Simultaneously, Secretary of State Lansing did everything in his power to ruin Wilson’s last attempt to play the neutral after his reelection. When Wilson sent a note to both sides, asking them to state their peace terms, Lansing held a press conference in which he denied the president’s message was a “peace note” and remarked that the United States was “on the verge of war”—presumably with Germany. The statement caused a sensation in the newspapers and panic on the New York Stock Exchange. Next, he called in the British and French ambassadors and privately told them that the United States was on their side and there was no need to take the note seriously.87
In England, meanwhile, an even more astute student of the political-diplomatic game took charge of foreign policy and almost everything else in sight: David Lloyd George. The Welsh Wizard, as he was not very affectionately known to many people, became prime minister of a largely conservative cabinet, frankly committed to fighting the war to the finish. Sir Edward Grey and virtually every other liberal British leader vanished into the shadows. Lloyd George desperately wanted to get Wilson into the war. How to do it, with a man who saw himself as a proponent of a peace without victory and a would-be servant of humanity?
With some help from German Foreign Minister Zimmerman and his telegram, the task proved to be almost absurdly simple. Lloyd George sent a message through Ambassador Page that if Wilson wanted to participate with an equal voice at the peace conference after the Allies won the war, the United States would have to become a belligerent. The prime minister claimed that, like America, Great Britain wanted neither territorial nor any other kind of gains from the war, but the other belligerents would almost certainly insist on a vengeful peace unless Wilson joined the struggle.88
It was the perfect political bait. Just how totally Wilson swallowed it was visible in a conversation he had with Jane Addams, a pioneer social worker, and a group of fellow peace activists who visited him in the White House in February 1917. The Germans had just launched unrestricted submarine warfare, and Wilson had severed diplomatic relations with Berlin. Wilson told the activists that “as head of a nation participating in the war, the president of the United States would have a seat at the peace table, but that if he remained the representative of a neutral country, he could at best only ‘call through a crack in the door.’”89
XV
On a PBS documentary about Woodrow Wilson’s life, one historian commentator called his April 2 speech the greatest American state paper since Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. This comment is typical of the extravagant praise Wilson receives from some historians. Unquestionably, the speech was a rhetorical masterpiece. It was perfectly attuned to stir the emotions of a Congress and a country that had been soaked in British hate propaganda against Germany for the previous thirty-two months. Wilson was a masterful orator; one historian has called him the last of the oratorical statesmen in the tradition of Daniel Webster and Henry Clay.90
But from a factual point of view, time has not been kind to many aspects of this speech. The president’s claim that German submarine warfare was “a war against all mankind” is not substantiated by America’s experience in later wars. The submarine has been accepted as a legitimate naval weapon. There is no moral onus for using it in the only way that gives submariners a decent chance for survival against their surface enemies—torpedoing enemy ships without warning. This surprise-attack approach was the policy adopted by the U.S. Navy during World War II. No one, including America’s Japanese or German enemies, called the practice a war against mankind.
