Easy Chair Series

Wilson and World War I

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 83-91

Genre:

Track:

Dictation Name: EC391

Year: 1986

This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 391, August the 13th, 1997.

This evening Douglas Murray, Andrew Sandlin and I will attempt to answer some of your questions, those, at least, that we fell competent to answer. Mark Rushdoony is not with us since he is out of town.

We have a very interesting question from Richard A. Lewis in Pittsburg, New York. Could you talk about the entry of the United States into World War I? Specifically, what was the role of Woodrow Wilson? Did he attempt to undermine peace efforts in 1915 and 1917?

I am not sure we can answer that as precisely as, perhaps, you would want, but the position of the United States when World War I broke out was one that had more or less prevailed since the time of George Washington.

George Washington felt that it was very, very important for us to stay out of the European power politics. Europe was dedicated to the balance of power which meant that if any nation got too strong, then alliances were formed against it by the other powers in order to overthrow it. This had continued for generations. It had bled Europe. And Washington was very astute in warning against that.

Moreover, two subsequent presidents furthered Washington’s doctrine. With the Monroe Doctrine the position was taken that the United States would not allow the European powers to enter into the politics of the Americas nor of South or Central. They could do this and pit one power against another and introduce the balance of power politics into the Americas and keep them permanently in conflict.

Then a third president, one very much neglected in our time was Polk, P O L K who furthered this doctrine and applied it specifically to Texas. Texas was an independent republic. It had never been a part of Mexico, contrary to the mythology of our time. It had been a part of the Spanish Empire, one of the departments in it.

When the Spanish Empire broke up, the various aspects of that empire in the northern part of Central America and in North America declared their independence and tried to set up separate countries. Only one succeeded, because Mexico continued the imperialism of the Spanish Empire, only not as kindly as the Empire had been. And the states that refused to go into the Mexican state it waged war against. The only one that successfully maintained its independence was Texas. And, of course, subsequently Santa Ana sought to conquer it and the final conclusion was the Mexican War.

However, Texas was a small area. It did not have the population nor the financial wherewithal to be an independent country. And Britain immediately loaned vast sums of money to Texas.

Now the British position was that their loans were innocent. The American position was we don’t believe you, but innocent or not, it will make Texas a satellite of London and this we cannot tolerate. So Polk annexed Texas and he insisted that no American state could become in any way a satellite of the European powers.

Thus, the United States took a very, very strongly pro freedom role in regard to South and Central America. This is not to say that we abided by it perfectly. In the era before World War I, of course, we did interfere with Spain in the... and Cuba in the Philippines. And we sent the marines into various Caribbean and Central American countries with some non independent ideas in mind. In other words, we were going to help various companies.

However, at the same time, in some instances we did a great deal of good for those countries. In fact, what little there is in the way of improvements in one or two of those countries is still a relic of the marine occupation.

Well, the overwhelming opinion, however, of the American people was that they did not want involvement in Europe. A great many of the peoples in the United States were refugees from Europe. They came here to escape the draft, because they felt the powers and the various country were ruthlessly using them and sacrificing their lives for their political gains. As a result, they were bitterly anti war, anti Europe.

However, the situation was a difficult one, because Woodrow Wilson was quite an admirer of Britain and its empire. He was fanatically pro British. He felt that some kind of working together of Britain and the United States would be the foundation of any future world order. Thus, very quietly, he early on began to work to place us on the side of Britain.

There was, to a degree, a shooting war before we entered and this was true, again, in 1940 and 41, before Pearl Harbor. One of the things that Wilson did was to take advantage of the foolishness of some of the German representatives. For example, the German embassy in Mexico did indulge in some very stupid things aimed at America, at the United States, partly in response to what they knew Wilson was doing, but all the same it was the height of folly and it was grist for Wilson’s mill to arouse the American public.

Now there is another aspect here. We have in recent years been spoken of as basically a British country in our composition. In other words, the major group in the United States is of British descent.

