James G. Randall and the Revisionists: The Great War, the Good War, and the Civil War

James G. Randall and the Revisionists: The Great War, the Good War, and the Civil War

By Robert L. Dietle

September 10, 1945

Mr. Darryl F. Zanuck

20th Century-Fox Film Corporation

Beverly Hills, California

Dear Mr. Zanuck:

On the off chance that it may in some way be useful, I am taking the liberty of sending to you a reprint of my article entitled “Lincoln’s Peace and Wilson’s.” Some of the points of emphasis in this article might possibly be of value in working up a Wilson movie. From the great mass of Wilson’s speeches a few selections have been made, as for example on page 231.

The trouble is that very few people today, even those who ought to be sympathetic to him, have a correct concept of Wilson. They speak of him as a failure, yet the more precise truth is that failure came because of departing from Wilson’s program. This is all elaborated in the article, and I need not say more. I hope you will pardon me for attracting this much attention to my own bit of writing.

Yours sincerely,

J.G. Randall

Professor of History

This letter poses an interesting puzzle. Why would a professor of history think movie mogul Darryl Zanuck would be interested in either an article or a movie about Woodrow Wilson? Furthermore, why is James Garfield Randall—whose scholarly career was devoted to the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln—acting as a cheerleader for President Wilson?

In the world of academic historians, J. G. Randall’s name is forever linked with the Civil War Revisionists, a group of scholars who, starting in the 1920s and 1930s, began to change the field of Civil War scholarship. When first published, the Revisionists’ works upset a number of academic apple carts. The careers of James Buchanan and Stephen A. Douglas received far more positive treatment. The South was cast in a more favorable light. Slavery was no longer seen as the cause of the war and the abolitionists lost their luster.

Among the more controversial aspects of Revisionism was its insistence that the Civil War could and should have been avoided. The Revisionists rejected previous interpretations which assumed that the differences between North and South were irreconcilable. Avery Craven, for instance, argued that the conflict was the “work of politicians and pious cranks!” In a series of articles and books published between 1926 and 1953, J. G. Randall also questioned the inevitability of the war, attributing it to a “blundering generation” of politicians who had misled a peaceful nation into a horrible, senseless conflict. Underlying Randall’s argument was a deep disgust with war. Throughout his career, Randall laced his scholarly writings and private correspondence with impassioned denunciations of warfare.

In fact, an important portion of Randall’s career was devoted to the debunking of war in general and of the Civil War in particular. He believed, “There is perhaps too much of a tendency to glorify the Civil War which was, in reality an ugly thing, in many respects a discreditable thing in American life and a thing which loses its glamour when studied in detail.” In his published work, Randall stressed these ugly aspects of war. His “The Blundering Generation” (1940) article opens with a long passage in which Randall piles horror upon horror to remind the reader there was nothing romantic about the Civil War. “One does not often speak or read of the war in reality, of its blood and filth, of mutilated flesh, and other revolting things,” he wrote. “In the sense of full realism war cannot be discussed. The human mind will not stand for it. For the very word ‘war’ the realist would have to substitute some such term as ‘organized murder’ or ‘human slaughterhouse.’”

By the early 1950s, Revisionism began to be revised. Sparked by a reaction against the Revisionist orthodoxy, new issues and trends emerged in the field of Civil War scholarship and it seemed time to embalm the Revisionists in the textbooks of historiography. In their attempts to place Randall and his colleagues in context, the historians of history quite rightly linked Revisionism with reaction to the First World War. In Americans Interpret Their Civil War, originally published in 1954, Thomas Pressly found the explanation for Revisionism in the 1930s, a decade which displayed a widespread “disillusioned attitude toward war . . . [that] was rooted specifically in the reaction against American participation in the First World War.” More recently, Peter Novick has also stressed the same link, arguing it was “manifest how disillusionment with World War I had led to the ‘revised’ version of the Civil War, indeed, the revisionists themselves avowed that this was true.”

I have no desire to contest the link between the Revisionists and reactions to the First World War. Without question, Randall’s reactions to the Great War did shape his scholarly treatment of the Civil War and Lincoln. My purpose here, however, is to complicate the story.

