Remarks in Cedar Rapids on November 11, 2023
Henry Nicholas John Gunther was born in Baltimore, Maryland, to parents who had immigrated from Germany. In September 1917 he was drafted to help kill Germans. The world's first modern war propaganda campaign was underway. It was a hard sales pitch for war, including if you said the wrong thing you'd go to prison. Henry wrote home from Europe to describe how horrible the war was and to encourage others to avoid being drafted. Well, his letter was censored and he was demoted. After that, he told his buddies that he would prove himself. He would prove how much he hated and was willing to murder the right group of people. As the deadline of 11:00 a.m. approached on the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918 the war was scheduled to end. The armistice had been signed early in the morning, but with 11:00 chosen as quitting time, allowing an extra 11,000 people to be killed, wounded, or go missing. I would say for no good reason, but wouldn't want you to think that the millions killed before that morning had been for some good reason. As the clock ticked down, Henry got up, against orders, and bravely charged with his bayonet toward two German machine guns. The Germans were aware of the Armistice and tried to wave him off. What was the point? But Henry kept approaching and shooting. When he got close, a short burst of machine gun fire ended his life at 10:59 a.m. Henry was given his rank back because he had done the proper thing. If he'd come home and done it in a bowling alley it would have been the improper thing. He was not given his life back, and we label him the last man to die in World War I, even though World War I continued for weeks in Africa, and even though the so-called Spanish flu that came out of the war would kill as many as the bullets and the gas, and even though many of the veteran suicides were yet to come, and even though farmers would go on being killed by unexploded ordinance indefinitely, and even though deaths caused by needless hunger, poverty, and deprivation of proper medicine would continue, and even though the peace agreement would eventually be concocted in such a way as to practically guarantee and in fact elicit predictions of the continuation of the war in what we call World War II, and even though the military industrial complex was now slouching determinedly toward Washington to be born.
The moment of ending the Great War was supposed to end all war, and it kicked off a world-wide celebration of joy and of the restoration of some semblance of sanity. It became a time of silence, of bell ringing, of remembering, and of dedicating oneself to actually ending all war. That was what Armistice Day was. It was not a celebration of war or of those who participate in war, but of the moment a war had ended and a remembrance and mourning of those war has destroyed. Congress passed an Armistice Day resolution in 1926 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." That lasted until the holiday was renamed Veterans Day in 1954.
Veterans Day is no longer, for most people in the United States, a day to cheer the ending of war or even to aspire to its abolition. Veterans Day is not even a day on which to mourn the dead or to question why suicide is the top killer of U.S. troops or why so many veterans have no houses. Veterans Day is not generally advertised as a pro-war celebration. But chapters of Veterans For Peace are banned in some small and major cities, year after year, from participating in Veterans Day parades, on the grounds that they oppose war. Veterans Day parades and events in many cities praise war, and virtually all praise participation in war. Almost all Veterans Day events are nationalistic. Few promote "friendly relations with all other peoples" or work toward the establishment of "world peace."
Jane Addams and her colleagues not only predicted in 1919 that a second world war would come, but also detailed what would need to be changed about the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations in order to avoid it and launched a global peace organization to advocate toward that end. The famous 14 points promoted by President Woodrow Wilson were largely lost in the Treaty of Versailles, replaced by brutal punishment and humiliation for Germany. Addams warned that this would lead to another war.
The British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1919 in The Economic Consequences of the Peace, "If we aim deliberately at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare predict, will not limp."
Thorstein Veblen, in a highly critical review of Keynes' book, also predicted the Treaty of Versailles leading to more war, though he understood the basis of the treaty to be animosity toward the Soviet Union, against which, it should be noted, the United States and allied nations were fighting a war in 1919 that rarely shows up in U.S. history books but which every Russian knows about to this day. Veblen believed that reparations could have easily been taken from wealthy German property owners without imposing suffering on all of German society, but that the primary goal of those making the treaty had been to uphold property rights and to use Germany as a force against the communist Soviet Union.
