A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror

by Larry Schweikart

  With the public’s attention increasingly focused on Europe, few people wanted a war with Mexico, especially under such confused circumstances (in which Villa could in no way be viewed as a legitimate agent of the official Mexican government). Given his own culpability in destabilizing the Mexican regime under the guise of promoting democracy, Wilson looked for a graceful exit, agreeing to an international commission to negotiate a settlement. The troops came home from the Mexican desert, just in time to board steamers for France.

  The episode was rife with foreign policy and military lessons for those willing to learn. First, American troops had been committed with no reasonable assurance of achieving their mission, nor was there much public support. Second, Wilson had not exhausted—or really even tried—other methods to secure the U.S. border against Villa’s incursions. Third, by arbitrarily and hastily invading Mexico, twice, Wilson turned a natural ally into a wary neighbor. Last, Wilson’s insistence on American-style democracy in a primitive country—without concurrent supervision through occupation, as in post–World War II Japan or Iraq—was fraught with peril. Mexico did not have fully developed property rights or other essential concepts of government. Wilson did learn some of the lessons. The next time he had to send American forces into foreign lands, it would be for unimpeachable reasons.

  He Kept Us Out of War

  On September 29, 1913, Turkey, Greece, and Bulgaria signed a Treaty of Peace that many saw as an omen for world amity. Yet over the next year, Europe’s diplomats and clear thinkers sank, buried beneath a wave of war mobilizations over which they seemingly had no control.

  The June 1914 assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand launched these forces on their course. A Serbian nationalist has been blamed for the assassination, although controversy exists as to whether he was a member of the terrorist Black Hand group. Regardless, Austria, with the full support of Germany, immediately moved to retaliate. Serbia invoked a secret agreement with Russia, mobilizing the Russian army, which in turn prompted a reaction from Germany, then a counterreaction from France, who in turn brought in the British. Within a matter of weeks, the armies of Europe were fully mobilized on enemy borders, trigger fingers itchy, and without any comprehension of why they were going to fight.

  Germany’s Schlieffen Plan, however, demanded that Germany not wait for a full-scale Russian mobilization before striking the Allies. On August 3, 1914, German forces crossed the Belgian border, thereby touching off the Great War. Britain, France, and Russia (called the Triple Entente or Allies) soon declared war on Germany and Austria-Hungary (soon known as the Central Powers). Before long a host of second-tier states had been sucked into the war as well, essentially pulling the entire world into the conflict in one form or another—all except the United States.

  When German guns opened their barrage against Belgium, Wilson warned Americans against that “deepest, most subtle, most essential breach of neutrality which may spring out of partisanship, out of passionately taking sides.”37 Roosevelt immediately broke with him, arguing that the nation should take the position of a “just man armed,” and he wrote angrily of Wilson’s reluctance to stand up for the wrongs Belgium had suffered. Wilson, instead, implored the nation to be “neutral in fact as well as name.” Already, in January 1915, the Central Powers had launched the world’s first zeppelin attacks against England and had finalized plans to cut off Britain’s lifeline at sea to the United States.

  As is often the case, experts on both sides mistakenly foresaw a quick end to the war. British forward observers at Neuve-Chapelle were dumbfounded when their initial probing assault, led by 1,000 men, was entirely obliterated. They had another surprise when, in April 1915, the Germans used poison gas for the first time, choking French African troops who could only cough and point to their throats. The British had barely absorbed the threats posed by gas when, in July, the Germans introduced another horror—the flamethrower.

  The news got worse. Seeking an end run to link up with the Russians and come at the Central Powers from the Black Sea, Britain attempted to break through the Dardanelles Strait. Even the powerful Royal Navy could not punch through the defenses of Germany’s allies, the Ottoman Turks. Underestimating the enemy and the geography, the Allies staged a massive invasion of the narrow beaches at Gallipoli at the foot of the Dardanelles. British, Australian, and New Zealand troops were staggered when, rather than running, the Turks stood their ground to repulse attack after attack up bloody hills. Over a nine-month period, British, French, Australians, and New Zealanders lost 48,000 men yet gained nothing. Only then did it begin to dawn on the military minds that the machine gun, combined with trench warfare, barbed wire, and long-range artillery, had made the massed infantry charges of the day utterly useless.