Randall’s disgust with war did not result from the general disillusionment of the 1930s. Unpublished writings in Randall’s papers at the University of Illinois make clear that Randall’s negative view of warfare predated America’s participation in the Great War and his views did not change. His papers also reveal that, while Randall hated war, he was no pacifist. He seems never to have doubted the necessity of America’s intervention in the First World War just as he supported America’s participation in World War II, a conflict he preferred to call “The Nazi War.” Whatever disillusionment Randall felt came not from the Great War but from the failed peace that followed. For Randall, the failure of the United States to accept Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations was a tragic mistake that only helped make future wars more likely. As a politically engaged individual in the 1930s, Randall battled against isolationism. As part of that fight, he struggled to correct popular misconceptions concerning Wilson, his ideals, and his accomplishments. Randall’s revisionist impulse was not confined to the study of the Civil War era.

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On April 6, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson announced to Congress and the nation that the United States was at war with Germany. For almost three years, Wilson had adhered to a policy of neutrality that was based on the assumption that U.S. interests were quite distinct from the interests of Europe. From the perspective of the early twenty-first century, we sometimes underestimate how greatly America prided itself on avoiding the corrupt politics of the ‘old world.’ As the British historian Frank Chambers, writing in the late 1930s, pointed out, “In the wisdom of afterknowledge we are sometimes too apt to regard the participation of the United States in a European war as something inevitable, and we forget too easily the revolution in national habit and sentiment which that participation represented.” Randall’s reactions to the Great War present a case study of this ‘revolution of habit and sentiment.’

Randall was thirty-six years old and was about to marry for the second time when the United States entered the Great War. Born and raised in Indianapolis, Randall had attended Butler College before earning his doctorate at the University of Chicago in 1911. As a young man, he taught Sunday School and gave uplifting talks to the Epworth League of the Methodist Church. Such activities suggest that Randall possessed a large dose of the earnestness and piety that are often assumed to be part of the Hoosier character. While completing his graduate studies and immediately after taking his degree, Randall taught in several Midwestern high schools and small colleges.

In 1913 Randall joined the faculty of Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia, where his duties included coaching the debate team. Among Randall’s notes from this phase of his teaching career is a typed sheet with the heading, “Topics Pertaining to International Relations.” While undated, the list was compiled sometime after early 1915 but before America’s entry into the war. It includes such topics as “Resolved, that militarism caused the European War”; “Resolved, that the Monroe Doctrine makes for peace”; and “Resolved, that the course pursued by the United States during the Great War has been one of strict and absolute neutrality.” Although it would be foolish to extract a political philosophy from a list of debate topics, the list does display an antiwar sentiment that was common at the time.

Randall’s personal opinion of war is made much clearer in an unpublished piece entitled “An Outworn World-Idea.” Though undated, this heavily revised typescript comes from the same period as the debate topics. The opening paragraph reads:

            A train of soldiers sweeps westward across the rails through Belgium. Thousands of strong, picked men, the cream of the nation, are hurrying, equipped to the last shoe-string, to answer the call of the “Fatherland.” They meet and pass another train moving in the opposite direction. It takes but a glance to see that these are broken, shattered human wrecks which the surging tide of war has thrust backward. Countless others to whom Fate has been more merciful lie dead in unmarked graves. For days and months similar trains continue to pass, for human beings are cheap in Europe, and the blessings of life, health, and comfort are lightly sacrificed for “the honor of the flag.” If we ask what modern warfare means, let us answer that it is epitomized in these passing trains: the oncoming train of youths torn from their families and sweethearts, and the train of survivors who return, bleeding and mangled, to their homes. This is the sure fruitage of war. Its vaunted benefits are problematical; this misery and suffering is certain and inevitable.

Randall goes on to list the peaceful challenges that faced pre-war Europe: poverty to relieve, distress to heal, ignorance to dispel. Why, he asked, was it impossible for mankind to unite to solve these challenges of peace? Why can humans only unite for carnage? “To the same mind ‘war’ is too dignified and polite a term to apply to the raging fury of violence which is now abroad, killing and maiming millions, annihilating billions of accumulated treasure, increasing suffering a hundred-fold, multiplying poverty, propagating ignorant hatred, sowing the seeds of misery and discord.” Randall’s denunciation of war continues for seven pages before concluding, “May America do her part toward introducing Reciprocity and Arbitration as the great world-ideas that will ultimately cause wars to cease on the face of the earth.”

