Unbelievably, next morning, to the “profound amazement and relief,” in Lansing’s words, of everyone concerned, Zimmermann inexplicably admitted his authorship. It was a second blunder, wrote Lansing, almost bemused with relief, of a most astounding kind. He thought it showed Zimmermann to be not at all astute and resourceful, for in admitting the truth he not only settled the question in American minds but threw away an opportunity to find out how we had obtained the message.
What led Zimmermann, who, despite Lansing, was both astute and resourceful, to commit this historic boner, is not known. That he was too stunned to think clearly is unlikely, for the Germans had had two days to consider their answer and Germans do not issue official statements off the cuff. Probably he reasoned that since the Americans had somehow acquired a true version of the message they were likely also to have acquired some documentary proof of its authorship; therefore denial could only make him look foolish. This was logical but as not infrequent with logic, wrong.
At Zimmermann’s press conference, just before the fatal words were spoken, William Bayard Hale, who was in Berlin as Hearst correspondent, tried to head him off. Hale was at this time and had been for two years a paid German agent, under actual contract to the German government at $15,000 a year as propaganda adviser to the German embassy in America, but this status was not known at the time and did not become known until much later.
“Of course Your Excellency will deny this story,” Hale urged in a frantic signal to Zimmermann to toss back the grenade upon the United States. The Foreign Minister failed to take the hint. “I cannot deny it,” he said. “It is true.”
Twelve
Obliged to Believe It
ZIMMERMANN’S ADMISSION shattered the indifference with which three-quarters of the United States had regarded the war until that moment. The nation sat up and gasped, “They mean us!” Nothing since the outbreak of war had so openly conveyed a deliberately hostile intent toward Americans, and nothing had so startled opinion across the country. Back in 1915 the Lusitania had shocked the nation, but that shock was humanitarian, not personal. This was different. This was Germany proposing to attack the United States, conspiring with America’s neighbor to snatch American territory; worse, conspiring to set an Oriental foe upon America’s back. This was a direct threat upon the body of America, which most Americans had never dreamed was a German intention. It penetrated to the midpoint of the continent, even to Omaha, Nebraska, a thousand miles from either ocean and a thousand miles from Mexico. “The issue shifts,” soberly stated the Omaha World Herald, “from Germany against Great Britain to Germany against the United States.”
Wilson had said the American people would not believe that Germany was hostile to them “unless and until we are obliged to believe it.” And, in judging the submarine issue to be no cause for believing it, the American people, on the whole, agreed with him. Torpedoings of merchant ships and loss of noncombatant lives, including American, convinced Americans of German frightfulness but not of German hostility to themselves. Despite Washington’s concentration on neutral rights and freedom of the seas, the mass of Americans, who never saw a seacoast, could not be worked into war fever over an international lawyers’ doctrine nor aroused to a fighting mood over persons who chose to cross the ocean on belligerent boats in wartime. Besides, they had got used to maritime atrocities, had grown accustomed to official crises over ship sinkings. The Lusitania, the Sussex, the Arabic had followed one after another, provoking Wilson’s notes, Bryan’s resignation, endless correspondence in incomprehensible diplomatic language, even some quite comprehensible threats and ultimatums, all mixed up with similar eruptions vis-à-vis the British over contraband and blacklisting. It was all very confusing and—to the majority of the country—remote.
But the Prussian Invasion Plot, as the newspapers labeled the Zimmermann telegram, was clear as a knife in the back and near as next door. Everybody understood it in an instant. When Germany plotted attack upon United States territory there could no longer be any question of neutrality. Overnight the Midwest isolationist press acknowledged it. The Chicago Daily Tribune warned its readers they must realize now, “without delay, that Germany recognizes us as an enemy,” and the United States could no longer expect to keep out of “active participation in the present conflict.” The Cleveland Plain Dealer said there was “neither virtue nor dignity” in refusing to fight now. The Oshkosh Northwestern said the note had turned pacifists, critics, and carpers into patriots overnight. The Detroit Times said, “It looks like war for this country.” All these papers had been ardently neutral until Zimmermann shot an arrow in the air and brought down neutrality like a dead duck.
