Fascism Comes to America: A Century of Obsession in Politics and Culture

By Bruce Kuklick

A deeply relevant look at what fascism means to Americans.

From the time Mussolini took power in Italy in 1922, Americans have been obsessed with and brooded over the meaning of fascism and how it might migrate to the United States. Fascism Comes to America examines how we have viewed fascism overseas and its implications for our own country. Bruce Kuklick explores the rhetoric of politicians, who have used the language of fascism to smear opponents, and he looks at the discussions of pundits, the analyses of academics, and the displays of fascism in popular culture, including fiction, radio, TV, theater, and film. Kuklick argues that fascism has little informational meaning in the United States, but instead, it is used to denigrate or insult. For example, every political position has been besmirched as fascist. As a result, the term does not describe a phenomenon so much as it denounces what one does not like. Finally, in displaying fascism for most Americans, entertainment—and most importantly film—has been crucial in conveying to citizens what fascism is about. Fascism Comes to America has been enhanced by many illustrations that exhibit how fascism was absorbed into the US public consciousness.  

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Nov 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9780226822457

Book preview

Cover Page for Fascism Comes to America

Fascism Comes to America

Fascism Comes to America

A Century of Obsession in Politics and Culture

BRUCE KUKLICK

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2022 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2022

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82146-7 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82245-7 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226822457.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kuklick, Bruce, 1941- author.

Title: Fascism comes to America : a century of obsession in politics and culture / Bruce Kuklick.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022012517 | ISBN 9780226821467 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226822457 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Language and languages—Political aspects. | Fascism—United States. | United States—Politics and government—20th century. | United States—Politics and government—21st century.

Classification: LCC P119.32.U6 K83 2022 | DDC 306.44—dc23/eng/20220316

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022012517

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Charles Myers

and

Rosemarie D’Alba

’Tis writ, In the beginning was the Word!

I pause, perplex’d! Who now will help afford?

I cannot the mere Word so highly prize;

I must translate it otherwise

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

The spirit aids! from anxious scruples freed,

I write, In the beginning was the Deed!

GOETHE, Faust

When I use a word, Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less. The question is, said Alice, whether you can make words mean so many different things. The question is, said Humpty Dumpty, which is to be master—that’s all.

LEWIS CARROLL, Through the Looking Glass

Contents

Introduction: Expressing Fascism

PART I: 1909–49

Why Fascism?

1  Fascism before Fascism, 1909–35

2  Franklin Roosevelt and Political Culture, 1932–36

3  Perplexity at Home and Abroad, 1934–38

4  Foreign and Domestic Contradictions, 1938–40

5  The Coming of the War, 1939–42

6  Fascism Penetrates Popular Life, 1936–49

PART II: 1942–2020

Performing Words

7  Fascism on the Right, 1942–70

8  Europeans Bring Fascism to the States

9  Fascism Triumphs over Communism

10  Scholars Approach Fascism

11  Fascism Everywhere, 1970–2020

12  Democracy and Fascism

Conclusion: Fascism without Fascism

Notes, Sources, and Methods

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

INTRODUCTION

Expressing Fascism

Google fascism comes to America, or search the same topic on Amazon. Thousands of entries pop up. Reformers are fascists. Conservatives are fascists. Corporate business leaders are secret fascists. We find crypto-, egalitarian, fastidious, modern, neo-, and respectable fascists. Fascism can creep or be friendly or feel at home on Park Avenue. It can be sweet or mild and watery. During the 1930s, US followers of the Russian communist Joseph Stalin called the communist adherents of Leon Trotsky social fascists. During the same decade, some citizens dreaded that fascists might declare themselves antifascists. More certainly, the government later chastised other citizens for their premature antifascism. During the 1970s, the Black Panthers of Oakland, California, identified liberals as fascist pigs, but another Oakland-based organization, the Symbionese Liberation Army, announced the assassination of a Black leader for his fascist plan for public school safety.¹ Fascism has functional equivalents. Fascists often reemerge, while some politicians count as fascist-oid or fascist-like. Roosevelt’s New Deal had fascist affinities, and so did the Reagan Revolution. The Jim Crow South evidenced fascism, but so did its opponents in the Civil Rights movement. Barack Obama was a fascist, but so was John McCain. Donald Trump was undoubtedly a fascist.

