America came up several times, but particularly on February 5, after the news hit of Wilson’s severing relations with Germany. “The Russian public has favorably received this important piece of news,” Doumergue told his diary, “but the impression it conveys is but vague and superficial. For Russia knows nothing of America; she does not even suspect what a great drama has been taking place in the conscience of the American people during the last twenty months”—or at least in President Wilson’s conscience.
The delegates were, however, learning about the great drama now playing out in Russia. Civic disorder was spreading. On February 13, eleven members of the Central Committee of War Industries were arrested on charges of “plotting a revolutionary movement with the object of proclaiming a republic.” Paléologue arranged a luncheon for Foreign Minister Doumergue with leading liberals, including Pavel Miliukov, a key figure in the Diet’s coalition of liberal parties known as the Progressive Bloc and prominent member of the Constitutional Democrats, known (from their party’s initials) as the Kadets. When Doumergue counseled patience, Miliukov and the others exploded with rage. “We’ve had quite enough of patience,” they said. “Our patience is utterly exhausted! Besides, if we don’t act soon, the masses won’t listen to us any longer!”
Doumergue replied that he was talking about patience, not resignation. “But whatever you do, put the war first!”14
Yet that was exactly what the Russian leadership, liberals or reactionary monarchists, seemed unable to do. There had been some hope that the death of the hated monk Rasputin (murdered by a cabal of Russian aristocrats on December 30, 1916) would break the ice that had frozen the czar and czarina in their manifestly self-destructive course. According to Paléologue, “the Rasputin party has survived Rasputin, but it is a body without a head.” Even worse, the murder had backfired. While city folk celebrated, to the average Russian peasant, “Rasputin has become a martyr,” a well-respected prince with deep connections in the countryside and in industry, explained a leading and well-informed nobleman to the French ambassador. “He was a man of the people; he let the Czar hear the voice of the people; he defended the people against the Court folk, the pridvorny. So the pridvorny killed him!” Paléologue’s informant warned that the split between urban and rural Russia now loomed wider than ever, with forbidding prospects for the future.15
Finally, after weeks of fruitless discussion, the Allies seemed no closer to a common coordinated strategy than when they began. “The work of this conference is dragging on to no purpose,” Ambassador Paléologue wrote in his diary. “No practical result has emerged from all the diplomatic verbiage.”
One thing did emerge, however: the sense that Russia was on the brink of some great internal upheaval that, if anything, the murder of Rasputin had only made worse. As the conference broke up on February 21, the French ambassador gave Doumergue and General Castelnau a note to pass to French prime minister Aristide Briand.
“A revolutionary crisis is at hand in Russia,” it read. “It nearly broke out five weeks ago and is only postponed. Every day the Russian nation is getting more indifferent towards the war and the spirit of anarchy is spreading among all classes and even in the army . . . In case of a rising the authorities cannot count on the army. My conclusion is that time is no longer working for us, at any rate in Russia, and that we must henceforth take the defection of our ally into our calculations and draw all the inferences involved.”
Doumergue read the note and said he agreed. “I am just as pessimistic as yourself,” the foreign minister said. But even with this growing pessimism about Russia’s future, neither man could have guessed that the czarist regime had less than a month to live.16
WASHINGTON, FEBRUARY 21–MARCH 1
THAT SAME DAY, February 21, officials in the German Admiralty could look at one another with grim satisfaction. In just three weeks of unrestricted submarine warfare, German U-boats had sunk 134 Allied and nonbelligerent ships—a new record. The submarine campaign was proving as much a success as Ludendorff and the generals had hoped. For the entire month of February, half a million tons of shipping would be sent to the bottom of the sea. The critical number of six hundred thousand tons seemed just over the horizon.
The count of sunken ships now regularly included American ones, even as President Wilson remained on the sidelines and refused to act.
On February 3, a German submarine sank the U.S. cargo ship Housatonic off the coast of Sicily. There were twenty-five Americans on board, although none was killed. Back in Washington, President Wilson did nothing.
