In the Time of the Americans

by David Fromkin

  Word of the summer camp for adults spread, and by the summer of 1916 the program had become a movement: 16,000 men enrolled in a number of “Plattsburgs,” preparing themselves to form the nucleus of an officer corps in a citizens’ army should the need arise. Among trainees at the camps were future Secretary of War Robert Patterson, future Assistant Secretary John McCloy, and, though he was over the normal age, former Secretary of War Stimson. Taking over from Wood as the head of the movement was a young New York attorney named Grenville Clark, who had started in the law practice with Franklin Roosevelt. Whether or not they consciously intended to do so, the Plattsburg volunteers—mostly Republicans of the Theodore Roosevelt persuasion—were sending a political message not only to Berlin but to Washington.

  Caught between TR and Bryan, the President walked a political tightrope. In the aftermath of the Lusitania sinking, facing opposition from the pacific and the belligerent alike, Wilson set out to outline his view of America’s proper role in a speech that proved to be an utter disaster. Explaining to an audience of 15,000 that America was so right that there was no need to use force to prove it, he hit upon the unfortunate phrase that “there is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight.” In TR’s country there also was such a thing as a man being too much of a sissy to fight, and the popular revulsion against Wilson’s apparent weakness was instantaneous.

  For the administration, it clearly was a time to alter course.

  * Excluding gold, which really was a payment, not an “import.”

  † Now spelled Plattsburgh.

  9

  AMERICA PREPARES—BUT FOR WHAT?

  FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT, like TR, had been in favor of American military preparedness even before the outbreak of war in Europe. His enthusiasm for a bigger navy had brought him support from outside the constituencies normally served by the Democratic administration in which he served. While his faithful assistant Louis Howe dealt skillfully with administrative details of wages and working conditions in such a way as to win a following for Roosevelt in organized labor, the assistant secretary of the navy developed a cordial relationship with the Navy League of the United States, which brought him the friendship of big business as well as retired and serving naval officers.

  The Navy League, incorporated in New York December 29, 1902, with the stated aim of teaching the public the need for a strong navy, had languished for lack of finances and membership throughout most of the first decade of its existence. But as war broke out in Europe, it came into its own. In campaigns in 1915–16, League officials addressed 120,000 people and distributed 500,000 pamphlets.

  A feud between the League’s officials and Secretary of the Navy Daniels that seems to have begun sometime in 1914 widened with time. But the assistant secretary was on close personal as well as political terms with the League’s president, Robert M. Thompson, chairman of the International Nickel Corporation, and the League’s vice president, New York attorney Herbert Satterlee, son-in-law of J. P. Morgan. Only a month after taking office in 1913, Roosevelt had addressed the League in full support of its program. In the years that followed, he had become the League’s friend at court. The League spoke for the industrialists and bankers of the East, the very groups that Josephus Daniels and William Jennings Bryan and the rural America they represented regarded as their enemies; so, as the League’s advocate in the Wilson government, Roosevelt staked out a position that distinguished him from his fellow Democrats.

  In December 1914, at a public meeting in the Hotel Astor in New York, Roosevelt called for universal military training just days before President Wilson, in his annual message to Congress, denounced proposals for compulsory military training. The day after the President delivered his message, Daniels, in an appearance before the House Naval Affairs Committee, presented evidence to show that the U.S. Navy, “ship for ship,” was the equal of any in the world and could be fully manned and ready for action in a few days with a few thousand more men; whereupon Roosevelt testified before the committee that the U.S. Navy was only third or fourth best, and would need months and tens of thousands of men to be fully manned and ready. In the spring of 1915, when Daniels, in a speech to the Navy League, praised the Congress for enacting Wilson’s domestic reforms, Roosevelt, who spoke before him, suggested that, insofar as strengthening the navy was concerned, the Congress had not done enough: “… trust to the judgment of the real experts, the naval officers. Let us insist that the Congress shall carry out their recommendations.”