To anyone familiar with Randall’s later writings on the Civil War, this earlier piece will sound very familiar. A comparison of “An Outworn World-Idea” with his 1940 article in the Abraham Lincoln Quarterly, “When War Came in 1861,” reveals a number of similarities. While his prose style became more subdued, Randall’s arguments against war seem to have remained constant. “An Outworn World-Idea” makes it impossible to attribute Randall’s disgust with war to a general disillusionment of the 1930s.

Given the views in this piece, one might expect Randall to have opposed America’s entry into World War I. In fact, he appears to have supported wholeheartedly U.S. involvement even to the point of interrupting his scholarly career. During the summer of 1917, Randall began working for the Committee on Public Information (CPI), the propaganda agency created to mobilize public opinion behind U.S. participation in the Great War. The CPI drew upon the talents of a large number of scholars: Carl Becker, Charles Beard, Wallace Notestein, and Sydney Fay were among the established historians who wrote for the committee. Randall’s assignment was to study the relationship between the press and the army. In a July 1917 letter to J. Franklin Jameson, editor of the American Historical Review and a member of the CPI, Randall described how he had “recently gone over a mass of unpublished material in the War Department files (War College Division) on the subject of press control.” He warned Jameson of how “German agents discover and transmit information that is disclosed either carelessly or maliciously in newspapers. I have noted a number of news leaks in the present war which indicate that our hundreds of editors are by no means to be relied upon to withhold information whose publication is detrimental to public safety.”

Randall’s contributions to the CPI were not confined to the study of news control. The CPI drew upon his experience as a public speaker and sent him to the Midwest to help create support for the war. The rough, rather telegraphic notes for several of Randall’s speeches have survived. One, entitled “Education for Citizenship,” was delivered at Buchanan High School in Indianapolis on May 16, 1918. While ostensibly extolling the value of a college education, Randall soon turned to the war effort, telling the high school students that the “Kaiser’s God” was “a tribal deity who uses sword vs innocent peoples—very far from [the] true Xn [Christian] God.” Later in the same talk, Randall again stressed the need for a college education but warned, “In this country we want to avoid the aggressive, combative attitude that one well known nation has toward culture—‘Kultur.’” In his conclusion, Randall referred to Wilson’s claim that this was a war for democracy. On the last page of his notes, Randall typed the message printed on the flyleaf of the Bibles given to the U.S. troops landing in France: “Hardships will be your lot, but trust in God will give you comfort; temptation will befall you, but the teachings of your Savior will give you strength. Let your valor as a soldier and your conduct as a man be an inspiration to your comrades and an honor to your country.” Randall then added his own comment, “These are the ideals of the Amer[ican] Army under P[ershing]’s leadership, and these are also the ideals which the American College is holding before the youth of the land, the picked men who are to be the world’s leaders in the new age.”

On June 19, 1918, Randall addressed the Westminster League of Salem, Virginia. This time his topic was the “Religious Bearings of the War.” Randall described how the war was strengthening the nation’s religious impulse. Unfortunately, the war had also helped unleash “forces alien to Xty [Christianity]. Nietchean [sic] philos[ophy]. Supermen. A few imperious masterful men developed as super-brutes, . . . rest of mankind subordinated to them. Morality = weakness.” He continued: “Supreme task of this war . . . discredit this negation of Xty [that] might is right. . . . My final word: The great world crisis is having its spiritualizing influence. Our young men are going thru an ordeal of fire. Out of all the pain and stress of this tragic time there will come a better type of manhood of Xty, a deepened spiritual sense. Already we realize it’s only the spiritual things that count. We should all catch this regenerating spirit in the air. None of us should fail in this time to experience a spiritual awakening.”

It is difficult to reconcile these talks, in which Randall sounds like Theodore Roosevelt extolling the manliness of war, with his earlier and later denunciations of all war. It is possible that Randall’s later emphasis upon how emotion-based war mentality easily overwhelms more rational views may stem from his own experience.

