Ironically, numerous American politicians, including Woodrow Wilson, worked themselves into a state of considerable outrage at the Germans for trying to “tamper” with American public opinion. No one ever said a word against Wellington House, for a very simple reason: Its existence was unknown to all but the top people in the British government.
IX
The Germans had seemingly formidable allies in the second largest ethnic group in America, the Irish-Americans. Four million strong, with powerful political machines that controlled major cities such as Chicago and New York, the Irish had a grievance against Great Britain, which some of them were not shy about expressing: the long history of oppression in their homeland. The famine of 1847, which killed 1.5 million Irish, while the British feasted on beef and barley exported from Ireland, was still a vivid memory. In 1911, the slums of Dublin had a higher death rate than Calcutta.48
In the Gaelic American and the Irish World, the two largest newspapers read by Irish-Americans, Great Britain was abused with a pugnacity and pertinacity that the Bernstorff team must have found heartwarming at first. The papers praised Irish-Americans who stormed movie theaters showing British propaganda films and shut them down. They published in large black type a protest against the U.S. government’s pro-British tilt by the United Irish-American Societies, whom they pointedly described as “the largest aggregation of citizens in Greater New York”—a warning to vulnerable politicians. Not far behind these two papers was the American Truth Society, headed by Jeremiah O’Leary, which tried to expose British lies as fast as Wellington House churned them out. Among O’Leary’s favorite quotations was an editorial in the London Chronicle:“The debt that England owes the newspaper world of America cannot be overestimated. . . . We have no better Allies in America than the editors of the great papers.” O’Leary also began publishing a monthly magazine whose title spoke for itself: Bull.49
These Irish-Americans pointed out that the British empire controlled some 13 million square miles of the earth’s surface, with a subject population of 444 million. In this vast expanse, the only people with the right to vote were a minority of Britons in their home islands, and in the dominions of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa. The Irish occasionally noted that if you threw in the Russian empire, the two governments controlled half the earth’s surface, each a colossus built “on the ruins of small nations.” London’s claim to be fighting for democracy was a sick joke. The top 21/2 percent of Britain’s population controlled 98 percent of the country’s wealth. England, wrote John Devoy, the editor of the Gaelic American, was “the incarnation of greed. Her arrogance and insolence are only equaled by her conscienceless cupidity.”50
With this viewpoint, it was hardly surprising that Devoy and his fellow supporters of Irish independence rooted for a German victory. They argued that Ireland, Poland, Finland, Egypt and India would become free democracies. They scoffed at the atrocity stories flooding New York newspapers, and urged a political union of Irish-Americans and German-Americans that would be “more than a match for the pro-British intriguers who have been using press, pulpit and platform to promote England’s interests.”51
For a while, these inflamed Irish spokespersons were supported by the semiofficial newspapers of the Roman Catholic Church, which was strongly sympathetic to the Catholic rulers of Austria-Hungary, the Hapsburgs. The church was also extremely cool to embattled France, where anticlericalism was part of the political creed of French liberals and had prompted the government to expel numerous religious orders from the country in 1904. 52
The alliance that the Irish-Americans and the German-Americans tried to concoct to meet the British propaganda onslaught soon revealed serious weaknesses. The circulation of the Gaelic American, the Irish World, and Bull barely exceeded 200,000 a week. The New York Times alone reached 300,000 readers each day, and the total circulation of the other New York papers, most of them even more pro-British, came to ten times that figure. Only William Randolph Hearst’s chain of newspapers (circulation 4 million) scoffed at British claims and called for genuine neutrality. The old adage, it takes one to know one, seemed to apply here. Hearst readily saw Lord Northcliffe’s yellow-journalist hand in Wellington House and ordered his newspapers to resist London’s line.
The great mass of Irish-Americans were not passionately concerned with Irish independence—or into hating the British in the violent style of Devoy, O’Leary and company. They were as repelled by the German atrocity stories as most other Americans and were equally dismayed by the sinking of the Lusitania and the execution of Edith Cavell. As one woman put it some years later, there was too much “Deutschland go-bragh” in the onslaught of the Irish independence men for most Irish-Americans to swallow.
