American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Wilson’s conception of America’s potential role in the war was a positive and activist one. He sought to keep his nation neutral, Barbara Tuchman suggests, in order to “make America a larger, rather than a lesser, force in the world.” The British historian Lord Devlin concluded that Wilson was from nearly the beginning animated by the desire to use the neutral power of the United States for “restoring the peace of the world.” From that desire would flow three years of tortuous diplomacy that would end, in seeming failure, in April of 1917.

  Wilson tried to take the long view. “I have tried to look at this war ten years ahead,” he told Ida Tarbell, “to be a historian at the same time I was an actor. A hundred years from now it will not be the bloody details that the world will think of in this war: it will be the causes behind it, the readjustments which it will force.” Since he saw those causes as lying in the actions of both sides, he felt qualified to act as an impartial mediator.

  Several obstacles stood in the way of Wilson’s attempts to mediate the conflict and in so doing to guide the peace talks to the higher goal of fashioning a new world order. One was the propaganda efforts of the belligerents, by which they tried to draw America into the war or at least to bend her neutrality to serve their own purposes. Another was the domestic agitation, both for and against America’s entering the war, led by such figures as Theodore Roosevelt for intervention and Jane Addams for pacifism. Indeed, the controversy reached even into Wilson’s inner councils, dividing the isolationist Secretary of State Bryan from Wilson’s more belligerent advisors, Robert Lansing and Edward House.

  The greatest barrier to Wilson’s goal of a negotiated peace, however, was the European powers’ imprisonment within the military juggernaut they had unleashed. Only a total victory would seem to justify the tremendous sacrifices of lives and wealth that they were making. Every new weapon—the submarine, the tank, poison gas—and every new ally tempted the side possessing it to believe that one more great push would bring complete military success.

  These delusions of victory were never stronger than in the first months of the war. With German armies nearing the outskirts of Paris, and a Russian force thrusting deep into East Prussia, Wilson despaired of being able to put his principles into effect. To House he wrote that “there is nothing that we can as yet do or even attempt. What a pathetic thing to have this come.” The German advance finally was halted in the Battle of the Marne, and an entire Russian army was destroyed at Tannenberg; still it took several more months for the two sides to exhaust their first efforts. Only at the end of 1914 could the first moves toward peace be made.

  Wilson’s Secretary of State was to play a key role in shaping America’s first peace initiatives. William Jennings Bryan was no longer the stentorian “Boy Orator” who had shocked and aroused the country in 1896. Four Democratic conventions, and two more runs for the presidency, lay in between. The onetime “demagogue” from the West had made his share of partisan compromises in the intervening two decades: seeking a commission in the Spanish war and then campaigning against imperialism in 1900; supporting free silver but not disavowing the conservative, Alton Parker, whom his party nominated in 1904. Bryan’s receding hair and expanding paunch seemed to confirm his evolution into a conventional, albeit progressive, politician.

  But Bryan the moral visionary was in fact far from dead. Indeed, he often outstripped Wilson in applying idealistic principles to foreign policy. Bryan was the guiding force behind the negotiation of conciliation treaties between the United States and thirty other nations. He also was Wilson’s chief prop in the struggle to avoid war with Mexico. For the Secretary as much as the President, World War I represented a crowning opportunity to bring to life his most cherished visions of a new world order based upon the tenets of Christian charity and fellowship.

  Like Wilson, Bryan was committed to the belief that “war could be exorcised by making moral principles as binding upon nations as upon individuals,” Paolo Coletta noted. But he conceived America’s neutral role in the war differently from Wilson. While the President searched with increasing desperation for some form of diplomatic leverage that would enable him to force the belligerents to the peace table, Bryan advocated what he called a “Real Neutrality” where America would remain even-handed, uninvolved, and thus free to influence Europe by its moral example. Wilson’s principles led eventually to the internationalist ideas embodied in the League of Nations and the United Nations; Bryan’s evolved into the isolationism of the 1930s.

