by David Milne
Europe was divided into two camps at the start of 1914: the Entente Powers, principally composed of Great Britain, France, and Russia, and the Central Powers, composed of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. All parties were bound to their allies by treaty commitments. While there were various points of friction that made a European-wide war a distinct possibility, the trigger point was an assassin’s bullet. On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir apparent to the throne of the Habsburg Empire, was shot dead in Sarajevo by a nineteen-year-old Serbian nationalist named Gavrilo Princip. Austria-Hungary interpreted this as an act of war, secured a “blank check” from Berlin on July 6 that promised unconditional German support, and then made ten demands of Serbia that were purposefully unacceptable. When Serbia refused to sign two of the demands, on July 28 Austria-Hungary declared war. Rising indignantly in support of its Slavic cousins, the next day Russia offered its support when Tsar Nicholas II ordered a partial mobilization, an act designed to deter German involvement. The warning shot did not work, however; Berlin mobilized in response, which then led France, Russia’s ally, to do the same on August 1. Germany declared war on Russia that very same day, leaving just one major power unaccounted for. Playing its usual historic role as a counterweight in European disputes, Great Britain entered the fray on August 4, when it declared war on Germany for refusing to honor Belgium’s neutrality. With such speed and asininity began the cataclysm that was the First World War. During the next five years, more than fifteen million people would die. The war marked the beginning of the end of European primacy in global affairs.
Alfred Mahan was surprised by the speed in which war engulfed Europe, but he had few doubts about which side bore principal responsibility. On August 3, 1914, Mahan gave an interview to the New York Evening Post in which he argued that Vienna had used the assassination as a pretext for Austria and Germany to attack Russia, to which the essential corollary was the invasion of France to prevent a two-front war. In those circumstances Mahan believed that Britain had no choice but to “declare war at once,” which it did a day later. Anticipating the inevitability of war from the events of August 1–3, Mahan had been working on an article for Leslie’s Weekly in which he argued that Britain could defeat Germany by imposing a naval blockade, choking the nation into submission—just as the Union navy had done against the Confederacy during the Civil War.
Sensing an opportunity to rally Americans behind a pro-British stance, Mahan began working on another piece, provisionally titled “About What Is the War?” which dismissed the notion that effective international arbitration would have prevented this war and might do so in the future—a clear attack on the proclivities of the sitting president. Mahan’s hardheaded analyses were in huge demand. The Wood Newspaper Syndicate, Pulitzer Publishing Company, Paul R. Reynolds literary agency, Charles Scribner’s Sons, The Independent, and Leslie’s all enticed Mahan to write for them with significant financial inducements—the latter two publications offered him $100 a week for the duration of the conflict for short dispatches on military developments as they happened.65 But this promise of rapt nationwide attention and a significant payday was ended abruptly by Woodrow Wilson. Concerned that Mahan’s august reputation, pro-British sympathies, and gifts of literary persuasion would whip up support for the Entente, and constrain his freedom of action, the president silenced Mahan. He sent the following letter to his secretary of war, Lindley Miller Garrison:
I write to suggest that you request and advise all officers of the service, whether active or retired, to refrain from public comment of any kind upon the military or political situation on the other side of the water … It seems to me highly unwise and improper that officers of the Army and the Navy of the United States should make any public utterances to which any color of political or military criticism can be given where other nations are involved.66
There is no doubt that Mahan was Wilson’s primary target, and he was furious. He was compelled to return a $100 fee from The Independent. Worse, Wilson had suppressed a message that was vital to America’s national security. Mahan was convinced that German control of the European continent would allow Kaiser Wilhelm to project power into the Caribbean, thus threatening U.S. interests and making a mockery of the Monroe Doctrine. He composed two letters to Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, both dated August 15, urging him to ask Wilson to reconsider:
Public opinion being in the last analysis the determining force in our national polity, the effect of the Order is to disable a class of men best qualified by their past occupation, and present position, to put before the public considerations which would tend to base public opinion in matters of current public interest, upon sound professional grounds … At the age of seventy-four, I find myself silenced at a moment when the particular pursuits of nearly thirty-five years … might be utilized for the public. I admit a strong feeling of personal disappointment … When I was in France eighteen months ago, a leading French statesman, a member of the present cabinet, told me that Germans had said to him that if they got France down again they would bleed her white. If a nation of that temper gets full control on the continent, which is what she is trying for, do you suppose it will long respect the Monroe Doctrine? At this moment Germany suffers from a lack of coaling stations here. If she downs France, why not take Martinique? Or if Great Britain, some Canadian port?67
Having been encouraged by McKinley to write on the Spanish-American War and by Roosevelt on the Russo-Japanese War and Second Hague Conference, Mahan was being silenced by a Democratic president determined to keep America out of what he viewed as Europe’s descent into senseless conflict—in which all sides shared culpability—and who opposed Mahan’s rationale for assisting Britain, France, and Russia. Daniels replied tersely, noting that Mahan’s well-established pro-British affinities would “trench upon the line of American neutrality.”68 The president’s muzzling order would stand and there was to be no future debate on the matter.