Confusing matters even further were ferocious assaults on the independence men by fellow Irish-Americans, such as the distinguished lawyer and bibliophile John Quinn. His contacts with British writers had turned him into a critic of his own people. Quinn said he would like to see Paul von Hindenburg (Germany’s top general) as governor general of Ireland for six months. Not only would he get rid of the likes of Devoy and O’Leary, but he would “teach the [home] Irish industry, order, efficiency, economy [and] cleanliness.” One can almost hear the ghost of that earlier British propagandist, Samuel Johnson, repeating his famous remark:“The Irish are a fair people—they never speak well of one other.”53
Perhaps most important, the vast majority of the Irish-Americans were Democrats, and in early 1916, Woodrow Wilson made a series of speeches condemning “hyphenates.” He accused them of “pouring poison into the veins of our national life.”The speeches had a chilling effect on support for Germany among the Irish-Americans who did not regularly read the independence-for-Ireland press. Wilson was reviving memories of their persecution in the previous century by nativist organizations such as the Know Nothing Party and the American Protestant Association, which questioned their loyalty to the United States. When Devoy and his friends tried to respond to the president by calling an Irish Race Convention in 1916 to create a semblance of Celtic unity, numerous leading Irish-Americans such as Senator James O’Gorman of New York declined to attend.54
Then came a dramatic turnaround. On Easter Sunday, 1916, Irish rebels seized key buildings in Dublin and proclaimed a republic. The British quickly crushed the rebellion. With a stupidity that more than matched the German execution of Cavell, the London government sentenced most of the leaders to death—and the Wilson administration, with equally incredible stupidity, made no protest against the barbarity.
The executions caused a huge uproar in the Irish-American community and gave new influence to the independence men. Easter martyrs also solidified the Irish link to Germany, which lost no time issuing a statement that it recognized Ireland’s right to independence.“The Irish are with us,” gloated the secretary of the German American Alliance.”55
The independence men’s antagonism to Wilson was intensified by the Gaelic American’s claim that the U.S. government had betrayed the Easter rebellion after Secret Service agents raided the office of the German consul in New York and discovered correspondence between Devoy and Roger Casement about a shipload of arms and ammunition that Casement had obtained from Germany. The Wilson administration had supposedly turned the letters over to the British, who captured Casement and forced the panicked German captain to scuttle his ship. Casement was executed for his role in the rebellion, and his reputation smeared by the publication of diaries purporting that he was a homosexual. Throughout the rest of 1916, the Gaelic American repeatedly accused Wilson of being the evil genius behind this tragedy.
Again revealing the minority status of the independence men, the accusation had little impact on the Irish-American vote for Wilson in the 1916 election. No mean debater, Wilson used the violent hostility of the Devoy O’Leary circle to bolster his call for ethnic support for his frequent declarations of neutrality. When Jeremiah O’Leary sent Wilson a snide telegram predicting his defe
at, the president replied:“I would feel deeply mortified to have you or anybody like you vote for me. Since you have access to many disloyal Americans and I have not, I will ask you to convey this message to them.” Joseph Tumulty, Wilson’s Irish-American secretary, later claimed this telegram galvanized the president’s reelection campaign.56
It was, as the saying goes, a famous victory. But the time was not far off when Wilson would pay dearly for alienating these outspoken Irish Americans.
X
Throughout the argument over submarine warfare, the Germans said they only wanted a fair hearing—something the British made sure they never got. The London government had a very different agenda in mind—one that extended beyond public opinion. From the opening of the war, British newspapers portrayed the submarine as an outlaw weapon, used by the Germans to kill unarmed sailors on merchant ships. Woodrow Wilson and most other Americans accepted this idea. Much of Wilson’s dialogue with the German government before the declaration of war was about his insistence that the submarine should act as a surface raider, and give sailors time to abandon ship before their vessel was sunk. The British praised the president for this stance.
