was avoidable in 1919, and we’ll come to that (see Chapter 12 below, but please read the intervening chapters first). Let’s start with the full 20 years of completely unnecessary actions. If we went back an additional 20 years to the proposals for peace discussed at the Hague in 1899 but never acted upon, our case would be that much stronger.74
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. That organization, which is still around, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), posted on its website in 2019 an account of what had been said one century earlier.75 The famous 14 points promoted by President Woodrow Wilson, nine of which WILPF took credit for having proposed to him, 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.76
Months before the treaty negotiations, Wilson had told Congress, “Food relief is now the key to the whole European situation and to the solution of peace.” But a commission led by Winston Churchill recommended maintaining the blockade against Germany, because “it would be inadvisable to remove the menace of starvation by a too sudden and abundant supply of foodstuffs.”77 One wouldn’t want starvation to stop too suddenly! And it certainly didn’t. As Adolf Hitler later gained power, he made frequent reference to his own experience with hunger, which he blamed not on England, France, Italy, or the United States, but on a global Jewish conspiracy. The very next day after Germany had ratified the Treaty of Versailles, Hitler had begun attending Army propaganda classes aimed at repressing revolutionary tendencies and at promoting antisemitism. The endless “we’re about to win” WWI coverage of the German media -- which resembled, in reverse, that of the British and Americans78 -- made defeat and the subsequent demand for reparations payments shocking to the German public, made it easy to blame a treasonous scapegoat.79
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. Nothing can then delay for very long that final civil war between the forces of Reaction and the despairing convulsions of Revolution, before which the horrors of the late German war will fade into nothing, and which will destroy, whoever is victor, the civilization and the progress of our generation." 80 There are many far less sensible things that Keynes wrote that were taken far more seriously than this warning was.
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.81 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. The United States did not join, and World War II came. Whether joining the League as it then existed would have prevented World War II is hard to guess. WILPF wanted the League transformed into a league for peace, rather than for war alliances. WILPF thought disarmament was needed, and that no league could prevent war while its members all armed themselves in frantic anticipation of more slaughter. In 1928, the powerful nations of the world outlawed war with the Kellogg-Briand Pact, but didn’t stop arming and didn’t prosecute violators.82 Would the League have done the trick?
Veblen thinks Wilson didn’t cave in and compromise at the treaty negotiations, but rather prioritized enmity toward the Soviet Union. However, Veblen, unlike Keynes, wasn’t there. And those who were there knew that Wilson began by forcefully arguing against vindictive punishment of Germany, but that Wilson was struck down by the so-called Spanish flu, that he was weakened severely, that he spoke as though delusional, and that he quickly agreed to abandon much of what he had promised the world.83 The Spanish flu (so called because, although it probably came from U.S. military bases to the European war, Spain allowed its newspapers to write about unpleasant news, a forbidden practice in nations at war) had infected the White House.84 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. 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