Through War & Peace

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security. He insisted that only Democrats could properly support his efforts of war & peace in Congress. Churchill said of him: "If Wilson had been either simply an idealist or a caucus politician, he might have succeeded. His attempt to run the two in double harness was the cause of his undoing . . . That was his ruin, and the ruin of much else as well. It is difficult for a man to do great things if he tries to combine a lambent charity embracing the whole world with the sharper forms of populist party strife."

Churchill played no great part in the Peace Conference. He deplored its failure to make peace on the principles he had recommended for the Boer War. The terms the victors gave Germany were neither generous nor safe. Churchill called the reparation clauses "malignant and silly."

The Allies made him their agent in an effort to crush the Bolsheviks. It would not have been a difficult job then; the Reds controlled only about 20% of the Czar's old territories. But the world was sick of war. Communists led a mutiny in a French fleet sent to the Black Sea to help the Russian Whites. After a desultory struggle, which Churchill called "a war of few casualties and unnumbered executions," the Allies gave up and the Communists won by default. Not their own strength, but the weakness and indecision of their enemies brought them to power and saved their skins.

The Demon Rum.

In a sense Europe never recovered from World War I. The old sense of unity, stability and confidence had been buried in the trenches. The U.S. went through a similar experience. In the midst of prosperity greater than it had ever known, it began to doubt itself more deeply than ever before. The political muckrakers of Teddy Roosevelt's day had been succeeded by a brilliant group of muckrakers of the spirit. Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passes, Ernest Hemingway asserted the barrenness and hypocrisy of American life.

The weird controversy over Prohibition contributed to American disunity and self-doubt. Prohibition had not been solely the achievement of frustrated rural preachers, as H. L. Mencken & friends suggested. It had substantial support among industrialists, social workers, educators. Harvard's Charles W. Eliot at the age of 90 wrote in 1924: "I have become convinced that cheap alcohol threatens the existence of the white race." He especially decried the combination of alcohol and prostitution "resulting from the brothel or from the newer method of telephone assignation." Probably, in 1920, a majority of thoughtful Americans believed that Prohibition would work. It did, for a while. Its success had been connected with the war-born idea that governments were responsible for everything and could do everything; its failure came out of a war-born loosening of discipline and a more feverish tempo of life.

F. Scott Fitzgerald and the newspaper moralists described the '203 as one long drunken stagger. The actuality was considerably less lurid. The '203 played golf, listened to the radio and sang When My Baby Smiles at Me, It Ain't Gonna Rain No More, and I'm Sitting on Top of the World. More solid suburban homes than silver hip flasks were sold in that decade. Even so, the fact that millions of Americans believed that millions of others were living in Babylonian depravity helped to undermine moral