On February 7, the British steamer California went down to a German torpedo off Ireland’s coast. Again, there were American passengers on board; again, there were no American casualties, although forty-three people died in the attack. And again, President Wilson chose to do nothing.
On February 14, an Austrian warship sank the Lyman M. Law, an American-owned schooner with a crew of ten and a cargo of wooden staves for making lemon-packing boxes. The Austrians ordered the crew off the schooner before they sank it; if it had been a German and not an Austrian vessel, the outcome could have been very different. Once again, Wilson did nothing.
Two days earlier, Roosevelt disparaged Wilson as “yellow all through,” and repeated his claim that “I don’t believe Wilson will go to war unless Germany literally kicks him into it.”
In London, U.S. ambassador Walter Hines Page was even more discouraged. On February 19, he wrote in his diary, “I am now ready to record my conviction that we shall not get into the war at all.” Wilson, he wrote, “is constitutionally unable to come to the point of action. That much seems certain to me.”17
Wilson, however, was not entirely inactive. He was considering a major step and was on the verge of asking Congress for the authority to arm U.S. merchant ships. If that measure passed, it would mean that an armed confrontation with Germany on the high seas would be only a matter of time.
And so it was, in these tense, dark days at the end of February 1917, that the Zimmermann telegram landed on President Wilson’s desk.
That telegram had been in the possession of British Naval Intelligence since January 17 (see the prologue). It had come in two coded parts, one long and one relatively short. The long part had been the easiest to crack. It contained the information regarding the German government’s decision to renew unrestricted submarine warfare on January 31, news that was no longer news by the end of February.
It was the second part of the message, consisting of 155 coded groups and beginning, “Berlin to Washington, W158, 16 January 1917, Most Secret,” that proved the most interesting to the British decoders, but it was also the toughest to crack. Its subtitle, however, kept drawing the decoders on: “For Your Excellency’s [meaning, Ambassador Bernstorff’s] personal information and to be handed on to the Imperial [German] Minister in Mexico by a safe route.”
Mention of Mexico had certainly been intriguing to Hall and his code breakers as they sat in their cramped, damp room at the Admiralty, as far from sunny Mexico as one could get. Their sense of intrigue grew as they decoded the first section of this second message; it was an offer of an alliance between Mexico and Germany, in the event that resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare forced the United States into war, something that the German ambassador was to tell the Mexican president was a distinct possibility.
The next group of coded numbers, thirty groups in all, stumped the code breakers completely. It had taken another two weeks of painstaking, backbreaking labor to force the enigmatic numbers to disclose their secrets, and when they did, Hall and his team realized they were sitting on a detonator that could blow the war wide open.
The telegram offered the promise that if Mexico allied itself with Germany, then Germany would help Mexico “regain by conquest her lost territory in Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico.” It went even further, suggesting that Germany and Mexico also reach out to Japan, and encourage that country’s defection from the Allied camp by “mediating a
peace,” while offering to let the Japanese join in the spoils taken from the breakup of America’s presence along the Pacific.
At one level, the offer made sense. Mexico’s president, Gen. José Venustiano Carranza, was still smarting from Wilson’s decision to declare war on Mexico three years earlier and to send one American expeditionary force to Veracruz and another across the Mexican border to pursue the bandit Pancho Villa, an expedition commanded by one Gen. John J. Pershing. The American troops were now gone, but the shame and humiliation remained. Carranza had reached out more than once to Berlin, professing undying friendship and asking for Germany’s help in strengthening the Mexican navy. He had even made noises about providing logistical support for German submarines operating in the South Atlantic, and promised to “eventually provide them a permanent base on the Mexican coast.” If there was any neutral country poised for an alliance with Germany, and an alliance against the United States, it was the Republic of Mexico.18
Approaching Japan in an anti-American alliance also had some reasoning behind it. Japan had taken a dim view of the United States ever since President Roosevelt intervened and negotiated an end to the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, just when Russia was staggering from defeats on land and sea and Japan seemed on the verge of a historic and decisive victory. Anti-American demonstrations broke out across Japan; dozens of Japanese committed hara-kiri out of shame and humiliation. Japan’s rapidly growing navy considered the U.S. Navy its single most important future rival—more than the German navy or even Britain’s Royal Navy. Zimmermann hoped that by offering Mexico as a jumping-off point for a possible Japanese attack on the American West Coast, and offering American possessions in the Pacific such as the Philippines, Guam, and Hawaii as the spoils of war, Germany could turn Japan from foe to friend—and create enough of a distraction that even if the United States joined the Allies, it would be unable to intervene in Europe until it was too late to save Britain from starvation or surrender.
