Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [87]
In allowing their bias to control their judgment, what the authors have come up with is Mencken’s “the perfect model of a Christian cad”—with headaches. This is inadequate. It does not account for Wilson’s enduring influence or for the devotion, adoration, and respect of good men that he was able to inspire. The puzzle of Wilson remains.
More serious than their one-sided picture of the man is the authors’ twisting of history. The most startling example is their claim that for eight months, from October 1915 to May 1916, Wilson’s “supreme desire was to lead the United States into war” on the basis of an agreement to be reached with the Allies allowing him to dictate the peace. This is their analysis of the negotiations surrounding the House-Grey Memorandum. It supposes that the combined lure of being leader in war and arbiter of peace was irresistible to Wilson because the first would release his hostility to his father and the second would satisfy the super-ego’s demand to become Savior of the World. The argument is compelling if one grants the Freudian premise that unconscious drives invariably control conscious acts, but the human record suggests rather that sometimes they do and sometimes they do not. It is quite possible that a subconscious desire for war as a vent for hostility may have been rumbling around in Wilson’s interior, but the historical fact is that his conscious determination to stay neutral maintained control. Undoubtedly Colonel House, out of strong personal conviction, was trying at this time to maneuver the United States into the war. By playing upon the President’s ambitions and weaknesses and judiciously misinforming him, he may have lured Wilson for a time into believing that the Allies’ acceptance of his terms was possible (being ignorant of the Allies’ secret treaties, House may have thought it was). But that American entry into the war was Wilson’s “supreme desire,” or that he was “doing his best” to bring it about, is, to put it politely, hokum.
To reveal Wilson as warmonger, the opposite of what he professed and everyone has believed him to be, is the kind of magicianship Freud delighted in. He always “took a special interest,” says Dr. Jones, “in people not being what they seemed to be.” He was convinced that Shakespeare was really Bacon or the Earl of Oxford and discovered to his own satisfaction that Moses was not Hebrew but Egyptian. Giving free rein to intuitive flashes may be fun, but it is not history and it is not science. These disciplines require that the intuitive flash must stand the test of evidence. Freud, by reason of the change he wrought on habits of thought, with effect on art, literature, philosophy, medicine, social relations, and indeed almost any aspect of modern life, is one of the world’s outstanding figures, but when he called his method “the science of the unconscious” he was setting a standard that it does not live up to.
We come now to the gaping hole in the argument. It is the assumption that in the conditions prevailing after the Armistice, in the passion of anti-German feeling, in the wounds of the victors, in the antagonisms and nationalisms released by the breaking up of three empires, an ideal peace was possible; that, in short, Wilson had the power to dictate a just peace and failed to exercise it.
All he need have done, the authors announce, was to have faced Clemenceau and Lloyd George with “masculine” weapons: threaten to leave the Conference, to publicly denounce the Allies as the “enemies of peace,” and to withdraw American financial and economic aid. In fact, as Wilson well knew, to have risked such an open rupture was impossible, if only for his own sake, for with it would have gone glimmering any hope of the League. Rather than being hailed as Savior, he would have been denounced as a