American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Wilson realized that policy, not rhetoric, would be the acid test of his own shift toward progressivism. By early summer 1916, he was not only supporting a rural credits bill and a child labor bill but personally lobbying members of Congress. As the President moved left, progressives increasingly flocked to his standard: Jane Addams, John Dewey, Lillian Wald, Herbert Croly, Lincoln Steffens, and a host of other national and grassroots leaders of progressivism. Wilson met with another convert, Walter Lippmann, to mutual enchantment.

  The President had virtually dished the Bull Moosers by the time they convened in Chicago early in June 1916, at the same time as the Republicans and only a mile away. Under pressure from Taft and other Old Guard leaders, the GOP drafted Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes as the ideal compromise candidate who might unite the fractured ranks of Republicanism. Since Taft’s preconvention stance was “anyone but Roosevelt,” and TR’s “anyone but Taft or Root,” the old rivals could at least unite behind the mildly progressive candidacy of the former New York governor—and behind their ultimate war cry, “anyone but Wilson.”

  The end came for the Bull Moosers during the Republican convention. From his home in Oyster Bay, Roosevelt had been negotiating with Republican leaders, using the only leverage he had left—his threat to run again under the Bull Moose banner. But his heart was not in it; by now he was far more interested in the nation’s foreign and war policies. At the last moment, after the indignant and frustrated Progressive convention nominated Roosevelt anyway, he declined the honor—and then had the audacity to urge his old comrades to draft Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, a moderate standpatter and the Colonel’s longtime confidant. Two weeks later, the Progressive party leadership disbanded the party, but progressivism would not die. Early in August, a rump of the Progressive party held a new convention in Indianapolis, repudiated Roosevelt, and endorsed Wilson.

  The Democratic convention in St. Louis was a far happier affair and a far more momentous one. For at this convention the antiwar forces in the Democracy spoke up with a power and passion the party leadership could not ignore. It had been planned not as a peace convention but as a patriotic one. The President had directed that “Americanism” and “preparedness” be the keynotes, and the flag-bedecked hall was full of spread-eagle symbolism. When the keynoter, Governor Martin Glynn of New York, dutifully sounded these themes, however, the response seemed so tepid that Glynn decided to hurry through pages of his address that listed historical precedents when the United States did not go to war. But this was the red meat the crowd wanted, and as he began to recite the provocations that the nation had not converted into war, the crowd picked up the refrain, chanting again and again: “What did we do? What did we do?” and Glynn roared back: “We didn’t go to war! We didn’t go to war!”

  The convention delegates—leaders in their own precincts but relegated to mere followership at these party conclaves—were exerting a leadership of their own. Other speakers responded with thunderous peace oratory. The delegates called Bryan from his seat in the press gallery—the Peerless Orator had been denied a convention seat—and Bryan thanked God that the people had a President who did not want war. Wilson, the “peace President,” was nominated by acclamation.

  Sounding the peace theme, and passing a strongly progressive platform that Wilson had largely framed, the Democratic convention set the tone of the fall contest. The President, who had been preaching both peace and preparedness, both Americanism and internationalism, now moved strongly toward the stance that would make his 1916 campaign famous: “He kept us out of war.” Pamphlets by the millions and newspaper ads by the thousands amplified the keynote of peace. Hughes not only made tactical errors—most notably tying himself to the Republican Old Guard in California and unwittingly snubbing the prickly Hiram Johnson—but he failed to work out an effective strategy beyond carping at the Administration record. His potential big break came in early September after Wilson, in order to head off a nationwide rail strike, forced through Congress the Adamson Act requiring an eight-hour day on interstate railroads. Hughes quite reasonably seized on this as a campaign issue, protesting that Wilson had given in to organized labor to win its votes, but the Republican candidate may have done little more than polarize the contest, as more businessmen moved to his side and more laborites and progressives to Wilson’s.

  The 1916 election would long be remembered for its poignant election night: Hughes went to bed expecting to wake up as President, and Wilson retired expecting to awaken as a lame duck. The Republican candidate had had good reason to be optimistic, for early returns showed him sweeping the Northeast, save for Ohio, and the Democratic New York World conceded victory to him. Then the West and of course the South came in heavily Democratic, with California’s thirteen votes proving decisive for Wilson in the final 277 to 254 electoral college outcome. California’s popular margin for Wilson was by 4,000 out of 928,000. Snubbing an old Bull Mooser, the pundits pontificated, could be costly.

  Wilson’s photo finish portended ill for the Democratic party. A popular President, riding the tide of peace and progressivism, had barely beaten an inept campaigner hardly known in much of the nation. The barely reunited Republican party had reestablished its hammerlock on the big industrial states of the East, awakening horrendous Democratic memories of McKinley’s trouncings of Bryan. The shape of the nation’s political future was forecast far more in the GOP’s party victory than in Wilson’s personal one. And, after a decade of national debate and ferment over issues of industrial democracy, perhaps a hint of the nation’s ideological future lay in the Socialist Party vote in 1916, which dropped off almost 40 percent from its high point of four years before.

