By Michael F. Duggan
The First World War was the most seminal event of modern history. To this day it pays dividends.
The Russian Revolution and Civil War (and thus the rise of Marxist-Leninism), the rise of fascism—and thus the Spanish Civil War and Italian adventures in Africa in the 1930s, and a far more destructive Second World War (and Holocaust) ending with the use of atomic weapons—the Cold War with all of its brushfire wars, and the Islamic Revolution are all the spawn of the Great War. To understand the far-reaching influence of the war, one need only consider that the borders of modern Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria were drawn at Versailles—drawn with little or no sensitivity to ethnic or religious distinctions in the region. There was also a delegation from French Indochina that petitioned for the rights of the Vietnamese people at Versailles. The young man who presented the petition would later call himself Hồ Chí Minh. He was roundly snubbed by Wilson and by the other leaders of the great Western powers.
Before the onset of the pandemic, I bought a used copy Witness to a Century, the memoir of George Seldes, a remarkable American journalists whose life spanned the 20th century. Born in Pennsylvania in 1890, he lived to be 104. He covered Theodore Roosevelt’s visit to Pittsburgh in 1910. He published his memoir in 1987.
Seldes was thrown out of the Soviet Union by Lenin, thrown out of Italy by Mussolini, and thrown out of a hotel room by William Jennings Bryan, who he had caught wearing long underwear (complete with a flap in the back) while trying to get an interview as a cub reporter. He knew or met virtually everybody and the index of his book is like a Who’s Who of the 20th century. Like a good reporter, he seemed to be everywhere at the right time. He was with Lincoln Steffens in a bar during the Genoa Conference of April 1922 (a follow-up to Versailles), where they taught a young Ernest Hemingway an abbreviated style of writing for the wire services called “cablese.”1 Even if his name is unfamiliar to you, you might have caught a fleeting glimpse of him as one of the witnesses in the movie Reds. One of his few lines is near the beginning of the film: “Jack [Reed]… Well, I wouldn’t call him a playboy, but some people did.”
Recently I picked up his book again and found him to be a lively, amusing, and insightful writer. I would like to think that he never reported to the Kremlin—he sometimes spoke out against the American Communist Party. But who knows what a progressive journalist might have done as a young man.
Seldes tells an amazing story about how he crossed the lines on the Western Front at the end of WWI, went to Kassel and conducted an exclusive interview the German Chief of Staff, Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg. During the interview, Hindenburg is supposed to have said that, militarily speaking, it was the American infantry in the Argonne that had been the decisive factor in Germany’s defeat. After that the general broke down in tears.
When Seldes crossed back to the Allied side, Pershing and his censors detained him and would not let him send the story or even write about the incident. Of this he writes:
“If the Hindenburg confession had been passed by Pershing’s (stupid) censors at that time, it would have been headlined in every country civilized enough to have newspapers, and undoubtedly would have made a lasting impression on millions of people and become an important page in history; and I believe it would have destroyed the main planks of the platform on which Hitler rose to power, it would have prevented World War II, the greatest and worst war in all history, and it would have changed the future of all mankind.”2
Would Hindenburg’s admission of the defeat of the Imperial German Army in the field have stopped the “stab in the back” narrative in its tracks? Hard to say. To his eternal dishonor, Hindenburg never publicly repeated his admission, and in fact was a progenitor of the stab in the back myth.
Seldes might have been naïve in thinking that a single news story, even an important one, would have detailed a major current of history and prevented the rise of the Third Reich. Hitler and his thugs would have still issued their false narrative and would have called his story a lie (Seldes was Jewish, so a denial of the story would have fit in with Hitler’s phobic view of the world and would have found a ready audience in those who followed him).
We will never know if Seldes’s Story of the Century would have guided that century in a more peaceful direction. At the very least, we can say that the world would have probably been a better place if it had know that the German Chief of Staff knew that his armies had been defeated militarily and not stabbed in the back on the home front. And it might have prevented the largest war in history.
Notes
- George Seldes, Witness to a Century, Encounters with the Noted, the Notorious, and the Three SOBs (New York: Ballantine Books 1987) 311-313. Denis Brian, The True Gen, an Intimate Portrait of Hemingway by Those Who knew Him (New York: Grove Press 1988) 37.
- Seldes, Witness to a Century, 100.