The KKK to Pearl Harbor, Communism in China, and the War in Vietnam
In 1915 filmmaker D.W. Griffith released his epic film "The Clansman," a story about heroic Ku Klux Klan members fighting to save pure white women from "the black horde." One of the viewers was then President Woodrow Wilson who watched a private screening of the film, renamed "Birth of a Nation." The film hardened and reinforced Wilson's view that there was a definite hierarchy of races and that non-whites needed to be controlled.
Wilson brought this view to Paris in 1919 following the end of the Great War and it drove him to make one disastrous decision after another. The Japanese delegation was also present in Paris, having aided the ally cause. Japan at the time was just emerging as an industrial and economic force and was not particularly militarily inclined. What they wanted most was recognition of their emergence and inclusion in the world economy. The Paris negotiations were about dividing up the spoils among the victorious allies and laying out a new system that would prevent future wars. The Japanese brought with them only two demands. They wanted a province in China; Shandung, which included a harbor and railway built by pre-war Germany, which claimed Shandung as a colony. The Japanese also wanted a clause of racial equality included in the treaty, which would respect the Japanese race as equal.
It was this clause that Wilson balked on. He could not bring himself to agree to any form of racial inequality based on his view reinforced by "Birth of a Nation." He simply refused to budge which lead to the resignation of a number of members of the U.S. delegation. Frustrated by Wilson refusal, the the allied delegates had little choice but to give in and exclude the equality clause. The Japanese were dumbfounded and knew if they returned to Japan empty handed the government would fall. The allies knew this as well and decided, against both their own views and the vehement objections of the Chinese, to give Shendung to the Japanese.
Returning with this booty kept the Japanese government in power but had far reaching consequences. The Chinese never got over being stabbed in the back and Shendung would be one of Mao Tse-tung's rally point against the West sponsored Chiang Kai-shek government. The Japanese also never got over their exclusion as unequal, choosing to build inward and focus their efforts on obtaining militarily what they couldn't obtain in the world economy. Had the Japanese been allowed to participate in the western economic system as racial equals it is unlikely the military option would have become so important and equally unlikely they would have fomented a hatred towards America that would result in the sneak attack at Pearl Harbor a quarter century later.
If all this bloodshed wasn't enough to lay at the feet of the racist U.S. President; one of the observers in Paris was a young Ho Chi-Minh. The sell out of Shendung and the treatment of the asian race left an indelible impression on Ho who would never again trust the West. He returned from Paris convinced that the only fair treatment his country could get would come when all ties to the West were severed. He spent the rest of his life trying to break these ties. His country would eventually succeed, only after Ho's death, 50 years after Woodrow Wilson's watched "Birth of a Nation."
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