Wilson’s view of the submarine did not even survive the immediate aftermath of World War I. In 1923, Rear Admiral William Sims, wartime commander of U.S. naval forces in the European Theater, wrote in a magazine article that the “vast majority” of German submarine commanders were “decent seamen” who did not fire on defenseless men in open boats and generally acted humanely toward the survivors of sunken ships. Out of the thousands of sinkings during the war, Sims pointed out, only eighteen U-boat commanders were tried for a total of fifty-seven criminal acts after the war, and some of these were acquitted. A submarine commander who sank a hospital ship and then fired on the lifeboats was tried in Germany after the war and convicted.91
Wilson’s argument becomes even weaker when we examine the statistics (which also confirm Sims’s contention.) A total of 66 Americans died when four U.S. ships were sunk by submarines before war was declared. Another 131 were killed while sailing on British ships that were torpedoed, with the Lusitania’s 128 deaths accounting for most of these losses. Another thirteen American ships were sunk with no casualties. Even after war was declared, most of the ships sunk had no casualties. This hardly amounts to barbarism, much less a war against mankind.92
Equally invalidated by time and experience is Wilson’s insistence that American citizens had a right to travel on British ships in the war zone, ignoring repeated warnings by Germany that this was a very dangerous thing to do. No such right exists or ever has existed in the history of naval warfare. Nor did U.S. merchant ships have an absolute right to sail into the war zone declared by Germany around the British Isles. If maritime access to a war zone were a right on a par with free speech and other clauses in the Bill of Rights, William Jennings Bryan, Robert La Follette and other idealistic antiwar leaders would never have urged the president to abrogate such traffic. President Thomas Jefferson, a fervent proponent of the Bill of Rights, banned such commerce in 1807 to keep the United States out of the world war then raging between France and England. Congress, overhauling the neutrality laws in the mid-1930s, passed by huge majorities laws forbidding both practices—laws that were signed without a word of criticism by Wilson’s supposed political heir, Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Wilson not only insisted on the right of Americans to travel on belligerent ships, he did not hesitate to call anyone who challenged him on this assertion a traitor to the country. When a Texas congressman named Jeff McLemore sponsored a resolution forbidding Americans to travel on such ships, Wilson fought the measure as if it had originated with Kaiser Wilhelm. A hefty majority of the Democrats in Congress backed McLemore; Speaker of the House Champ Clark told the president the resolution would pass by 2 to 1. But Wilson, using threats of patronage cutoffs and desperate appeals to party loyalty, managed to defeat the proposal. Later he claimed that those who voted for it had failed the “acid test” of true patriotism.93
Even more dubious was Wilson’s call for “a war without hate.” He had watched the British and French tell thousands of lies to make the German army, the German people, and their leader, Kaiser Wilhelm, more hateful than any other nation in recorded history, give or take a few villains like the Mongols under Ghengis Khan. This tidal wave of hate had washed over Americans for almost three years. Did Wilson think he could make it disappear with a rhetorical flourish? Apparently he did.
A corollary to this sad illusion is Wilson’s claim that the United States had no quarrel with the German people, only with their government. As Senator La Follette pointed out at the time, this idea came close to an absurdity. It would return to haunt Wilson in his conduct of the war on the home front and in his attempt to make peace abroad. The idea of distinguishing the people from their government came from Colonel House, who got it from Sir Edward Grey. House wanted Wilson to build a “backfire” against the German government in the minds of its own people. The don’t-take-this-personally idea was also supposed to placate the German Americans—something it signally failed to do.94
No one seemed aware—or to care—that many other Wilson phrases, such as a war to make the world safe for democracy, were already clichés in the speeches of British politicians and the propaganda of Wellington House. Wilson and America would eventually pay a price for this secondhand rhetoric and the naive idealism that lay behind it: British and French disdain.
Wilson’s long resistance to joining the war that had already consumed so many hundreds of thousands of French and British lives had alienate
d the leadership of America’s putative allies. In 1917 and early 1918, the president had repeatedly declared that he saw no difference between the warring powers from a moral or ethical point of view. The culmination of these statements was his “peace without victory” speech. These assertions infuriated the British and French, whose hate campaigns against Germany were predicated on their claim to moral superiority. Andrew Bonar Law, the leader of Britain’s Conservative Party, snarled, “What Mr. Wilson is longing for we are fighting for.” In Paris, the novelist Anatole France sneered,“Peace without victory is bread without yeast, jugged hare without wine, brill without capers, mushrooms without garlic . . . in brief, an insipid thing.”95
In Washington, an exasperated Cecil Spring Rice ranted denunciations of Wilson’s peace-without-victory policy at Secretary of State Lansing until the shocked secretary was forced to order the British ambassador to desist. When both sides spurned the president’s proposal, Spring Rice told his superiors in London that it now seemed likely that the United States would finally “drift into the war.” Not exactly a compliment to the president’s decisiveness and leadership.