  This was a lesson it had taken the Americans in both the Union Army (Fredericksburg) and Confederate Army (Gettysburg) thousands of battlefield deaths to learn, but finally the message had sunk in. Battles in Europe soon claimed a half million dead and wounded in a single day, then three quarters of a million, then a million casualties in battles that lasted weeks over a few acres of ground. British units lost 60 percent of their officers in a single day’s combat. At the Somme, in June 1916, despite the fact that the British fired a quarter million shells at the German trenches—sixty artillery shells every second—20,000 men and 1,000 officers died in a few hours. Entire companies literally vanished in unending sprays of bullets and shells.

  The Germans misjudged their enemies even worse than the Allies, predicting that the colonies would rise up, that Ireland would rebel, or that the British population would demand peace at any price. None of that materialized. Next, the Germans expected the Americans to suffer indignity after indignity and gambled that they could kill U.S. citizens, incite Mexico to go to war with the United States, and flagrantly disregard Wilson’s repeated warnings. They were wrong about England, and they were wrong about America.

  Still, after a full year of watching the carnage from afar, Americans shook their heads in wonder. Until May 1915, many still held out hope their nation could avoid taking sides. Wilson even offered to mediate. But forces were already in motion to ensure American entry sooner or later. Germany doubted her High Seas Fleet could compete with England for control of the oceans and early on had employed U-boats (submarines) to intercept and destroy trade bound for England. U-boat warfare proved phenomenally effective, if mistake prone. U-boat captains had difficulty establishing the colors of vessels at sea through their periscopes, and, to make matters worse, the British fraudulently flew neutral flags on their own merchantmen, which violated the very essence of neutrality. Before any real enmity could appear between the United States and England over the neutral flag issue, the Germans blundered by sinking the passenger liner Lusitania in May 1915, killing 1,198, including 128 Americans.

  Between its zeppelin and U-boat attacks, the German government helped shift American public opinion to the Allies, prompting leading newspapers such as the New York Herald to refer to the sinking of the Lusitania as “wholesale murder” and the New York Times to compare the Germans to “savages drunk with blood.”

  Wilson already had justification for joining the Allies at that point, and had the United States done so, it might have shortened the war and short-circuited Russian communism. Certainly Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov Lenin, exiled in Switzerland when the war started, would have remained an insignificant figure in human history, not the mass murderer who directed the Red October Revolution in Russia. Instead, Wilson opted for the safe, and cheap, response. He demanded and secured German assurances that “such atrocities would never be repeated,” although within a few months the Reichstag would formalize the policy of unrestricted submarine warfare, dooming the Sussex, a Channel ferry, to torpedoing and the loss of another fifty passengers, including two more Americans.

  Wilson again issued strong protests, to which the Germans again responded by promising to behave. In truth, Erich Ludendorff, the industrial supremo who direct
ed the U-boat campaign, had no intention of curtailing his effective submarine war, even less so after May 1916, when the outnumbered High Seas Fleet failed to break the blockade at Jutland. In a gigantic battle that pitted more than 100 German warships against more than 150 British vessels, some 6,000 British sailors were killed and 2,500 German seamen went down. The German High Seas Fleet had engaged a force significantly larger than its own, inflicted more than twice as many casualties, and yet after the battle, German Admiral Reinhard Scheer informed the kaiser that the surface fleet could not defeat the English. Only U-boats could shut down transatlantic trade. They continued to ignore previous promises made to Wilson.

