Customer Reviews

Politics of War: The Story of Two Wars Which Altered Forever the Political Life of the American Republic

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This is one of the best history books I have read in a long time.The first part of the book is about America's involvment in the Spanish American War and is very interesting,but it is the rest of the book,which deals with America's long slide into WWI that makes the book great.Karp totally demolishes all the old fairy tales about "peace loving" Woodrow Wilson being reluctantly forced into declaring war on Germany in 1917.Instead we see a Wilson who worked tirelessly for three years to drag the US into the war against the wishes of the vast majority of his nation's people.As Karp shows,Wilson and his ambassador in England,Walter Hines Page,virtually committed treason in their efforts to get the US into the war,routinely ignoring British violations of America's neutral rights and generaly putting the interests of England ahead of their own nation.The resistance of the American people was able to block Wilson's ambitions for almost three years,but in the end the wishes of the people didn't matter and the politicians(plus the press and Wall Street) got the war they had been hoping for.Sounds familiar doesn't it?

This book is most provocative in its treatment of the generally revered Woodrow Wilson and the story of how (according to Karp) he cynically engineered our entry into WW I, motivated by Anglophilia and a messianic (and in Karp's view delusional) conviction that he could bring a new era of peace and justice to the world.

A number of books have made similar allegations about FDR and our entry into WW II, but at the end of the day, who cares? Does anyone really think the world would be a better place if the U.S. had stayed out of World War II?

WW I was quite a different kettle of fish, as Karp points out. It was not in any way clear that the U.S. had something to gain from involving itself in a sordid struggle in which neither side held the moral high ground. And Karp argues rather convincingly that Wilson was played for a fool -- he tipped the balance to Britain's Lloyd George and France's Clemenceau, only to see these enormously cynical and skillful politicians torpedo his "just peace" in favor of viciously punitive terms which ultimately led to the rise of Adolph Hitler.

Karp also discusses Wilson's suppression of free speech and his aggressive use of propaganda in favor of the war effort.

Karp was a frequent contributor to Harper's magazine who unfortunately died quite young a number of years ago. This little-known book should be read by anyone interested in America in the WW I era and in the development of modern American political culture. It's also worth studying if you want to understand better why U.S. public opinion was so resolutely isolationist up until the attack on Pearl Harbor. Wilson got his war, but the experience left a very bad taste in the mouth of the American public.

Karp, author of the brilliant book Indispensable Enemies, comes through again in this fascinating history book. Karp's underlying premise is that polticians start wars to destroy internal reforms wanted by the people. Here he shows how the Progressive movement was stymied by the Democrats and Republicans, with war as their chosen instrument.

Part I is a history of the Spanish-American War and here Karp shows how both parties colluded to bring on an unnecessary war. He firmly disagrees with the traditional historians who blame the war on the press. Part II continues this analysis, applied this time to the years leading up to another unnecessary war, World War I. Karp shows how Wilson drags the country into war, while all the time talking of peace. Once again the motivation is the same: thwart reform at home. Once the war has begun, Wilson uses the fake threat of German treachery to suppress the press and free speech of the American public. The last chapter is particularly chilling, as Karp gives the example of a woman jailed for saying the government is for the profiteers.

No political history has ever been done better. I am proud to give this book a 5 star rating and encourage anyone interested in history or politics to read this book.

Walter Karp's "The Politics of War" is simply the most concise and powerful study in history I've ever read. Simply by sticking to the premise that history is made not by anonymous "forces" but by men of power acting out of self-interest, Karp turns stuff that was frankly dull in your high school textbooks - you remember the names: the Progressive Era, the gold standard, William Jennings Bryan, the Lusitania - into something not only gripping, but eerily reminiscent of what our nation is currently experiencing. Karp's portrait of Woodrow Wilson as a self-deluded, self-righteous, vainglorious would-be messiah determined to drag an unwilling nation into war to suit his own dreams of glory is especially powerful and damning.

The final chapter, "The Old America That Was Free and Is Now Dead," is simply the most powerful piece of writing I've ever read in a nonfiction work, comparable only to the conclusion of Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem." No one could ever accuse Walter Karp of hating his country; he hated what a few people had done to it, and that, as all too many would like us to forget these days, is something very different.

