Page:Scott Nearing - The American Empire (1921).djvu/29

 24 The entrance of the United States into the war did not greatly alter the character of the forces at work, nor did it in any large degree change the direction in which the country was moving. Rather, it brought to the surface of public attention factors of American life that had been evolving unnoticed, for generations.

The world situation created by the war compelled the American imperial class to come out in the open and to occupy a position that, while wholly inconsistent with the traditions of American life, is nevertheless in keeping with the demands of imperial necessity. The ruling class in the United States has taken a logical step and has made a logical stand. The masters of American life have done the only thing that they could do in the interests of the imperial forces that they represent. They are the victims, as much as were the Kaiser and the Czar on the one hand, and the Belgians and the Serbs on the other, of that imperial necessity that knows no law save the preservation of its own most sacred interests.

Certain liberal American thinkers have taken the stand that the incidents of 1917–1918 were the result of the failure of the President, and of certain of his advisers, to follow the theories which he had enunciated, and to stand by the cause that he had espoused. These critics overlook the incidental character of the war as a factor in American domestic policy. The war never assumed anything like the importance in the United States that it did among the European belligerents. On the surface, it created a furore, but underneath the big fact staring the administration in the face was the united, front of the business interests, and their organized demands for action. The far-seeing among the business men realized that the plutocratic structure the world over was in peril, and that the fate of the whole imperial régime was involved in the European struggle. The Russian Revolution of March 1917 was the last straw. From that time on the entrance of the United States into the war became a certainty as the only means of "saving (capitalist) civilization."