by Hugh Brogan
The British command of the sea was nearly absolute, and so much resented by the Americans that they began to talk of ‘navalism’ as a sin of the same order as German militarism: ‘freedom of the seas’ was a potent cry. The British strictly forbade neutrals to trade with Germany and Austria; neighbours of the Central Powers, such as Holland and Denmark, were forbidden to import anything by sea which might find its way across their frontiers (as a result the war was a period of acute hardship for these little countries). American vessels trading across the Atlantic were regularly stopped and searched by British ships; contraband goods were confiscated. A black list was compiled of firms guilty or suspected of trading with Germany, whose shipments were therefore liable to instant seizure. The mails were intercepted and censored. As the war went on the British, nicely judging the American temper, slowly increased the pressure. Woodrow Wilson protested in vain. By the summer of 1916 he admitted that he was ‘about at the end of my patience with Great Britain and the Allies’. On top of everything else, Britain’s savage repression of the Easter Rising in Dublin had done almost as much damage to her moral standing in the eyes of the American public as the attack on Belgium had done to that of Germany. Wilson’s resolution to commit the full strength of the United States to the search for peace grew: it was plainer and plainer that the war was a major hurt to American interests, whether the country was a belligerent or not.
Before any decisive new departure could be undertaken there was a Presidential election to be held. Wilson had done his best to prepare for it by appropriating the more tempting items in his enemies’ domestic programmes; but somewhat to his surprise, somewhat to his dismay, the winning issue turned out to be the slogan ‘He Kept Us Out Of The War’. The mood of the country, understandably enough, was overwhelmingly pacific. Wilson privately doubted his ability to live up to the slogan: he knew that the decision really lay with Germany, which might at any minute resume submarine warfare. But he had of course no objection to winning the peace vote, and was narrowly re-elected, receiving 277 electoral votes to the 254 given to his Republican opponent, Charles Evans Hughes (the Progressive party was dissolving).
That matter out of the way, Wilson set earnestly to work as a peace-maker. On 18 December he sent identical diplomatic notes to the belligerents asking them to state their war-aims. He hoped that, if they could be induced to do this, they might also be induced to accept America as a mediator in the search for a compromise peace. So they might have done, had their quest for victory been all it seemed: had both sides believed what they proclaimed, that they were only fighting in self-defence. Unfortunately the belligerents had war-aims they could not decently avow. Germany, for example, wanted the Belgian Congo, and the reduction of Belgium herself to satellite status; while the Allies had their own plans for carving up Turkey and destroying for good the strength of the Central Powers. They were fighting for conquest; besides, any compromise peace in 1916 or 1917 must have been a thinly disguised German victory, for Belgium and northern France were still occupied: if Allied blood was no longer to be shed, then Allied diplomacy would have had to make many concessions to get this territory evacuated. Yet Britain and France felt themselves far from defeated. It is not surprising, therefore, that Wilson’s demarche was received with dismay in London and Paris, and that the only question it raised in the minds of the Allied governments was how it might be painlessly frustrated.
A similar reaction might have been expected from the Germans: if they defined their war-aims in terms acceptable to American opinion, they would be throwing away the fruits of their victories; if they replied frankly, they would discredit themselves. Best to reply evasively. But it so happened that Wilson’s intervention coincided with a fateful change in German policy. Tirpitz had now built up a large submarine fleet; Tsarist Russia was plainly on the brink of defeat; the time had come, the high command determined, for an all-out effort against Britain. Before it was taken, however, the diplomatists were allowed one last attempt at negotiation. Accordingly Bethmann-Hollweg, the German Chancellor, returned a surprisingly conciliatory answer to Wilson’s note, and the President for some weeks was able to sun himself in the illusion that a compromise peace was possible. He was so pleased with the German attitude that he began to put heavy pressure on the British, going so far as to order that no more loans should be made to them, since they seemed uncooperative.
For the Allies it was perhaps the most dangerous moment of the war and, had the Germans had the wit to see it, it might have been decisive. But Hindenburg and Ludendorff were bent on settling matters their own way – by blood and iron. At a conference at Pless Castle in eastern Prussia it was decided, over the anguished protests of Bethmann-Hollweg, to re-open the submarine offensive. It was assumed that this would bring America into the war but that, the generals thought, did not matter. Before US strength could be brought to bear, the Russians would have been forced to make peace and the U-boat campaign would have starved Britain into asking for terms. The decision was taken in early January 1917 – at the very time that Wilson was assuring House that ‘there will be no war’.
It was a bold scheme, which almost succeeded. But the Germans had overreached themselves. The British convoy system blunted the submarine offensive. Russia was totally defeated, but the terms that Germany exacted were so unbearably harsh that an army had to be kept in the East to enforce them; consequently the great Western offensive, when it came (in March 1918), was not sufficiently overwhelming, and the Anglo-French front held. Worse yet, the Americans were indeed forced into war by the consequences of the Pless decision, and this fact guaranteed German defeat.
