I want to get back to the parade that was even dumber. Recall that Woodrow Wilson had been reelected on the slogan "he kept us out of war," although he'd been trying for a long time to get the U.S. into the war. He'd hoped to get the British and the French to agree to his terms for a postwar world with a peace without victor, and his 14 points drafted by Walter Lippmann and others and including a League of Nations meant to preserve peace, plus disarmament and free trade and an end to colonialism. Despite their refusal, Wilson went ahead and pushed the U.S. into the war using all sorts of lies about sunken U.S. ships and a brutal propaganda campaign that let virtually everyone know what to think and locked up those who didn't think correctly.
Recall that the Great War was the worst, most concentrated violence that white people had ever imposed on themselves, and that they were not used to it. On top of the dramatic death toll, the United States shipped soldiers and sailors with the flu off to the trenches of Europe from which the deadly disease spread around the world, killing perhaps 2 or 3 times the number of people killed directly in the war. Ignorance about the flu was encouraged by policies that forbid newspapers to report anything less than cheerful during a war. Spain didn't have those restrictions. So news of the epidemic was first reported in Spain, and people began calling the disease the Spanish Flu.
Now, the U.S. government wanted to hold a parade in Philadelphia with more weapons than even Trump might have demanded plus crowds of flu-infected veterans just returned from the trenches. Numerous health experts pointed out that this was about as smart as machine gunning and poison gassing millions of young men in the name of ending war -- or as a popular poster at more recent protests has put it: fornicating for virginity. But Philly's health director Wilmer Krusen had about as much respect for the general public as a Philadelphia Eagles fan has for an opposing team. Krusen announced that the flu was fake news. He proposed that people just stop coughing, spitting, and sneezing. Seriously. The Christian Scientists or the pray the gay away people were in charge. Stop sneezing. That will fix everything.
One purpose of the parade was to sell bonds to pay for the war, and each city wanted to sell the most, including Philadelphia. Instead, what Philadelphia grabbed the record for was spreading the most influenza. A massive outbreak was predicted and occurred.
One man who may have come down with the flu as a result of the epidemic that was hugely increased by the parade was Woodrow Wilson. When Wilson travelled to Versailles to negotiate the peaceful paradise he had promised the world, he found, as expected, that the British and the French wanted no part in it. Instead they wanted to punish the Germans as viciously as possible. One reason that Wilson put up hardly any fight for what he had sworn he would fight for was almost certainly the amount of time he spent sick in bed in France. And one reason he was sick in bed may very well have been the dumbest parade in history -- a parade that helped kill on the scale of the war and perhaps a much larger scale.
Smart observers predicted World War II the moment they saw the nasty terms of the peace agreement that Wilson had seen roll over his sick bed. That second fit of collective lunacy would, as I've said, kill more than the first one and its flu combined. And the legacy of World War II would be the endless ongoing slaughter of millions of civilians in a normalized permawar that has ended all peace. And that has included permanent WWII propaganda rendering it impossible to question WWII and therefore much more convenient never to think about WWI. So, the moral of the story is: plan your parades carefully.
Actually, there are some other morals of the story. If you read Sigmund Freud's biography of Woodrow Wilson, he cites the fact that following the disaster at Versailles, Wilson could blatantly contradict himself in a matter of days as evidence that Wilson had lost his mind. Of course we have now progressed so far beyond Freudian mythology as to recognize that a U.S. president really ought to blatantly contradict himself in a matter of minutes.
A more serious moral of the story is one that Freud and most everyone else ignores, namely that -- as usual -- there were some people who got things right very early on and were not listened to: the peace activists. We shouldn't excuse World War I on the grounds that nobody knew. It's not as if wars have to be fought in order to learn each time that war is hell. It's not as if each new type of weaponry suddenly makes war evil. It's not as if war wasn't already the worst thing ever created. It's not as if people didn't say so, didn't resist, didn't propose alternatives, didn't go to prison for their convictions.
In 1915, Jane Addams met with President Wilson and urged him to offer mediation to Europe. Wilson praised the peace terms drafted by a conference of women for peace held in the Hague. He received 10,000 telegrams from women asking him to act. Some historians believe that had he acted in 1915 or early in 1916 he might very well have helped bring the Great War to an end under circumstances that would have furthered a far more durable peace than the one made eventually at Versailles. Wilson did act on the advice of Addams, and of his Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, but not until it was too late. By the time he acted, the Germans did not trust a mediator who had been aiding the British war effort. Wilson was left to campaign for reelection on a platform of peace and then quickly propagandize and plunge the United States into Europe's war. And the number of progressives Wilson brought, at least briefly, to the side of loving war makes Barack Obama look like an amateur.
