1917

by Arthur Herman, PhD

  Nor would Lenin be averse to getting safe passage to Russia from the German government, if the Germans were willing. And in the last days of March and the first days of April, there was every indication they would be.

  It was the German chancellor himself, Bethmann-Hollweg, who now advised Romberg to get into contact with the Russian exiles in Switzerland to give them permission to go to Russia. It was the German foreign minister, the same Arthur Zimmermann, who asked the German Supreme Command to approve the decision to invite those exiles, including Lenin, to cross German territory on their way to their home country. The generals were as enthusiastic about the idea as Zimmermann at the Foreign Ministry.6 Ludendorff understood that Berlin’s goal was “to improve peace possibilities through the internal weakening of Russia.” He and they had always seen Russia as the weakest link in the Allied chain, and the one most likely to fall out of the war. The revolution unfolding in Petrograd, and now spreading elsewhere, only made it more so. Sending Lenin there seemed the best way to finish the job.

  This was an important point. Everyone involved in the subterfuge maneuver from the German side assumed that Lenin would fail. The goal was to sow chaos and more chaos, not to see a Marxist-Bolshevik government come to power—indeed, nothing seemed less likely. The only person who was convinced Lenin could succeed was Lenin himself. If the Germans were willing to use him as a tool for their ends, he was more than willing to use them for his.

  Other exiles had more scruples. They thought it would be best to get permission from the Provisional Government to make the trip under German auspices. There was even talk of a prisoner swap, with German detainees being released from Russia in exchange for the exiles’ returning home. Lenin, however, brushed these objections aside. (Besides, Foreign Minister Miliukov in Petrograd had turned them down flat.) Instead, he had a far-left German friend, Fritz Platten, approach Ambassador Romberg with a plan hatched by Lenin and his closest ally in exile, Grigory Zinoviev.

  The idea was for Germany to provide a train for their travel to Russia, regardless of the Provisional Government’s wishes. Lenin’s conditions were that the train have extraterritorial status during the journey, and that the exiles pay their own fares, so that there was no appearance of their acting as paid German agents. Although Romberg thought it odd that an “individual,” as he put it, should set conditions for a “government,” he passed Lenin’s request along, and on April 4, Zimmermann and the Foreign Ministry approved the plan.7

  Lenin was delighted. He plunged into making plans with Zinoviev. A total of thirty-two exiles would make the trip. They were to assemble at the Zähringer Hof hotel in Zurich on April 9. The next day, Lenin made a kind of farewell address to the revolutionaries who were staying behind, many of whom were furious with him for what they saw as an act of betrayal. Lenin told them he was perfectly aware that “the German Government allows the passage of the Russian Internationalists only in order to thus strengthen the antiwar movement in Russia.” What the Germans wanted didn’t matter. The worldwide workers’ revolt would soon topple them, too—but that revolt would start first in Russia.

  This was also part of Lenin’s new thinking, ideas he would lay out on paper during his journey across Germany, the so-called April Theses. The fact that Russia was still far behind the rest of Europe in its economic development, and that its government was in a condition of monstrous turmoil, would make establishing a Marxist-led workers’ revolution easier, not harder. In Lenin’s mind, Russia was now what we today would call a failing state, and like other radical fanatics (including Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, and, nearly a century later, Osama bin Laden), he sensed that a failing state offered a huge opportunity for even a tiny revolutionary minority, provided it was dedicated and ruthless enough to seize it.

  No one would prove more dedicated, or more ruthless, than Lenin.

  The date set for his departure was April 7. When that day came, America had been at war for exactly twenty-four hours.

  WASHINGTON, APRIL 2–APRIL 6

  WOODROW WILSON STRODE to the rostrum at eight o’clock on the evening of April 2 with a calmness and resolve that stirred observers. He was about to give the speech of his life, yet his physical presence—he leaned one arm nonchalantly on the lectern—suggested a man who habitually dealt with world-changing events with ease.

  He began with a grim recitation of German aggressions against the neutral nations of the world, including the United States. “Vessels of every kind, whatever their flag, their character, their cargo, their destination . . . have been ruthlessly sent to the bottom without warning and without thought of help or mercy,” he said. “Property can be paid for; the lives of peaceful and innocent people cannot. The present German submarine warfare against commerce is a warfare against mankind . . . The wrongs against which we now array ourselves are no common wrongs; they cut to the very roots of human life.”

  At this point the entire chamber was standing, applauding as one. Wilson’s next words rang out like the tolling of a bell: “With a profound sense of the solemn and even tragical character of the step I am taking . . . in unhesitating obedience to what I deem my constitutional duty, I advise that the Congress declare the recent course of the Imperial German Government to be in fact nothing less than war against the government and people of the United States.”