Fascism has also implied vague doctrines of subversion and illogical violence that have marked American literature and culture since Benito Mussolini invented himself as a fascist and climbed to rule in Italy in 1922. During the 1920s, Herbert Croly of the New Republic urged that whatever the dangers of fascism, it accentuated a common national purpose that the United States lacked. In 1934 Edward Dahlberg wrote Those Who Perish, one of the first novels distressed about the nation’s fascist tendencies. Witter Bynner’s 1946 poem, Defeat, about segregation during World War Two, regretted that in carrying the day over fascism, the United States vanquished the essentially American: It is again ourselves who we defeat. In 1964 the film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb brought fascism to the White House, as a Nazi madman by that name counseled the president. The baseball movie Field of Dreams (1989) introduced an opponent of a high school curriculum in Iowa; this Eva Braun or Nazi cow believed in book burning. In 2004 Philip Roth’s novel The Plot against America fictionalized an alternative fascist history of the era of Franklin Roosevelt. And The Man in the High Castle, in which German and Japanese fascists have taken over the United States, succeeded as a television series from 2015 to 2019.

For the last one hundred years, politicians and political commentators have compulsively examined fascism and provoked fevered public concerns. Fiction, cinema, Broadway, radio, television, and most recently blogs have considered disaster after disaster. Despite the antithesis between democratic and fascist values, Americans have perceived fascism as a constant presence or threat. Is the republic as fragile as some witnesses claim—or moderate and firm, as its existence for 225 years might suggest? Why does the enticing peril of fascism endure? Because the flame attracts the moth? Because Americans have nightmares that they will mature into what they truly are? Or because they fear weakening in the face of evil?

This book explores the spectacle of fascism in the United States—the imagination of it in America and the outlook from America. I have perused political history and the political theory based on this history to determine what has generated the enchantment and how it has been generated. While the Europe of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s informed Americans, the horror over fascism has derived not entirely from distant affairs but also from internal disputes. Moreover, popular forms of expression have contributed to an array of fascist portents. Fascism Comes to America reconnoiters print and internet punditry and nonfiction. Amusements on the screen, on the page, on television, and on the stage are surveyed to see how they accommodated fascism. To these sources we must add learned commentary that also requires study over several decades. Finally, over many years, European savants in the United States contributed to anxieties by warning that the seeds of fascism had sprouted in America.

Three themes run through this book. A history first traces how the term fascism has altered in American English. Thousands of items tell us of fascism. Newspaper articles and editorials—during the 1930s, 1950s, 1980s, and onward—offer summaries of various forms of fascism at the time of the writing. Erudite volumes that aim at precision and objectivity have produced theories of fascist philosophy and practice up to a given author’s present. Many of these endeavors urge that we can rationally locate fascism, a subsisting phenomenon.

My history of the concept of fascism differs. I do not offer a definition, or an evolution of discrimination, or a refinement of analysis. From the book’s perspective, offering definitions, discriminations, or refinements makes primary what is secondary. Trying to break down the notion of fascism or to make it less vague bewitches us, for fascism does not have a bundle of coherent significations. It expresses loathing more than it identifies a reality or a growing series of realities. The verifiable ingredients have never compared to the deleterious emotional weight the word lays on the scale. Fascism does not so much describe as it accomplishes reproof. There is no elemental fascism or much empirical content. Every political posture has been christened as fascist. Unable to associate fascism with any stable observables over one hundred years, I am unconvinced that they exist. Having fascism in a vocabulary demands some explanation other than that the speaker is singling out some attributes. This form of political address takes us to a world of nonrational feeling. But this does not mean that fascism is devoid of meaning or that it is a vacuous signifier.

It is rather a part of language that is more evaluative than factual. Fascism belongs in a category of what may be designated the less than cognitive in that it does not so much refer to anything that exists as it accomplishes disapproval. To put fascism on paper or to utter it in conversation complexly resembles canceling a magazine subscription in disgust or throwing a tomato at a speaker at a public event—but not worrying much about retaliation. Fascism does not so much isolate a thing as it does some stigmatizing. Of course, such a finding does not suppose the frivolity of the hocus-pocus. Indeed, the opposite is to be inferred.