In their war at sea, however, the British went to great lengths to make these “cruiser rules” extremely dangerous if not impossible for the U-boats. The admiralty under First Lord Winston Churchill warned ship captains that they would be prosecuted if they tamely surrendered their ships. The admiralty ordered crews to ram or fire on U-boats whenever possible. Churchill also ordered that the survivors of sunken U-boats be treated as felons rather than prisoners of war, meaning they could be shot if this was the “most convenient” way of dealing with them.57
British ships were ordered to sail with no names or registry numbers. When they were in the barred zone around the British Isles, they were told to fly a neutral flag, preferably American. On the voyage before it was sunk, the Lusitania had used this tactic as it approached the Irish coast. Although the Wilson administration objected to this misuse of Old Glory, the president was ignored as usual and did nothing as usual.58
The sinking of the British steamer Falaba on March 29, 1915, was a good example of England’s deft combination of resistance and propaganda. The story as it was told by Wellington House for the New York newspapers portrayed a ruthless German submarine captain who sank the cargo-passenger liner without warning, killing 110 people, including one American, by triggering a “terrific explosion” in the engine room. After the war, historians found that the U-boat captain had given Falaba’s master three warnings to abandon ship, waiting a total of twenty-three minutes while the Englishman made excuses and radioed for assistance. Only when a British warship appeared on the horizon did the Germans unleash a torpedo, which blew up 13 tons of ammunition in the Falaba’s hold, accounting for the heavy casualties.59
Another British innovation that made it difficult if not impossible for the U-boats to follow cruiser rules was the Q-ship. This disguised merchantman had a well-trained crew and almost as many concealed guns on its decks as a royal navy destroyer. If a submarine surfaced and ordered one of these craft to abandon ship, the U-boat was answered with a hail of shellfire.60
In August 1915, the Baralong, a Q-ship flying the U.S. flag, destroyed a German submarine that had surfaced to attack another British vessel, the Nicosian. Adding outrage to this injury, the Baralong’s crew executed the submarine’s survivors. The chancellor of Germany went before the Reichstag to denounce this “bestial” high-seas murder. He called the Baralong a franctireur ship, demonstrating that the Germans still thought their execution of Belgian civilians the previous August was justified.61
Winston Churchill’s correspondence as first lord of the admiralty offers evidence that getting the United States into the war on Britain’s side was a major consideration. He urged the British government to offer the cheapest possible insurance rates to neutral shippers:“It is most important to attract neutral shipping to our shores in the hope especially of embroiling the United States with Germany.” The more neutral “traffic,” the better, Churchill insisted.“If some of it gets into trouble, better still.” 62
XI
In early October 1914, two months after the war began, Charles Schwab, the president of Bethlehem Steel, was in London, eager to do business with the British government. Bethlehem was one of the world’s biggest arms merchants. After picking up orders for millions of artillery shells, Schwab visited First Sea Lord Sir John Fisher, who told him England was desperate to acquire more submarines, fast. This stance differed a good deal from what Fisher’s government was saying about the submarine’s being an underhanded, weapon, but Schwab was not the sort to let such seeming contradictions bother him. He told Fisher he could build ten 500-ton undersea boats at crash speed. With a handshake, the deal was done.
Back in the United States, U.S. Navy inspectors at Bethlehem were distressed to discover British submarines under contract. They informed Schwab the deal violated a law that was 120 years old. In the 1790s, during the Napoleonic wars, the French government tried to outfit privateers in American ports. Fearing this would embroil the country in a war with England, Congress banned the practice. During the Civil War, the Confederate raider Alabama, built in Great Britain, wreaked havoc on Union shipping and brought U.S.-British relations to a low point. Schwab replied that he was not actually building the submarines for Great Britain. He was going to ship the parts to Canada, where they would be welded together by another company.