  It was an extraordinary moment. Instead of Wilson and Congress declaring war on Germany, the speech implied it was Germany who had declared war on the United States. Wilson added, perhaps with an eye to the large and very active German American minority inside the United States, that “we have no quarrel with the German people.” This was a war, Wilson averred, “determined upon as wars used to be determined upon in the old, unhappy days when people were nowhere consulted by their rulers and wars were provoked and waged in the interests of dynasties and little groups of ambitious men”—an echo of his accusation against the senators who had blocked his Armed Ship Bill.

  Now Wilson closed on the heart of the matter, at least as far as he was concerned. This was his ever-present hope for a future “league of nations,” especially democratic nations, as the guarantors of world peace.

  “A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations,” he explained. “No autocratic government could be trusted to keep faith within it or observe its covenants. It must be a league of honor, a partnership of opinion . . . Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honor steady to a common end and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow interest of their own.”

  That lofty sentiment then led him to speak of Lenin’s homeland: “Does not every American feel that assurance has been added to our hope for the future peace of the world by the wonderful and heartening things that have been happening within the last few weeks in Russia? Russia was known by those who knew it best to have been always in fact democratic at heart . . . The autocracy that crowned the summit of her political structure, long as it had stood and terrible as was the reality of its power, was not in fact Russian in origin, character, or purpose . . .”

  So much for three hundred or more years of Russian history, going back at least to the master builder of the Russian Empire, Ivan the Terrible. Wilson plunged on: “Now it has been shaken and the great, generous Russian people have been added in their naïve majesty and might to the forces that are fighting for freedom in the world, for justice, and for peace. Here is a fit partner for a League of Honor.”

  Germany, however, was clearly not. It embodied all the faults and brutalities that characterized despotism—brutalities so blatant, Wilson noted, that even Germany’s ally Austria-Hungary had disavowed its campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare. And it was to eliminate those brutalities and the regimes that perpetrated them that Wilson and America were now prepared to take this next momentous step.

  “The world must be made safe for democracy,” he declared. The events in Russia had demonstrated that the democratic principle was on the rise around th
e world. America’s direct involvement in this war would provide a way to secure it, both for Russia and for the other Allied powers.

  “We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind.”

  If that wasn’t enough to bring his audience to its feet again, Wilson finished with these thoughts: “It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war . . . But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts—for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own government, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by which a concert of free peoples shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.”

  In short, by going to war, America was pledging to do nothing less than set the rest of the world free.

  Then Wilson added this: “To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything we are and everything we have . . . America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other.”8

  Never had there been a declaration of war quite like this one—one that ended, as anyone with a modicum of knowledge of history had to notice, like Martin Luther’s famous declaration at the Diet of Worms: “Here I stand; I can do no other.” It was a commitment not just of a nation but of its entire heritage to the enterprise of war—and all in exactly thirty-two minutes.

  Admirers of the speech virtually swooned with admiration. Walter Lippmann, editor of the New Republic, wrote, “Only a statesman who will be called great could have made America’s intervention [in the world war] mean so much to the generous forces of the world, could have lifted the inevitable horror of war into a deed so full of meaning.” From London, Ambassador Page wrote, “Your speech cheers the whole enlightened world and marks the beginning of a new international era.”9

  The references to Russia also drew admiration and attention. In Paris, Georges Clemenceau not only welcomed Wilson’s declaration of war but was pleased with his mention of the revolution enveloping France’s ally. “The Russian Revolution and the American Revolution complement each other in a miraculous way,” the French Radical leader wrote effusively, “in defining once and for all the moral stakes in the conflict. All the great peoples of democracy . . . have taken that place in the battle that was destined for them. They work for the triumph not of one alone, but of all.”10

  Wilson would have agreed wholeheartedly with Clemenceau’s sentiment, just as he would agree with Ambassador Page, that the speech marked the beginning of a new international era. That was what he had planned, but this would be an era very unlike the one before. It would rest not on concepts such as balance of power or spheres of influence, but on higher moral ideals—with the United States sitting at the center of the new world order.

  On the one hand, Wilson seemed to be acquiescing in the arguments of Roosevelt, Lodge, and his own secretary of state, Robert Lansing, regarding whether America should go to war and which side it should be on. On the other, he had carefully distanced himself from the geopolitical assumptions that had led them to the conclusion that the United States was a Great Power and, as such, it needed to exert its influence in the world.

  For example, he did not include Germany’s allies, Turkey and Austria-Hungary, in his declaration of war; he had even spoken in praise of Austria. Nor did he highlight France and Britain as examples of “the league of honor” or the “partnership of democratic nations” he believed would be the foundation of a future concert of peace. Nor did he refer to them as allies at all. In fact, Wilson avoided entering any formal alliance with the Entente powers; instead, he insisted on the United States’ being an “Associated Power.”11

  Wilson’s eye was still on the goal he had set out in his “Peace Without Victory” speech of January 22: establishing America as the arbiter of a new kind of global power, one based on ideals and ideology, not physical force or material interest. In January, he had tried to do it by avoiding war. Now he was prepared to do it by entering the war. Either way, his idealistic, even utopian, vision of America and the world remained undimmed. It was only the means of achieving it that had drastically changed.