It was a well-thought-out and clever plan. It was also geopolitical lunacy. Zimmermann’s plan involved nothing less than trying to engineer the breakup of the United States. If anything could tempt the world’s biggest industrial power to commit itself to total war, and also tempt President Wilson, it would be a scheme like this one. Even if Zimmermann believed that the chief value of the Mexican alliance (and likewise that with Japan) would largely be to distract America’s attention at a critical juncture, the plan would instantly boomerang if it were somehow to fall into the wrong hands ahead of time.
This is precisely what did happen, when Zimmermann’s telegram arrived at Room 40 that January. The decoding of the last stubborn set of coded groups was finished on February 19. The British government now knew the full extent of the diplomatic bombshell the telegram contained, and when, on February 23, the secretary of state for foreign affairs, Arthur Balfour, walked over to Grosvenor Square to deliver the text of the telegram personally to the American ambassador, it was, he admitted later, “the most dramatic moment of my life.”
Walter Hines Page’s reaction can be imagined. If any document could propel Wilson out of the passivity Page had been deploring in his diary just four days earlier, this had to be it. He took until 2:00 a.m. to compose a covering message, prefaced by the warning that “in about three hours I shall send a telegram of great importance to the President and the Secretary of State.”19
After sending Wilson the full text of the Zimmermann telegram and his covering message explaining how the British had obtained it, Page went to bed elated but apprehensive. “This would precipitate a war between any two nations,” he wrote in his diary before turning in. “Heaven knows what effect it will have in Washington.”20
Wilson’s reaction after reading the telegram was one of “much indignation,” according to an eyewitness. Declaring it “astounding,” he sent it along to Colonel House. But the president’s immediate thought was not of declaring war on Germany or opening a new line of negotiations with Britain, as Ambassador Page and others had hoped. Instead, he decided he could make political use of it to push his Armed Ship Bill through Congress. Even this half measure, of arming American ships going to sea to allow them to defend themselves against attack, had aroused enormous controversy and opposition from pacifist groups, and from his own former secretary of state William Jennings Bryan. A National Pacifist Congress meeting in New York City, with more than five hundred delegates, condemned the measure. The pressure on Congress to block the bill was intense. Perhaps the release of the Zimmermann telegram, the president reasoned, would be enough to break the logjam.
He had some additional help from the Germans. On February 26, Wilson went before another joint session of Congress, this time to ask the members to authorize providing arms to American ships against attack “in their legitimate and peaceful pursuits on the seas.” As he spoke, a crescendo of whispers began to fill the chamber, as a piece of sensational news spread from one congressman and senator to another. The media were reporting that the Cunard liner RMS Laconia had just been sunk by a German submarine off the coast of Ireland. Twenty-five passengers were dead, including two American citizens.21
Yet even this could not move the die-hard opponents of the Armed Ship Bill, opponents such as Sen. Gilbert Hitchcock of Nebraska, William Jennings Bryan’s home state. They argued that American ships shouldn’t be sailing into waters the Germans had designated as sink-on-sight zones, anyway; arming them would only tempt fate and provoke a confrontation. Opposition to the bill therefore was, if anything, only stiffened by the Laconia incident.
