In the Time of the Americans

by David Fromkin

  Wilson’s apparent diplomatic victory allowed him to be portrayed by his supporters at the Democratic convention and in the autumn presidential campaign as the candidate who “kept us out of war.” Wilson also began speaking of a league of nations to prevent future wars. “I have come around completely to Wilson,” wrote Walter Lippmann, “chiefly because I think he has the imagination and the will to make a radical move in the organization of peace.” Although the candidate of the reunited Republicans, the colorless Charles Evans Hughes, also was not in favor of going to war, Wilson’s record enabled him to bid for the support of Progressives in the West who did not share the enthusiasm of their onetime leader, TR, for flexing America’s muscles in dealing with Germany. (TR accused the West of being “yellow.” Kansas newspaperman William Allen White replied: “Man! You are clean, plumb crazy.”)

  THROUGHOUT 1916 President Wilson was conscious of the precariousness of America’s neutrality. He was uncomfortable with the “he kept us out of war” slogan that emerged at the Democratic convention and that was to be used by his supporters in the autumn election, because he was not sure it was going to prove true: if the U-boat truce in the Atlantic did not hold, he might well have to bring the United States into the war.

  Increasingly Wilson’s hopes and ambitions came to center on mediating an end to the European war, as TR had settled the war between Russia and Japan in 1905, winning a Nobel Peace Prize. Wilson’s friend Edward House, whose special interest was foreign policy, long had thought in terms of making peace between Britain and Germany, and from 1914 onward was encouraged by the President to take the matter in hand. In international dealings as in face-to-face politics at home, House listened and spoke for Wilson, acting as a surrogate and alter ego for the reclusive chief executive. Without any formal authorization, House was (or at least seemed) the President’s plenipotentiary.

  A small, urbane man who moved through the world of affairs with catlike agility, House seemed never to put a foot wrong. He had earned a reputation for discretion and had a way with him that led his interlocutors to believe that he fully understood not merely what they said, but also what they left unsaid.

  Nonetheless House seemed in his initial meetings with the Europeans not to grasp the essentials of their outlook. Indeed, he appeared to be naive about international politics in general when, for example, he told the Allied ambassadors to Washington in January 1915 that if they agreed to make peace, he would keep Germany from starting more wars by obtaining the German chancellor’s promise to give up militarism. The ambassadors refrained from asking House what such a promise would be worth.

  In their bones, Wilson and House did not seem to understand why Europe was at war. So the plans they proposed to end the conflict never came to grips with the concerns of the powers involved, and were viewed in London, Paris, and Berlin as irritatingly simpleminded. Of course the various foreign offices and their ambassadors in Washington were diplomatic in feigning serious interest in whatever the Americans suggested, with the result that House felt encouraged to voyage to Europe in the winter of 1915, where he learned firsthand that at that time there was no serious interest on either side in a negotiated peace. Germany was unwilling to quit while ahead. Britain and France did not want to quit while behind. Suffering losses that became ever more catastrophic as time went on, the Allies wanted to continue the war until they could inflict even more catastrophic losses on the Germans to match their own. Unless Germany was beaten decisively, any peace (in the Allied view) would be a mere cease-fire allowing Germany to rebuild strength before launching another war.

  House journeyed to Europe on another peace mission a year later, in the winter of 1915–16. This time his proposal was that the Allies, at a moment they judged opportune, should ask the United States to convene a conference of belligerents for the purpose of ending the war. At the conference Prèsident Wilson would recommend moderate but pro-Ally territorial peace terms and also would propose to establish a league of nations to guarantee the security of the powers thereafter. British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, certain that Germany would reject the proposal, agreed to it on condition that the United States would pledge without qualification to go to war against Germany if the German government said no. House was willing to give the pledge. At that point he may even have come to share Britain’s real goal of using what appeared to be a peace proposal as a means of bringing America into the war.

  But the American President was willing to say only that the United States “probably” would enter the war if Germany said no. That was not good enough for Great Britain, though there was no need for Grey or his ambassador to offend Wilson by saying so; the House-Grey formula called for the President to try to make peace only when the Allies told him that the time was right, so the Allies never told him that the time was right.

  In fact, from an Allied point of view, the time suddenly was not right. The Allies had counted on things going better, but instead they were getting worse. The bloodletting at Verdun in the spring of 1916 was such that General Joseph-Jacques-Césaire Joffre, France’s commander in chief, warned that by midsummer the French army might cease to exist. The British hoped to save their Allies and turn the tide of battle against Germany by mounting a summer offensive in northern France. But in the event, when the British attacked that summer, opening the battle of the Somme River valley, the army they destroyed was not Germany’s but their own.

  The British lost 25 percent of their attacking forces in the first half hour of fighting, and 50 percent in the first day as a whole. “God, God, where’s the rest of the boys?” asked a Scottish lieutenant looking back for the battalion with whom he had gone over the top, and finding only two survivors. When the Battle of the Somme ended four and a half months later, the British army, despite suffering losses of close to a half-million men, far from winning the war had failed to achieve even its first day’s territorial objectives.