Verbal action more than logical inquiry constitutes fascism, although the insult is hemmed in, and regularities govern how the insult occurs. The force of the back-of-the-hand depends on fascism’s common establishment as insult. Shared conventions also regulate when the insult can be employed and how it insults. And while speakers and writers are engaged in denigrating, we finally cannot deduce lack of justification for the denigration. Fascism Comes to America sets out the variety of contexts in which fascism has taunted over the years. The conceptual history asks the reader to look at this constituent of our politics from an altered point of view.

A second theme searches for the connection between how politicians have dealt with fascism and how learned commentators have treated the abuse. Politicians latched on to fascism (and other particulars in their dictionary) in a struggle for power characterized by speeches, state papers, electioneering, and policies. In recycling the terminology of the actors, social scientists and historians have not probed matters with an impartial framework. The university has served as a guardian of the politicians’ tools and has depended on the politicians’ taxonomies. The core notions of real politics—fascism in this inquiry—have become the categories through which students have understood politics. The treatises—so many, over so many years—continue politics by other methods. Research about politics, like politics itself, displays standard sentiments as much as the research conveys disinterested information. Especially problematic in a heated political atmosphere, the language of scholars enables advocacy. My argument invites the reader to be more skeptical about this research.

A final theme implicitly and explicitly contrasts mass amusements to literate clarifications of fascism. In schooling Americans about fascism, entertainment—with a focus on Hollywood—overwhelmed scholarship (such as mine) and at least competed with the politicians in importance. In warning the public about fascism, Sinclair Lewis’s fiction of 1934, It Can’t Happen Here, was more significant than scrutiny of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia of the following year. In 1939 the movie Confessions of a Nazi Spy starring Edgar G. Robinson arguably changed perception as much as did conversation about the Munich Agreement that had occurred eight months before. More than Hillary Clinton’s run for the presidency, I believe, the television series The Handmaid’s Tale that began in 2017 alerted many suburban women to political challenges.

The account begins in the early part of the twentieth century, even before Mussolini engaged American attention during the early 1920s. The first part of the book ends with World War Two and the immediate postwar years. The book’s second part covers the time from the war to the period of Vietnam, civil rights, and student rebellion, and then through the early twenty-first century. The narrative is thus chronological, although only roughly so. In several places I have had to get a little ahead of the history or retrace my steps in providing a proper context, or I have had to make detours to track down puzzling episodes. I have also interrupted the narrative with my best estimate of how to fathom events, especially those about the language of politics. And the last chapter, which makes a stab at explicating the fixation on fascism by examining the fixation on democracy, does not carry my report forward in time but even manages the reverse.

Only a small number of experts knew of some of the arguments about fascism. National officials conducted other dialogues with the educated public. The uneducated public enjoyed varied entertainments, especially the Hollywood motion picture. A web of attitudes encompassing fascism underlay American culture. In inspecting this web and in outlining the connections among experts, politicians, and national pastimes, I have striven for the comprehensive but not the encyclopedic. Yet the story has gaps, and synonyms for the paradoxical litter these pages. I have formulated my own interpretations and conclusions. But readers should take them as tentative, for the central idea has not been to prove a thesis but to show what fascism is. This case study of a significant item in our political thesaurus suggests, to me, the fragility of our grip on a rational understanding of public life. Readers are nonetheless encouraged to arrive at their own views based on the evidence presented.

---

*

I have deliberately not discriminated between mention and use. The reader decides whether to take fascism as the word fascism (mention—bracketed with quotation marks or set in italics) or the politics of fascism (use), or something in between, as perhaps intended by those who employed the language. The same kind of reasoning has led me to forego distinguishing Fascism (typically referring to Mussolini’s regime) from fascism (characteristically a more generic designation).

PART I

1909–49

Why Fascism?

Part 1 surveys fascism during a period that ended in the aftermath of World War Two, a war in which Italy, Germany, and Japan had existentially threatened the United States. During this period of some forty years, fascists had a checkered and complex history. After Mussolini took over Italy during the 1920s, the United States initially honored his regime, and its success caused American intellectuals to look back differently at their own politics of the first decade of the twentieth century. By the late 1930s, however, fascists had become indistinct villains—the noun might apply to anyone but did so with increasing negativity. Then, when the United States entered World War Two, the term was affixed to certain kinds of politicians on the right—it received a more or less secure locus. For some fifteen years, from the early 1930s to the late 1940s, fascism was a way of categorizing at the forefront of collective American brooding, and after that era it remained the word of choice when a certain kind of condemnation was required.¹ Why is it fascism—and not one of the many other items of vilification that came to the lips of Americans during the late 1930s and early 1940s—that has survived for a century?