So, on February 28, Wilson ordered the text of the Zimmermann telegram to be made public. Before he did, he had one last humiliation to endure from the German foreign minister. He learned that the copy of the telegram sent to Ambassador Bernstorff had been transmitted on the U.S. diplomatic cable, which Wilson, as a gesture of goodwill, had allowed the German embassy to use after the British had severed Germany’s own transatlantic cables at the outbreak of the war. It was akin to a kidnapper writing a ransom note using a pen his victim’s parents had given him as a Christmas present.
“Good Lord! Good Lord!” Wilson exclaimed over and over—the closest he ever came to swearing. The damage that the release of the telegram did now to Germany’s reputation as a respectable member of the community of nations no longer mattered to him. All that mattered was turning around his opponents on the Armed Ship Bill.
Certainly, the immediate reactions were gratifying. Shown the text of the telegram, Senator Hitchcock immediately switched sides, calling the Germans’ communication with Mexico a “dastardly plot” and promising to help shepherd through the Senate the bill he had previously opposed. Release of the telegram to the media triggered a feeling of outrage and revulsion, both on Capitol Hill and around the country. Congress “is stirred to its depths today,” the New York Sun reported. On March 1, the House of Representatives passed the Armed Ship Bill by a lopsided 401 to 13.22
Yet, even after this, Wilson was still not moved to consider a declaration of war against Germany or to ask Berlin for a retraction of, or even an explanation for, Zimmermann’s extraordinary message. (Wilson couldn’t, of course, ask the German ambassador; he had been expelled from Washington more than three weeks earlier.) If anything, the telegram only reinforced his position on American neutrality. Given Germany’s perfidy and that of other nations, including Mexico, it was all the more important that America remain above the fray and avoid the contaminating touch of alliances and wars of conquest and territorial gain. America’s restraint and “self-control,” Wilson’s obsession since the Great War began, were needed now more than ever, when those wishing to see America join forces with the Entente were using the telegram to push for war.
One of those was Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge: “It is no longer a contest between England and France and their allies on the one side” and Germany and its allies on the other. “It is now a struggle for the existence of freedom and democracy against a military autocracy wh
ich reverts to barbarism.”23 Still, Lodge also knew Wilson, or thought he did. He had no faith that the president would elect to go to war if he could help it, no matter the provocation. The Zimmermann telegram, however, might give Lodge his opening to force Wilson’s hand at last.
Lodge worked all weekend on what he considered the right plan to do it, and the right place and time. Others were planning something more robust. On March 1, the Senate would meet to debate the Armed Ship Bill, and Sen. Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette was there to defeat it. Clearly, he was prepared for anything: as he closed the door of his residence on his way to Capitol Hill, in his pocket was a loaded pistol. He checked once more to make sure it was there. Then he descended the steps and was gone.
5
BREAK POINT
Amidst the chaos and the darkness of the collapse of Czarism, there arose the bright sun of liberty.
—ALEXANDER KERENSKY
PETROGRAD, MARCH 5–MARCH 12
RUSSIA’S CURSE as 1917 began was as much meteorological as social or political. A colder-than-usual winter was followed by a warmer-than-usual early thaw. Both would sweep over the government of Nicholas II in ways that doomed the Romanov dynasty.
For instance, the average temperature in Petrograd for the first three months of 1917 was a dismal ten degrees Fahrenheit, compared with an average of forty degrees in 1916.1 The cold was so severe that food from the countryside could not reach the city; snow closed down the railroad tracks leading into Petrograd, while nearly sixty thousand railroad cars piled high with food, fodder for horses, and coal for fuel were stuck, unable to relieve a capital starved for food or to feed hungry Russian armies in the field.2
On March 5, rumors circulated that the government would be forced to ration bread and that every adult would be limited to one pound of bread per day. Despite the bitter cold, people fought for their places in the long lines that appeared in front of stores. Even policemen complained that they couldn’t get food for their families. The shortage of coal also forced local factories to close their doors. By March 6, more than ten thousand unemployed workers filled the streets—tinder for a firestorm to come.
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