"A dazzling achievement." — Steve Forbes, Editor in Chief, Forbes Media
“Woodrow Wilson, the liberal idealist, and Vladimir Lenin, the illiberal totalitarian, hand-in-glove unwound the old nineteenth-century order and redefined war as an existential and global struggle over ideas—with disastrous twentieth-century results. In yet another well-written and fascinating dual biography, the prolific and insightful historian Arthur Herman shows how Wilson’s naive good intentions and Lenin’s deliberate ruthlessness nonetheless had the same pernicious effect of using the state to defy human nature. A fascinating and entirely original explanation of the American and Russian origins of the modern world.” — Victor Davis Hanson, Senior Fellow, the Hoover Institution, Stanford University
“The pairing of these two diametrically opposed figures into one biography makes this illuminating read for anybody interested in World War I, the new political order it spawned, and the failures that led to the rise of Nazism and the horrors of World War II.” — Library Journal
"Deeply researched and engagingly written, this is a gripping account of great battles won and lost, of a triumphant war followed by a failed peace, and of clashing ideologies that shaped a century." — Robert Kagan, author of The World America Made
Arthur Herman writes with the artistic gifts of a novelist, and 1917 breaks new ground, plowing up the seminal event of the twentieth century, World War I. In his unique telling of this tale, the spotlight of interpretation falls on Vladimir Lenin and Woodrow Wilson, the former a Russian ideologue of violent Bolshevik revolution, the latter an American academic ideologue of peaceful ‘progressive’ revolution. As the author makes clear, both millenarian politicians are determined to rule their revolutions, and to bend the existing social order to their abstract, even utopian, ideals.
Woodrow Wilson, the liberal idealist, and Vladimir Lenin, the illiberal totalitarian, hand-in-glove unwound the old nineteenth-century order and redefined war as an existential and global struggle over ideas—with disastrous twentieth-century results. In yet another well-written and fascinating dual biography, the prolific and insightful historian Arthur Herman shows how Wilson’s naive good intentions and Lenin’s deliberate ruthlessness nonetheless had the same pernicious effect of using the state to defy human nature. A fascinating and entirely original explanation of the American and Russian origins of the modern world.
Arthur Herman’s parallel biography of Lenin and Wilson will make the reader stop and think — about the great man theory of history and the cataclysmic events of 1917. Analyzing their legacies, Herman issues a clarion call for us to cast a wary eye on ideologues who want to remake the world, in 2017 as in 1917.
‘The wars of peoples,’ predicted Winston Churchill in 1901, ‘will be more terrible than those of kings.’ Arthur Herman has brilliantly identified the moment that that prediction came true, only sixteen years later. In his gripping account of the pivotal year 1917 – as seen through the world-changing decisions of its two crucial protagonists VI Lenin and Woodrow Wilson – Herman shows how Total War descended on Mankind, how ideology trumped the old European kingly concepts of Realpolitik, and how competing beliefs about dictatorship and democracy would lead to an even bloodier conflict only two decades later.
Until the calamities of 1939−45 prompted a name change, what we now call World War I was known as either the Great War or, wishfully, the War to End All Wars. A century later, it looks more like the true Mother of All Wars, including how its Ottoman Empire sideshow -- a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia and all that -- created the modern Middle East. This may explain why the big cataclysm's centennial commemorations from 2014 on have been so short on zest. We don't much mind honoring gory history so long as its upheavals feel safely remote from civilization's settled, confident present. That's hardly the situation here, though -- not with the prospect of another showdown as mindless as the one set off by Archduke Ferdinand's assassination in 1914 crisping the air everywhere from Donald Trump's Washington to Pyongyang and Tehran. No longer a quaint business featuring spike-helmeted kaisers, khaki puttees, herky-jerky silent films, and "It's a Long Way to Tipperary," World War I looks increasingly like our own anxious era's origin story. Welcome to the overarching premise of Arthur Herman's 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder. It stands out in the glut of revisionist histories timed to World War I's 100th anniversary, not least because it's a terrific read. Even when you want to quarrel with Herman's interpretations, he's a whiz at organizing his complicated materials for maximum narrative clarity and dramatic effect. His provocative pairing of Lenin, the Soviet Union's inventor, with Woodrow Wilson, the most intransigently high-minded of U.S. presidents, as the joint architects of the chaotic planet we know today is never boring, no matter how irritated you may be by his ambition to turn "Tommy and Volodya" (one of his breezier chapter titles) into unwitting kindred spirits. The way they're portrayed here, it's only a slight exaggeration to say there are moments when only Lenin's goatee and Wilson's silk topper will keep you able to tell them apart. Lenin struggled to turn post-Romanov Russia into the unlikely starter