Well, that is true and not true. It is often stated that it is of primarily English descent and that is clearly wrong. It is British, but the Scots at the time of the War of Independence outnumbered the English by more than two to one. This was a—as one British agent reported to London—a Scotch Irish Presbyterian rebellion that the colonies were putting on.

Then, too, the German population was very, very high. It was a factor before World War I and before World War II. The German population wanted no involvement. Now, before World War II some of them were of—a minority definitely—pro National Socialist, but the basic German position was: We don’t want involved.

This was the position of all the other groups that had come over here. The Germans constitute, according to most scholars, 13 percent or 12 percent as against 13, maybe 14 percent who were English. That is not all together accurate.

One of the things we have to realize is that there always have been lazy people in the government bureaucracy. At Ellis Island as the immigrants would land, the clerks would take down their name and spell it out as best they could. But they were lazy men in the line up there who would look at someone and ask him his name and he would say, {?}. They would say, “What? Your name is Smith,” or something like that. They would do this with Germans, with Armenians, with everybody. They just simplified it and said, “You will never get along with that name here. A lot of Schmidts became Smiths. A lot of Muellers beame Miller and so on. And this has distorted the perspective.

If you look in any phone book and see all the Millers, for example, and you were to check on them, you would find that a fair percentage of their were Mueller originally and their name was changed when they came here.

So there was a considerable sentiment both in World War I or before World War I and before World War II against any kind of intervention, the ground being this is something special. The United States is not involved in the centuries old battles and conflicts of Europe. Let’s stay out.

But Woodrow Wilson did have messianic dreams. He was going to be the world savior, make the world safe for democracy, as he said, create a one world order, the League of Nations. He was going to end war. So he was determined to get into the war to make a name for himself.

Now let me add this and I will turn the mic over to the others. This has been the insane dream of the 20th century. Woodrow Wilson was not alone. One of his protégés, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had the same dream. He put us into World War II with the same ideas in mind.

Churchill had an agenda also, a personal one. And Stalin had his world agenda, a world Marxist order. And Hitler had his dream of an empire to the east.

So we have been the victims of the wild dreams of people in power and great numbers who have been ready to follow them.

Douglas, do you want to comment on Mr. Lewis’ question?

[Murray] Well, I think another factor has to be taken into consideration around the time of World War I. The British and the French and the Germans and the Americans were beginning to look for oil in the Middle East. And I think the futurists in the industrial sector here in the United States taking a look at Henry Ford’s assembly lines and looking forward to the mechanization of industry as well as the mechanization of personal transportation here in this country were concerned that the Europeans, particularly the British might get a corner on the oil market. And I think that perhaps another reason why they wanted to get involved in European politics, the British were... at that time were quite proactive in looking for oil around the world. And I think that is probably another reason they were looking at the dollar sign as well.

[Rushdoony] Andrew?

[Sandlin] I will just mention quickly, Rush, we didn’t point out that Woodrow Wilson was the son of a Presbyterian minister and he himself was president of Princeton College at a time when, I think it would be fair to say, Rush, it was starting to be riddled with Liberalism. Of course, then there was a few years later the reorganization of the seminary. So he was probably what we would call, in general, a bland liberal Presbyterian whose religious views definitely influenced his political views.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Sandlin] One thing I want to pose a question before we go on real quickly, Rush. I know you speak so much about World War I. Would you mention just briefly from your perspective some of the fundamental changes in the world generated by World War I? How the world was different after World War I than before.

[Rushdoony] Yes. The end of the Humanistic era with the state as the messiah, as it were, began with World War I. To this day we have very, very few accounts of how horrifying a war that was, how bitterly it was fought, how terrible the casualties were.

I forget the name of the historian, but a book, The Rites of Spring, R I T E S, is a grim and horrifying account of World War I, how young men went to battle with dreams of glory, how the first Christmas in the trenches the British and German soldiers stopped, came together with their food and sang carols together, but that never happened again. The war became grim and murderous. It became an incredible nightmare. The area on the western front had one of the wettest years on record and it was nothing but mud by the foot in depth and more. The stench of rotting bodies was around all the men. The real story of that war has rarely been told. It is a wonder that more of the men did not go insane, but only a handful did.