Mussolini constructed fascism. While Adolf Hitler did not dispute fascism as an approach to understanding his rule in Germany, he did little to exploit it, and the Germans never sought the phraseology. Even scholars know the adherents of National Socialism in Germany as the Nazis. The Germans of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP)—the National Socialist German Workers Party—never employed Nazi, for it was an idiom of reproach. It originated as a colloquial affront for a clumsy peasant. Then, following Sozi to pillory German socialists during the 1920s, Nazi—playing on Nationalsozialistische—mocked that party’s members as repugnant rednecks. Exiles from Germany used the demeaning name after Hitler took over, and then it spread in anti-German lands as the repellent characterization for his government.

Contemporary academics render German documents that mention the NSDAP as Nazi in English. This is extraordinarily prejudicial. We may liken it to a scholar translating the United States in official government texts as AmeriKa (with a K), and about as neutral. So why not latch on to Nazi, at one time as negative as fascist and more conspicuously German, as the pejorative of choice? Or Hitlerism?

During the World War Two period, US policy specialists linked German and Italian ideology to the Japanese. But in Japan itself, the controlling military never had a Western-style name connected to fascism. Tojoism, after Hideki Tojo, the most prominent Japanese leader, never caught on as execration. For Americans, these Asian views were Japanese fascism.

One regime nominated itself as fascism: Italy.² Part of the reason for the later omnipresence of fascism may simply be that the Italians had the name first. For a few years after Hitler rose to command, he was subordinate to Mussolini, and fascism signified the sort of polity that the National Socialists secondarily exemplified. We had a fascist genus and two species in Hitler and Mussolini—and later Japan. Yet these details, I believe, hardly explain why fascism was victorious, especially since, by the mid-1930s, bystanders had often spoofed the Italians as doltish and bungling and not people who incarnated wickedness.

There is no good answer to the question, Why fascism? Nor is it at all clear what fascist had conveyed by the late 1930s. Neither Italians nor Japanese primarily came to mind. Speakers of political English, moreover, did not always think that the non-Italian Caucasians or Nordics referred to were German. Even when words like Nazi or Hitlerite were deployed as a kind of substitute for fascist, they, too, ceased to have an essential connection to Germany. These peculiarities frame the discussion in part 1.

1

Fascism before Fascism, 1909–35

Fascism’s rise to primacy began when knowledgeable Americans initiated discussions comparing America and Italy as soon as Benito Mussolini had taken power in 1922. This dialogue in the United States from the early 1920s to the mid- to late 1930s proceeded in the context of the country’s recent history. First, the emergence of the third-party populists—the Peoples Party—at the end of the nineteenth century, and especially the 1896 election, when they gave votes to Democrat William Jennings Bryan. Next, the rise of another third party, the Progressive Party, that former Republican Theodore Roosevelt created for a second presidential run in 1912. Finally, context included the resurgence of conservative Republicanism in 1919–20, after World War One, when the Senate rejected Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations. These earlier events determined how Americans understood what was going on in Continental Europe from the 1920s till the late 1930s.¹

The Structure of American Politics

After the Civil War, the Republicans—the Grand Old Party, or GOP—dominated national life. The Democrats had two more or less suspect wings—former plantation Confederates in the South and mainly Irish immigrants in the North. Associated with Thomas Jefferson, a vague ideology of liberalism that honored the autonomy of small communities and some toleration for difference barely kept these wings together. The Democratic Party hardly ever secured a national majority. In 1896 William Jennings Bryan, an agricultural spokesman, gained the Democrats’ nomination, though he frightened northerners. Joining Democrats was the new and edgy Peoples Party. These southern and midwestern populists represented the economically and politically dispossessed in farming communities. Some of the populist-inclined electorate dreamed about a winning alliance with the metropolitan poor. The Peoples Party might link farmers and workers, and Jeffersonian liberalism might legitimate this link. But such a coalition of producers never took place. Although rural areas were more formidable than districts of northeastern laborers, some of whom were in unions, the two constituencies could neither coalesce nor individually challenge the status quo. The fused Democrats and Peoples Party lost to the Republican, William McKinley, for whom many people in the cities voted.