wife for his fantasy of worldwide proletarian revolution, while Wilson, maybe even more imaginatively, tried to repurpose the Western Front's barbaric slaughter into an abolition movement against the wickedness that had led to it in the first place. Both were, in Herman's view, radical zealots, equally determined "to transform events . . . in ways that would make those events consistent with their larger vision." Even though neither man's vision prevailed in the long run -- that's how it goes with visions -- 1917 amounts to a prosecutor's brief against both on a charge of shared messianic absolutism. Except, perhaps, among a few diehard Communist dotards, the deleterious effects of Lenin's ideas aren't in much dispute. Once the Bolsheviks secured power, an outcome far from guaranteed when the famous German-sponsored train transporting Lenin from Swiss exile chugged into Petrograd's Finland Station in April 1917, his ruthless conflation of patriotism and party loyalty laid "the essential foundation of the totalitarian state." Not only Mussolini and Hitler, but Mao Zedong and, in our time, Kim Jong-un, owe Lenin's example for making their variants on it possible. Dispelling any lingering sentimentality about where the Marxist dream went wrong, Herman does a first-rate job of demonstrating that Stalin's USSR -- gulag, show trials, vulpine secret police, and all -- was by no means a travesty of Lenin's blueprint but its fulfillment. ("Yes, we are oppressors," Lenin once bluntly said, because revolutions with no real popular backing can't work any other way.) However, Wilson doesn't really come off much better, at least aside from Herman's acknowledgment that Lenin's embrace of murderous violence would have horrified him. You don't have to be much of an admirer of our twenty-eighth president -- and who is anymore, except a few diehard Princetonian dotards? -- to think there were plenty of other significant differences. One of them is that, even at its most vainglorious, Wilson's project -- unlike Lenin's -- didn't include the destruction of representative democracy to help realize his goals. He merely had a temperament amazingly ill suited to democracy's give-and-take, which comes under the heading of personality flaws and not crimes against humanity. That's why there's a certain underhanded brilliance in comparing Wilson to Lenin so relentlessly. No liberal himself -- his current home base is the right-wing think tank the Hudson Institute, and he's a regular contributor to the likes of Commentary and National Review -- Herman is a man on a mission he plainly delights in: doing his bit to discredit the liberal tradition by giving one of the Democratic Party's bygone paragons feet of clay that reach, in Wilson's case, right up to his pince-nez. It doesn't even matter that Wilson is hardly a hero to the Woke Generation, as white supremacists with a virtuous hankering to impose America's will abroad aren't popular campus figures these days. Linking twentieth-century American liberalism to twentieth-century totalitarianism is an old game among conservative intellectuals, but Herman's originality is all in personalizing things by rooting his case in the similarity of Lenin's and Wilson's psychological makeup and depicting both as fanatics. If that requires playing fast-and-loose with ideological categories on occasion, Herman certainly goes about it nimbly. Among other ploys, he habitually identifies Wilson as a capital- P "Progressive," not merely a Democrat; while Wilson himself wouldn't have objected to the label, Herman rather scurries past the fact that it was a catchall term for reformists back then, with prominent proponents in both parties. The effect is to make unwary modern readers see Wilson as much more of a left-winger than he was, setting up broad-brush claims on the order of Herman's sweeping assertion that Wilson saw the war as an opportunity "to realize his Progressive dream of a nation that responded to the agenda and needs of government -- as opposed to the other way around." (Really? How very Leninist of him.) On the flip side, Herman breezily equates the Bolsheviks' creation of a state security apparatus to enforce ideological conformity with "what would come to be called 'political correctness,' " which is really pretty disgraceful as drive-by calumnies go. In other words, you'd do well to take his more extreme elaborations of his schema with roughly a pound of salt. That frees you up to enjoy his book's considerable virtues, from its lively storytelling -- lots of quasi-cinematic cross-cutting between capitals -- and zesty plunges into the intricate political maneuverings that Lenin ruthlessly mastered and Wilson obstinately held himself above, to Herman's frequently acute insights into how both men's minds worked. If he's at his weakest, not to say shoddiest, when he's trying to turn his leading actors into funhouse-mirror soul mates -- their diametrically opposed understanding of the machinery of power is enough all by itself to demolish that notion -- he's much more convincing when he's plumbing them separately as individuals and giving the manufactured parallels a rest. Herman's portraits of the other key players in 1917 's vast canvas are often stimulating as well. Alexander Kerensky, the head of the Provisional Government the Bolsheviks overthrew, emerges here as a more impressive, less feckless figure than the sad sack of caricature -- a man, in fact, with the gifts to have emerged as "the George Washington of the new Russia" if