His admission exploded the disbelief in the telegram which the pacifists and pro-Germans had clung to when the blow first fell upon them. George Sylvester Viereck said it ended pro-Germanism in the United States. Nothing the American government could have said could have convinced the doubters, but when Zimmermann said, “It is true,” he himself silenced the talk of forgery and British trick. The German-Americans, of whom he had such fond hopes, retreated across their hyphen to take their stand, somewhat sullenly, on the American side. In Minneapolis, where large numbers of them were concentrated, the Journal admitted it was no longer possible for German-Americans to be loyal to both their native and their adopted countries, and the Tribune said Germany’s bid to bring in Japan against us was “equivalent to an act of war.” In Milwaukee, home of the German brewing industry, that city’s Journal feared that Zimmermann’s act would cause a “revulsion of sentiment” among Germany’s many friends in the Middle West, and this proved to be the case. Such papers as the Chicago Staats-Zeitung, the Detroit Abend-Post, the Cincinnati Volksblatt and Freie Presse, and the St. Louis Amerika, several of which had earlier pronounced the telegram a fraud, were now sheepishly silent or hurried to proclaim their loyalty to America.
Midwest sentiment paled beside the outraged indignation of the Pacific Coast and the roar that came out of Texas. The San Antonio Light asserted with “quiet modesty and simple truth” that if a German-Mexican-Japanese army overran Texas, not a Texan would be left alive unless he was across the border fighting his way back. The El Paso Times grew purple at the spectacle of Prussian militarism “writhing in the slime of intrigue,” and out in California the Sacramento Bee echoed its outrage at Germany’s “treacherous enmity, underhanded, nasty intriguing.”
Editors from Vermont to Florida to Oregon expressed a sense of Zimmermann’s having crystallized feelings everywhere. The Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican said that nothing else but this threat of hostile action to American territory could have so solidified the American people, and the Los Angeles Tribune said it extinguished all differences. These were overstatements, because editorial opinion never truly reflects the diversity of private opinions. Pacifism was not extinguished, but it was outweighed by a sense that America was now involved and, willing or not, would have to fight.
In the already Anglophile East the press tended to regard the Zimmermann note as a blessing that would awaken the rest of the country to an awareness of the German threat, and the Eastern papers did their best to warm up that awareness. The Buffalo Express let itself go in a horrendous imagining of “hordes of Mexicans under German officers, sweeping into Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.” The New York American on its own authority added Russia to the proposed combination of Germany, Mexico, and Japan, and depicted this unholy quadruple alliance overwhelming and carving up our country: Mexico, it said, would retake the Southwest and restore it to barbarism; Japan would take the Far West and “orientalize” it; Germany and Russia would enslave generations of Americans in the payment of vast war indemnities. “Citizens, prepare!” it commanded. “The hours are short, the days are few …”
By the middle of March, when the Zimmermann telegram had had two weeks to take effect, the American people, by and large, realized they would have to face up to war. The press was already ahead of the President. Individual p
acifists were still vocal, but the majority of the people were mentally (if not militarily) prepared. They were not calling for war; they were simply waiting—waiting for Wilson. Far in the van, Theodore Roosevelt was bugling for action. If Germany’s plot to get Mexico and Japan to join her in “dismembering” this country was not an overt act of war, he told a public meeting, then Lexington and Bunker Hill (rather an odd comparison) were not overt acts of war. If Wilson does not go to war now, he wrote to Lodge, “I shall skin him alive.”
Meanwhile discovery had not stopped Zimmermann’s efforts to bring Mexico into the war. In their urgent need of a cause to keep America occupied on her own side of the Atlantic, the Germans increased, if anything, their efforts to set off an explosion in Latin America. Alarming reports kept coming in of German activity in Guatemala, on Mexico’s southern frontier, and in Salvador, just below Guatemala. Eckhardt and the German Minister in Guatemala, Herr Lehmann, were reported to have Carranza’s support in a design to ignite a train of revolutions down through the little republics of Central America. Regimes friendly to the United States were to be turned out and a federated state of Central America, stretching from Mexico to Panama, set up with a pro-German president.