  Still, he had some lingering doubts about the new course he had chosen.

  For one thing, he doubted his own abilities as a war leader. He even told House on March 27 that “he did not believe he was fitted for the presidency under such conditions.” House had to agree. “It needed a man of coarser fiber and one less a philosopher than the President to conduct a brutal, vigorous, and successful war”—although, as we will see, when it came to the real thing, Wilson could be as vigorous and even as brutal as any Prussian general.12

  For another, he worried about the effects of war on the American people themselves. He confided his fears to a newspaper editor friend, Frank Cobb, even earlier in March, shortly after the sinking of the Illinois and the City of Memphis had been announced and when the clamor for war against Germany was growing.

  “Once lead this people into war,” Wilson ruminated, “and they’ll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance . . . The spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fibre of our national life, infecting Congress, the courts, the policeman on the beat, the man in the street.” Wilson worried that the Constitution itself would not survive: “a nation can’t put its strength into a war and keep its head level; it has never been done.”13

  Again, Wilson was haunted by those childhood memories of the Civil War: of a nation waging war to the hilt, of a president suspending habeas corpus, of Sherman’s March to the Sea, and of a peace and Reconstruction ruthlessly imposed on a defeated South, with (in Wilson’s mind) black men taking the rightful place of whites in statehouses and at the polls.

  Nor was Wilson the only one worried about whether this was indeed the right course for America. Emotions were running high on all sides. That same morning of April 2, Henry Cabot Lodge had been visited by a delegation of pacifists from his home state, Massachusetts. One of them, a former ball player named Alexander Bannwart, had become verbally abusive when Lodge told the delegation that he fully intended to support the president if he asked for a declaration of war. “Anyone who wants to go to war is a coward,” Bannwart blurted out. “You’re a damned coward.”

  Lodge replied, “And you’re a damned liar!” He then reared back and smacked Bannwart in the jaw. Bannwart answered with a punch of his own, hurling Lodge back against the closed half of the double doors to his office. The other pacifists sprang forward to continue pummeling the stunned senator, but his staff now moved in and broke up the fracas, and a bruised and battered Bannwart was hauled off to jail.14

  “At my age there is a certain aspect of folly about the whole thing and yet I am glad that I hit him,” Lodge wrote to Theodore Roosevelt. When Lodge arrived at the Senate two days later for the vote on the declaration of war, he found that many of his fellow senators were glad, too. They congratulated him on his fisticuffs with the pacifists. Some said there were rumors that Lodge had actually killed Bannwart, which had made the senator very popular in their home states.

  The vote in the Senate on April 6 was overwhelmingly for declaring war, 82 to 6. The vote in the House of Representatives was less lopsided. One of the votes against war came from the very first woman ever to sit in the House of Representatives, Jeannette Rankin of Montana, who had assumed her seat that January. Hers was one of fifty votes against war with Germany; 373 other congressmen had agreed with the president, however, and so the resolution easily passed.

  For the fourth time in its history, America was officially at war. This would be unlike any other war it had ever fought: it would demand of the United States resources and manpower that would
dwarf all its previous efforts combined, including the Civil War. The Great War was the bloodiest war that history had ever seen. American troops would be entering a slaughterhouse that had already claimed more than two million lives. Now it was American boys who would be scythed down by blazing machine guns, blown to bits by massive artillery shells, coughing their lungs out from clouds of poison gas, tumbling from their machines flying in the sky, or sinking into the sea in vessels turned into iron coffins.

  To Wilson, however, it would be worth the sacrifice. By entering the war, America was also transforming the conflict from a competition for empire and national interests into a crusade to make the world safe for democracy and to secure mankind’s hopes for future peace. He believed it would transform America as well, making it fully worthy to be the arbiter of a new world order.

  ZURICH, APRIL 8

  THE SCENE IN Bern on April 8 was a moment for expectant dreams and high ideals as well.

  Bern was where Lenin and his fellow exiles would board their train for Russia, and where Lenin was due to arrive from Zurich. Lenin was almost beside himself with excitement and impatience to begin the long journey home to Russia and his revolutionary future. Nadya had other ideas. She suggested he go on ahead without her; there was so much to do before they left, including collecting the nine or so years’ accumulation of papers and correspondence with other Bolsheviks; paying their landlords, the Kammerers; and returning books to the library—or perhaps she simply needed a break from her increasingly frenetic and hyperactive husband. She was also unhappy about having to leave behind her mother’s ashes, which were in Bern, where Yelizaveta Krupskaya had died two years earlier.