  In 1914, the two men were still working in harmony. At first, they had to grapple with foreign actions that threatened both American leverage and American neutrality. Early in the war, the British government took decisive steps to cut off all commerce with Germany, steps that severely infringed upon the previously accepted rights of neutrals to trade with belligerents. Through their Orders in Council, the British extended the category of contraband to include foodstuffs and most other materials and used the doctrine of the continuous voyage to limit the trade not only of Germany but also of her neutral neighbors. Additional British actions particularly aroused resentment in America: the opening of U.S. mail to Europe; the blacklisting of American firms that did business with the Central Powers; the flying of neutral flags by British ships.

  Bryan drafted a series of protests against Britain’s infringements of America’s neutral rights, but he had his misgivings about the use of force. The Secretary would countenance no implied threat of retaliation against Britain, nor any American military buildup that might alarm the European powers. An arms embargo would have been perhaps the best means of forcing the Allies to change their maritime practices; yet Bryan actively opposed legislation that would have cut off arms shipments the combatants needed.

  Instead he sought a humanitarian solution to the impasse over neutral trade. In February 1915, at Bryan’s urging, Wilson proposed to the belligerents a plan for reopening trade, at least in foodstuffs, to the Central Powers. Only food for Germany’s and Austria’s civilian population would be admitted through the British blockade, and the United States would undertake to monitor German compliance with those conditions. Britain and Germany were quick to see the tremendous power that control over food shipments to Europe would give Wilson; both sides rejected the offer. Thus the closest collaboration between Bryan and Wilson ended in failure.

  The two men were increasingly forced apart as Germany radically changed the stakes in the debate over neutral rights. In the same month that Wilson made his offer to supervise food imports, the German navy unleashed its U-boats against shipping around the British Isles. This initial submarine campaign, undertaken with only a handful of boats, was aimed more at forcing the British to negotiate than seriously challenging their command of the seas. Still, the Germans were sinking ships and killing people—including, on March 28, 1915, an American named Leon Thrasher, who was traveling on the unarmed British liner Falaba.

  The death of Thrasher divided the American government. Bryan urged that the President bar Americans from traveling on the ships of belligerents, even circumscribe U.S. trade with Europe if necessary, in order to preserve the impartial position of the United States. Lansing, on the other hand, termed the sinking of the Falaba a “wanton act... in direct violation of the principles of humanity as well as the law of nations.” He called for a strong protest against Germany’s U-boat campaign. Wilson temporized between the opinions of his two advisors, and meanwhile had warned the Germans that he would hold them to “strict accountability” for any further American deaths. The debate within the Administration continued for another five weeks, until a U-boat commander dramatically forced the issue.

  On May 7, 1915, the British passenger steamer Lusitania was torpedoed and sunk off the Irish coast. Nearly 1,200 people died in the sinking, including 128 Americans. Bryan immediately suggested—and historians have subsequently confirmed—that the Lusitania was secretly carrying munitions and thus was a legitimate target of war. He used the public outcry over
the sinking to reiterate his case: that Americans be warned off traveling on belligerent ships, that any apology or compensation for the incident could be postponed until the war in Europe ended, and that in the meantime an evenhanded protest to both Germany and Britain be sent. The alternative, Bryan feared, was war.

  Wilson disagreed. A retreat into isolation, he told Bryan, might save lives, but in the long run it would only diminish the chances of finding a way to lasting peace. “To show this sort of yielding to threat and danger would only make matters worse.” When the German government quibbled over Wilson’s first note protesting the Lusitania incident, the President drafted a second in which he demanded that the Germans give specific guarantees not to attack unarmed ships. Unwilling to sign the note, Bryan resigned on June 7, and Lansing replaced him as Secretary of State.

  Ironically, the submarine threat gradually receded after Bryan’s resignation. When, in August, two Americans died in the torpedoing of the British steamer Arabic, the Germans offered an apology and indemnity. More important, Wilson extracted from German Ambassador Johann von Bernstorff the so-called Arabic pledge that no more passenger ships would be attacked, a pledge that Berlin finally confirmed nine months—and another torpedoed passenger ship—later with the Sussex pledge. The German submarine skippers, meanwhile, turned their attention back to sinking Allied warships and freighters.

