In the Time of the Americans

by David Fromkin

  When Bethmann-Hollweg traversed the long avenue to the entrance of the 300-room castle of Pless on the morning of January 10, was ushered inside by liveried servants, climbed the marble staircase to the conference room, saluted Kaiser Wilhelm, who had arrived to preside over the conference, settled himself and listened to the navy’s chief, Holtzendorff, explain why unrestricted submarine warfare provided Germany’s last and only chance to win the war, and then launched into his own hourlong rebuttal, he evidently believed that the U-boat question was still an open one. He also seemed to think that the 200-page memorandum supplied by the navy in support of its position, with its detailed charts and statistics, was an advocate’s brief that the memorandum his vice chancellor had prepared for him could counter. He was mistaken. The kaiser yawned and fidgeted throughout most of the chancellor’s presentation. Bethmann-Hollweg must have sensed that he had lost his audience, for he began to retreat. Finally he said: “But if the military authorities consider the U-boat war essential I am in no position to contradict them.”

  They did consider it essential, and indeed essential to sign the necessary orders that very day. In exactly three weeks—on February 1—the submarine campaign then could begin. In no more than six months thereafter, the military chiefs promised, Germany would win victory. The United States might declare war, but there would be no time for Americans to gear up to fight before the Allies surrendered. “I guarantee on my word as a naval officer that no American will set foot on the Continent!” pledged Admiral von Holtzendorff that morning. Hindenburg said: “We can take care of America.”

  The kaiser, bored with all the talk and impatient to conclude matters, signed his name to an authorization already prepared (“I order that unrestricted submarine warfare be launched with the utmost vigor …”) and went in to lunch. Bethmann-Hollweg, in what seemed to be a state of collapse, told intimates that the decision just taken meant that Germany was finished, an opinion immediately recorded in a diary for posterity; but he trimmed his sails to a different wind in speaking to his colleagues. “If success beckons,” he told the military leaders who predicted that the submarines would bring a quick victory, “we must follow.” Advised to resign as chancellor by those who shared his fears of what retribution submarine warfare might bring, Bethmann-Hollweg instead was of the view, not uncommon among politicians, that he owed it to his country to stay in office; and he remained chancellor until pushed out six months later.

  In the three weeks between the conference of January 10 and the launching of Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare on February 1, the utmost secrecy was to be preserved. Nobody was to know that the decision to unleash the U-boats had been taken. Peace proposals advanced by the United States were to be treated as though they were being seriously considered. Germany’s military leaders had convinced themselves and the kaiser that the war would be over by harvest time.

  WHEN THE SENATE of the United States assembled at noon on Monday, January 22, Vice President Thomas R. Marshall, its presiding officer, read aloud a letter he unexpectedly had received the night before from Wilson, in which the President asked permission to address the Senate. Within hours Wilson, fresh from a morning on the golf links in Virginia, was on the speaker’s podium delivering his statement.

  What the President read aloud to the Senate was a message to the warring powers, but his thought processes were so thoroughly American, so utterly alien to Europe, that his message could not have been appreciated in Berlin, Vienna, St. Petersburg, Paris, or possibly even London. Wilson addressed Europeans in a language more foreign to them, even, than American English: “The question upon which the whole future peace and policy of the world depends is this,” Wilson declared. “Is the present war a struggle for a just and secure peace, or only for a new balance of power?” This question, as posed, could only have been mystifying to the great powers, for Europe’s experience had been that a stable peace and a just one, in the sense of protecting the rights of the weaker countries, could be achieved only by a balance of power.

  Europeans on both sides of the terrible conflict believed deeply that it was justice and security for which they fought, but Wilson dismissed the beliefs of both camps, urged them to abandon the gains they already had won and the war goals they had set for themselves, and advised them instead to settle for “a peace without victory.”

  Wilson linked his peace proposals to his espousal eight months earlier of a league of nations. The United States, though historically unwilling to participate in world politics, now (said Wilson) would agree to do so, through participation in an international peacekeeping league—but only on condition that the warring coalitions in Europe make peace on America’s terms. It was only right, he argued, that Europe should make peace on the basis that the United States urged; for America, by joining a league to keep the peace, would be making a long-lasting commitment to guarantee those terms. He could not ask the American people to uphold a settlement in which they did not believe.

  Among the basic terms of the peace agreement, Wilson said, should be those that the United States long had advocated, such as freedom of the seas. This meant that Great Britain, with which America had been quarreling and sometimes even warring on this vital issue for more than a century, would surrender to the claims of the United States, giving up the strategy on which her position in the world was based and abandoning the control of the world’s oceans in wartime that both ensured Britain’s survival and maintained her supremacy.

