Observing America: The Commentary of British Visitors to the United States, 1890–1950

4 The Global Stage: H. G. Wells on America’s Emergence in the First World War

4 The Global Stage H. G. Wells on America’s Emergence in the First World War When the First World War broke out in August 1914, the global catastrophe that Wells had long held out as a possibility was becoming a reality. Convinced that Germany was the aggressor and that an Allied victory was imperative for the future of Western civilization, he enthusiastically lent his pen to promoting Britain’s war effort. In fact, he was responsible for coining the phrase, “the war that will end war.” Within a couple of years, however, he viewed the conflict more skeptically and came to regret his earlier zeal, which had generated bad feelings between him and many of his friends. Wells did not forsake his support of the Allied cause, but he became adamant that the objectives for fighting the war should be clearly defined and that a return to the status quo ante bellum would be unacceptable. He took an active part in the League of Nations movement, and by exploiting his appointed position in the British propaganda machine, he attempted to insinuate his idealistic aims into government policy. By the end of the war, Wells’s mood was disconsolate, for his nation’s leadership had shown little interest in his ideas, including the innovations he had suggested in military technology . When the Treaty of Versailles was worked out in 1919, he grew only more pessimistic about the world’s prospects. During the late 1910s, as more and more men were slaughtered on the fields of France and as 111 the war’s purpose grew increasingly obscure, the atheistic Wells even turned—temporarily—to religion and embraced the notion of a strong, benevolent God.1 During this period in his life, from the heady days of 1914 through his post-Versailles years of despair, Wells was certain of one thing: national boundaries had to be erased to make way for a single, unified world state. He had long advocated such a union, but now, with the tragic failings of the nation-state system so starkly evident, he pressed for the idea with a new urgency. Working for international cooperation, and ultimate unification, became his top priority, while he placed less emphasis on his socialist beliefs and, for a time, his notion of bloodless revolution. From the First World War until the end of his life, Wells saw it as his mission to prepare people to think in global, rather than national , terms, and it is no coincidence that the war marked the end of his career as a lively, daring novelist lionized by young artists and radicals throughout the English-speaking world. His novels became painfully didactic—the functionalist tendency had actually been apparent even before the war—and though millions were now exposed to his popular educational texts and pervasive journalistic output, he forfeited his position as a leading writer of fiction.2 In the war and immediate postwar years, as he sought to bring a new sense of order to the world, Wells looked hopefully toward America— first in its role as the preeminent neutral power, then as an active participant in the struggle to defeat Germany, and ultimately as a major force in arranging the peace and determining the contours of the new international rapprochement. The optimism about American society that he had adopted in the first decade of the century now spilled over into global affairs, for he believed that the United States could play a unique and crucial role in reconstructing the world. Wells placed great faith in America, but he found it necessary to cajole the nation to assume the part he had carved out for it and often was left disappointed. Specifically , like many intellectuals throughout the West, he initially saw great promise in America’s wartime leader, Woodrow Wilson, only to feel in the end that the president was a limited man who had betrayed his own stated principles. But when Wells made his second trip to America in 1921, to cover the Washington Conference, he was still prepared to cast the nation in a special role. During these years, while Wells was focused on the position of the United States in the world, some of his fellow Britons, namely George Bernard Shaw, Graham Wallas, and a young 112 The Global Stage • Harold Laski, were concerned about what was happening to American freedoms at home. For Wells the role of the...