  The threat of war between Germany and America really had never been serious. The phlegmatic Colonel House may briefly have lost control, warning the President that Americans “can no longer remain neutral spectators” after the Lusitania sinking, but the overwhelming majority of the public seemed opposed to an outright break with Germany. The editors of the Chicago Standard, echoing the sentiments of publicists and politicians across the country, urged its readers to view the incident with calmness and deliberation: “We must protect our citizens, but we must find some other way than war.” Thus, when Wilson spoke of America being “too proud to fight” over the submarine sinkings, too sure of its own righteousness to descend into the morass of war with Germany, he struck a responsive chord.

  Some of Wilson’s critics, however, responded with anger rather than applause. Theodore Roosevelt characterized the President’s course in the submarine controversy as “supine inaction,” mere “milk and water” diplomacy. Wilson, the old Rough Rider growled, spoke for “all the hyphenated Americans … the solid flubdub and pacifist vote … every soft creature, every coward and weakling, every man who can’t look more than six inches ahead.” The Lusitania galvanized partisan opposition to the President in Congress, and guaranteed him the enmity of the small but influential band still clustered around Roosevelt. Foremost among its members was Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, senior Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee.

  The British were quick to capitalize on American revulsion at the submarine attacks. British spokesmen linked the Lusitania to other alleged German atrocities in France and Belgium, played up the theme of Prussian autocracy and militarism, and sought to persuade Americans that a victory by the Central Powers would endanger the safety of the United States. The Germans, however, countered with an extremely effective propaganda campaign of their own, playing in part on the sentiments of German-Americans and the anti-British feelings of Irish-Americans. The latter received a particular boost in mid-1916, when the British bloodily suppressed an uprising in Ireland and, over the formal protest of the U.S. Senate, executed several Irish leaders. In the end, scholars have concluded, the propaganda efforts of the two sides largely canceled each other out, and in the process left the American public with a better grasp of the war situation than the populations of the belligerent countries.

  Wilson thus faced challenges to his policies from his political opponents, from abroad—and also from within his own party. William Jennings Bryan had not renounced his belief that the Administration’s hard line toward Germany was leading to war, nor had he stopped trying to change it. While Wilson was struggling in early 1916 to get the German government to confirm von Bernstorff’s Arabic pledge, two Bryan supporters—Thomas Gore of Oklahoma and A. Jefferson McLemore of Texas—introduced legislation in Congress to bar Americans from traveling on armed ships of the warring powers. Bryan and others hoped by this means to induce the British to disarm their commercial steamers, thus allowing German submarines to stop the ships and search them as per the old rules of cruiser warfare. Failing that, at least U.S. citizens would be kept out of the way of German torpedoes. Wilson handily defeated these Gore-McLemore resolutions, but the price in lost congressional goodwill was high.

  The President further alienated the peace wing of the Democratic party when he pushed through Congress, with considerable Republican support, a “preparedness” program involving major increases in land and naval forces. Taking these defeats in good grace, Bryan continued to pledge his personal support to the President. However, the Nebraskan also kept up his public warnings against the “Jingoes” within the Administration who would “drive us into war.”

  In Europe, 1916 was another year of bloody stalemate. The German attack on Verdun and Britain’s counteroffensive along the Somme both ended in defeat. In the east, the Central Powers and Russia traded staggering blows without altering the strategic balance. The British and German fleets clashed off Jutland in the North Sea, to no avail. Likewise, Italy’s armies were checked on the southern front by the Austrians.

  Amid the whirl of events during late 1915 and early 1916, as Wilson was spun about in the European maelstrom, the President moved at home and abroad toward new strategies that would mark one of the transcendent acts of political leadership in American history—an act rivaling Jefferson’s assuming command of the republican movement in the 1790s and Lincoln’s decision for Emancipation during the Civil War. In all these transforming acts, the leader sensed profound human needs on the part of followers, took action, raised supporters’ hopes and expectations, and worked with followers-turned-leaders in a supreme enterprise in collective leadership.