  It was not unnatural that Europe’s leaders should resent rather than welcome these proposals. For two and a half years their countries had been engaged in fighting one of the bloodiest wars in history, enduring suffering and losses of every kind on an unprecedented scale, only to be told that it was not to be their terms but America’s on which the war was to be ended. To some, the lofty tone in which the President spoke was irritating in itself, as the American leader deprecated the war goals of Europeans as selfish while portraying policies that would benefit the United States, such as freedom of the seas, as noble. Wilson, commented the noted British historian George Otto Trevelyan, “is surely the quintessence of a prig.” To Anatole France, urbane and ironic grand old man of letters, the peace terms suggested by the American President, coming as they did after all that the Allies had suffered, were “fetid, ignominious, obscene.…”

  Though Wilson’s plea for peace and his idealism compelled admiration, his specific proposals met with less success, even in the United States. With the exception of Progressive senator Robert La Follette, who was enthusiastic, Wilson’s approach was not supported by America’s political leaders. Wilson’s eloquent address, regarded by contemporaries and by posterity alike as among his most important statements, was like a flash of lightning suddenly illuminating a scene that had been dark: it lit up the foreign policy differences among America’s politicians with stark clarity. Those who opposed Wilson’s package of a league of nations tied to “without victory” peace terms (i.e., no gains by either side in the war) were of three minds: some were for the league but against the terms, others were for the terms but not the league, and still others were against both.

  1. William Jennings Bryan praised Wilson’s proposals as a “brave and timely appeal to the war-mad rulers of Europe”; but true to America’s isolationist traditions, he opposed American membership in a league of nations because time after time it would require the United States, in order to keep the peace, to use its armed forces overseas. Farm-state Republican senator William Borah, expressing views widely held everywhere from the Allegheny mountain range west to the Pacific coast, launched a battle for isolationism that he was to wage until his death in 1940.

  2. Theodore Roosevelt had been the first (in 1905) to propose creation of a league of nations. But his had been a much different conception. His league was to be an alliance of the few but powerful: a club of like-thinking great powers who would act together to police the globe and keep the peace. Edward House, in the years just before the outbre
ak of the European war, had proposed a similar scheme: an alliance of Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, perhaps along with France and/or Japan, to direct the affairs of the world.

  TR regarded Wilson’s notion of a league to which all countries would belong as impractical. More important, he and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge thought the American public did not fully understand, and eventually would fail to honor, the commitments that Wilson’s sort of league entailed. Like Bryan, they saw that membership in Wilson’s league meant that America was pledged time after time to fight wars abroad to stop aggression; but unlike Bryan, they feared that when the point came, Americans would back down and refuse to send armies abroad. This, believed Lodge and TR, would be dishonorable. It was a long-standing theme in the thought of both men that Americans never should sign a treaty—never should make promises—they were unlikely to keep.

  3. Former President William Howard Taft, who for the past two years had headed an organization to promote a league of nations, gave his public support to the President’s proposals, which, insofar as establishing a league was concerned, were inspired by proposals of his own. Privately, however, Taft complained of the way Wilson had framed the issue, for Taft was opposed (as were TR and Lodge) to linking the league issue to the peace-without-victory terms that Wilson advocated. Taft (like his Republican rival TR, and like Senator Lodge) wanted the Allies to win the war and to impose their own peace terms.

  I FEEL CONFIDENT,” President Wilson told the Senate in his January 22 address, “that I have said what the people of the United States would wish me to say.” He added: “I would fain believe that I am speaking for the silent mass of mankind everywhere.” Of his proposals, he affirmed that “these are American principles, American policies.…”

  As he was to do two years later, the President, despite opposition from politicians in both parties, claimed to speak for the people of the United States. As he was to do then, he linked acceptance of his attractive plan to establish a league for peace with the acceptance of peace terms that many found objectionable. He identified America’s principles with those of the world, believing in all good faith that to pursue America’s interests was for the general good, while for other countries to pursue their interests was selfish. As he was to do in 1919, he said that he, and not their national governments, spoke for the people of Europe. As in 1919, he misconstrued the motives of foreign leaders and failed to understand the rationale of the policies they pursued. And as they were to do at Versailles after the war, the leaders of Europe failed to appreciate at their true value the wisdom of Wilson’s counsel and the clairvoyance of his prophecy, which seemed to be so strangely intermixed with naiveté.

  Duped by the charming German ambassador, Count Johann von Bernstorff, who did not know the full truth himself, America’s President believed that his message was receiving careful consideration in Berlin. He did not know that the issue had been decided weeks before, that he was wasting his words on deaf ears, that the kaiser had already signed the order sending the U-boats out from their home ports into the depths of the Atlantic in search of victims. So while Wilson, on his podium in Washington, spoke of peace, beneath the surface of the oceans the submarine fleet unleashed by the German High Command scanned the horizon through periscopes in search of American merchant vessels to blow out of the water.

  * Now, as it was before 1742, the Polish city of Pszczyna.

  11

  AMERICA FINDS A FOREIGN POLICY

  WASHINGTON, D.C., Wednesday, January 31, 1917. The German ambassador, Count von Bernstorff, paid a formal call on Secretary of State Robert Lansing to deliver a message to the surprised secretary. Bernstorff stated that he had been instructed by Berlin to announce that, weeks before, the kaiser’s government had decided to resume unrestricted submarine warfare. “I know that it is very serious, very,” said Bernstorff, adding, “I deeply regret it. Good afternoon.” Later the ambassador told reporters that “I am finished with politics for the rest of my life.”