  Wilson did not accept, or perhaps did not understand, the reasoning behind the Allies’ contention that they had to drag Germany down to their level of weakness before they could talk peace; that after being bloodied by Germany for two years, they could not afford to let the fighting be stopped before they had a chance, in turn, of bloodying Germany.

  Waiting for the call that never came—the call from the Allies to step in to try to stop the war—Wilson doubted that the Allies, if they had been dealing with him in good faith, would choose to go on absorbing such horrendous losses when he had given them a chance to stop it all and, on the basis of House’s proposals, get the essentials of what they claimed to want. The obvious explanation was that they were lying to turn and to the public about what they actually desired. Britain and France claimed to have gone to war to repel aggression and to rescue Belgium, but Wilson was driven to suspect that had been a mere pretext, and that the Allies really were waging a war of conquest.

  The truth was at once more simple and more complex than Wilson seemed to suppose. What was simple to understand was why the Western democracies had gone to war in the first instance. France had not had a choice; without having given any provocation, she had been invaded by Germany, and had no alternative but to fight back. Britain then had come into the war on France’s side for reasons of both head and heart: a minority seriously concerned with foreign policy thought it mortally dangerous to allow any one power—in this case, Germany—to achieve total mastery in Europe, while the majority felt that Britain, having pledged by treaty to uphold Belgium’s neutrality and the inviolability of her frontiers, was morally bound to rescue Belgium from Germany’s invasion.

  Once the fighting started, ideas about war goals began to change; but that outlooks were shifting in all the belligerent countries was one of the many aspects of wartime reality that Wilson seemed not to grasp. Germany’s successes in the first two years of the war showed its military machine to be far more effective, as compared with the forces of the Allies, than Allied leaders had recognized before 1914. It was only natural that
London and Paris would be more conscious than they had been in antebellum days of the danger that would continue to be posed by Germany in the future and that a level of German power that might have seemed acceptable to the Allies a few years earlier might now seem ominously high. The circumstances of Britain and France no longer were what they had been, and they sought to crush Germany’s military machine in the fighting to come—not only (as Wilson seemed to assume) in order to obtain the peace terms they desired, but also because, with their own armies devastated, the Allies would be inferior to Germany in the postwar world if peace were negotiated before the German army, too, could be destroyed.

  So as the war raged, both the Allies and the Central Powers adopted new war goals, responding to changes in circumstances and in the fluctuating fortunes of war, but also to shifts in their own governments and politics. Thus Prime Minister Asquith, who had been opposed to England’s taking any territorial gains in the war, was replaced in 1916 by David Lloyd George, a political figure of a very different sort. Once a radical and an enemy of imperialism, Lloyd George now was neither. British strength and prosperity were being destroyed in the war, and Lloyd George, in addressing himself to the task of turning that situation around, came to believe that only by acquiring new territories, with the wealth and strategic advantages that they would bring, could Great Britain be made whole. Moreover, Britain (even in the opinion of Asquith and Grey) could hardly stand aside and take nothing if her Allies advanced large claims in the postwar world. And the number of Allies, and therefore of claims, kept expanding, for there were new recruits, drawn not to the cause, but to its rewards: the Allies were obliged to promise territorial bribes to countries like Italy to come into the war on their side.

  Wrongly suspecting that the imperialist ambitions harbored by the Allies in 1916 might explain the origins of the European war, Wilson (and Marxist observers as well) misperceived the process that was occurring. Wilson guessed that he was seeing imperialism beget war when he really was seeing war beget imperialism.

  To the extent that he became aware of the rewards that Britain and France were promising to themselves and their allies, President Wilson became disillusioned with the Allied cause in 1916 and confirmed in his fears that the true animating force of Allied policy must be the lust for conquest. In spurning Wilson’s offer to mediate, in choosing instead to fight on and endure numbingly horrible losses, the Allies, in Wilson’s view, were showing their true colors as imperialists.

  In the spring of 1916 the President learned that the Allies—Britain, France, Russia, and Italy—had met secretly in Paris to concert a program for beating off the American economic dominance they feared might otherwise arise in the postwar world. They discussed such matters as the creation of trade barriers to keep American products out of their markets. It was news that could not help but color Wilson’s perception of what the Allies sought to achieve.

  In the United States and abroad, politicians and journalists who spoke with Edward House at one point or another in 1916—believing, as everyone did, that speaking with House was the same as speaking with Wilson—imagined that the President was pro-Ally and might even be seeking some basis on which he could bring the United States into the war if he could do so without dangerously dividing the country on that issue.

  House, it is true, remained pro-Ally, but the President did not, and increasingly thought not of Germany, but of Great Britain, America’s traditional enemy, as the adversary. Military preparedness, the program Wilson had taken over from TR after the Lusitania affair, could be of more than one sort. An army would be of use in fighting Germany. But as against Britain, it was a navy that would be needed—and it was into naval preparedness that Wilson threw himself. Incensed by Britain’s restrictions on America’s trade with Germany, Wilson told House in September 1916: “Let us build a navy bigger” than Britain’s “and do what we please.”