Scholars have deemed 1896 a critical election. Modern businessmen and sometimes a genteel reformism, mainly Republican, dominated politics for the next thirty-five years. Militants who claimed to act for workers and who advocated the transformation of capitalism played less than a major role. Agrarian Democrats were permanently detoured, although for a time populism lived on in American belief as a purveyor of social democracy and as a threat to an unjust standing order. More important, some politicians who labeled themselves populists later contended that they were like Mussolini, and even later the American populists were analogized to the Italian fascists.

Voters reelected McKinley in 1900, but in September of 1901, just after taking office for the second time, he was killed by an assassin. Theodore Roosevelt, whom the Republicans had put on the ticket as vice president in June of 1900, was elevated to the presidency when he was just forty-two years old. A wealthy graduate of Harvard University, Roosevelt led effectively. He had in him a touch of authoritarian masculinity, having served as New York City’s police commissioner and briefly as an officer during the Spanish-American War of 1898. He also had a dose of self-righteous activism, sure of what government needed to do and convinced that the university-trained should rule. Elected on his own in 1904, he had been in the White House almost eight years by 1908. Satisfied that he had held office for the two stints that George Washington had established as seemly, Teddy Roosevelt—or TR—handed the job over to his selected successor, William Howard Taft. Four years later, disillusioned with Taft, Roosevelt broke with the Republicans and stumped for the presidency as the candidate of a breakaway group, the Progressives. They were composed, in 1912, of that branch of the Republican Party committed to TR’s dynamic programs and others drawn to his charisma. In the future, because of his charm and activism, this Roosevelt would be favorably compared to Mussolini. In the more distant future, TR would be denounced as a fascist.

Roosevelt, however, had split the Republicans. Any satisfactory Democrat could win the election, and Woodrow Wilson did. A professor of politics who had risen to the presidency of Princeton University, Wilson had gained the governor’s office in New Jersey in 1910. He defeated TR and Taft in 1912 and got another four years in 1916.

Standard contrasts illuminated the two men, Roosevelt and Wilson, who defined politics from 1900 to 1920—the warrior and the priest, for example. But they were much alike. With his sanctimonious Calvinist Protestantism, Wilson was styled as ministerial. No less moralistic, Roosevelt practiced a less sectarian Dutch Reformed Protestantism. While Wilson shied away from militarism, his second administration, from 1917 to 1921, revolved around US participation in the world war (World War One), during which time the president brandished a taste for battle. The two leaders moreover operated in a framework of progressivism that TR had explicitly named in a party but that had saturated the atmosphere from before the turn of the century. Progressivism crossed party lines and gave prominence to nationalistically inclined, intellectual leaders. Especially respected by college graduates, such leaders would provide professional management to the country and its economy. Progressivism would soon be compared to fascism.

Roosevelt and Wilson blended old-fashioned Protestant certitude and up-to-date know-how. Among Republicans, TR Progressives contrasted with the Old Guard, the standpatters, or the regulars, exemplified by those who had voted for Taft in 1912. Among Democrats, progressivism diverged from Bryan’s lowbrow enthusiasts and from the more well-thought-of but now-outmoded liberalism attributed to Jefferson. Wilson compromised his party’s traditional beliefs in the rights of the little guys and of the states over the federal government. TR and Wilson cast themselves as wedged between two groups of the uneducated. US industrialism exploited, first, many average Americans; second, rich men, the robber barons like Andrew Carnegie, E. H. Harriman, George Pullman, and John D. Rockefeller, sometimes did the exploiting. Progressives would evenhandedly serve as stewards for the first group and pilots for the second. Each side would get its due from a state that campus learning captained. Again, years after, some commentators would argue that the stronger state under construction was the precondition of fascism in the United States.

