that nothing would go wrong if everyone refrained from coughing, sneezing, and spitting. They didn’t. The flu spread.85 Wilson got it. He didn’t do what he might have done in Paris. It’s not inconceivable that World War II could have been avoided had a parade in Philadelphia been avoided. That may sound crazy, but the parade in Philadelphia, as we will see, 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.
William Geimer, drawing on the research of Margaret MacMillan, writes that “There were those on the allied side,” at the negotiations of the Treaty of Versailles, “notably Lloyd George, who saw the future danger of the treaty and saw the need for modifications. A member of his delegation said, We came to Paris confident that the new order was about to be established; we left convinced that the new order had merely fouled the old. Herbert Hoover, the American administrator of relief for Europe, recognized that the consequences of many parts of the proposed Treaty would ultimately bring destruction.”86 In Geimer’s analysis, much of the harm was in how the treaty was negotiated, with Germany and Russia excluded from the process and from the League of Nations, with Germany blamed, declared guilty, punished, and humiliated. Additional harm came from drawing borders that divided numerous ethnic groups, including dividing German-speaking and German-identifying people from Germany, and splitting one piece of Germany off from another.
Ferdinand Foch, a Frenchman, was Supreme Allied Commander. He accepted the German surrender in World War I. He refused to allow an immediate ceasefire, preferring a six-hour delay, which resulted in the war ending upon the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. I do not know whether he found it numerically pleasing that the delay cost 11,000 additional lives. Foch was very disappointed with the Treaty of Versailles. “This is not peace,” he 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.87
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’.
After WWII, Winston Churchill said, “Last time I saw it all coming and I cried aloud to my own fellow-countrymen and to the world, but no one paid any attention. . . . There never was a war in history easier to prevent by timely action than the one which has just desolated such great areas of the globe. It could have been prevented in my belief without the firing of a single shot, and Germany might be powerful, prosperous and honored today; but no one would listen and one by one we were all sucked into the awful whirlpool.”88 Churchill meant that more armaments, more show of force, more threats and provocations could have prevented WWII, and that the same would prevent war with the Soviet Union. Churchill also put it this way:
“President Roosevelt one day asked what this War should be called. My answer was, ‘The Unnecessary War.’ If the United States had taken an active part in the League of Nations, and if the League of Nations had been prepared to use concerted force, even had it only been European force, to prevent the re-armament of Germany, there was no need for further serious bloodshed. If the Allies had resisted Hitler strongly in his early stages, even up to his seizure of the Rhineland in 1936, he would have been forced to recoil, and a chance would have been given to the sane elements in German life, which were very powerful especially in the High Command, to free Germany of the maniacal Government and system into the grip of which she was falling. Do not forget that twice the German people, by a majority, voted against Hitler, but the Allies and the League of Nations acted with such feebleness and lack of clairvoyance, that each of Hitler's encroachments became a triumph for him over all moderate and restraining forces until, finally, we resigned ourselves without further protest to the vast process of German re-armament and war preparation which ended in a renewed outbreak of destructive war. Let us profit at least by this terrible lesson. In vain did I attempt to teach it before the war.”89
While Churchill seems not to be describing a stable peaceful world, so much as a delicate and increasingly dangerous imperial balance, there is no way to know that he’s mistaken. There was great opposition to Nazism in Germany, and some shift in history -- whether a greater understanding of the tools of nonviolent action, or a more Churchillian militaristic resolve, or an assassination or coup (there were a number of failed plots) -- might have defeated it.
But the point here is not that the world might have gotten lucky, or as we will discuss further, might have acted very differently. Rather, the world acted foolishly, both by the standards of the time, and even more so by today’s. The Marshall Plan following WWII, for all its deep flaws, was an effort not to repeat the stupid way in which WWI had been ended. People were too much aware immediately after WWII of how they had created it after WWI.
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. We’ll get to each of these topics. I’d like to focus in the next several chapters on some of the ways in which the United States did not have to contribute to Nazism.
4. The United States did not have to develop and promote the dangerous bunk science of eugenics
Eugenics had British and U.S. roots and was popularized by Americans in the first two decades of the Twentieth Century, despite various scientists pointing out the lack of evidence for its claims. It took until the 1930s for most scientists to finally reject it, but much longer for the public and governments to catch on. Eugenics was so American that one of its big promoters was John Harvey Kellogg, the same guy who invented corn flakes. Eugenics was so loony that its proponents developed intelligence tests no more scientific than any eugenic claims, and those tests were used to classify half of U.S. draftees in World War I as “morons.”90 A moron was someone smarter than an “idiot” or an “imbecile” but not smart enough for morality.
Eugenics was so American that Margaret Sanger promoted birth control by describing it as a tool for eugenics. The latter was acceptable, the former scandalous. During the 1920s and right up through WWII, at state fairs in the United States, families competed in “Better Babies” and “Fitter Families” contests (sometimes limited to whites only), exhibiting humans in competitions analogous to those for various farm animals. African American author and brilliant opponent of racism WEB Dubois even suggested that the talented tenth Negroes should breed for a better race. That’s how saturated the society was with eugenics. Even those opposing bigotry thought in its terms. The NAACP held better babies contests to fund campaigns against lynching.91
Eugenics was funded by the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Harriman railroad fortune. Members of the American Breeders’ Association (still around but renamed the American Genetic Association) included Alexander Graham Bell. The League of Women Voters promoted eugenic public policies. Witnesses on the evolution side of the Scopes Monkey Trial were eugenicists.
U.S. eugenicist Charles Davenport wrote a letter to U.S. eugenicist and white supremacist Madison Grant arguing for the need to “build a wall” to “keep out the cheaper races.”92 Grant’s book, The Passing of the Great Race, invented a race called The Nordic Race that had a lot in common with the race later promoted by the Nazis.93