The navy men—and some newspapers—did not agree, and the matter soon attracted President Wilson’s attention. He asked Robert Lansing, at that time the State Department’s counselor, for a legal opinion. A Watertown, New York, lawyer who had been involved in much international litigation, Lansing was an Anglophile from his cravat to his wingtips. He quickly produced some dense legalese that sanctioned Schwab’s maneuver. Wilson wrote back, telling Lansing that he still wanted the submarines stopped. Lansing ignored him, and in June 1915, the ten 500-ton subs sailed from Quebec for the war zone. Neither President Wilson nor the U.S. Department of Justice said a word. In the next year, 1916, Bethlehem Steel earned $61 million, more money than the company’s total gross for its previous eight years.63
The Bethlehem story is a pithy summary of the evolution of the United States into a branch of the British armament industry during the thirty-two months of its neutrality. Wilson talked—and talked and talked—about neutrality and apparently convinced himself that he was neutral. But the United States he was supposedly running was not neutral, in thought, word or deed, thanks to Wellington House in London—and the international banking firm of J. P. Morgan in New York. The storied founder of the firm had died in 1913; it was now headed by his son,“Jack” Pierpoint Morgan, who spent six months of each year on his English estate and was a totally committed Anglophile. Morgan and his fellow bankers were the key players in the shift from genuine to sham neutrality. The war was barely two days old when the French government, through Morgan’s Paris branch, requested a loan of $100 million.64
Morgan replied that he feared the U.S. government would object—and he was right. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan opposed the loan and told President Wilson:“Money is the worst of all contrabrands because it commands everything else.” He warned Wilson against letting “powerful financial interests” get involved in the war. They had the ability to influence many other parts of society, especially the press and politicians.65
In spite of Bryan’s three losing runs for president on the Democratic ticket, he still had a strong following inside the Democratic Party. Wilson had made the Nebraskan secretary of state because Bryan had switched his support to him at a crucial moment in the 1912 nominating convention. Like most Midwesterners, Bryan viewed the Great War as an outbreak of European insanity from which the United States should distance itself. Wilson asked Robert Lansing for his legal opinion of the French request for a loan. The State Department counselor produced a brief, declaring it “com
patible with neutrality.”66
Bryan vociferously disagreed, and Lansing backed down. Wilson supported Bryan, personally composing a statement: “Loans by American bankers to any foreign government which is at war are inconsistent with the true spirit of neutrality.” An ecstatic Bryan thought a major threat of war had been eliminated. The Nebraskan soon discovered it was only the first inning of a long ball game. As British and French orders for ammunition and other war matériel filled the books of U.S. companies, the pressure for financial assistance to pay for them grew more and more acute.67
Meanwhile, Bryan became distracted by the dispute over submarine warfare, which British propaganda and the Anglophile tilt of Wilson’s cabinet skewed in England’s favor. Bryan’s protests against the British blockade, particularly England’s refusal to allow U.S. foodstuffs into Germany, which he found especially reprehensible, were muted by Wilson’s ambassador to London, Walter Hines Page, who totally identified with the British cause. A former editor of the Atlantic Monthly and a longtime Wilson friend and supporter, Page “thanked heaven he was of [English] race and blood,” and regularly presented Bryan’s protests to Foreign Secretary Grey with dismissive comments. During one of his presentations, Page said: “I have now read the dispatch but I do not agree with it; let us consider how it should be answered.”68
As the war continued, Wilson edged Bryan to the diplomatic sidelines. He sent his confidential adviser, Colonel House, to London, Paris and Berlin to explore the possibilities of a mediated peace. House was as pro-British as Page, but concealed it out of his desire to blend with Wilson’s seemingly neutral stance. In the State Department, Lansing gradually acquired more influence than Bryan, a political rival Wilson never liked or respected. Soon Lansing convinced Wilson that loans might be a violation of America’s neutral stance—but the granting of “credits” to England and France by the House of Morgan and other banks was legally justifiable. Wilson accepted this fine distinction, and by the time the United States declared war, Morgan had loaned the two belligerents $2.1 billion, the equivalent of almost $30 billion in 2002, making a neat profit of $30 million, worth $422 million in 2002 dollars. Twenty years later, when a Senate committee investigated the World War I munitions industry, J.P. Morgan was asked about the difference between loans and credits. His testimony made it clear that practically speaking, there was no difference.69
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