The announcement that Germany was resorting to unrestricted submarine warfare (that is to say, that all Allied or neutral vessels on the Atlantic would be torpedoed without warning, whatever their mission) abruptly awoke Wilson from his dream that the belligerents would accept his proposals for ‘peace without victors’. This was no unplanned Trent affair, no ‘calculated outrage’ from ‘any little German lieutenant’ such as Wilson had feared. It was an attempt by the imperial German government to drive all American shipping off the high seas, in order to starve a people into surrender. To acquiesce in this murderous humiliation was unthinkable; but Wilson shrank from the obvious alternative. The German note was received on 31 January 1917; three days later Wilson broke off diplomatic relations. News of sunken shipping began to come in; but still the President did not go to war.
His instincts were profoundly pacific. He had been a child in the South during Civil War and Reconstruction: he knew, as no other President has known, what the costs of war might be. Among them he could reckon soldiers dead or mutilated and families wrecked by the loss of their ‘boys’, as he always thought and spoke of them (he had no sons, but he had taught young males for years at Princeton, who always stayed the same age while he got older). He knew how war could defeat the hopes of those who entered upon it and warp the course of social and political development: he foresaw the end of the New Freedom in war fever. In a war, a united America must win, of course; but she might be transformed for the worse. Even the diplomatic price would be high: the tradition of more than a century would be abandoned when the United States consented to embroil itself in the quarrels of Europe.
The sinkings went on. The British gave Wilson the text of a German cable which they had intercepted and decoded. It was from Alfred Zimmermann, Under Foreign Secretary, and was so monumentally provocative that it deserves to be extensively quoted:
Berlin, January 19, 1917. On the first of February we intend to begin submarine warfare unrestricted. In spite of this it is our intention to keep neutral the United States of America. If this attempt is not successful we propose an alliance on the following basis with Mexico: that we shall make war together and together make peace. We shall give general financial support, and it is understood that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona… Please call to the attention of the President of Mexico that the em
ployment of ruthless submarine warfare now promises to compel England to make peace in a few months.
Wilson published the text of this interesting document; Zimmermann, to the astonishment of the government in Washington, admitted that it was genuine; and the American people were left to contemplate what seemed to them a monstrous plot against their national integrity. The point about ‘ruthless submarine warfare’ reminded them of their losses at sea and of the Germans’ reputation for frightfulness. The sorry state of Mexican-American relations lent an air of reality to Zimmermann’s scheme which it did not deserve, for Mexico showed no interest. At last the people knew their own mind. Wilson asked Congress to approve the arming of merchantmen; when a little group of Senators filibustered the proposal to death, he authorized the measure under an ancient Act of 1797, relic of an earlier international crisis. The Russian Revolution of March overthrew the Tsardom, thus making the Allied cause more attractive to democratic Americans. The President bowed to necessity, and on 2 April 1917 went before a joint session of Congress to ask for a declaration that a state of war existed between Germany and the United States. He got what he wanted by a nearly unanimous vote in the small hours of Good Friday. It fell on 6 April that year: for the third time the cruellest month thrust the American people into a major war.
In his address to Congress Wilson set the country on a new course. He did not mention the Zimmermann telegram, perhaps because he thought so foolish a plot to be unworthy of serious notice, but he reviewed the question of unrestricted submarine warfare at length, making the point that, if America wanted to preserve her property and, especially, the lives of her citizens, she must either submit to German bullying or retaliate with war: ‘armed neutrality, it now appears, is impracticable’. America would not, could not, submit: she would defend her rights and the hitherto sacrosanct principles of civilized maritime warfare. So far, it was a prescription for war on the Atlantic. But Wilson had convinced himself, and now tried to convince his hearers, that Germany’s conduct showed that her government could not safely be allowed to co-exist with democratic nations. ‘We are glad, now that we see the facts with no veil of false pretence about them, to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included… The world must be made safe for democracy.’4 So he proposed all help to the Allies, and the raising of a huge American army, initially of half a million men. And he ended by painting a glorious vision of what might be achieved:
It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts — for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own Governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.
He was rewarded with tumultuous cheers, led by the Chief Justice of the United States. It did not comfort him. ‘My message today was a message of death for our young men,’ he said afterwards, in a moment of Lincolnian insight. ‘How strange it seems to applaud that.’
Wilson’s address carried a substantially united America into war; but he risked a great deal. If his promises of universal peace and democracy could not be kept, disappointment might be as bitter as hopes in 1917 were high. It is worth asking why the promises were made. In part, the answer must be that Wilson had been convinced by the outbreak and conduct of the war that, in Norman Angell’s famous phrase, there was a state of international anarchy, and that, until it was remedied, the world could not be safe either for democracy or for the American people. He had already, in the previous year, announced himself ready to abandon the isolationist tradition if, by signing a treaty or forming an alliance, America could help to bring into being and to sustain ‘a concert of free peoples’ – a league of nations, that is, such as was becoming the popular remedy for the ills of the world. In 1917 he took advantage of the need to declare war to commit his country firmly to this policy.