  WITH THE SINKING of the Lusitania and the adverse reaction to his “too proud to fight” speech, Wilson changed course and in the summer of 1915 ordered the armed services departments to embark on programs of military preparedness. On November 4 he announced his new military expansion proposals in New York City (“We have it in mind to be prepared for defense, to protect our security,” he told his dinner audience), and in top hat jauntily led a Preparedness Day parade down Fifth Avenue. As 1916 began, the aloof and unapproachable President uncharacteristically brought his case to the people on a tour that took him to the West.

  The heart of the Democratic party in Congress and the country still belonged to William Jennings Bryan, a pacifist. Therefore, to win the support in the House and the Senate that he needed to carry through his new program, Wilson had to persuade his fellow Democrats that preparedness would not lead to war. Military strength, he claimed vaguely, would enable him to uphold America’s “honor” while keeping the country neutral.

  Not even TR advocated intervening in the war. His followers avoided the issue by claiming that if TR had been President in 1915, Germany would not have dared to sink the Lusitania. They did not specify what should have been done once the vessel had been sunk. TR faulted Wilson for being slow to formulate a preparedness program and for then proposing a program that was inadequate: for being too late with too little. TR’s supporters continued to maintain that they were not warmongers, but that, in the words of young Grand Rapids (Michigan) newspaperman Arthur Vandenberg, “preparedness does not cause war, if anything it helps to preserve the peace.”

  Franklin Roosevelt, who agreed that the administration’s program was inadequate, urged upon the President the creation of a Council of National Defense to coordinate and mobilize America’s resources; but Wilson would not pursue the matter. On his own initiative, in September 1915 Roosevelt then created a 50,000-man Naval Reserve force.

  THE TRUTH about the reclusive President’s real views and objectives always will be a subject of controversy. At times he said one thing; at other times, another. But there is strong cause to believe that for many reasons, some political and some principled, he did not want to bring the United States into the war. However pro-Ally he may have felt privately in 1914—and he had reservations even then, for despotic Russia was among the Allies—by 1916 he had come to distrust and disapprove of the Allies as much as, or perhaps even more than, the German-led coalition.

  The news of the war in Europe was not such as to encourage a desire to participate in it. Trench warfare—a type of fighting that the world had not known before—had commenced in the autumn of 1914. Nobody knew how to win it, and it was not evident that those involved would survive. Each of the two rival coalitions had dug trenches across the Continent from the Atlantic Ocean to the Alps. The two lines of trenches ran parallel to one another and blocked each other’s way. The lines of trenches were heavily fortified with barbed wire, sandbags, and land mines. Each long line was more or less impregnable, yet the two sides continuously bombarded and charged one another as though a sustained breakthrough were possible. The charges were suicide attacks.

  The armies of the western front lived underground in growing hopelessness in the perhaps 35,000 miles of trenches that they eventually dug for themselves, amid mud, rats, excrement, and squalor. The deadlock, by the end of 1916, had lasted for two years, and there were those who believed that it would last forever. What was occurring on the battlefields of the war was less a military campaign than
the mass execution of the young male population of Europe.

  Erich von Falkenhayn, the German war minister who had replaced Moltke as chief of the General Staff, believed that 1916 was the decisive year: that Germany could not hold out much beyond that. Though Germany seemed to be coming out ahead on the western front by pursuing a defensive strategy behind powerful fortifications, he feared that Allied superiority in population and supplies eventually would tell. He lacked the manpower to launch a knockout blow, but argued that he could accomplish the same thing by attacking a fortress town so important to the French that they would “throw in every last man they have. If they do so the forces of France will bleed to death.…” The town in France that he had in mind was Verdun, a gray citadel on the river Meuse that had been a fortress of the Gauls even before the coming of the ancient Romans, and that was a spearhead of the French defensive system.