  The charge leveled by Bryan and others, that the Administration was increasingly pro-Allied, had some truth to it. Certainly Walter Hines Page, the U.S. envoy in London, was so outspoken in his pro-British views that Wilson thought he needed to be brought home for “a bath in American opinion.” Robert Lansing, too, Bryan’s successor at the State Department, seemed to be working for an Allied victory. He had watered down Bryan’s protests against British abuses on the high seas while toughening the language of notes to Germany, had advised Wilson to cut off German radio traffic with America, and had drafted the legal rulings that enabled the Allied governments to obtain credit in the United States.

  This last point was of special importance, for strong financial ties were growing between American industry and the Allied war effort. By April of 1917, American firms had advanced Britain and France $2.3 billion, and were doing almost $3 billion in trade each year with the Allied countries. The war was working a revolution in global economic relations, making New York the financial capital of the world in place of London. The American economy, meanwhile, was stimulated to new heights of prosperity by the Europeans’ war expenditures.

  Bryan would allege, in 1917, that America finally entered the war at the behest of “Eastern financiers” determined to “make their investments in the war loans of the Allies profitable.” “We are going into war upon command” of Wall Street “gold,” Senator Norris charged. Echoed by such respected historians as Walter Millis and Charles Beard, that theory later gained wide acceptance in the 1920s and ’30s, although more recent writers have rebutted it. By the end of 1916, according to John Milton Cooper, Wilson was brandishing the money club over the Allied heads; “if Senator Norris’s ‘command of gold’ existed, the United States held it and exercised it.”

  The one man who surely could influence Wilson was Edward Mandell House. The self-styled Texas “colonel” had the President’s ear and his confidence; he also was one of Wilson’s prime sources of information on European politics after his two trips to the Continent in 1914 and 1915. According to House’s diary, Wilson assured him on the eve of his second mission to Europe that “we are of the same mind and it is not necessary to go into details with you.” The President entrusted House with the task of bringing Europe’s leaders around to his ideas for a compromise p
eace.

  If Wilson really believed that he and House thought alike—a possibility, given the pains House took to hide his true feelings from others—then the President was mistaken. While Wilson was trying to force the Germans to honor the Arabic pledge and Bryan was working for the Gore-McLemore resolutions, House composed a secret plan to bring America into the war on the side of the Allies. He proposed that, after obtaining the consent of the British, Wilson call for a peace conference, with America to join the fight against Germany if the Berlin government refused. House refined this plan in a series of secret discussions with the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, and then formalized it in the so-called House-Grey Memorandum.

  That Wilson accepted the House-Grey Memorandum in early 1916 has mystified many observers since. Certainly the President had not abandoned his belief that the “worst thing that could possibly happen to the world,” as he confided to his new wife, “would be for the United States to be drawn into this contest.” Wilson made several important changes in House’s memorandum, noting that he would use every diplomatic measure available to bring Germany to the peace table and that should those fail America’s entry into the war was only “probable.” Still, Wilson was running a great risk by endorsing the plan, a risk he could justify to himself only with the possible reward of ending the fighting in Europe.

  Ironically, the British refused to take up Wilson’s half-commitment to intervene on their side. Several times during the spring and summer of 1916 Wilson, through House, asked the British for their consent to his calling a peace conference, but each time he was rebuffed. It eventually became clear to House and Wilson that the British wanted to win more than they wanted peace. When no Allied victories followed, the House-Grey Memorandum was allowed to lapse.

  The failure of House’s secret diplomacy, plus the sneaking suspicion that the Colonel may have been duped all along by the British, may have been the first step in the weakening of Wilson’s ties to his Texan advisor. In the past, the President had always sought to keep House close at hand; now he offered to send him to London as U.S. ambassador. Yet if the President may have been a little disillusioned with House, his disgust with the British was clear and manifest. In the fall, he informed Lord Grey “in the strongest terms” that the feeling of the American people was “as hot against Great Britain as it was at first against Germany and likely to grow hotter still against an indefinite continuation of the war.” Conventional diplomacy had failed to secure peace; so had secret machinations. Once the election of 1916 was safely won, Wilson resolved to strike out on his own, through the public and oratorical means that had served him so well in domestic politics.

  Wilson’s peace offensive in the winter of 1916–17 met resistance from every side. The President originally intended to demand an immediate armistice and to repeat his offer of mediation. House, however, persuaded him to limit his statement to a call for both sides to reveal their war aims. Even this move was sabotaged by Lansing, who of his own accord told, reporters, on the day Wilson’s peace note was published, that America was on the “verge of war.” The President, furious, made Lansing retract his remarks and came close to firing him, but the damage was already done. The British, now even more hopeful of imminent American support, announced war aims that included transfers of territories and colonies which clearly were unacceptable to the Central Powers.