  Wilson used his (so far) successful efforts at neutrality as a campaign motif in 1916. With the slogan “He kept us out of war,” Wilson squeaked out an electoral victory in the November elections against the Republican Charles Evans Hughes, a former governor of New York who had the support of Teddy Roosevelt. In the electoral college, Wilson won 277 to 254, although he enjoyed a wider popular vote margin of about half a million. Americans wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. Certainly he received support from the peace movement, which was largely, though not entirely, sponsored by the Socialist Party, from whom Wilson drew large numbers of votes. Antiwar groups appeared—the American Union Against Militarism and the Women’s Peace Party, for example—and some 1,500 women marched down Fifth Avenue in New York in August 1914 to protest against intervention. House Democrats broke away from the White House to block even modest preparations for war, and celebrities such as Jane Addams and Henry Ford publicly announced their opposition to involvement in “Europe’s fight.”

  There was one small problem: the Germans would not cooperate. In October 1916, Kaiser Wilhelm celebrated the U-boats’ feat of sinking a million tons of Allied shipping, and a week later five Allied ships were torpedoed within sight of Nantucket Island.38 Only a few days before the election, a U-boat sank the British liner Marina (six Americans died) and then, in an act of astounding recklessness, the Germans sank the Lanao, a U.S.-chartered vessel, off Portugal. Victories on the ground further bolstered the German outlook on the war, despite the fact that on the Western Front alone men were dying at the rate of 3,000 per day (including, since 1914, 800,000 Germans). By late 1916, German or German-backed Austro-Hungarian forces controlled Serbia, Montenegro, and Galicia; had dismantled Romania, soundly thrashed the French army at Verdun, and turned back Allied offensives at the Somme; and occupied much of the western section of Russia. Moreover, the Austrians had dealt defeat after defeat to the Italians (who had come in on the side of the Allies). Under such circumstances, a little risk of offending the United States seemed harmless, especially since Wilson had not demonstrated that he was a man of action when it came to Germany.

  In December 1916, Wilson made yet another effort to mediate, issuing a Peace Note to the belligerents that first raised the prospect of a league of nations that might “preserve peace throughout the world.” He also offended and irritated both sides by claiming that the United States “was too proud to fight.”39 For their part, the Germans had no intention of giving up territory they already held under any Wilsonian-brokered agreement. And Germany rightly perceived that Russia was coming apart. It probably would not remain in the war much longer, in which case a France that was already bled white would, the Germans thought, offer little final resistance.

  Here again, Wilson’s potential impact on the calculations of the warring parties was critical. Had Germany in 1915 or even 1916 seriously thought that several million American troops would replenish the French, the Germans might have come to the negotiating table sooner. Wilson’s reluctance to fight over the just cause of the sinking of several American ships hardened, rather than softened, the foe. Sensing they could turn the war, the German leaders made two critical errors in January 1917.

  The first involved a resumption of the de facto policy of unrestricted submarine warfare. Now the Germans admitted publicly that U-boats would attack anything and everything at sea—belligerents, civilian vessels, neutrals. All shipping was fair game. Even if that brought the United States into the war, they reasoned, it would be over before American armies could mobilize and arrive in Europe. Perhaps the second error was an even greater blunder in that it directly (if weakly) threatened Americans in the homeland.

  Noting that Pershing’s expedition against Pancho Villa had soured relations between the United States and Mexico, the German foreign minister, Alfred von Zimmerman, sent a coded radio message to Carranza’s government, essentially urging Mexico to declare war on America. In return, Germany would recognize Mexico’s reconquest of Arizona, New Mexico, and other parts of the Southwest. American agents in London deciphered the code, showed it to an American diplomat, then forwarded it to the White House. Washington made the message public, generating the expected indignation. Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts knew immediately that the Zimmerman note would arouse the country more than any other event.40