  Attacking Verdun on February 21, 1916, Falkenhayn began the longest and arguably most terrible battle in history. It raged for ten months. Per square foot of ground (the battlefield was three and a half square miles) there were greater losses than in any other battle before or since. Total casualties ranged somewhere between three-quarters of a million and a million and a quarter. In the end neither side gained: no ground of any significance was won or lost.

  Americans who read accounts of the nightmarish new kind of warfare, symbolized by Verdun, that was being waged in the mud-fields of northern France and Flanders were bound to be thankful that they were not involved in it.

  BETWEEN LATE 1915 and late 1916, realistic hopes for a British or German victory shifted mostly to attrition and economic warfare, and therefore largely from land to sea. The British naval blockade and the German U-boat campaign each aimed at strangling the other side by cutting off all supplies. No matter how much it upset the United States, neither of the warring camps engaged in this life-or-death struggle could afford (or so their military chiefs believed) to let go.

  Yet Woodrow Wilson found himself in 1916 in a position in which he needed the various political forces with which he had to contend to show some willingness to give. It was a presidential election year, and his prospects for reelection were uncertain. Wilson had squeaked into office in 1912 with less than 42 percent of the vote only because the majority party had split in two. Now the Republicans mostly were reunited, and on a straight party vote, on past form, would beat him by better than seven to six.

  Wilson had made himself personally unpopular by remarrying in late 1915, too soon (the country felt) after the death of his first wife in August 1914. Politically, he had gone downhill since the 1914 midterm elections. In foreign policy he was attacked by TR’s followers as weak in defense of American interests at sea against both British and Germans. Yet short of going to war against Britain or Germany or both, which Americans did not want to do, the only way to safeguard Americans and their merchandise from being attacked when crossing the Atlantic would have been an embargo prohibiting Americans from shipping supplies to either of the warring sides or from traveling on ships belonging to the Allies or the Germans. In turn, an embargo on trade would have destroyed America’s prosperity and doomed whatever chance Wilson might have had to be reelected. So the President found himself blocked in 1916 in every direction in which he looked to extricate himself from his foreign difficulties.

  In an effort to stave off the German challenge in the Atlantic, the President sent a series of stiff notes to Berlin following the Lusitania incident. Only months later, in the summer of 1915, a British liner (the Arabic) was torpedoed by Germans, taking two American lives; and though Germany then promised Wilson to curb the U-boat campaign, she sank more Allied ships without warning the following winter, with further American casualties. After the last of these sinkings, the French channel steamer Sussex on March 24, 1916, Wilson threatened to break off diplomatic relations with Germany.

  The President had failed to think of a response more imaginative than ceasing relations, complained Walter Lippmann; “That’s why we are so utterly discouraged about Wilson.” In the pages of The New Republic, which had been studiously impartial in the European war, Lippmann now proposed a “differential neutrality” in which the U.S. would use a military force to protect against U-boats. Though Lippmann and The New Republic still did not want the United States to enter the war, this proposal, which was bound to upset the conservative Middle West, also aroused the anger of the Left—and Lippmann was particularly wounded by an attack in that respect from a member of his graduating class in college.