  President Wilson went into shock. He had believed that the Germans, unlike the Allies, were giving his views serious consideration; but now it was clear they had been stringing him along. He told House that he “could not get his balance” and that he felt as though the sun suddenly had reversed itself and “had begun to go from west to east.” He spent hours in seclusion trying to think things through.

  At his home in New York that day, January 31, Edward House also received a communication from Bernstorff. Apparently replying to Wilson’s December note—though not in terms that would move the peace process forward—the German government notified House, too, of the submarine blockade. Promptly after dinner, House went to the railroad station and caught the midnight train to Washington. He arrived in the capital the following morning and went to the White House after breakfast to confer with Wilson. Later Secretary of State Lansing joined them.

  Lansing, who had come by the White House the night before to urge Wilson to break off diplomatic relations with Germany, wanted the United States to intervene in the war. So did House, who believed that a break in relations was bound to be followed by entry into the war. But Wilson, in discussing the matter that Thursday morning, February 1, still hesitated; he neither wanted to enter the war nor believed it inevitable that the country should do so. He told Lansing that “‘white civilization’ and its domination of the planet rested largely on our ability to keep this country intact.”

  At the regular cabinet meeting the following afternoon, Wilson argued that the United States had to stay out of the war in order “to keep the white race strong against the yellow—Japan, for instance.…” Then, too, he did not really believe in the Allied cause: “Probably greater justice would be done,” he told the Cabinet in assessing the situation in Europe, “if the conflict ended in a draw.”

  Reluctantly, on February 3 he asked Congress to approve breaking with Germany. But he clung to the hope that matters would stop there. He told Congress that he refused to believe that the Germans, when it came to the point of moving from words to deeds, really would sink American and other neutral ships, and that only “actual overt acts on their part” could make him believe they would do so. “We are the sincere friends of the German people,” he declared, and “we shall not believe they are hostile to us unless and until we are obliged to believe it.”

  This was too meek for such warriors as Theodore Roosevelt, who commented that Wilson was “a very timid man when it comes to physical danger.… As for shame, he has none, and if anyone kicks him, he brushes his clothes, and utters some lofty sentiment.” Others, even those less hostile than TR to the President, were uncertain in what direction Wilson proposed to go.

  Walter Lippmann, however, believed that he understood where Wilson was leading the country. The young editor, whose phrase “peace without victory” had been used by the President in his January 22 speech, enjoyed the heady sensation of being at the center of things. In close and frequent communication with Edward House, Lippmann fell into the common error of assuming that House’s thoughts and sentiments reflected the President’s. Lippmann had come to believe by the end of 1916, as House did, that the United States should join the Allies. It would be “something to boast of,” he wrote in The New Republic, “that we have lived in a time when the world called us into partnership.”

  As against the U-boat danger, he wrote, “The safety of the Atlantic highway is something for which America should fight.” His new concept was of an “Atlantic community” in which the United States and Great Britain were partners. Britain, as he now saw it, had used her dominion of the oceans to shield the Western Hemisphere from attack by the great powers of the Continent. In now building its own naval strength, the United States should seek to play a role as England’s partner in shouldering the burden, hitherto borne by the United Kingdom alone, of policing the “vital highways of our world” to keep them open to Americans while denying their use to those who would endanger the Americas.

  Lippmann w
rote to Felix Frankfurter February 19 to explain what he imagined was Wilson’s hidden design. After breaking with Germany February 3, Lippmann claimed, “the administration absolutely expected a sensational outrage within a few days”—a German U-boat sinking of some unarmed vessel—“and had set its mind in preparation for war on the strength of it. They miscalculated the facts.” For in the days and weeks after February 3, nothing had happened, and pacifist and isolationist feelings in the country had reasserted themselves. So Wilson, Lippmann explained, was obliged to hold off. “If he acts now the aggression will seem to come from Washington,” he wrote; “if he acts aggressively and seems to desire war he will lose the very public opinion which he most needs.”

  Wilson lived through a very different winter of 1917 than Lippmann believed. In retrospect it seems that the President waited to see if there would be a German attack at sea—not in hope, as the young journalist thought, but in fear. He deliberately avoided provoking or offending the Germans, knowing that his record in this respect would help unify the country behind him if he were obliged to ask for a declaration of war. But that was not the reason he was doing it; it now looks very much as though he was doing it in sincerity to try to avoid the coming of war.

  THE SAME MONTH in which Walter Lippmann wrote to Felix Frankfurter outlining what he believed to be Wilson’s political strategy for bringing the United States into the European war, Kansas newspaperman William Allen White wrote to a British acquaintance that “the war is not a first page story in the West. A score of things interest the West more.…” The farther away from the Atlantic seaboard that Americans lived, the more remote and irrelevant events in Europe seemed to them to be. Middle and western America were not even considering getting involved in the faraway fighting.