A. Craig Baird (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1956), 239.
Woodrow Wilson, “Address to a Joint Session of Congress,” April 2, 1917, The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 41:523–26.
Allan M. Winkler, “The Selling of the War,” Reviews in American History 8, no. 3 (1980): 382–85.
Albert Bushnell Hart, “Can Germany Be Regenerated?: The Coming Struggle Between the Thinking Majority and the Organized Minority,” Forum 61 (January 1919): 4 (emphasis added).
Louis Graves, “Leaves from a Coblenz Diary: Fragments from the Notebook of Heinrich Scheinstutzen, Apothecary,” Atlantic Monthly 124 (July–August 1919): 83.
Woodrow Wilson, “Address to a Joint Session of Congress,” November 11, 1918, The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 41:40.
Gerald Stanley Lee, “Bloodthirsty Angels: An Inquiry into How Americans Can Get On with Germans,” Saturday Evening Post 191 (January 4, 1919) 3.
Ibid., 4 (emphasis added).
William J. Moroney to Senator Philander Knox, April 5, 1921, Records of the Department of State Relating to Political Relations Between the United States and Germany, 1910–1929, 711.62119/P81, Reel #2, M355, RG059, National Archives and Records Administration (hereafter NARA), College Park, Maryland (emphasis added).
Heinrich Charles to Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, August 19, 1921, Records of the Department of State Relating to Political Relations Between the United States and Germany, 1910–1929, 711.62119P81/20, Reel #2, M355, NARA; Unfortunately, to date no such concurrence had developed. Scholarship determining the guilty party in instigating the Great War fills vast shelf space in libraries; the best summary of historiography is Annika Mombauer’s Origins of the First World War, in which the author argues that Germany’s imperialistic aims are indeed primarily to blame for the war and that the nation’s historians and educators worked to obscure its guilt in the interwar years.
Kemper Fullerton, “To the Editor,” Nation 13 (September 7, 1921): 266.
Oswald Garrison Villard, “Germany, 1922: I. The Political Situation,” Nation 115 (July 19, 1922): 61–62, and Villard, “Germany, 1922: III. In the Occupied Territory,” Nation 115 (August 2, 1922): 117.
Allied and Associated Powers, Treaties of Peace, 1919–1923 (New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1924), 1:3–263.
Richard M. Gamble, The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2003), 230, 228–29.
Quoted in John Braeman, Albert J. Beveridge: American Nationalist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 260.
Quoted in Alfred E. Cornebise, The Amaroc News: The Daily Newspaper of the American Forces in Germany, 1919–1923 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981), 78–79.
Kennedy, Over Here, 387; Ambrosius, “Wilson, Alliances, and the League of Nations,” 163.
Frank N. Putnam to President Woodrow Wilson, April 15, 1921, Records of the Department of State Relating to Political Relations Between the United States and Germany, 1910–1929, 711.62119P81/1, Reel #2, M355, NARA.
Charles A. York, Secretary of National Disabled Soldiers’ League, Indianapolis Post, to Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, n.d., Records of the Department of State Relating to Political Relations Between the United States and Germany, 1910–1929, 711.62119P81/4, Reel #2, M355, NARA.
E. F. Thompson to Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, April 16, 1921, Records of the Department of State Relating to Political Relations Between the United States and Germany, 1910–1929, 711.62119P81/3, Reel #2, M355, NARA.
Keith L. Nelson, “The ‘Black Horror on the Rhine’: Race as a Factor in Post—World War I Diplomacy,” Journal of Modern History 42 (1970): 606–27.
Mary Lee, It’s A Great War! (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1929), 460.
Nelson, Victors Divided: America and the Allies in Germany, 1918–1923 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1975), 185–88.
Sally Marks, The Illusion of Peace: International Relations in Europe, 1918–1933, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 17.
Ibid.
Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2002), 465–66.
Ibid., 394.
Elizabeth Harvey, “Visions of the Volk: German Women and the Far Right from Kaiserreich to Third Reich,” Journal of Women’s History 16, no. 3 (2004): 152.
Elizabeth Harvey, “Pilgrimages to the ‘Bleeding Border’: Gender and the Rituals of Nationalist Protest in Germany, 1919–1939,” Women’s History Review 9, no. 2 (2000): 201–29; Scheck, “Women Against Versailles,” 26.
George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951; repr. New York: New American Library, 1961), 88–89; George F. Kennan, “Morality and Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs 64, no. 2 (Winter 1985/86): 205–18.
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© 2008 Erika Kuhlman
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Kuhlman, E. (2008). “What to do with the Germans?” American Exceptionalism and German-American Reconciliation . In: Reconstructing Patriarchy after the Great War. The Palgrave Macmillan Series in Transnational History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230612761_4
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