  John Reed (“Jack” to his friends) was a curly-haired young man from Oregon, an outsider with no friends in the East, who had spent his Harvard years looking for a team or club that would let him join. In those days the idol of the Socialist Club on campus had been high-minded Walter Lippmann (“Who builds a world, and leaves out all the fun,” teased Reed in a lighthearted verse). Reed showed enthusiasm for socialism, but also for sexual freedom, atheism, votes for women, anarchism, modern art, and other advanced causes. On graduation both Reed and Lippmann had been given jobs by Lincoln Steffens, the famous muckraking journalist, who had introduced both young men to Greenwich Village bohemian society and to the salon at Fifth Avenue and Ninth Street of Mabel Dodge that was its social center. Reed went on to ride with Pancho Villa in the Mexican revolutionary war in 1914, winning fame as a journalist for his vivid accounts of his experiences. Though he broke off his turbulent love affair with Mabel Dodge (and entered into an even more turbulent affair with the wife of a Portland dentist, Louise Bryant, who came east to live with him), his outlook remained that of the romantic Greenwich Village bohemian prorevolutionaries of the Dodge set. The war in Europe, he (and they) thought, was “a clash of traders,” a struggle for markets and monopolies, in which sympathies should lie with Germany as the newcomer and underdog. England, he wrote, “grips the Red Sea, sucks the blood from India, menaces a half billion human beings from Hong Kong, owns all Australia, half North America, and half of Africa … the great intriguer, sitting like a spider in the web of nations.… It was England’s will that Germany should be destroyed.” Of the Allies, perversely, he was attracted by tsarist Russia: “Russian ideals are the most exhilarating, Russian thought the freest, Russian art the most exuberant, Russian food and drink are to me the best, and Russians themselves are, perhaps, the most interesting human beings that exist.…”

  In 1916 Reed urged socialists to support Wilson (even though Wilson was against socialism) in order to keep the United States out of the war. He charged that Lippmann’s idea of taking a stand against the German U-boat campaign was a betrayal of the Left, a selling out to the Wall Street of The New Republic’s owner. Lippmann replied bitterly. “I do not suppose that I was entitled to expect any kind of patient fairness from you,” he wrote, “even though I have tried to be pretty patient and fair with you for a good many years. I continued to believe in you even though many times I have felt that you had acted like a fool or a cad.… I cannot help saying that you are hardly the person to set yourself up as a judge of other people’s radicalism. You may be able to create a reputation for yourself along that line with some people, but I have known you too long and I know too much about you. I watched you at college … trying to climb into clubs … and to tell you the truth I have never taken your radicalism the least bit seriously.… I got into this fight long before you even knew it existed and you will find that I am in it long after you quit.”

  Lippmann believed that Reed knew nothing about the Wall Street he so often attacked. Reed certainly was wrong if he believed that Willard Straight, publisher of The New Republic, was typical of it or representative of its views. In the Lippmann-Reed-Straight generation, a representative Wall Street figure instead would have been someone like John Foster Dulles, the young international lawyer at Sullivan and Cromwell.

  In 1915–16 Dulles was busily exploiting every wartime opportunity for the benefit of his clients. The war had led to an outburst of American global commercia
l and financial activity, and he was part of it, especially after his uncle Robert Lansing became secretary of state in May 1915. When in Washington, Dulles stayed at his international lawyer grandfather’s house on I Street: the house where he was born, where his grandfather Foster still lived, and where Lansing and his wife lived, too. Dulles continued to ask Lansing for favors for clients in Europe, Latin America, and China. As counsel for Merck and Company, he had obtained the Department of State’s help with European shipments. In April 1915 State wrote letters of introduction for him in Europe as he made his first business trip to deal with interests in France, Holland, and Britain, and to obtain war-risk insurance for his clients. He maintained his connection with the Caribbean, a region that had marked him forever with his disconcerting tic. In New York City he arranged dinner parties at which he introduced current and prospective clients—bankers and businessmen—to the secretary of state. Like so many in the East in 1915 and 1916, the Dulles family of the house on I Street prospered from the war.

  CIVILIAN ELEMENTS within the kaiser’s government were worried from 1915 onward that their country’s unrestricted submarine warfare might bring the United States into the war. After the sinking of the Lusitania and the Arabic in 1915, Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg prevailed upon the kaiser to pledge that Germany would stop sinking passenger liners and unarmed merchant vessels without warning. When the German authorities broke their word and resumed sinking such vessels as the Sussex in March 1916, leading Wilson to threaten to break off diplomatic relations, the chancellor again was able to prevail upon the kaiser to pledge a halt to the unrestricted U-boat campaign. Bethmann-Hollweg warned Wilson, however, that the new pledge might be withdrawn if the President could not force the Allies, too, to respect the rules of international maritime law.