You must realize these were green kids, farm boys, predominantly from the farms of America. And they were in their only in the latter part of 1917 to 18. We were in it about a year. But the others from 1914 to November the 11th, 1918.

Lord Gray of England when war was declared looking out across the channel and seeing the lights go off, said, “The lights are going off all over Europe. They shall not be lit again in our time.”

And he meant the light of civilization, that this was the beginning of the end.

We do not realize how much Statism has developed since then, because, as Lenin recognized: War is a form of revolution. If you want revolution, push the country into wars, great and small. And with each war you will expand the powers of the state. And, of course, this was the goal of some.

Well, one of the things that happened was, of course, that at the same time we were undergoing revolutions of another kind. We went into the war in the horse and buggy age. We came out of it with model T Fords filling the country. We went into it with the airplane hardly more than a new discovery and almost a toy. After a year or two of war, it became an important weapon of war.

The world changed. We went into it a rural people and came out an urban people, totally changed. We still had a rural outlook, rural roots until the end of World War II by which time we were predominantly an urban people.

As a rural people, the old time religion was still very strong among the American people. And it changed with the war. You had very quickly what was name as the Flapper Age develop, the Roaring 20s, a time of bootlegging and gangsters.

Now compared to today Chicago was a tame place under Capone. Fewer murders in a year than are now common place in a month or less. But at that time the whole thing was a shock to the American people. They had grown up in an atmosphere where in much of the country you never locked your door, where people came by the millions to the United States and quickly got ahead, because they all went to work. Within a half a dozen years at the most they had accumulated enough money in order to go out and rent a good home or buy a house. There was that constant dream of upward mobility.

And the result was that the country had an upbeat, optimistic outcome. It is something that continually amazes me and I regard it as very important to think that in the 20s and 30s there was this clearly optimistic, clearly exuberant temper among the people. There were no problems that the American people were not going to lick. And those who saw themselves as American were all these immigrants. They fell in love with this country. They saw here opportunities that didn’t exist anywhere in Europe. So now we have a deep pessimism and, of course, it is beaus people have become less and less the masters of their own lives as the state has taken over.

[Murray] There is one important aspect of the First World War. I wonder what you think. What the effect was of the demise of the monarchies as far as running the countries in Europe.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Murray] Most o the monarchies were replaced by national legislative bodies.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Think of the empires that were destroyed by World War I: the Ottoman Turkish Empire which was in Europe and Asia Minor; the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which occupied all of central Europe and into the Balkans; the German Empire which included colonies in Africa; the Russian Empire, which included the Baltic States and part of Poland and a great deal else.

[Murray] Alaska.

[Rushdoony] Some... what?

[Murray] Alaska.

[Rushdoony] Well, they sold that earlier, but the thing is the Russian Empire was quickly reconstituted by the Marxists, but a host of small states now filled Europe. And various parts of those empires are continuing to break up. The Russian Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Czech Republic and... has broken away from what was Czechoslovakia. And Yugoslavia was a combination of several countries. And it has in the past two years divided. There are strong hints of further divisions within Europe as things are breaking up.

[Sandlin] Rush, let me follow up on that question with a related one. Do you think that in actuality World War I in its consequences was more, perhaps, staggering, devastating, ethical than even World War II was?

[Rushdoony] In a sense, yes. World War II had several very important factors that were new. However, it was, in a real sense, a continuation of World War I, both in the Messianic hopes with regard to the United Nations very early voiced by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and yet a counter movement Stalin was going to use World War II to further world revolution. And, of course, revolution did occur after the war and the French and British Empires were dismantled. Roosevelt gave a major amount of help to Stalin in that destruction of the imperial system. For better or for worse his role in the entire matter was a very considerable one.

Now, Douglas, you were in Vienna when you were in the army, weren’t you, in Austria?

[Murray] Yes, at the time I was there in the 1950s early 1950s Austria was occupied by the four powers, the British, the French the Americans and the Russian. And Vienna was similar to Berlin. It was partitioned. And there was ... there was an armistice in force. There was no final peace treaty which didn’t... wasn’t signed until October 1955.