In the same letter, the British ambassador revealed a significant perception of the American public’s state of mind.“All I can record for certain is that the vast majority of the country desire peace and would do a great deal to secure peace.” The ambassador blamed this lack of enthusiasm for the war on Wilson’s failure to wholeheartedly embrace the Allied cause.96
In March 1917, Colonel House and Sir William Wiseman, who was in the process of taking charge of British intelligence in the United States, prepared a memorandum for Prime Minister Lloyd George and his cabinet, aimed at giving them a realistic grasp of the U.S. political situation. Before Wiseman sent the statement to London, House persuaded President Wilson to read it and give it his covert approval. The memorandum amply confirmed Spring Rice’s estimate of America’s lack of enthusiasm for the war. It admitted that sympathy for the Allied cause was largely confined to what Wiseman and House called “broader-minded” Americans. The “mass of the people” were not ardent backers of the Allies. In fact, a substantial number were hostile to Great Britain because of its blockade of Germany, its blacklisting of U.S. firms, and its censorship of war news. Summing up, the memorandum declared: “The people of the United States wish to be entirely neutral as far as the European war is concerned. The Administration, however, have always understood the cause of the war and have been entirely sympathetic to the Allies.”97
Did this mean that Wellington House’s thirty-two months of hate propaganda had failed? By no means. The “broader-minded” Anglophile Americans were Germanophobes to a man—and woman. They controlled most of the press, the universities, the banks, the corporations and the levers of government. But the Spring Rice letter and the House-Wiseman memorandum confirmed the claims of La Follette and his followers in the Senate and House that many people, especially in the Midwest, had profound doubts about the declaration of war.
Ambivalence and barely concealed hostility abroad as well as substantial lack of enthusiasm at home lay just beneath the surface of America’s crusade to make the world safe for democracy—along with a visceral hatred of all things German. An even more visceral hatred of Woodrow Wilson emanated from Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge and their fellow Republicans. They were convinced, in Roosevelt’s words, that “the contrast between Wilson’s conduct down to the declaration of war and his subsequent utterances cannot be overcome.” As Lodge put it acidly to Roosevelt, if Wilson’s speech declaring war was right, “everything he has done for two and a half years is fundamentally wrong.”98
For the moment, Wilson’s oratorical skills had obscured these harsh realities. But they were still there, not unlike the thousands of British mines in the North Sea blockading Germany that the president had ignored throughout the thirty-two months of America’s neutrality. These hazards would soon produce a degree of instability in the ship of state beyond the imagination—or talents—of Philip Dru, administrator.
Chapter 3
ENLISTING VOLUNTEERS AND OTHER UNLIKELY EVENTS
The ink was scarcely dry on the declaration of war when Woodrow Wilson found out how little impression his soaring rhetoric and noble phrases had made on the leaders of the Republican Party. Still seething over the president’s hairbreadth victory in November on the slogan “He kept us out of war,” the GOP was in no mood to let Wilson use his somersault into the global struggle to increase his power and popularity.
On Monday, April 9, Senator John W. Weeks of Massachusetts rose to urge Congress to create a Joint Committee for the Conduct of the War to make sure that Wilson and his fellow Democrats were up to the job of winning victory. The committee, composed of five Democrats and five Republicans, would have the power to subpoena witnesses, from generals to cabinet secretaries to underlings, and inquire into every aspect of the war, from the battlefields to the boardrooms of the arms companies.
Wilson was horrified. As a historian, he had read about a similar committee that had operated during the Civil War, headed by two Radical Republican enemies of Abraham Lincoln, Senators Benjamin Wade and Zachariah Chandler. They had terrorized Lincoln’s administration and tormented the army, often accusing defeated Union generals of being secret Confederate sympathizers and pushing their favorite officers, radical abolitionists like themselves, for promotions. Wilson had no doubt that Weeks planned to select anti-Wilson Democrats such as Nebraska’s Senator Gilbert Hitchcock for his committee. They would not be hard to find. The president’s abrupt switch from neutrality to war had left many members of his party discomfited, even though most had voted for the war resolution.