  Berlin, however, did not publish its own demands, calling instead for peace talks at which both sides would state their case. This was the slim hope to which Wilson clung, not knowing that the Germans had already secretly resolved against peace. In the meantime Wilson laid out, in an address to the Senate, his own design for “a peace without victory.”

  Victory for one side or the other, Wilson argued, would not bring true peace. It “would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand.” A lasting peace would have to rest on respect for the rights of small nations, on freedom of the seas, upon the free self-determination of subject peoples such as the Poles.

  “I am proposing, as it were, that the nations should with one accord adopt the doctrine of President Monroe as the doctrine of the world: that no nation should seek to extend its polity over any other nation or people.... I am proposing that all nations henceforth avoid entangling alliances which would draw them into competitions of power, catch them in a net of intrigue and selfish rivalry….

  “I am proposing government by the consent of the governed … freedom of the seas … moderation of armaments…. These are American principles, American policies. We could stand for no others. And they are also the principles and policies of forward-looking men and women everywhere, of every modern nation, of every enlightened community. They are the principles of mankind and must prevail.”

  The Senate greeted Wilson’s elevating statement of ideals with thunderous applause. The President’s speech, however, changed no minds in Berlin, where the military commanders had already browbeaten Kaiser Wilhelm into unleashing Germany’s submarines for an all-out attack on Britain’s vital sea links. In Washington, Ambassador von Bernstorff, himself desperate to prevent war between the United States and Germany, fed Wilson’s hopes with positive replies to the President’s suggestions while bombarding Berlin with telegrams begging for reconsideration. At last, on January 31, von Bernstorff was forced to tell Wilson that unrestricted submarine warfare would resume the next day. Allied, American, and other neutral ships would be sunk indiscriminately. The chance for peace was lost.

  The collapse of all his hopes shocked Wilson deeply. He felt, he confided to House, “as if the world had suddenly reversed itself … and he could not get his balance.” He severed relations with Germany and on February 26 asked Congress for the power to put navy gun crews on American merchant ships, hoping that these actions would force the German government to reverse itself. Instead, the toll of sinkings in the North Atlantic mounted, until Wilson finally was forced to call Congress back into session. On April 2, he went before both houses and called for a declaration of war against Germany.

  How could a country fervently committed to neutrality, led by a President with a sweeping vision of the benefits to be derived from peace, choose to go to war? Part of the explanation lay in the dire and intolerable nature of the German provocations. As one historian put it: “Britain’s violations of neutral rights provoked delay and argument, but claims for damages could eventually be settled peacefully; Germany’s procedure presented a threat to important economic interests and also threatened life itself, a matter not subject to amicable arbitration.” After February 1, 1917, as the Germans continued to sink American ships and kill American citizens, the consensus for peace among American voters had rapidly unraveled.

  A period of confusion might have followed, but instead the German government made a critical diplomatic blunder. The new German Foreign Secretary, Arthur Zimmermann, had cabled to Mexico a proposal for a military alliance, under which the Latin republic would join in attacking America in return for Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The British had intercepted the telegram and forwarded it to the State Department, which made it public on February 28. Touching a sensitive nerve, the Zimmermann telegram crystallized national opinion. Editors castigated Germany’s actions as “sneaking and despicable.” There was a national outcry, but no stampede toward war—most Americans were still yearning for both honor and peace.

  At this point, Wilson demonstrated his power to lead, as the members of the House and Senate overwhelmingly embraced his call to fight “for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples, the German people included: for the rights of nations great and small ... to choose their way of life” so that the world could be “made safe for democracy.” Individual legislators like Robert La Follette and George Norris—whom Wilson denounced as members of a “little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own”—did honestly differ with the President as to how those ideal
s might be translated into policy. But for one dramatic moment in American history, public emotion and private vision were fused into national action.

  Others took a quite different view—notably V. I. Lenin. And he was right, to a degree; the bonds of trade and travel did help draw the United States into the war. But much more was involved. Wilson’s search for a road to peace rather than war cannot be gainsaid. As Devlin has noted, the President was prepared, just prior to Germany’s shift to unrestricted submarine warfare, to stop trading with the Allies rather than extend them formal loans and thus compromise America’s neutral stance. Even after February 1, the policy of retreat and noninvolvement advocated by Bryan was still an option.

  Ultimately, Wilson’s choice of war over isolation turned on one compelling point. “This was that, if he and America with him chose the path of submission,” according to Devlin, “his ideals, his hopes, and his dreams of bringing in the new world to regenerate the old would be destroyed.” Wilson did not want war—particularly not this war. Yet every ideal that he cherished impelled him to seek a democratic world order in place of the old order that Europe’s war had razed. The President’s intimates have testified to the agony of indecision he endured in those last two months of neutrality.

  In effect, Wilson called for a revolution on April 2. He summoned Americans to rally, not around the flag, but around a radical extension of the American experiment, a goal as different from Lenin’s as it was from those of supporters of the old order in both Europe and the United States. If he could mobilize Americans for war while still keeping their eyes fixed on his higher vision of peace, Wilson could yet make his ideal into reality.