  Wilson had followed a wavering middle-of-the-road course since the New Freedom’s glory days of 1913–14. His tariff, banking, and other reforms stood proudly on the legislative books, but he appeared to compromise them by some of his appointments—notably of conservatives to the new Federal Reserve Board and Federal Trade Commission. He supported trade unionism but straddled the issue of labor’s immunity to the antitrust laws. He favored the curbing of child labor—but not a federal child labor law because he deemed it unconstitutional; he favored woman suffrage, but preferred to leave the matter to the states, and hence to the reactionary state legislatures; he had promised that Negroes too would share in the New Freedom, but tolerated increased segregation in federal employment. For a time, he welcomed controversial business leaders like Henry Ford and even J. P. Morgan to the White House.

  In foreign policy, the man who had denounced Republican imperialism in 1912 put American troops into Veracruz in 1914, established a de facto United States protectorate over Haiti in 1915, and perpetuated American intervention in Nicaragua and Santo Domingo. The Administration that ruled against loans by American bankers to European belligerents in August 1914 allowed American investors to buy over $2 billion in bonds from the Allies within the next two and a half years. The President who urged Americans to remain neutral in thought as well as in deed kept in London a U.S. ambassador more rabidly anti-German than many Englishmen. As the Central and Allied powers grappled and tottered, at times Wilson seemed bound for war, at other times bound to peace.

  Like most changes in grand strategy, Wilson’s did not result from a sudden revelation but from his and his party’s close watch of the shifting balance of political forces at home and military forces abroad. Like most acts of creative leadership, Wilson’s was compounded of commitment, opportunism, and chance. His shift in strategy was signaled at the end of January 1916 in a decision of calculated audacity—his nomination of Louis Brandeis as associate justice of the Supreme Court.

&n
bsp; “I tell Louis, if he is going to retire, he is certainly doing it with a burst of fireworks,” Brandeis’s wife, Alice, wrote on reading the press reaction to his nomination. The fireworks continued to burst from that time to the day five months later when she proudly greeted her husband, returning from his law office to their Dedham home, with “Good evening, Mr. Justice Brandeis.” Progressives and conservatives waged a battle over the nomination all the more bitter for being partly under cover. Financial and industrial interests opposed the “people’s lawyer” on the public grounds of lack of judicial temperament and the like, but in fact attacked this radical—and a Jewish radical, to boot—because they did not want his economic and social views represented on the High Court.

  Brandeis himself, while publicly standing mute, supplied his supporters with reams of material to rebut the opposition, wrote a partial brief defending his own “high reputation,” and personally and secretly lobbied two Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Boston Brahmins, headed by Brahmin-in-chief A. Lawrence Lowell, circulated an anti-Brandeis petition. Brandeis’s supporters, including Rabbi Stephen Wise and Henry Morgenthau, threw themselves into the battle. Brandeis’s young friend Felix Frankfurter wrote unsigned editorials for the New Republic; Walter Lippmann campaigned day after day on Capitol Hill. Following this counterattack, and a public statement by Wilson that constituted one of the most generous endorsements of an Administration nominee in presidential history, the Senate voted for confirmation, 47 to 22, with only one Democrat deserting the President and his nominee.

  During the spring and summer months of 1916, Wilson shifted steadily toward a progressive stance in both politics and policy. In part, he was moving into the void left by the disintegrating Progressive party. Not only had the Democrats lost seats in the 1914 elections—predictably for the party in power—but the Bull Moosers too suffered setbacks across the country, though the indomitable Hiram Johnson won reelection as governor of California. Progressive leadership was more divided than ever, as Theodore Roosevelt edged back toward the GOP and Pinchot progressives eyed the liberalizing Democracy with rising hopes. A great Democratic party opportunity was beckoning.