In Mexico itself German propaganda campaigned to provoke anti-Yankee incidents of the Villa variety that would precipitate American intervention and the long-sought war with Mexico. El Democrata, the German legation’s organ, published a series on American aggression against Mexico, past, future, and imaginary. Monterrey, a railroad junction of lines connecting with Tampico, Mexico City, and the Pacific Coast, suddenly found itself host to an influx of Germans from southern Mexico. German agents were surveying Mexico’s west coast for submarine and air bases. General Pershing’s headquarters reported a German junta at Cordoba near Veracruz. Agent Cobb wired, “My men on track of big German-Villa combination.” Consul Canada reported Germans and Mexican officials thick at Veracruz—“They have secret meetings every night.”
American pressure upon Carranza to repudiate the Germans availed no more than Wilson’s efforts had once done upon General Huerta to make him salute the flag. Even when Ambassador Fletcher journeyed to see the Mexican President personally at Guadalajara, Carranza remained truculently uncooperative. He would only say that no German proposition had been made to him and avoided answering the question of what he would do if it were. He kept returning, reported the Ambassador, to the embargo proposal.
This was far from satisfactory, but Zimmermann had no more success. He was frantically trying to find out how the telegram had been betrayed and at the same time trying to gain Carranza’s consent to become a German ally. He pelted Eckhardt with telegrams, of which the improbable fact may be recorded that they were all sent in the same code as the one already betrayed. Admiral Hall had rightly judged the German character. It did not permit them even to consider the possibility that a code devised by Germans could be solved by lesser minds. As Hall had counted upon, they decided that, through someone’s carelessness, a decoded copy must have fallen into the enemy’s hands and either Bernstorff or Eckhardt would have to be the scapegoat. The circumstance that Bernstorff was aboard a twelve-day boat crossing the Atlantic on his way home when the telegram was published gave Eckhardt that much time in which to shift the blame, and he lost none of it. Protesting his blamelessness even before anyone had time to accuse him, he rushed off a telegram to Zimmermann on March 1: “Treachery or indiscretion here out of the question; therefore apparently it happened in U.S.A., or cipher 13040 is compromised.” Eckhardt had the wit to see that Zimmermann’s second telegram, the “even now” order, was crucial and he hurried to assure Zimmermann that it had not been published, adding, “I denied everything here.”
Zimmermann’s answer began, “Please burn compromising instructions,” surely the most futile closing of a stable door in history. Equally unnecessarily he reported his admission of “No. 1,” the original telegram, and added, “In connection with this, emphasize that instructions were only to be carried out after declaration of war by America. Dispatch No. 11” (the second telegram) “is of course being kept strictly secret here also.” It is not often that arrogance is the mother of naïveté, but only the Germans’ arrogant confidence in the superiority of their code can explain their naïve belief that No. 11 could remain secret after No. 1 was known.
Never had the cryptographers of Room 40 so enjoyed their work as when they followed the increasingly agonized exchanges between Berlin and Eckhardt. Still using the same code to inquire how the code was betrayed, the German Foreign Office cabled Eckhardt on March 21, “Most secret. Decipher personally. Please cable in same cipher who deciphered Nos. 1 and 11, how the originals and decodes were kept and in particular whether both dispatches were kept in the same place.” Eckhardt, recognizing the scapegoat maneuver, replied that both dispatches had been deciphered by his secretary, Magnus, and were kept from the knowledge of other legation officials. The originals were “burned by Magnus and the ashes scattered,” and until they were burned had been kept “in an absolutely secure steel safe procured especially for the purpose and installed in Magnus’s bedroom.”
Even the steel safe and the scattered ashes did not satisfy Berlin. “Various indications suggest that treachery was committed in Mexico,” they told Eckhardt. “The greatest caution is indicated.” And he was again ordered to “burn all compromising material.”
Eckhardt angrily retorted that greater caution “than is always exercised here would be impossible.” All telegrams were read to him by Magnus “at night, in a low voice.” (Hilarity in Room 40.) His servant slept out and did not understand German. No one had the combination of the safe but himself and Magnus. Then he added some hints about Bernstorff. Kinkel, one of the Washington embassy officials who had joined Eckhardt’s staff after Bernstorff left, had told him that in Bernstorff’s embassy “even secret telegrams were known to the whole staff,” and two copies were always made. This raised the possibility of carbon copies and waste paper, he hinted. As a final protest he said that if he were not officially exculpated, he and Magnus would insist on a “judicial investigation.”