  FROM THE BRITISH POINT OF VIEW, it seemed evident that Wilson wanted to be asked to mediate the war in 1916 because it would help him win the presidential elections. Tory statesman Arthur Balfour, a former prime minister, told the cabinet on the first day of spring 1916 that the House proposal “was not worth five minutes’ thought” but that “no doubt, if carried out, it would get the President of the United States out of political difficulties.” Spring-Rice, the British ambassador in Washington, who never had gotten on well with Wilson, warned London for the future “against the danger of entrusting the United States with any large measure of influence over the affairs of other nations …” and reported that in the United States “there is nothing so sacred … no consideration of right and wrong … that … is not subordinated, without a semblance of shame or hesitation, to the party calculations of an election year.”

  IT IS AXIOMATIC that in good times people tend to vote for the incumbent, so the prosperity of the United States in 1916 to some extent offset Wilson’s disadvantage as the candidate of the minority party and gave him a fighting chance of being reelected. His breakthrough came in winning normally Republican Ohio, with its big bloc of electoral votes, a result that may have reflected the growing strength in that state of trade unions, which in the years ahead were to become a mainstay of the Democratic party.

  In the end, though, as in 1912, Wilson’s victory was a fluke made possible by a split in Republican ranks. The last and deciding vote in the 1916 presidential campaign was cast by California, which was believed to be safely Republican. But the state’s powerful Progressive Republican governor, Hiram Johnson, was bitterly offended when a factional opponent was treated by Charles Evans Hughes as the leader of the party in the state. With Johnson and his supporters walking out on the Republican campaign, Wilson squeaked by to carry the state by a plurality of less than 4,000 out of a million votes cast. California’s thirteen electoral votes put Wilson over the top.

  With less than 50 percent of the popular vote, Wilson carried the solid South, the border states, and almost the entire West, winning thirty states (with 277 electoral votes) to Hughes’s eighteen (with 254). Wilson won the antiwar West but lost the antiwar Middle West, including states such as Wisconsin with heavily German-American populations. So it is not clear what role the war issue played in the election.

  Even if it played no material role in the minds of the voters, it was an issue that haunted the campaign—and haunted Wilson. For the President recognized that the fate and direction of his foreign policy now were in Germany’s hands. He could emerge as the peacemaker who ended the war—but only if Germany helped him do it, for the Allies would not. Or he could become the first President to embroil the United States in a war on the continent of Europe—if Germany drove him to it by ending the U-boat truce, as from a military point of view she might have to do sooner or later in order to defeat the Allies. For the United States the issue of war or peace would be decided not in Washington, but in Berlin.

  10

  BERLIN DECIDES

  THE UNITED STATES, having loaned Britain and France so much money, was bound to come into the war on the Allied side: such was the opinion of William Bullitt, the twenty-five-year-old star reporter of the Philadelphia Public Ledger, who had returned to America in February 1916 from reporting the adventures of Henry Ford and his peace mission to Europe. Bullitt reasoned that the countries he should get to know while there still was time were America’s enemies-to-be, Germany and Austria-Hungary; for he continued to pursue his plan of acquiring firsthand information about Europe that the government lacked so that one day President Wilson would appoint him to high office.

  The dashing young man-about-Philadelphia was about to marry. His bride, Aimee Ernesta Drinker (whom Felix Frankfurter, too, had courted), had qualities that Bullitt especially prized: her family was older than Philadelphia itself, and she was of a startling beauty that led passing strangers to stop and stare. She wished to be a writer, and the young couple chose to spend their honeymoon in Germany and Austria-Hungary so that they both could pursue their ambitions.

&
nbsp; “We were broad-minded before we touched Germany,” wrote Ernesta. “We—particularly Billy—were ready to understand Germany. Billy said he could see their point of view perfectly.” But in fact he and she could not. On entering Germany they were shocked at the first thing said to them: a young German who boarded their train explained “how much he hated America, because the United States was selling munitions to the Allies.”

  On arriving in Berlin May 29, 1916, the Bullitts were invited to a luncheon at the American embassy by the U.S. ambassador, James Gerard, the family friend who had advised Bullitt and his mother to leave Germany in 1914. At the embassy the young couple met the staff, whom Gerard’s deputy, Joseph Grew, had made a point of recruiting from Harvard, his alma mater. “The Embassy is filled with Harvard secretaries,” wrote Ernesta, quoting a diplomat she had met, “whose lips … are still wet with the milk of Groton.”

  In exploring life in Berlin, the Bullitts found food shortages (“there’s scarcely any butter”) as a result of the war, but no real hardship. “We have given up the romantic idea of starving,” wrote Ernesta, and “Billy says he’s not going to be the first to complain of the high price of caviar and pate de foie gras.” What struck Ernesta was the efficiency and discipline with which Germany carried out the rationing of food; no other people, she remarked, had it “in” them to do it.