Lenin's greater wiliness hadn't thwarted him. (Charmingly, Herman mentions that he once met Kerensky, who didn't die until 1970, in the latter's old age.) A good deal less persuasively, Herman blames Wilson for dooming Kerensky's government by not pressuring his new European allies to end the war before Russia collapsed, a scenario that evaporates in the face of Britain's and France's likely reaction to the proposal. He's on surer ground assessing how Wilson's hauteur checkmated him politically at home. Clearly a much bigger fan of Theodore Roosevelt's boisterous conception of the United States as an emerging world power than he is of Wilson's maddeningly lofty version, Herman argues that Wilson's rejection of Roosevelt's eager offer to raise a division of volunteers to fight on the Western Front -- which most historians treat as a well-deserved rebuke to the former president's bellicose vanity -- was actually one of his key mistakes, making an enemy out of not only T.R. but his Senate ally Henry Cabot Lodge. Lodge, of course, ended up as the man chiefly responsible for torpedoing American participation in the League of Nations, Wilson's ultimate dream. Nonetheless, by ultimately bringing the United States into the war, Wilson did launch us on the road to becoming a world hegemon, even if that status wasn't certified until the end of World War II. From Herman's perspective, this was a more or less unqualified "Good Thing," putting him in the odd position of giving Wilson credit for letting the genie out of the bottle, after spending several hundred pages castigating him for confusing genies with the Holy Ghost. Trying to reconcile the public relations value of Wilsonian idealism with the Kissinger- style Realpolitik he obviously prefers in practice makes his concluding pages fairly convoluted, but most readers will have caught on well before then that the pleasures of 1917 are in its energy and detail, not its ambitious but bungled aspirations to big-picture profundity. A two- time National Magazine Award winner during his stint as Esquire's "Screen" columnist, Tom Carson is currently a columnist at GQ. He is the author of Gilligan's Wake (2003), a novel .
Reviewer: Tom Carson
The Barnes & Noble Review
"Deeply researched and engagingly written, this is a gripping account of great battles won and lost, of a triumphant war followed by a failed peace, and of clashing ideologies that shaped a century."
"A dazzling achievement."
11/01/2017 Historian Herman (senior fellow, Hudson Inst.; Douglas MacArthur) argues that both U.S. President Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) and Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) were, to a degree, idealists who viewed the European political order, mired in war, as corrupt and unredeemable. In 1917, each man sought to remake that order. Wilson envisioned a peaceful revolution in which people lived free from violence and want with the right to govern one's self. Lenin sought class warfare, led by a revolutionary elite ruling through violence and fear, and with this revolution spreading beyond the borders of individual countries. According to Herman, the fundamental differences in these two worldviews shaped the character of the superpowers that emerged and influenced the course of World War II and the Cold War. VERDICT The pairing of these two diametrically opposed figures into one biography makes this illuminating read for anybody interested in World War I, the new political order it spawned, and the failures that led to the rise of Nazism and the horrors of World War II.—Chad E. Statler, Lakeland Comm. Coll., Kirtland, OH
2017-09-19 Dual biography of two men who stand in this account as avatars of worldwide change in a critical historical moment.Woodrow Wilson and Vladimir Lenin are not, on the face, a natural pairing in the same way that the murderous dictators Hitler and Stalin are. Then again, Hudson Institute senior fellow Herman (Douglas MacArthur: American Warrior, 2016, etc.) did put Gandhi and Churchill together in a study of the decline of the British Empire, and putting Wilson and Lenin together does help to show how the foreign policy of the nascent superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, would have as their overarching goal not "to protect their own national interests as narrowly understood, as almost all nations understood foreign policy before 1917, but to make others see the world as they did." For Wilson, this was a longtime insistence on a Pax Americana, formulated well before World War I, and one of the newsworthy aspects of Herman's readable, engaging book is that Lenin once approached the U.S. with "a bizarre offer": since, for obvious reasons, Germany could no longer be Russia's chief industrial partner, as it had been before the war, then why not America? In exchange for help modernizing Russia, then, the U.S. would have had oil, mineral resources, and fur. "For a few tantalizing days…the world rocked on its hinges at the prospect of a future U.S.-Russian consortium dominating the postwar world," writes Herman—but Wilson declined. Another great what-if: Germany declined the offer to stop fighting with status quo, meaning it could keep conquests and colonies in exchange for peace. In either instance, the world today would be much different from what it turned out to be, which, rather than Wilson's much-longed-for peace, was a century of endless conflict.Mixing both real events and a few moments of speculation, a fine account of a climacteric year.