Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [90]
Since then, as is the circular fashion of history, counter-revision is leading the way back to what was obvious at the start. The somersaults of revisionists—whether it be that Roosevelt plotted Pearl Harbor or that the Third Reich, as held by England’s antic historian A. J. P. Taylor, was pushed into aggression by the democracies—enjoy the notoriety of the sensational, but the facts roll over them in the end.
On the outbreak of war in 1914 the prevailing American attitude was one of self-congratulation that it was none of our affair; and there was a fixed intention that it should not become so. In classic summary—appropriately from a small town in the heart of the Midwest—the Plain Dealer of Wabash, Indiana, stated: “We never appreciated so keenly as now the foresight of our fathers in emigrating from Europe.” Newspaper cartoons habitually depicted Uncle Sam separated by a large body of water from a far-off, furiously squabbling group of little figures; in one case reminding himself that the chance of his life was to “sit tight, keep his hands in his pockets and his mouth shut”; in another case standing shoulder to shoulder with President Wilson with backs firmly turned on Europe’s gore-dripping “barbarians.”
The belief in our safe isolation was reinforced by Wilson, who, bent on pursuing the New Freedom through domestic reform, was irritated by the threatened interference with his program from overseas. He declared in December 1914 that the country should not let itself be “thrown off balance” by a war “with which we have nothing to do, whose causes cannot touch us.” (The familiar ring can be traced to a more famous echo twenty-five years later in Neville Chamberlain’s reference to Czechoslovakia as “a far-away country of which we know nothing.”)
For Wilson it was justifiable in August 1914 to ask the American people to be “impartial in thought as well as in action … neutral in fact as well as name.” But by December, when the expectation of a short war had vanished at the Marne and the armies were locked in the deadly stalemate of the trenches, the war was already touching us. Forced to recognize that American business could not be held immobile, Wilson had already in October reversed his earlier ban on loans to belligerents. This was the foundation for the economic tie which thereafter in ever-increasing strength and volume attached the United States to the Allies. By permitting extension of commercial credit it enabled the Allies to buy supplies in America from which the Central Powers, by virtue of Allied control of the seas, were largely cut off. It opened an explosive expansion in American manufacture, trade, and foreign investments and bent the national economy to the same side in the war as prevailing popular sentiment.
For the country on the whole was as pro-Allied in sympathy as it was anti-belligerent in wish. The President shared the sentiment. “I found him,” wrote Colonel House after the first month of war, “as unsympathetic with the German attitude as is the balance of the country.” Counselor Von Haniel of the German Embassy in Washington, trying to disabuse his principals of certain illusions, reminded them that American feeling was the outgrowth of a natural connection with England “in history, blood, speech, society, finance, culture,” and that “in the present case commercial instinct and sentiment point in the same direction.” He had hit upon the essence of the situation.
At the same time as he lifted the ban on loans, Wilson agreed to permit unrestricted trade in munitions, contrary to an earlier proposal for their embargo. The two measures were not taken in the