But the British, the French and the Americans had to wait on the Russians until the Russians were finished looting the eastern part of the country. They stole everything that had any value whatsoever. They left the people in absolute poverty. They left the farmers with nothing more than pitchforks and hand implements. They stole all of the tractors. They stole all of the machinery. They stole the engines out of the boats on the Danube and just left the hulls. They even stole the metal window frames out of factories, pried them out of the walls of concrete buildings in the eastern part of Austria. So they left the country pretty poor.

[Rushdoony] They even stole the plumbing and the pipes.

[Murray] Exactly. Anything...

[Rushdoony] ...ripped them out of buildings.

[Murray] Yeah. And I... I heard from someone... one of the security services that they simply piled all this stuff in a huge staging area outside Moscow and left it to rust, beautiful lathes and machine tools and... because they had no one with the technical ability to run them. But rather than allow the West to have them or allow the Austrians to have them, it was... it was booty. It was just as if it was the Mongol hordes that swept over eastern Europe and stripped it and that was their booty was they had to pile up just outside Moscow. And it ... it just went to ruin.

[Rushdoony] Not long after the satellite Russian states in central Europe were abandoned by the Soviet Empire, someone who was the was describing to me the truly magnificent buildings that had been built, stone structures by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, administrative centers, army centers and so on. And now just stripped and left in shambles by the Russians.

And I was told of one complex and I don’t recall where it was now, I think in Hungary, that if someone from the West went there with enough funds, they would have a complex of building that would provide a magnificent university campus if they would invest enough money to restore those structurally sound buildings to what they were before the Russians gutted them.

[Murray] Well all of the military bases in Austria were... that the Americans built for the American forces stationed there were permanent. They were poured concrete buildings. They had steam heat. You know, everything was... was pretty good quality. And all of those buildings were left to the Austrians when the Americans moved out in the latter part of 1955. Most of those buildings became either part of university complexes or were used as government administrative buildings.

[Rushdoony] One could actually say that in a sense World War I is not yet over, because all the damage caused by it has not yet been fully dealt with.

[Murray] Well, the... the thing that ... that struck me in 1955 I went to Munich, Germany and virtually all of the apartment buildings which were located not too far from the... the rail yards were destroyed. I mean, block after block after block after block, because it was a... it was not a primary target. It was a secondary target, but the bombers returning to Italy that were bombing targets in southern Germany that were of strategic value such as factories and that sort of thing in what were called the Bavarian states of southern Germany and northern Austria, they would drop the... if they were unable to drop their bombs because the target was obscured by bad weather, they were told to drop their bombs on the rail yards in Munich. And these guys didn’t care. I don’t think they even aimed. They just, you know, got somewhere over the area and let them go. And they just wiped out block after block of these apartment buildings.

But the thing that struck me—and this is 1955-is that the Germans didn’t even bother to determine who owned those buildings or to try to repair them or build them. They just went over to the edge of town and built a whole new city. These huge swinging arm type cranes that rise as the building goes up, apparently they invented those. And they were ... there were dozens of them putting up high rise... brand new high rise office buildings in... in... on the south side of ... of Munich, Germany and... we just ... the vitality of it. I mean, they were building a whole new city rather than taking time to try to ... to rebuild the old part and find out who owned them or do any repair work on it. They just needed the new office buildings to get going in a hurry. That is what does... is the thing that struck me about it. You can ... I always used to get a room on the top floor of the Bahnhoff Hotel which was a hotel that was built right over the railroad station and you could see out across the city. And Munich is a city with ... that has 53 large churches, nine of them of cathedral size and you could see architecture that spread all the way from about the 10th century all the way to the present, huge cathedrals where they could hold multiple gatherings of people and they are so large that they wouldn’t... the ... they wouldn’t interfere with each other. They could hold weddings, funerals, a service simultaneously and they are... they are just huge.

