Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [89]
The undoubted insights of this book into the motivation of a crucial figure in our past raise the question, What can the Freudian method do for history? The answer must be that as an instrument of illumination it can do much—on one condition: Let it for God’s sake be applied by a responsible historian.
The Atlantic, February 1967.
How We Entered World War I
On April 2, 1917, the United States as a new contender entered the tournament of world power from which we have not since, despite wishful attempts, been able to withdraw. Up to then, notwithstanding our hearty belligerence in the Spanish-American War, we were not regarded as one of the Great Powers, either by them or, on the whole, by ourselves. American participation in the Great War was the beginning of our majority in world affairs.
In the half-century that has since elapsed, a fundamental shift of the international balance has taken place, with the sites of power spreading outward from Europe to the periphery. The governing seat vacated by the collapse of Britain has been taken—not without kicking and protesting against our fate—by this country. Risen from newcomer to one of the world’s two dominant powers in fifty years, we are once again at war, no longer fresh and untrained but an old hand, skilled, practiced, massively equipped, sophisticated in method, yet infirm of purpose, and without a goal that anyone can define. Is this the destiny to which that first experience has led us? How did the United States become involved and had she a choice? “God helping her,” said President Wilson on that April 2 fifty years ago, “she can do no other.” Could we have done other?
The Great War has never been for us so embedded a part of our national tradition as the Civil War or World War II. It is somehow less “ours.” The average person thinks of it in terms of air aces who flew in open cockpits, a place called Chateau-Thierry, a song called “Over There,” a form of transport called “40 and 8,” and a soldier in leggings who became President Truman—but what it means in our history he could not easily say. When this writer in 1955 proposed to a prospective publisher a book on the Zimmermann telegram, a major factor in precipitating America’s involvement, the advice received was to abandon the idea because it was the “wrong war”; the public was interested only in the Civil and the Second. This was in fact a justifiable assessment, much the same as that reached by a historian in 1930 who, a decade after the end of the war, found the American people still “irritated and bewildered” by it.
These words, which describe so aptly our attitude toward the war in Vietnam, establish a link between the two experiences. The first experience was governed by an old illusion, and the present experience by a new one. World War II, on the other hand, with the imperative of Pearl Harbor supplying an understood cause and purpose, did not sow doubt and self-mistrust. It was clear why we had got in and what was the end in view. But as will certainly be the case with Vietnam, so for twenty years after World War I historical controversy raged over how and why we got into it, and the question is still being probed and re-examined.
The revisionists of the 1920s and ’30s, fueled by post-war disillusion, discarded the accepted view of our involvement as the unavoidable consequence of German aggression toward neutral shipping, in favor of conspiracy theories of one kind or another. They discovered the causative factor in British propaganda, capitalist profit, and other