100 e lusive v ictories
Very much wedded to the prevailing racial assumptions of his age, he
did not believe non-white colonial subjects were yet ready to fully
manage their own aff airs. He also saw that his ideas about a new kind
of international order enjoyed growing popular support in the Allied
nations, especially in Great Britain. Possibly the president concluded
that it would suffi ce to let those ideas percolate, generating a ground-
swell of support that would compel Allied leaders to yield at the
eventual peace conference.
Wilson’s decision not to initiate conversations with the Allies about
peace terms in early 1918 carried a risk: he left unresolved important
differences about territorial settlements, responsibilities for war
damages, and other issues. Only when an armistice was under consid-
eration in October 1918 would it become clear that the British and
French had only seemed to bless the Fourteen Points and Wilson’s
subsequent elaborations. How they might be induced to accept his
transformative vision of a postwar settlement remained uncertain.
Mobilizing a Nation for Modern War
Th e United States went to war in 1917 with a tiny regular army inca-
pable of making even the slightest mark on the European battlefi eld.
Designed as a glorifi ed constabulary to maintain security on the nation’s
borders and in its recently acquired overseas possessions, the U.S. Army
struggled to meet even those tasks. A punitive expedition against the
Mexican rebel leader Pancho Villa, with fewer than 5,000 men, had
taxed the army’s capacity, forcing Wilson to call up National Guard
units in 1916 to watch the southern border. Th is action revealed in turn
the wretched state of the American militia force.
About the best that could be said of the entire preparedness debate
was that it had accustomed American citizens to the idea of a mass
army and compulsory military service. Th e administration’s quick
decision to embrace conscription met with no serious political oppo-
sition, an interesting contrast to the Union experience in the Civil War,
and by mid-May 1917, Congress had approved enabling legislation. In
terms of equipment, the army found itself with no tanks or gas masks,
few aircraft, little artillery or ammunition for it, and obsolete machine
guns. American offi cers also lacked fi rsthand knowledge of battlefi eld