Walter Karp's "The Politics Of War" is simply an outstanding read.Karp analyses America's shift from continental republic to global power in the light of three major incidents, the now little known Venezuela border dispute of the Cleveland administration, the Spanish-American War under McKinley and the Great War under Wilson.

Karp's provides a unique "Jeffersonian" political framework for his analysis of each event. But you need to check out domestic politics before you dive into international diplomacy, or lack of diplomacy. Karp puts the rise of the permanent politcal party machines and their favoured 'machine politicians' in the foreground of his analysis. These are what, I believe, the Founding Fathers called "factions" and hoped to innoculate their child from. Karp sees America's traditional system of democratic republicanism, based on grassroots self government, as challenged and compromised by the new machine forces.

The party machines' interests are not just party politics. They dominated and reshaped the economic system, exaggerating if not seeding, whatever monopolistic tendencies were already inherent in the system. As old school western states Progressives would say "tariffs are the mother of trusts". And party machines are the father of tariffs and associated public sector goodies. Karp sees the party machines as developing an economic spoils system of sorts with direct, indirect, open and hidden spoils. But it's not just (or even mainly) about economics, it is politics that rules.

The 19th century Democrats in Karp's view were not so much a "do nothing" party because they supported laisser faire, although Cleveland, was genuine. The "do nothing" umbrella enabled them to patch together an electoral coalition of Southern rural voters and big city ethnics. The Do Nothing program was the minimum program they could agree on, ...that and opposition to the GOP. Karp however goes deeper than electoral analysis.

The party machines had their own interests and more often than not the main threat came from insurgent forces from within their own parties. And as insurgencies often crossed formal party lines, the party machines thus often had more in common with each other than with their insurgent rivals. This could lead to elections being thrown, electoral defeat being a superior outcome for the machine than losing control of the party reins. That in summary provides the skeleton of Karp's political analysis.

Fleshing it out, Karp sees the two wars and the one war threat in question as outcomes of this insurgent / counter-insurgent battle at the heart of American party politics. Each of the three incidents reflects a campaign by machines and machine politicians to maintain or wrest control of the party apparatus from Populists (in the Venezuela case) and Progressives (in the Spanish American and Great War cases). The final case, Wilson's war, more or less ends the old republican system with a new more degraded era to follow.

There are several points of criticism we can make of Karp's machine centric approach. For example historians like Kolko on the left and Rothbard on the right have pursued revisionist takes of the Progressive movement which make it seem not quite as virginal in origin and spirit as Karp maintains. Where Karp sees grassroots, the revisionists see astro-turf. Still as anyone with a real lawn knows it's hard to keep grass prisitine even with constant care. Karp, at least, helps promote an alternative perspective different from the usual quasi-marxist (even when pursued by anti-marxist) focus on big business. In Karp's model big business interests are sometimes paying clients, sometimes old and preferred clients, of the machines but never really their masters.

Karp makes some interesting observations I had never considered before. Jim Crow never really got established in the South until the Spanish American War. Before then the old post Civil War based party system meant that the Republicans would block it, the war by sidelining the populist and progressive internal Republican opposition made a sell-out of southern African Americans (and poor rural Southerners in general) to the "bourdon" southern Democrat machines possible. So much for the wonders of political consensus.

Karp's analysis of course has relevance today. After one "divisive" and war-like Republican president we now have a "new era" of "Hope". However the hopee emerges from one of the most notorious political machines in the country. Karp, were he alive, would, I suspect, not only smell a rat.

All that being said, it's not Karp's analytical model that is the real gem of this book. It is his writing style and flair for presentation. His writing is frankly magnificent and sets a high benchmark for non-fiction authors of all stamps to better. In his discussion of Wilson (who Karp skewers mercilessly) he maintains a pace and tempo during his unfolding of the schemes and snares of the Wilson war party to drag a wholly anti-interventionist public into the European slaughterhouse that is frankly edge of your seat exciting. You know how it ends but he keeps you guessing through to the back page. This is simply just great writing.

Karp worked as a journalist contributor for "Harpers" for many years until his 1989 death. He developed his own unique brand of "left Jeffersonian" political critique through this and other books. Perhaps his closest surviving peer, in terms of his politics, is Gore Vidal. Even if you disagree with his analysis there is much to learn from and to be entertained and illuminated by from Karp's writing here. Highly recommended.

