The War to End War

The War to End War names an ideal Paxton Hibben believes can give the conflict a democratic purpose and a transforming outcome. In the novel, that hope is set against the commercial interests threaded through the war and peace, and against the hostility Hibben encounters when he carries his belief in change back to the United States.

The promise Hibben believes in

Hibben’s conviction appears amid a sharp contrast: the war in Europe is described as bloody, dirty, and dull, while the war in New York City exposes hypocrisy and vileness. Yet in the army training camps, the soldiers believe they are fighting for a world safe for democracy. Hibben shares that belief in the Fourteen Points and in The War to End War. The phrase is therefore not just a description of the conflict’s hoped-for result; it is an expectation that the fighting might justify itself by making a different political world possible.

That expectation is also set against the lives caught inside the war’s material systems. Joe Williams, working on the Callao, waits with the crew at Roseau in Dominica while limes are prepared for shipment. An old man who hosts Joe and another quartermaster condemns United Fruit Company as a monopoly, arguing that it can let limes rot if growers refuse its prices. The episode places a promise of democracy beside a trade in which distant companies can control the terms of exchange and workers carry out the transport.

War’s machinery and commercial interests

The novel’s maritime passages broaden that contrast beyond one port. On a voyage around Spain and along the French coast, freighters from several nations move in a line near the coast, with life preservers and boats ready; transports, colliers, and hospital ships return from the war’s southern routes. French and British battleships patrol offshore, and destroyers stop ships to inspect their papers. The vessel’s passage is thus shaped by both ordinary shipping and military surveillance, while the coast itself can appear remote from the war’s apparatus.

In Paris, the discussion of postwar settlements gives the conflict another material dimension. At the Café de la Paix, Mr. Rasmussen, an engineer with Standard Oil, talks about Baku, Mohommarah, and Mosul, and about competition over oil and proposed mandates. J.W. Moorehouse answers that American public opinion might be stirred, while also emphasizing the country’s position in world oil production. Eveline raises the question of what the Russians are entitled to under self-determination. The exchange does not resolve the competing claims; it shows how the language of national rights sits beside calculations about resources and influence.

Peace and the power behind it

The book’s account of the Paris negotiations sharpens the gap between the ideal and the settlement. While delegates haggle over blood, flags, borders, and peoples’ historical destinies, powerful business interests remain positioned to acquire raw materials. The contrast makes peace appear less like a clean break from wartime competition than another arena in which political arrangements and economic advantage meet. Against that background, the phrase The War to End War carries an implicit test: whether victory and negotiation will alter the interests that helped organize the conflict, or merely redistribute their opportunities.

The account of J. P. Morgan’s reach gives that test a financial scale. The book describes Morgan interests extending across New York City, Paris, and London, through banks, trust companies, insurance companies, railroads, street railways, an express company, and the International Mercantile Marine. It further states that by 1917 the Allies had borrowed $1.9 billion through the House of Morgan, and that by the end of the Peace Conference the phrase J. P. Morgan suggests had force over a power of $74 billion. Placed beside the democratic language used to explain American participation, these details make financial influence a counterweight to the claim that the war’s purpose was simply to secure democracy.

Hope, reversal, and the phrase’s irony

Hibben’s hope is not presented as an isolated slogan. In Moscow, the narrative finds order, work, and hope, and brings together the revolutionary memory of La Marseillaise in 1905, Onward Christian Soldiers in 1912, and the waiting of soldiers at the front within the larger sound of The Internationale. Hibben believes in this new world. The sequence offers a counter-image to the negotiations in Paris: a vision of political possibility that does not take its measure from the bargaining over borders and resources.

But the return to the United States turns that hope into a source of danger. At a twentieth college reunion at Princeton, Hibben’s classmates put a noose around his neck; the narration allows that they may have regarded it as a drunken prank, but the threat is real. It then presents an America in which social justice, progressivism, revolt against oppression, and democracy have no secure place, and radicals are denied money and jobs. The phrase’s final force lies in this reversal: Hibben believes the war can end war by opening a path to a new society, while the postwar world depicted around him offers both concentrated economic power and punishment for those who still press for change.