In September 1918, Randall moved from the CPI to the U.S. Shipping Board, where he served as the board’s historian. In a letter to a friend, Randall described his duties: “I am expected to maintain informational files of the activities of the Board and the Fleet corporation, to get out the annual reports and various special reports, to furnish material to the War and Navy departments for official histories, to write special articles and speeches (not all of which appear over my name), to handle many assignments from the offices of the chairman and secretary, and to do many other chores too numerous to mention.” As this letter suggests, Randall enjoyed his work in Washington, D.C., and he was proud of the part he played in the administration of the war. He even considered a career in government, but those plans ended abruptly when in early August 1919 he was told his position was about to be eliminated as part of a general postwar effort to reduce the size of government agencies. With a bureaucratic career no longer beckoning, Randall returned to academic life, teaching a year at Richmond College before accepting a one-year position with the University of Illinois in the fall of 1920. The temporary post became a permanent one and Randall would spend the rest of his career at the Urbana-Champaign campus.

Like many academic historians, Randall’s teaching duties took in a far broader range of topics than his field of research in U.S. constitutional history. Upon his arrival at the University of Illinois, he spent a great deal of time and effort preparing an undergraduate course titled, “The United States in the Great War,” writing to government agencies for publications, and compiling an annotated bibliography and list of suggested research topics. He continued to offer this course well into the 1930s.

Randall’s first book, Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln, appeared in 1926. At that time Randall identified himself as a constitutional historian rather than a Lincoln scholar. Not until 1927 did he begin seriously to pursue the “Lincoln theme” that gained him a national reputation. The 1930s were the years in which Randall began to study the Civil War and Lincoln in exhaustive detail, laying the scholarly foundation for his Civil War and Reconstruction (1937) and his volumes on Lincoln that appeared in the late 1940s. During these years, however, Lincoln was not the only president on Randall’s mind.

In 1926, Randall received a letter from his brother-in-law Archie Throckmorton thanking him for a copy of Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln. Reading about the war president from Illinois evoked memories of a more recent war administration. Throckmorton wrote, “And some of these days, somebody is going to write a book comparing Wilson’s handling of the Great War with Lincoln’s handling of the Civil War. Perhaps the time has not yet come for the writing of this book, but I want to live to read it, for I have a notion that if the work is honestly done, it won’t do the fame of Woodrow Wilson any harm.”

There is no way of knowing whether this specific letter planted the seed of an idea, but in 1930 Randall did publish an article in the South Atlantic Quarterly, “Lincoln’s Task and Wilson’s,” in which he made explicit comparisons between the two war presidents. After identifying six “outstanding” presidents—Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Wilson—Randall focused on Lincoln and Wilson because “far-reaching matters of historic fate and development are bound up with the contrast between these two men in their personalities and their tasks of wartime leadership.” The article is a brief but thorough comparison of the personalities, policies, and achievements of the two presidents. From the perspective of Randall’s later career, we are prone to place the emphasis on Lincoln. But a careful reading suggests that, like his brother-in-law, Randall thought the comparison did Wilson’s fame no harm.

In the article, Randall used the comparison of Lincoln and Wilson to correct popular misconceptions about Wilson. Randall stressed Lincoln’s difficulties with Congress—while highlighting Wilson’s firm leadership of the legislative branch. Far from accepting the image of Wilson as an impractical idealist, Randall emphasized how Wilson’s close cooperation, even domination of Congress during his first term, led to a number of impressive legislative accomplishments. In terms of their respective war efforts, Lincoln’s administration was an ad hoc affair, held together by Lincoln’s loose style of leadership. “Nothing,” writes Randall, “under Lincoln matched the staggering complexity of the Wilson regime. . . . [T]here was nothing in [Lincoln’s] administration comparable to the elaborate boards and administrations by which the government under Wilson took over vast enterprises pertaining to transportation, industry, finance, labor, food, fuel, shipping, and trade.” Randall also compared the failed peace plans of Lincoln and Wilson. Assassination ended any chance that Lincoln’s plan for reconstruction would be implemented. According to Randall, Wilson’s physical breakdown in 1919 was the major factor in his failure to win acceptance of the peace treaty and the League of Nations.