Berlin did not like the sound of that at all, for no one knew what an investigation might turn up. They quickly reversed themselves. “Hardly conceivable that betrayal took place in Mexico,” they mollified Eckhardt. “No blame rests on either you or Magnus.”
Now the onus shifted to Bernstorff and the famous mystery of the Swedish trunk. Already he was the obvious villain in American minds. They knew little of Zimmermann and nothing of Eckhardt, but the elegant Count was a familiar figure whose complicity in the sabotage activities of Papen, Boy-Ed, and Rintelen was already known. Indeed, in the popular mind, Count Bernstorff was the Dr. Moriarty of the plot. Headlines had proclaimed him the “chief agent” and called the telegram the climax of his embassy’s “intrigues in this hemisphere.” In the days between the breaking of relations and the publication of the telegram, the papers had been full of stories about the elaborate arrangements for his departure with all his staff, consuls, wives, families, and retainers. Negotiations with Britain for his safe conduct, his farewell reception in the Red Parlor of the embassy, his last words to the press, his departure, “snugly buttoned in fur coat and spats,” from Union Station in Washington, his embarkation on the Danish liner Frederik VIII at New York with a party totaling two hundred persons, and a last-minute two-day delay before sailing were all chronicled in detail.
The British had agreed to grant safe conduct to the German party only if the ship halted at Halifax for search. Upon her arrival at Halifax on February 16 the Frederik VIII was instantly covered by a swarm of Canadian contraband officials who instituted a search of epic proportions into the baggage, cabins, clothing, and persons of every passenger. After it had gone on for a week, during which none of the German party was allowed ashore, speculation and protests mounted. The British blandly said that the “marked partiality” of the German passengers for quantities of cotton pajamas
and extra pairs of rubber heels necessitated extra care in view of the contraband on cotton and rubber. A hint that phonograph records, which the Germans were said to be taking home in remarkable numbers, might contain messages in code, required the search to be extended further. In all, the Frederik VIII was held up in Halifax for twelve days.
The truth was that Admiral Hall, who had been a constant reader of Bernstorff’s passionate efforts to keep his government from provoking America into war, was taking no chances with the Ambassador’s powers of persuasion. Once home, and in personal contact with the German leaders, he might even yet persuade them to accept Wilson’s peace mediation. Hall wanted the Zimmermann telegram to take effect first. It was he who arranged matters to delay Bernstorff’s homecoming. Not until after the telegram was sent off to Washington and had had three days to gestate was the Frederik VIII allowed to leave Halifax, on February 27.
Bernstorff was on the high seas all during the uproar. On his arrival at Christiania, where the ship was diverted by storm, he expressed surprise at the sensation and, with the habitual insouciance with which he always greeted revelations of German intrigues and sabotage in America, said, “It’s news to me.” Hurriedly briefed by the German Minister to Norway, who was on hand to meet him, he was able, when he reached Berlin two days later, to fall in with Zimmermann’s prepared defense—that the proposal was a perfectly correct preliminary which had never been communicated to the Mexican government. He conferred with Bethmann and Zimmermann the same day and was said to be working on a report on how the telegram might have been discovered.
The whole German press had obediently taken the line that Mexico would never have heard about the alliance if the United States had not obtained the telegram by “treachery” and disclosed it, in a typical piece of Wilsonian hypocrisy, to influence Congress. In fact, according to them, the affair was an American “plot,” not a German one. Doubtless Zimmermann told as few people as possible—if any—about the existence of his “even now” order and Eckhardt’s replies. Whether Bernstorff was told or not, he subscribed to the official story and smoothly denied that the German government had ever attempted to influence Latin American countries “in any sense hostile to the United States.” All those tales of German intrigues in Haiti, Cuba, and Colombia, he said—omitting Mexico—were “fairy tales.”
The Zimmermann Telegram Page 20