[Rushdoony] Well, one of the grim things about World War I is how blithely the great powers prepared for it as though it was going to be a bonanza when it began for their particular goals. I know that my father when he was in his mid teens might have been 16, I believe, at the time, in Armenia, was hired by a couple of, two or three English travelers who were supposedly writing a travel book. He very quickly found out that they represented the foreign office or something connected with that and were there to see if there were any revolutionary groups among the Armenians they could contact and encourage to state a revolt at the brink of war.

Well, they didn’t find any and, as my father said, they were only fools and hot heads who were unrealistic enough to believe that they could do anything without any arms to speak of. And he told these men when he found what their motive was that what they were doing was heartless and cruel. He said, “Your government will have no consideration for our people. It is only their objectives and how we can serve them and if we can be encouraged to stage a revolt and help your purposes when war breaks out, well and good. You will allow us to be butchered without a second thought.”

And, of course, before too long, the Turks, somehow after the trip was over learned of the nature of these two men and what they represented and after that my father had to go under a number of aliases when early on he added I A N to his name to make it look like all other Armenian names so they wouldn’t spot Rushdoony as such. And I have forgotten the other aliases. In fact, earlier this year my brother told me that someone in the family had encountered another alias that he had used, because he was a marked man. And this is the way the various countries operated. In some respects the Austro-Hungarian government precipitated the war as Laffer pointed out in his book Keepers of the Gate, a book on the Serbs.

But the saddest fact is that the peoples in power have learned nothing from World War I, II. They still plan on using people here and there, playing games with them to further their goals and they can make at one time a good ally and friend out of someone like the dictator of Iraq and then overnight convert him into a bad, bad person when they decide that he no longer serves their purposes. It is a cruel, heartless and totally amoral game.

[Murray] Well, the method of warfare in World War I indicated a lack of concern for human life. Trench warfare is a war of attrition and it was the first large scale use of chemical agents to kill people.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Murray] And the real lack of medical care caused a lot of men to die with gangrene. A lot of men had their hearing destroyed, their ear drums broken from the concussion from the weapons that they were using and the... compared to World War II where it was more of a strategic war where hey would leapfrog around the enemy and... and bottle them up rather than just trying to kill off everybody before they advanced ahead on the battlefield.

[Rushdoony] Well, the United States made quite a contribution to Germany before World War I. The German general staff studied the battle scenes and the histories of the American Civil War. They recognized that a new stage of warfare—which had been in the making—had come into full bloom with that war as waged by the North, total war.

Now there were some guerilla forces in the South that had the same concept, but the North systematically waged total war. Well, total war is waged against not only the army of the other side, but against the civilians so that modern warfare is planned to hit hard against civilians. If we go onto a third world war, what, with missiles and all, the major target will be the American civilian population. We haven’t been subjected to it before except, of course, as the South was to some degree under Sherman.

So a major step was taken in the strategy of warfare by Germany in World War I. Churchill very quickly picked up the lesson. He waged war, total war against the German civilian population in both wars. One of the key figures was a blockade of food, a destruction of food sources in order to starve the population into submission. And, of course, this is why in World War I Germany deep in France and its armies way out in foreign territories had to surrender. It was near total collapse from lack of food. And the average height of Germans dropped two inches after the war because of the hunger experienced and its effect on children who were conceived and born in that era.

So it was a very, very grim thing and we have yet to see how far that grimness can be extended. If there is a third world war—and it is not unlikely, especially with our absurd and insane foreign policy—our ...

[Murray] It is really the... the arrogance of... of these leaders who are convinced that they will not make the same mistakes from the past.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Murray] And every generation keeps doing this.

[Sandlin] Right.

[Murray] ...through history.

[Rushdoony] One of the worst things is that our propagandists keep attacking the military as though they are lusting for war. And I have known a few top military men in the United States. And I have talked with them. And one of them expressed it most plainly when he said, “It is idiocy to think that we who are generals are itching for war. There is nothing that destroys more military reputations than a war.”

Most of the generals are going to wind up as losers. They are going to go down in history in infamy, not always because they were lacking in any character, but simply that is the way the things worked out.