Wilson rushed from the White House to the Capitol and personally sought out members of the Senate Rules Committee, who controlled the process of bringing legislation to the floor for a vote. He persuaded the Democratic majority on the committee to bury the Weeks proposal. The agitated president preferred this covert suppression to letting the idea come before the full Senate, which almost certainly would have voted for it.
Only seven days after his oratorical triumph, Wilson was forced to admit he had less than wholehearted support in the national legislature. He also had to worry about the near certainty that Weeks would revive his proposal if the war effort floundered.1
II
This minicrisis was only a symptom of Wilson’s legislative woes. An even more vivid glimpse of trouble ahead had come three days earlier, on April 6, when a war department aide, Major Palmer S. Pierce, testified before the Senate Finance Committee about the army’s request for $3 billion to fight the war. The chairman of the committee, Senator Thomas S. Martin of Virginia, was also the Senate majority leader. Martin scowled at Pierce and asked him to explain how the army was going to spend this stupendous sum, the equivalent of at least $50 billion in 2002 dollars. Pierce began listing how much it cost to build training camps and to buy rifles, artillery, airplanes—then added nervously, “And we may have to have an army in France.”
“Good Lord!” Martin said.“You’re not going to send soldiers over there, are you?”2
Few comments better exemplify the almost incredible naïveté that underlay the U.S. decision to declare war on Germany. Were the Americans going to send an army to France? No one in the War Department seemed to have a clue. Nor did President Wilson, the supposed prophet who purportedly told Cobb of the World how much anguish and turmoil the war would cause America. Wilson added to this overall impression by insisting that the United States had not joined the Triple Entente as an ally, but as “an associated power.”
On April 6, 1917, the U.S. Army numbered 127,588 men, roughly the same size as the army of Chile. On paper, there were also 80,446 men in the National Guard. When these men were summoned to the Rio Grande in 1916 to protect the border against Mexican guerrillas, appalling numbers of them flunked army physical examinations—and a great many failed to show up. Senator Weeks told Congress on April 23, 1917:“A very con
siderable percentage—probably as many as one half—had never fired a rifle and nearly as [many] had never had an hour’s drill.”3
As late as February 1917, both Wilson and Secretary of War Newton Baker had issued statements in favor of voluntary enlistment. Wilson had made only a passing reference in his April 2 speech to his switch to conscription. He obviously failed to convince Congress that such a move was wise or necessary. On April 18, the House Military Affairs Committee reported out a bill that repudiated the president’s plan. By a 13 to 8 vote, the committee recommended a volunteer system. The bill was supported by Speaker Champ Clark, who delivered a fiery denunciation of a draft: “I protest with all my heart and mind and soul against having the slur of being a conscript placed upon the men of Missouri.”4
House Majority Leader Claude Kitchin, who had voted against the war resolution, was even more vehemently opposed to a draft. The chairman of the Military Affairs Committee, S. Hubert Dent, Jr., of Alabama had made his opinion clear by refusing to bring the bill to the floor, handing the task to the ranking Republican on the committee. Dent insisted the government should try to raise an army of volunteers before resorting to the draft. Senator Thomas W. Hardwick of Georgia introduced a bill that barred draftees from serving overseas. Throughout the South, the idea of drafting Negroes and putting guns in their hands caused widespread hysteria. One North Carolina congressman told Wilson there was no hope of passing the bill unless a volunteer system was tried first.
In the Senate, Jim Reed of Missouri predicted the streets would “run red with blood” if Congress voted for conscription. Senator Robert La Follette warned that the power, once granted, would be attached to the office of the president,“no matter how ambitious or bloody-minded he may be.” the Senate Armed Services Committee voted out their version of a conscription bill 8 to 7, with five of the ten Democrats against it, enabling the Republicans to claim credit for rescuing the measure. An alarmed Joe Tumulty told the president,“There is almost panic in our ranks.” He meant the ranks of the Democratic Party.5
The Illusion of Victory Page 11