The World War

Wilson had progressive domestic commitments in his initial two years, 1913 and 1914. Then, in August of 1914, World War One broke out. From 1915 on, the perils of US neutrality increasingly stalked the president. Germany and Austria-Hungary, the Central Powers, had squared off against England and France, the Allied Powers, who also combined with Russia. Germany and Austria-Hungary thus fought on two fronts, against the Allies in the west and Russia in the east. The conflict caught up many other nations, but Americans worried most about the western front, a long battlefield running through Belgium and France. The English and French to the west, and the Germans to the east, slaughtered one another. More momentous for the United States, the British navy cut off supplies over the Atlantic to Germany, and the Germans retaliated with a new weapon, the submarine, that might attack surface ships swiftly and stealthily. As a leading maritime power, the United States could not avoid serious issues and tilted toward the English. It traded with Britain, allowed that country to thwart shipping to Germany, and denied the legitimacy of the German U-boats. Commerce and travel made for dilemmas that propelled the United States to combat. Despite his holier-than-thou persona, however, the president wanted to keep the nation out of the fighting. Although events and his preachiness pushed Wilson toward belligerency in a 1916 campaign of preparedness, he resisted Teddy Roosevelt, who led confrontational Republicans. They questioned the president’s manhood, begged to engage the Germans, and exuded more public testosterone than Wilson. In any event, continued encounters over the US role in the Atlantic resulted in a declaration of war against Germany in the spring of 1917. The United States associated itself with the grateful Allies in the west and connected with the Russians.

In 1917 the president worried that shedding blood in France would awaken a US frenzy. But he launched a crusade against the Germans and lifted his fellow citizens into vehement patriotism. Wilson’s soaring slogans stirred fury against the enemy, while he only half-heartedly attempted to check the fury unleashed. If the president did not provoke the curtailment of civil liberties, he stood by as the White House incited a narrow love of country. Indeed, he shared the passions he had stimulated. From the view of America, it had gotten into the conflict in the nick of time and had brought the Germans to their knees. They had signed an agreement with Russia on the eastern front and had turned all their forces west for an assault that came in March of 1918. The advance stalled east of Paris, with Germany now fighting the United States. Because of America, said the Americans, the enemy retreated from France and surrendered in November of 1918.

Although it was implicit earlier in US foreign affairs, Wilsonianism articulated the first rationale for a planetary, missionary diplomacy, and through 1919 Wilson worked to realize his agenda. His speeches inspired people everywhere. He formulated policies that would carry progressivism forward overseas. Just as politicians with a thoughtful bent could right wrongs in America, so, too, they could fashion a more reasonable international order—or so the president and his party reasoned. An unselfish worldview guided an America opposed to despotic and dictatorial rulers with voiceless publics. On the contrary, the United States most perfectly represented democracy, a morally superior regime indebted to England, but one more genuine than that which existed there. America would make the world safe for democracy.

The Great War, the war to end all wars, would eventuate in a novel organization guaranteeing that no future bloodshed occurred. The peace conference at Versailles outside Paris constructed this brainchild of Wilson’s, a League of Nations, to secure inclusive amity. The colonial system of Europe would end, and in its place a fraternity of ethnically homogeneous states would arise. Wilson lectured on the morally right in resolving all the muddles that had brought on the war. Nonetheless, historians have mainly judged the Versailles Conference a failure. Wilson managed only a settlement that held Germany guilty and penalized it for causing the conflict. Then, a reaction set in to the United States’ entry into the war and to its enhanced role around the world. The president’s ideas did not long convince the electorate, and the US Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles that would have brought America into the League. Wilson, who had endured a stroke during his attempt to have the institution approved in 1919, left office in 1921 a broken man.

By the early 1920s, the United States had returned to normalcy. After the GOP presidential victory in 1920, less-sermonizing politicians exhibited more cynicism than Wilson. The progressive belief in the executive declined. Observers thought inserting the United States into Europe had been a mistake, and Americans suspected the British, who had inveigled America to their side. During the 1920s and 1930s, a perception of the fiasco of Wilson’s effort and of the unfairness of the Versailles Treaty reinforced apprehensions about America’s ability to influence events abroad positively, and Democrats had the burden of defending Wilson. Yet his notions about an enlarged responsibility for the United States around the world lingered, as did those about an international community that would enforce order. Foreign policy gurus debated these concepts for two decades, and many revered the heroic if crushed former president.

We gauge Wilson’s accountability with difficulty. What his administration wanted to happen did not; and things that Wilson surely did not want to happen did. In the end, he made the choices, and is implicated in the sequels—intended and unintended—of his commitment. Had he not delivered the United States to involvement in the war, it was argued, the conflict might have ended in a stalemate. National Socialism, the product of Germany’s humiliating defeat, might never have arisen. Had Wilson