  Sensing that the public mood had shifted, Wilson issued an order authorizing the arming of merchant ships for self-protection—a symbolic act with no substance. After seven more merchantmen went down, and following massive prowar demonstrations in the nation’s major cities, Wilson spoke to a special session of Congress on April second. He asked for a declaration of war, laying out the unlawful attacks on American persons and property. That would have been enough: Congress would have given him the declaration, and matters would have been simple. Ever the idealist, however, Wilson drifted into grandiloquent terms, seeing the struggle as about making the world safe for democracy. It was of the utmost convenience that only a few weeks earlier a revolution in Russia had dethroned the czar, for Wilson would have placed himself in the difficult position of explaining why, if America was fighting for democracy, the nation was allied with a near-feudal monarchy. Fortunately, the Russians had (temporarily, as it turned out) established a constitutional democracy under Alexander Kerensky, giving Wilson the cover of philosophical consistency.

  The war fanned the righteous indignation of an aroused public even more through an intense propaganda campaign. American strategy, like Grant’s fifty years earlier, involved wearing down the enemy with superior numbers and quality of arms. And finally, the war effort ensured that the world’s dominant economy was sufficiently mobilized on the one hand, yet not too centralized on the other. Committing to a European land war, nevertheless, was not easy. The very nature of civilian control of the U.S. military, its demobilized force structure, and the American optimistic willingness to see negotiation and compromise as possible in the most impossible circumstances all inhibited the quick and capricious use of armies and navies. Once Americans become convinced that force is the only option, however, they have proven that they can turn 180 degrees and implement it with wicked effectiveness.

  Flexing Democracy’s Muscles

  In spite of the nation’s original neutral position—Wilson’s strict neutrality “in thought and deed”—the administration now suddenly had to convince Americans that in fact one side was brutal and ruthless. Citizens who only a year earlier had been cautioned to curtail their anti-German feelings were now encouraged, openly and often, to indulge them. The government launched an all-out propaganda offensive, depicting the Germans in posters as the Hun—apelike, fanged creatures wearing spiked German helmets and carrying off women. A culture sanitization occurred in which products or foods with Germanic-or Teutonic-sounding names were replaced by American phrases: hamburgers became liberty sandwiches, and sauerkraut was called liberty cabbage. Any identification with German culture was proscribed: Berlin, Iowa, became Lincoln; Kaiser Street became Maine Way; Germantown, Nebraska, was renamed Garland; Hamburg Avenue in Brooklyn was changed to Wilson Avenue; and even the famous German shepherd dog received a new name, the Alsatian shepherd.

  Scholars often deride such efforts as “brainwashing,” failing to understand that in democracies, citizens view war as a last resort, something abnorm
al. Contrary to how propaganda is portrayed—manipulating the public to do something against its collective will—wartime propaganda is often obviously accepted and enthusiastically received as a means of preparing a republic for the grim task ahead.

  George Creel, a Denver journalist, supported this effort with his Committee on Public Information, which provided posters and distributed war literature. The committee encouraged citizens to report anyone engaging in antiwar behavior to the Justice Department. Creel used his contacts in journalism to encourage fellow reporters to monitor their coverage of the war.

  Of course abuses occurred. Germans in the United States became the objects of suspicion and, occasionally, violence. One German immigrant was lynched in St. Louis. Ultimately, the distrust spread to all immigrants, as seen in the Immigration Restriction Act of 1917, which refused admission to any adult immigrant who could not pass a basic reading test. (Prohibition, in part, reflected the anti-immigrant attitudes fanned by the war because of a belief that Germans and others brought a “drinking culture” to the United States.) And the most significant piece of legislation, the Espionage, Sabotage, and Sedition Acts of 1917 and 1918, extended the bounds of what was considered sabotage or espionage to include slandering the Constitution or the military. The postmaster general blocked mailings of Socialist Party materials. But even if somewhat censored, the press continued to report, Congress continued to meet and pass laws (in fact, Wilson vetoed the Immigration Act), and people still experienced a level of freedom unseen in most of the world during peacetime.