Walter Karp's book on the birth of American Empire is a clear presentation on how politicians could take the American public's eyes off the domestic maladies of country and turn them to affairs overseas. At 350 pages, the book is well presented in terms of sarcastic wit which the author derides major political figures from Grover Cleveland to Woodrow Wilson. For example when it looked as if Wilson was not going to able to fool the American public into World War I, the author states that the country was at the brink of peace.

The idea of continued "manifest destiny" was the motivation behind our attempt to establish footholds in far flunged places in the world with our war with Spain which had long since been on the decline. While the intent of the Spanish-American War was ostensibly for the purpose of establishing a free republic in Cuba, the reality was that it would dominate Cuba for its resources as well as put down a nascent independence movement in the Phillipines in order to establish a foothold in the Far East and have a say in China.

Karp's saves his special condemnation for Woodrow Wilson, who was described as a man who would wanted to be the saviour of the world, but in the end became a prisoner of his own nefarious devices and was literally a burnt out man by the time he left office in 1921. The main thrust of the book in the end was that the twin wars against Spain in 1898 and the Central Powers in 1917 and 1918 meant the destruction of the Republic as we knew it and became an empire dominated by corporate and oligarchical interests that would control the nation unto this day. Karp did not hold out promise for the continued survival of this nation. Randolph Bourne said that war was the health of the state. Walter Karp gives credence to that statement with a good amount of end notes and a good bibliography.

A sober read for those who think that the government cares for them...it does not.

As an avid armchair historian I found this book hard to put down. It can be very dense and I admit to skimming some passages in the beginning, but after that I read it word for word with great enthusiasm. It really gave me the feeling that I had been there and could feel the spirit of the times. There is dry recitation of the facts and there is over dramatizing too, this book has none of that. It is first and foremost lucid analysis.

I never totally bought into the myth that Woodrow Wilson did everything he could to keep us out of war. But, before reading this book, on the recommendation of a commenter to another review of mine, I didn't realize that, instead, he did everything he could to drag us into that war, and was doing that long before he was successful.

That said, my eyes were actually even more opened as to the Machiavellian character of William McKinley. Far from circumstances forcing us into war with Spain over Cuba, he was pushing that angle as soon as he was inaugurated. AND, already then, looking at the Philippines as well. Karp argues it's precisely that, and related things, that led him to appoint TR as assistant secretary of the navy.

And, since Wilson couldn't have pulled off his degree of international meddling without McKinley doing it before him, McKinley is worse in some ways.

That said, Karp's contrarian take digs deep. He also notes that Wilson was far from being a progressive, including on the allegedly progressive creation of the Federal Reserve.

The one thing I found missing, if you will, is that I would have liked even more background from Karp on his take on the populist movement/People's Party.

"In American history the years from 1890 to 1920 have often been called the age of reform. Those same years might with equal propriety be called the age of war."

So begins The Politics of War, Walter Karp's brilliant revisionist history that boldly challenges conventional interpretations of the Progressive Era. Karp, whose savage honesty and steadfast refusal to genuflect before the altars of power are refreshing to discover in a work of historical scholarship, exposes the exalted legacies of American political leaders such as McKinley, Roosevelt, and especially Wilson as being predicated on laudatory falsehoods, akin not to elegant statues of marble or granite but rather to crude butter sculptures which Karp gleefully destroys with sharp precision and fiery wit.

Karp's primary argument is The Politics of War is that the repudiation of America's tradition of non-intervention at the turn of the century and its subsequent adoption of an imperialist military policy represented a deliberate strategy by ruling political elites--the party oligarchies--to consolidate their authority and privilege and to divert attention away from domestic concerns. "For one thing," Karp argues, an aggressively interventionist foreign policy "would change--and change fundamentally--the question before the country. An electorate growing restive over economic conditions would find its attention riveted to the spectacle of America's overseas power and pursuits, its republican sentiments diluted and deformed by jingo nationalism, its political energies absorbed by overseas problems and perplexities" (12). If Karp is perhaps guilty of overstating the republican nature of earlier American society, presenting a somewhat idealized view of the past prior to the decades on which he focuses, it is impossible to argue with his criticism that the McKinley and Wilson administrations--and the party machines that supported them--were especially egregious. If their jinoistic projects did not represent an absolute break with the past, they were at least an extreme advancement that cemeted America's status as an imperialist and anti-republican power.