So he said, “You had better believe we generals don’t want a war. It is the last thing we want. We prefer to do our duty in peacetime and draw a pension.”

[Murray] Sure.

Well, they have raised the ante now. The losing side, the leaders of the losing side are prosecuted as war criminals. Well, you can make a case anybody who prosecutes a war is a war criminal.

[Sandlin] That is right.

[Murray] ...because you are going to have to break things and kill people in order to prosecute a war.

[Sandlin] And that idea of an international tribunal, you know, that is also... tends to spring from the messianic design idea, you know, the world courts and all that sort.

[Murray] Oh, yeah.

[Rushdoony] Well, with each brushfire war since World War II, we have seen our freedoms diminish and we have seen the United Nations increase its power so that there are troops now, American troops and other troops. And what is it? Over 16 countries around the world, supposed peace keepers.

[Sandlin] Yes.

Rush, that reminds of something. I read sometime ago, I was reading the book The Social Philosophers by Robert Nisbet. And he was pointing out how that war also tends to destroy fabric of the family.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Sandlin] That is a very powerful statement. I can’t remember all of it, but he was making a powerful point along that line and I am sure that is something that we could talk about a long time, but it is something that needs to be observed, I think.

[Rushdoony] Otto Scot is writing a biography of Woodrow Wilson. It is taking him forever to complete it, because new material keeps coming out. Papers and documents that were sealed for a long time are rapidly being opened up. So more and more very damaging information is coming out.

[Murray] You wonder how much more there is.

[Rushdoony] A great deal, I am afraid.

Well, this was a very important question, because our whole century has been under the shadow of World War I. In fact, some scholars have said the 20th century begins with 1914. And it ended with the downfall of Gorbachev. However, I am not sure it is ended. I hope they are right. We are still living in terms of that Wilsonian dream. Most of our presidents have had it. The dream is very much alive with Clinton as it was with Bush and with their predecessors.

[Murray] We have to wonder. How are they going to pay for all this? You have got troops in 60 countries around the world. The Russians have found out that you can’t maintain an army unless you can pay them. They are not going to stick around. You know, their power is diminished, because they are unable to maintain the same military presence. And we have got all of this debt. We are off the gold standard. Our paper money dollar today buys what a nickel would buy in 1969. There is an end to everything. There is an end to every currency when it is inflated. There becomes a point when people will no longer accept that currency as payment because it won’t buy anything and, you know, we are... we have continually moved in that direction since the end of World War II and at some point nobody is going to take dollars in payment for anything anymore.

[Sandlin] Yes.

[Murray] And we are not... and then at that point we are not going to be able to maintain those troops in those 60 countries. It is... it is like a ... a game where we are going to be left with the joker here pretty soon, because when the money runs out. The entire system will collapse like a house of cards. It cannot go on forever, despite what the people think. You know, Wall Street, the stock market cannot continue to go up forever. The Japanese found that out recently. The Germans found it out and they had a tremendous blow off of inflation immediately after World War I, the early 20s. We found out that the stock market can’t go up forever in 1929. The arrogance that we will... that history will not repeat itself, it just astounds me that intelligent people that there are people out there who still think that they are going to reinvent history.

[Sandlin] Yeah.

[Rushdoony] Well, this has been as Gene Elliot pointed out about 1959, the bloodiest century in all of history with a higher percentage of mankind having perished already due to war, mass murders, famine, slave labor camps and so on and on. And it isn’t over yet.

[Murray] Well, I think the excesses of Marxism killed more people than all of the other causes combined. You know, you recount the... the millions who died in the Ukraine under Stalin, the millions that died in southeast Asia, the millions who have died in Africa, all at the hands of Marxists who feel that that only way to get control of a population is by killing them.

[Rushdoony] One of the consequences of World War I was the massive uprooting of many peoples. Now, of course, I come from an Armenian background and there were three million Armenians in historic Armenia. According to Walter Marshal Lang, one million was left of the three after the massacres.

Well, our time is up. Thank you all for listening. Do send your questions. We do enjoy receiving them and I am sorry we can’t always answer them. Thank you and God bless you.