Not only were peace activists right about why and how to try to end World War I, but some of them immediately predicted World War II after Versailles. Some of them marched and protested against the build up to a war with Japan for many years leading up to Pearl Harbor, which was as much a surprise as Lindsey Graham voting for Brett Kavanaugh. And some of them made every effort to get Jews and other targeted people out of Germany for years, with the only government interested in helping them being that of Adolf Hitler.
World War II was not humanitarian and was not even marketed as such until after it was over. The United States led global conferences at which the decision was made not to accept Jewish refugees, and for explicitly racist reasons, and despite Hitler's claim that he would send them anywhere on luxury cruise ships. There was no poster asking you to help Uncle Sam save the Jews. A ship of Jewish refugees from Germany was chased away from Miami by the Coast Guard. The U.S. and other nations refused to accept Jewish refugees, and the majority of the U.S. public supported that position. Peace groups that questioned Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his foreign secretary about shipping Jews out of Germany to save them were told that, while Hitler might very well agree to the plan, it would be too much trouble and require too many ships. The U.S. engaged in no diplomatic or military effort to save the victims in the Nazi concentration camps. Anne Frank was denied a U.S. visa. Although this point has nothing to do with a serious historian's case for WWII as a Just War, it is so central to U.S. mythology that I'll quote here a key passage from Nicholson Baker:
"Anthony Eden, Britain's foreign secretary, who'd been tasked by Churchill with handling queries about refugees, dealt coldly with one of many important delegations, saying that any diplomatic effort to obtain the release of the Jews from Hitler was 'fantastically impossible.' On a trip to the United States, Eden candidly told Cordell Hull, the secretary of state, that the real difficulty with asking Hitler for the Jews was that 'Hitler might well take us up on any such offer, and there simply are not enough ships and means of transportation in the world to handle them.' Churchill agreed. 'Even were we to obtain permission to withdraw all the Jews,' he wrote in reply to one pleading letter, 'transport alone presents a problem which will be difficult of solution.' Not enough shipping and transport? Two years earlier, the British had evacuated nearly 340,000 men from the beaches of Dunkirk in just nine days. The U.S. Air Force had many thousands of new planes. During even a brief armistice, the Allies could have airlifted and transported refugees in very large numbers out of the German sphere."
One reason peace advocates have not been and still are not listened to is the system of propaganda first created for World War I. The propaganda machinery invented by President Woodrow Wilson and his Committee on Public Information had drawn Americans into the war with exaggerated and fictional tales of German atrocities in Belgium, posters depicting Jesus Christ in khaki sighting down a gun barrel, and promises of selfless devotion to making the world safe for democracy. The extent of the casualties was hidden from the public as much as possible during the course of the war, but by the time it was over many had learned something of war's reality. And many had come to resent the manipulation of noble emotions that had pulled an independent nation into overseas barbarity.
However, the propaganda that motivated the fighting was not immediately erased from people's minds. A war to end wars and make the world safe for democracy cannot end without some lingering demand for peace and justice, or at least for something more valuable than the flu and prohibition. Even those rejecting the idea that the war could in any way help advance the cause of peace aligned with all those wanting to avoid all future wars -- a group that probably encompassed most of the U.S. population. As Wilson had talked up peace as the official reason for going to war, countless souls had taken him extremely seriously. "It is no exaggeration to say that where there had been relatively few peace schemes before the World War," writes Robert Ferrell, "there now were hundreds and even thousands" in Europe and the United States. The decade following the war was a decade of searching for peace: "Peace echoed through so many sermons, speeches, and state papers that it drove itself into the consciousness of everyone. Never in world history was peace so great a desideratum, so much talked about, looked toward, and planned for, as in the decade after the 1918 Armistice."
That remains true today. The peace movement of the 1960s was huge. That of the 1920s was all-encompassing.
Congress passed an Armistice Day resolution calling for "exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding " inviting the people of the United States to observe the day in schools and churches with appropriate ceremonies of friendly relations with all other peoples." Later, Congress added that November 11th was to be "a day dedicated to the cause of world peace."
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