In the late 1930s, as the possibility of a new European war became apparent, Randall continued to uphold the Wilsonian ideal of peace through international cooperation. In letters to congressmen, senators, editors, and colleagues, Randall argued for U.S. membership in the World Court and denounced appeasement in Europe and isolationism at home. He embarked on a personal crusade, even attacking the fundamental text of isolationism—Washington’s supposed warning against “entangling alliances.” In lectures and letters, Randall pointed out that it was Jefferson, not Washington, who had coined the phrase. Furthermore, Jefferson had never suggested America turn its back on the world. Instead, Jefferson had “envisaged a liberal internationalism, advising that our policy should be that of pursuing the paths of industry, peace, and happiness, cultivating general friendship, and ‘bringing collisions of interest to the umpirage of reason rather than of force.’” Randall seems to have envisioned Jefferson as a Wilsonian before the fact.

The outbreak of the long-dreaded European war in 1939 saddened Randall. He opened his 1940 article “When War Came in 1861” with a lament over “this bedeviled age when general war has incredibly come to a Europe whose every normal instinct and every memory since 1914 cries to heaven against it.” What is striking about this article is the ease with which it can be misinterpreted. When I first read this piece, having not yet looked through Randall’s private correspondence, I wrongly assumed that Randall was arguing from an isolationist position and that he had followed an intellectual trajectory similar to that of Charles Beard. Randall’s letters make clear that, despite his views on war, Randall had no patience for those who argued that the European conflict was not America’s concern. Among Randall’s papers is a printed copy of one of Robert Maynard Hutchins’ antiwar speeches. On the cover Randall scrawled, “The Nazis ought to like this speech.” By the spring of 1941, Randall saw American involvement in the war as inevitable. In a letter of support he sent to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, he wrote, “Having failed to check aggression the peaceful way (by promoting international solidarity), the United States must take the hard way. Hitler can be stopped, and it must be done.”

Randall accepted America’s involvement in the Second World War as a cruel necessity. Arguing that the war be named “The Nazi War” since “they planned it and started it,” he also suggested a slogan for the war: “The War for Total Peace.” Almost immediately upon U.S. entry into the war, Randall began to look beyond the fighting to the peace. In a 1942 letter Randall drafted but did not send to Shepard Jones of the World Peace Foundation, he argued that “in shaping the coming peace nothing is more important than an intelligent reappraisal of Wilson’s formula, preferably in a form of such a nature that it will be widely read.” Randall discussed the need for “a little book that would give the essence of Wilsonism for its present significance. . . . Some of Wilson’s speeches should also be included to make them more accessible than they now are. With senators up for re-election, the subject is most timely.”

At the end of the letter Randall admitted that “some years ago I had prepared a manuscript of about five solid chapters on Government under Wilson, but I never got around to publishing it as a book.” While these “five solid chapters” are not among Randall’s papers in the University of Illinois archives, there does survive a typed, one-page outline of a book to be titled Wilson Restudied. Part One was to consist of eight chapters on such topics as: “Wilson and International Security,” “For and Against the League,” “Anti-League Stereotypes,” “The Concept of Isolationism” (which Randall labeled “muddled or faulty thinking”), and “Wilson’s Program and the Coming Peace.” Part Two was to consist of speeches by Wilson.

On the back of this outline, Randall wrote in pencil, “Add: Analogy of W[ilson] & Lincoln.” The comparison of Lincoln and Wilson became the only part of the project Randall completed. In 1943 he delivered a paper at the Mississippi Valley Historical Association on “Lincoln’s Peace and Wilson’s,” which was soon after published in the South Atlantic Quarterly. The article brings together all of Randall’s previous arguments concerning the importance and relevance of Wilson’s belief that international cooperation was the only hope for achieving a lasting peace. Randall thought the revival of Wilsonism so vital that he paid for 150 offprints of this article (and later tried to buy more) and mailed them to individuals whom he saw as having influence on public opinion; among those on his list was movie producer Darryl Zanuck. “Lincoln’s Peace and Wilson’s” was Randall’s attempt to draw upon the lessons of the past to construct a better future. Admittedly, there is something quixotic in Randall’s belief that offprints or movie producers could help solve a world crisis, but there is also something noble about his deep desire to help ensure a “just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all the nations.”

Robert L. Dietle is associate professor of history at Western Kentucky University.