Congress proved particularly slow to understand what it had committed the army to do. Even as it deliberated declaring war, the House Military Affairs Committee rejected the army’s budget request of $3 billion for armaments and soldiers’ pay. Eventually, Congress managed to provide the requested funds, but not until June 5, two months after it had declared war. A second appropriations request waited until October to wend its way through Congress.51
In a few aspects, though, the army anticipated the problems it would face. When Congress passed the Selective Services Act, army officials insisted that the law prohibit bounties, paid exemptions, or substitutions as part of conscription—those provisions that produced so much resentment during the Civil War.52 More important, rather than revert to an organization built around the state militias, the army parceled out its existing soldiers to train the millions of doughboys called into service. Professional soldiers then served as the commanding officers of new combat units.53 This way the army could best leverage its existing expertise and filter that expertise throughout the new fighting divisions.
Ironically, the decision to parcel out its regular soldiers ultimately kept Eisenhower and Clay from seeing combat. The army sent Eisenhower to Texas in the spring of 1917 as part of the newly formed Fifty-Seventh Infantry Regiment, promoting him at the same time to captain and placing him in charge of supply. He then moved to the training school at Leavenworth, Kansas, where he managed to enroll in the army’s first tank school. By February 1918, he was again reassigned, this time to develop a training facility for a new tank division in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Just three years out of West Point, he suddenly faced the daunting task of commanding thousands of volunteers in using this new and unfamiliar weapon (for which the army had no training manuals or field guides). Eventually, he learned that he would lead his trainees into battle as part of an offensive scheduled for spring 1919, with a planned departure of November 18, 1918—as it turned out, one week after the Armistice.54
Having narrowly graduated in 1918, Clay requested a post in the artillery. The army assigned him to the Corps of Engineers instead. Ever the iconoclast, Clay wired the adjutant general saying, “[You] made a mistake.” The adjutant general wired back telling Clay he had better show up as ordered. At Camp Lee, Virginia, Clay went through an accelerated training for engineers. No sooner had he finished that September than he got a new assignment to act as an instructor for new recruits at Camp Humphreys, Virginia, where he remained throughout the war.55
By contrast, MacArthur managed to use his position on the general staff to move out of the Corps of Engineers and obtain a command position within the newly formed Forty-Second Division. MacArthur named it the “Rainbow Division” because it included twenty-six different state national guards: it stretched “over the whole country like a rainbow.”56 MacArthur’s reputation soared. By July of 1918, he had been promoted from colonel to brigadier general. Once the American army began to engage the Germans, MacArthur showed an almost reckless willingness to personally lead in battle. In a grinding fight that ultimately ended the war, he was twice wounded and got so close to the front that his own troops mistook him for a German soldier and arrested him as a prisoner of war. By the time of the Armistice, MacArthur had received seven Silver Star medals, two Distinguished Service Cross medals, two Purple Hearts, and two Croix de Guerre awards from the French army, along with membership in France’s Legion of Honor. Second only to General John Joseph “Black Jack” Pershing, the commander in chief of all American forces, he had become the most famous American general in the world.57
Chapter 2
The War, the Economy, and the Army
By the end of the First World War, Douglas MacArthur, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Lucius Clay were still too early in their professions to affect the subsequent peace. Yet the war had important consequences for these men as they moved forward in their careers. First, it taught them critical lessons in preparing for any subsequent wars; in particular, it focused their thoughts on the relationship between America’s industrial might and its military might. Second, the army continued to professionalize as key officers recognized that the army would be an important part of America’s increasing involvement in global politics. Third, individual soldiers became at least informally more informed about governing foreign people as they maintained America’s interwar external state. Finally, as the peace treaty negotiated at Versailles in 1919 led within a decade to the Great Depression and then a Second World War, Eisenhower and Clay in particular began to become more involved in domestic political economy and think about what mistakes had led to depression and a Second World War.
In this last regard—the lessons that followed the Treaty of Versailles—Woodrow Wilson cast the longest shadow. In many ways, he provided the blueprint for a global order that American foreign policy has often followed since. At the same time, he ignored or misunderstood enough of his plan to almost guarantee its failure.1 In fairness to Wilson (and the statesman he negotiated with), World War I had drastically changed the globe. It involved almost thirty nations, killed almost ten million soldiers and sailors, and introduced the world to tanks and air power. It ended three empires (the Russian, Turkish, and Austro-Hungarian) and redrew the global map—especially in Central Europe and the Middle East. It ushered in the communist takeover of Russia and sparked colonial revolts in Southeast Asia, inspiring (among others) a very young Hõ Chí Minh to dedicate himself to Vietnamese independence. In many Western countries, the war legitimized labor rights and women’s suffrage, as those who bore the burdens of war became more active in shaping subsequent domestic politics. Making policy in the wake of these transitions would challenge the best of politicians.
Initially, in early 1917 and again in 1918, Wilson had defined America’s war aims in broad terms. The war must produce “some definite concert of power which will make it virtually impossible that any such catastrophe should ever overwhelm us again.” Indeed, only “a peace between equals can last,” and so he hoped to persuade the British, French, Italians, and other belligerents away from vindictiveness toward the Germans and Austro-Hungarians. With that “right state of mind” between nations, he aimed to tackle the “vexed questions of territory [and] racial and national allegiance.”2 America would join the war, but only if the war were “the culminating and final war for human liberty,” the war to end all wars.3 “What we are striving for,” he told Congress, “is a new international order based upon broad and universal principles of right and justice—no mere peace of shreds and patches.”4 Anything less would desecrate the deaths of American boys lost on French battlefields and sully America’s role in international affairs.
First, he planned to tap the democratic desires of people around the world to enjoy national self-determination. “‘Self-determination’ is not a mere phrase. It is an imperative principle of action, which statesmen will henceforth ignore at their peril.”5 His hope, articulated in the language of democratic reform, was that ethnic and racial strife would disappear if nationalism could find an outlet within borders that reflected the ethnic and racial makeup of the people who lived there. Second, nationalism could be kept from becoming imperialism if mitigated by an international commitment to “Open Door” trade and finance. So long as every nation felt it could safely buy and sell on international markets, the justification for colonial competition might fade away.6 Finally, a League of Nations would act as the institutional underpinning to provide security to the world. “My conception of the league of nations is just this,” Wilson explained, “that it shall operate as the organized moral force of men throughout the world.”7 The league would become “the watchman of peace,” it was the “main object of the peace … the only thing that could complete it or make it worthwhile … the hope of the world.”8 Behind all of these goals lay Wilson’s eschatological reading of history as progressive. The future would