But there was more to it than that. There was the matter of national tradition. Jefferson and Lincoln had dedicated the Revolution and the Civil War to the cause of humanity; Wilson would do the same with his war. Finally, he was under a compulsion common to all modern societies. The British, for instance, believed (or the civilians did) that they were fighting a war to end war. Mere national self-defence, let alone the lure of conquest, was no longer cause enough. The best that can be said for Wilson as he declared a war for democracy, an ideological war, is that any other man in his place would have had to offer such a justification for his actions, and that few others could so eloquently have articulated one so noble and so plausible.
Having committed themselves, the Americans began to work with their usual enormous energy. Their view was that having entered the war they had better do all they could to bring it to an early end. Their fleet, in conjunction with the Royal Navy, rid the Atlantic of the submarine menace. General Pershing set to work to raise and train an army for Europe. President Wilson, bypassing the regular Cabinet, appointed talented outsiders, businessmen of proved capacity working for a dollar a year, to oversee the war effort. Bernard Baruch, a Wall Street financier, headed the War Industries Board: in effect he was economic dictator, controlling the whole vast field of American manufacturing in the interest of the war-effort. Herbert Hoover, who had made a fortune as a mining engineer and earned international fame by his work to relieve the starving people of Belgium and occupied France, was made Food Administrator: he boosted American farm production to unheard-of heights and tripled exports to the Allied countries, which might otherwise have failed from hunger. The American Federation of Labor pledged its support to the war-effort and was eventually rewarded by a huge increase of numbers and influence. The standard rate of income tax was raised to 6 per cent, while a surtax of up to 77 per cent was imposed on incomes of more than a million dollars a year. The railroads were nationalized for the duration of the war; fuel use was as strictly regulated as industrial production; labour relations were supervised by the administration. For the second time the US government showed what it could do in a crisis.
Less happy were some other expressions of the wartime spirit. Hostility to the Germans was so intense that it led to a campaign of persecution against the whole German-American community, which was supposed to consist largely of traitors and spies, although the President had expressed his confidence in its patriotism. Unfortunately he had at the same time remarked that ‘a few’ might be disloyal, and had promised that disloyalty would be dealt with ‘with a firm hand of stern repression’. That was excuse enough. German music, German literature, German philosophy and the German language were all denounced; German books were removed from libraries, German-language newspapers were suppressed and German-American citizens were vindictively hounded. At least this hostility gave the other ‘hyphenated Americans’ a welcome breathing-space (during the period of neutrality they had been much attacked); and hatred of the Kaiser blotted out hatred of the Pope. But the radical and pacifist opposition to the war which soon announced itself was stigmatized as pro-German and persecuted accordingly. When the October Revolution brought the Bolsheviks to power and they made peace with Germany they were immediately tagged as agents of Prussian imperialism, and so were their sympathizers: 105 Wobblies were sent to prison for impeding the war-effort. Eugene V. Debs, bitterly opposed to what he thought was a bloody war of the plutocracies, appalled by the campaign against freedom of speech which had shut down the socialist as well as the German-language press, and determined to demonstrate what was happening to the Constitutional guarantee of free speech, made a speech denouncing the war and was sent to prison for ‘wilfully and knowingly’ trying to obstruct the operation of the Conscription Act. To make sure that such wickedness
would never go unpunished the administration pushed through an Espionage Act and a Sedition Act. Wilson did not seem to remember the outrage that an earlier Sedition Act had caused; or to care about the illiberal consequences of the new one. No one who weakened support for ‘the boys’ in uniform deserved any mercy. Debs was to stay in prison until Wilson left office.
Brewers, it was discovered, were commonly of German origin; King George of England had given up alcohol to help the cause; and anyway the manufacturers of beer and whisky used up corn which might otherwise have been sent to feed the Allies. It was a heaven-sent chance for the prohibitionists. They whipped up hostility to the brewing interests, and by banging the patriotic drum induced Congress not only to pass a law enforcing prohibition while the war lasted, but actually to pass a Constitutional amendment (the Eighteenth) forbidding the export, import, ‘manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors’, for ever. The patriotic cry was so noisy that no effective opposition could be organized, and the amendment became law on 29 January 1919, to come into effect a year later. This reform was to cause great trouble in the future, but in the long run it proved less important than the other wartime amendment, the Nineteenth, which at last gave all American women the vote and became law on 26 August 1920.
Immigration from Europe was cut off at the same time that a huge market for unskilled labour arose in the North. The opportunity was seized by the African-Americans, who now began to leave the South in large numbers to fill the war-built factories. This great migration stimulated hostility in the North among white workers facing this new competition. There was a race riot at East St Louis, Illinois, on 2 July 1917, in which some thirty-nine blacks and nine whites were killed. Two months later, at Houston, Texas, black soldiers were provoked into an uprising in which seventeen whites were killed, for which outrage thirteen blacks were later hanged and forty-one sent to prison for life. Lynching revived in the South on such a scale and with such special horror (burning to death was quite common) that President Wilson was at last moved to denounce it: ‘We are at the moment fighting lawless passions. Germany has outlawed herself… and has made lynchers of her armies. Lynchers emulate her disgraceful conduct.’ But it did no good. Some 454 persons were lynched between 1918 and 1927, 416 being blacks, and forty-two being burned.