Where Karp's book shines with the greatest luminosity is in its treatment of President Wilson. Most professional historians fall into the trap of treating presidents and other major public figures with sycophantic reverence, authoring veritable hagiographies that gloss over their moral failings and present to readers mere sanitized caricatures. Even worse, historians often abdicate their responsibilities by distorting the past in such a way as to heroize the unheroic, mindlessly embracing rather than refuting pernicious myths that become ingrained in the public consciousness. Perhaps no better example of this tendency exists than in the standard historical accounts of the vaunted President Woodrow Wilson, a man who has come to be regarded as a courageous leader, an avid liberal reformer, and an idealistic and principled man of peace who was dragged unwillingly into war.

But Karp, who never fell prey to the fatuous illusions of his colleagues, cast Woodrow Wilson in a very different light. He describes Wilson as a "man of high ideals but no principles," a man who self-servingly connived to placate the Progressive movement by pursuing weak and trivial reforms--nothing more than scraps from his presidential table--and who engineered America's entry into the Great War, openly flouting a public that wished to avoid it, through a policy of "imperfect neutrality" and through backroom machinations with British diplomats in order to satisfy his own egotistical desire for glory. Karp, whose prose stylings would make even the most accomplished writers seethe with jealousy, describes Wilson as follows (150-51):

"What lay at the core of Wilsons' political character was neither Presbyterianism nor even Christianity. Strictly speaking, it is anti-Christian and it is as old as politics itself. The decisive trait of Wilson's political character was vainglory: a hunger for glory so exclusively self-regarding, so indifferent to the concerns of others, that it would lead him to betray in turn the national movement for reform, the great body of the American people, the fundamental liberties of the American Republic, and in the end the hopes of a war-torn world. Had he not been a devout Presbyterian, Wilson would still have been a vainglorious leader; had he not been vainglorious, he would not have been Woodrow Wilson."

Karp argues that President Wilson, who has been canonized as a liberal idol and a torchbearer for progressivism, was ultimately the figure who drove the final nail in the coffin of America's republican traditions and its values-of distrust of oligarchy and arbitrary private power; of the importance of democracy and dissent; and of opposition to enervating entanglements in foreign conflicts. Karp writes that it was Wilson who, by manuevering America into a war of unthinkable brutality, by quashing with an iron fist any public display of dissent, and by inextricably tying patriotism with loyalty to the president and portraying noble opposition as base treason, dramatically and permanently altered the American Republic for the worse. To once again quote Karp at length (331):

"The sheer fact of war was shattering in itself. Deaf to the trumpets and the fanfare, the great mass of Americans entered the war apathetic, submissive, and bitter. Their honest sentiments had been trodden to the ground, their judgment derided, their interests ignored. Representative government had failed them at every turn. A President, newly reelected, had betrayed his promise to keep the peace. Congress, self-emasculated, had neither checked nor balanced nor even seriously questioned the pretexts and pretensions of the nation's chief executive. The free press had shown itself to be manifestly unfree-a tool of the powerful and a voice of the "interests."...Never did the powerful in America seem so willful, so wanton, or so remote from popular control as they did the day war with Germany began. On that day Americans learned a profoundly embittering lesson: They did not count. Their very lives hung in the balance and still they did not count. That bitter lesson was itself profoundly corrupting, for it transformed citizens into cynics, filled free men with self-loathing, and drove millions into privacy, apathy, and despair."

It is the mark of a great historian that he or she is able not only to make the concerns of the past relevant, but to make them timeless, and Walter Karp's book is as relevant now as it was when it was written as it will likely be fifty years from now. The insidious problems that plague the festering corpse of the Republic--oligarchy, greed, and a representative government that represents only its own interests and that of the wealthy and powerful--persist unabated. It is for this reason that The Politics of War is a vital and penetrating work, a masterpiece of truth-telling inconvenient to those whose only goal in life is to consolidate their authority at the expense of the public good and to those who slavishly devote themselves to power in the sanguine hope that they may make a feast out of the crumbs of their "betters." If the majority of historians and journalists were endowed with the intellect, the integrity, and the moral vision of Walter Karp, then perhaps there would still be some hope left for us.

I am a student of history and enjoyed this book. It gives a real good look at behind the scene at political manipulation on a national level and you can draw comparisons to the present administration.