Woodrow Wilson had promised "peace without victory," but, in the treaty negotiations, given in to French and British vengeance toward Germany. Afterwards, he predicted World War II unless the United States joined the League of Nations. Veblen thinks Wilson didn't cave in and compromise at the treaty negotiations, but rather prioritized enmity toward the Soviet Union. I think the British did that, but that Wilson's is a stranger story.
Wilson began by forcefully arguing against vindictive punishment of Germany, but was struck down by the so-called Spanish flu, was weakened severely, spoke as though delusional, and quickly agreed to abandon much of what he had promised the world. It was called the Spanish flu because, although it probably came from U.S. military bases to the European war, Spain allowed its newspapers to write about unpleasant news, whereas the U.S. and other nations did not allow such liberties. But the ridiculously named Spanish flu had infected the White House.
The previous fall, on September 28, 1918, Philadelphia had held a massive pro-war parade that included flu-infected troops just back from the war. Doctors had warned against it, but politicians had announced that nothing would go wrong if everyone refrained from coughing, sneezing, and spitting. Raise your hand if you think ever person in a giant crowd refrained from coughing, sneezing, and spitting. The flu spread. Wilson got it. He didn't do what he might have done in Paris. It's not inconceivable that WWII could have been avoided had a parade in Philadelphia been avoided.
That may sound crazy, but the parade in Philadelphia was just one stupid thing in an ocean of stupid things that didn't have to be done. Nobody could have predicted World War II as a result of that parade, but such a prediction was possible and in fact made about many other of the unnecessary and foolish actions in the years between the wars.
Ferdinand Foch, a Frenchman, was Supreme Allied Commander. He was very disappointed with the Treaty of Versailles. "This is not peace," he supposedly exclaimed. "It is an armistice for 20 years." World War II began 20 years and 65 days later. Foch's concern was not that Germany was punished too severely. Foch wanted Germany's territory limited on the west by the Rhine River.
With widespread agreement that all governments would arm and prepare for more wars, predicting that Germany would be embittered by too much punishment or that too little punishment could allow Germany to launch a new attack were both safe predictions. With the ideas of prosperity without armament, the rule of law without violence, and humanity without tribalism still so marginal, Foch's prediction made as much sense as Jane Addams'.
The Treaty of Versailles was only one thing among many that did not have to happen. The people of Germany did not have to allow the rise of Nazism. Nations and businesses around the world did not have to fund and encourage the rise of Nazism. Scientists and governments did not have to inspire the Nazi ideology. Governments did not have to prefer armaments to the rule of law, and did not have to wink at German outrages while encouraging a German attack on the Soviet Union. A major change to any one of these factors would have prevented WWII in Europe.
It's not as though nobody tried for peace. The peace movement of the 1920s in the United States and Europe was larger, stronger, and more mainstream than ever before or since. In 1927-28 a hot-tempered Republican from Minnesota named Frank who privately cursed pacifists managed to persuade nearly every country on earth to ban war. He had been moved to do so, against his will, by a global demand for peace and a U.S. partnership with France created through illegal diplomacy by peace activists. The driving force in achieving this historic breakthrough was a remarkably unified, strategic, and relentless U.S. peace movement with its strongest support in the Midwest; its strongest leaders professors, lawyers, and university presidents; its voices in Washington, D.C., those of Republican senators from Idaho and Kansas; its views welcomed and promoted by newspapers, churches, and women's groups all over the country; and its determination unaltered by a decade of defeats and divisions.
The movement depended in large part on the new political power of female voters. The effort might have failed had Charles Lindbergh not flown an airplane across an ocean, or Henry Cabot Lodge not died, or had other efforts toward peace and disarmament not been dismal failures. But public pressure made this step, or something like it, almost inevitable. And when it succeeded although the outlawing of war was never fully implemented in accordance with the plans of its visionaries much of the world believed war had been made illegal. Frank Kellogg got his name on the Kellogg-Briand Pact and a Nobel Peace Prize, his remains in the National Cathedral in Washington, and a major street in St. Paul, Minnesota named for him a street on which you cannot find a single person who doesn't guess the street is named after a cereal company.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
