Free People, Free Markets. George Melloan
calls the ‘Big Brass Hat.’ All the allies need to do now is to stand fast, with a sound defense, which includes a vigorous counter attack . . . What seems to be needed, so far as the leader of the Triple Alliance is concerned, is an international court to issue a writ de lunatico inquirendo.”
The editorial was certainly correct in its sarcastic remark suggesting a court inquire into the sanity of the Kaiser and that what had begun would be a horrible business. But it was wrong about almost everything else. Russia’s 5.4-million-man army almost matched the combined forces of Germany and Austria, about 6 million. But it was led by a decadent aristocratic class and was no match on the battlefield, suffering mass slaughter at the hands of the Germans.
So, contrary to Barron’s forecast, Russia was in fact the biggest loser, not only in casualties but in postwar consequences. The Bolsheviks gained popular support with their promise to take Russia out of the war, overthrew a short-lived representative government headed by Alexander Kerensky, once in power killed the czar and his family, launched a civil war and gave the Russian people 72 years of police state “Communism.” Moreover, the Russian people would be ravaged again in the 1940s replay of World War I, better known as World War II.
Also contrary to the Journal forecast, the western Allies in the Triple Entente had a hard time standing fast. The Germans took a large portion of France, almost reaching Paris. Then, three years of bloody stalemate ensued until the United States entered the war and tipped the balance against Germany. The Germans didn’t starve, and Britannia did not rule the waves. The editorial had reckoned without Germany’s capacity to wage submarine warfare, which took a fearful toll of Allied lives and shipping. So Barron and Hamilton were wrong on about every count. But they certainly were neither the first nor last journalists to misjudge the consequences of a war. It is an occupational hazard.
As it became more and more likely that the United States would enter the war in response to German U-boat attacks on American ships, the Journal carried an editorial deploring the state of American preparedness. It was mainly aimed at Josephus Daniels, the bumbling Populist secretary of the navy. The editorial sounds as if it might have been inspired by the warnings of Teddy Roosevelt and his fifth cousin, a young assistant secretary of the navy named Franklin Delano Roosevelt who was very often at odds with the secretary. Both Roosevelts were on speaking terms with Barron, who had been in frequent touch with Teddy since he advised Teddy on putting down the banking panic of 2007.
Wrote the Journal: “It is impossible to escape the conclusion that those in charge of the military and naval departments are temperamentally unfitted for their task . . . Mr. Daniels is typical of the handicap a country governed by popular politics carries into a war. He can regard the Navy as a high school for the enlisted man, as a floating branch of the YMCA, as a militant temperance machine, as a carrier of mails or even of cargo. But he cannot regard it as a fighting machine trained to the minute.”
On the whole, however, the American expeditionary force acquitted itself well and was sufficiently effective to tip the balance toward a Triple Entente victory, if the devastation and loss of so many young men could be called a victory for anyone.
The Journal didn’t think highly of the Bolsheviks then or forever after. The editors were not happy about the Bolsheviks’ offer to take Russia out of the war. An editorial of November 16, 1917, scored Leon Trotsky, the Bolshevik foreign minister, for his proposed deal with Germany. Pointedly, the editorial used Trotsky’s real name, Braunstein, perhaps to introduce the point that the Ukrainian revolutionary was part Jewish. There’s not much evidence of anti-Semitism in early Journal editorials, but given the suspicions of Jews on the Wall Street of that era, it should not be surprising that some crept into editorials from time to time.
The editorial quoted Trotsky as saying the aim of the Bolshevik movement was to gain the “people’s right to peace, free life, the land, bread and power.” Said the editorial: “It is certain that there is a great deal of land that the Russian people will not get if his program of peace with Germany is carried out.” It pointed out that under the deal, the Russians would lose to Germany “a large part of the black soil belt, the port of Odessa, the Black Sea and the mouths of the rivers emptying into it . . .
“Nor is that all. ‘The war indemnity to be paid by Russia must consist largely in the transfer of private titles to land.’ It is not to be a transfer of sovereignty alone, but present owners are to be dispossessed in favor of Germans. Pacifism will come high to Russians as well as any other country that meets Germany with it.” In other words, the Bolsheviks were not only selling out Russia’s western Allies but also a sizable portion of the landowning Russian population.
A Journal editorial about the World War I armistice of November 1918 contained some common sense that would be little heeded by the victorious European Allies, France in particular. The Journal argued that “if the world is to exact, as it unquestionably will, enormous indemnities, which can never be large enough to meet the destruction a national insanity has caused, it must still leave Germany with the tools with which to create the new wealth that will pay those indemnities.
“When we sentence a convict to hard labor, we give him the means for production. We do not expect him to make bricks without straw. The civilized world indeed will take over the receivership of this dreadful relic of the Dark Ages, this monster of greed, rapine, and arrogance and teach him to make a man of himself. An armistice means peace, but peace itself comes later. Recognizing that individual and national punishment of the most severe character is necessary, it is yet the task of civilization to save sixty million people from themselves.”
After the armistice, Journal editors were concerned that Germany would go the same direction as had Russia, with a revolution that would bring radicals into power. Their fears were justified, as Hitler would prove 15 years later, but a bit premature. This from an editorial on November 12, 1918: “When the armistice was signed the white flag became the emblem of Germany, and in spirit, at least, her flag for years to come. But with the revolution which forced the abdication of the Kaiser and the German Kings, the red flag was hoisted. However we may flatter ourselves with the prospects of a German Republic, we cannot be blind to the fact that the red flag means anarchy.
“It meant that in the French commune, and, after the world had forgotten that lesson, it meant it again in Russia. Dare we hope that it will not mean the same thing in Germany?”
The editorial was particularly concerned about what would happen in Germany when its soldiers, armed and embittered, returned home. “These men return to Germany armed, exempt from that stern discipline which alone could control them, habituated to rapine and oblivious to all personal controls as represented by religion, continence and honor, such as true civilization alone can breed. They are the creation of Germany, not merely of her war machine but of all the people, who could see nothing in them to criticize so long as they seemed victorious. This monster is let loose, and to what lengths it may go can only be imagined.”
“Did civilization fail in Russia? Can it tolerate another failure in Germany?” The crimes of Stalin and Hitler would be the unhappy answer to both of those questions.
One of the most significant effects of World War I was its destruction of monarchial rule on the continent, in Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia. A Journal editorial on November 9, 1918, worried that good kings like Albert of Belgium and George of England might be swept out along with the bad ones.
“The world is safe for democracy under a king if he is a good democrat in something more than a mere party sense. He may, indeed, when occasion calls be a better democrat than a president.” As it happened, both the British and Belgian monarchies survived the war, no doubt in part because they had long ago ceased to have absolute power and were forced to be responsive to democratic institutions.
On January 19, 1919, a Journal front-page article by C.W. Barron told of urging E.J. Dillon, a prominent author and adviser to heads of state, to return to the continent to help out with the post–World War I peace talks at Versailles, outside Paris. Dillon had responded: “There need be no hurry; the trouble has only begun. The problems of the war are as nothing compared with the problems of the peace.”
How right he was. As Barron’s friend Dillon had predicted, it didn’t take