1919 ★^775of the Irish Free State, while continuing to rule the northeastern corner of the
island. As for the Japanese proposal to establish the principle of racial equality,
Wilson, with the support of Great Britain and Australia, engineered its defeat.
The Seeds of Wars to Come
Du Bois, as noted above, hoped that black participation in the war effort would
promote racial justice at home and self- government for colonies abroad. “We
return,” he wrote in The Crisis in May 1919, “we return from fighting, we return
fighting. Make way for Democracy!” But the war’s aftermath both in the United
States and overseas left him bitterly disappointed. Du Bois concluded that
Wilson had “never at any single moment meant to include in his democracy”
black Americans or the colonial peoples of the world. “Most men today,” he
complained, “cannot conceive of a freedom that does not involve somebody’s
slavery.” In 1903, in The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois had made the memorable
prediction that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the
color- line.” He now forecast a “fight for freedom” that would pit “black and
brown and yellow men” through-
out the world against racism and
imperialism.
Disappointment at the failure
to apply the Fourteen Points to the
non- European world created a perva-
sive cynicism about Western use of
the language of freedom and democ-
racy. Wilson’s apparent willingness
to accede to the demands of the impe-
rial powers helped to spark a series of
popular protest movements across
the Middle East and Asia, and the rise
of a new anti- Western nationalism.
It inspired the May 4 movement in
China, a mass protest against the deci-
sion at the Versailles peace conference
to award certain German concessions
(parts of China governed by foreign
powers) to Japan. Some leaders, like
Nguyen That Thanh, who took the
name Ho Chi Minh, turned to commu-
nism, in whose name he would lead
Vietnam’s long and bloody struggle
for independence. With the collapse of
Why was 1919 such a watershed year for the United States and the world?Mahatma Gandhi, pictured here in 1919, became
the leader of the nonviolent movement for
independence for India. He was among those
disappointed by the failure of the Versailles
peace conference to apply the principle of
self- determination to the colonial world.