With no choice but to cease writing on the war, Mahan continued to attack those who argued that greater military preparedness, in the form of high defense spending, increased the prospects of future conflict, a misguided view to which Democrats were particularly susceptible. In a letter to The New York Times on August 31, Mahan wrote, “The hackneyed phrase, ‘Vital interests or national honor,’ really sums up the motives that lead nations to war. Armament is simply the instrument of which such motives avail themselves. If there be no armament, there is war all the same.”69 Unfortunately, this was one of Mahan’s final public pronouncements on foreign policy. He passed away on December 1, 1914, after suffering a heart attack. He was eulogized by Theodore Roosevelt, in a reference to the halcyon era in which he and like-minded Republicans had been ascendant, as “one of the greatest and most useful influences in American life.”70 He died during a presidency that was utterly hostile to his views.
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Wilson’s reaction to the onset of war in Europe was complex. Just two days after the British declaration of war on Germany, Ellen Axson Wilson, the president’s beloved wife, died suddenly. Wilson was consumed by grief, leading him to reduce meetings and speaking engagements to the barest minimum required. His statements during this critical time in world affairs were thus spare, somber, and typically eloquent. Wilson affirmed that the United States’ position was one of scrupulous neutrality and called on his fellow Americans to display “the fine poise of undisturbed judgment, the dignity of self-control.” The president believed that “the United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name during these days that are to try men’s souls.”71 That this was a difficult task to achieve in a multiethnic, hyphenated America was not lost on Wilson. A third of America’s citizens in 1914 had been born overseas. The majority, including the elite northeastern establishment, favored Britain and France (forgiving their alliance of convenience with tsarist Russia) due to a shared ethnic and cultural heritage, and a belief that Prussian militarism was at the root of Europe’s problems. Ge
rman Americans naturally supported the Central Powers, as did Irish Americans, through their enmity toward Britain, and some Jewish and Scandinavian Americans, who despised tsarist Russia for its institutionalized anti-Semitism and territorial ambitions to its western borders. In such a volatile national environment, Wilson sincerely believed that “we have to be neutral since otherwise our mixed populations would wage war on each other.”72
Accompanying Wilson’s strongly declared neutrality was an aversion to ordering any significant increases in the defense budget, the course urged by Mahan up to his death, and by Roosevelt and Lodge thereafter. In his State of the Union address of December 8, 1914, Wilson rebuffed those advocates of military preparedness, whose expensive contingency plans would “mean merely that we had lost our self-possession, that we had been thrown off our balance by a war with which we have nothing to do, whose causes can not touch us, whose very existence affords us opportunities of friendship and disinterested service which should make us ashamed of any thought of hostility or fearful preparation for trouble.”73 The opportunity to which Wilson referred was the possibility that the war would be stalemated, allowing the United States to serve as arbiter, affording Wilson increased leverage to preside over peace negotiations that would refashion international relations on more collaborative grounds. With prescience, Wilson remarked to the journalist Herbert B. Brougham that the best opportunity for “a just and equitable peace, and of the only possible peace that will be lasting, will be happiest if no nation gets the decision by arms; and the danger of an unjust peace, one that will be sure to invite further calamities, will be if some one nation or group of nations succeeds in enforcing its will upon the others.”74 Wilson’s assessment combined unimpeachable reasoning with a corresponding reluctance to consider how nations’ hearts can be hardened in time of war.
At the beginning, there was a remarkable unanimity of approach toward the war across the Wilson administration. As Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt observed, “To my astonishment on reaching the Dept., nobody seemed the least bit excited about the European crisis—Mr. Daniels feeling chiefly very sad that his faith in human nature and civilization and similar idealistic nonsense was receiving such a rude shock. So I started in alone to get things ready and prepare plans for what ought to be done by the Navy end of things.”75 One Democrat, at least, was displaying an appreciation for Alfred Thayer Mahan’s teachings.
FDR’s second cousin was even less impressed by what he viewed as Wilson’s self-righteous detachment. Theodore Roosevelt observed to his friend Rudyard Kipling that Wilson’s cowardliness was regrettable but explicable considering that none of his family “fought on either side in the Civil War.” Roosevelt believed that Germany was the aggressor, that the Entente deserved full American support, and that the course of the war threw into sharp relief “the utter folly of the present administration and its pacifist supporters” in promoting Pollyannaish arbitration schemes at the expense of military preparedness. He concluded that Wilson was “a college president with an astute and shifty mind, a hypocritical ability to deceive plain people.”76
Yet Wilson’s neutrality policy favored the Entente (or Allied) Powers more than it did Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. To pursue a true neutrality policy would have required the United States to cease all its exports to Europe, which amounted to $900 million annually. The purest application of neutrality was thus entirely unacceptable for the United States, as it would have led to a sharp economic recession. During the period when Wilson curtailed his official duties to grieve, Secretary of State Bryan, in an attempt to define neutrality’s “true spirit,” imposed a blanket ban on American loans to all belligerents. This action led the Allied Powers, more dependent than the Central Powers on overseas finance, to swiftly run out of money to purchase American goods, a situation as injurious to American business as it was to Anglo-French military prospects. In October 1914, recognizing the extent of the damage wreaked by this policy, Wilson ordered an amendment that permitted credits—but not public loans financed by the American taxpayer—to be extended to Paris, London, and Moscow. Some $80 million in credits were granted in the six months that followed, and the remaining restrictions on loans were removed a year later. In the spring of 1915, Colonel House, whose pro-British sentiments were firmer than those of his president, conceded that the American national interest was “bound up more or less” in Allied victory.77
Wilson also assisted the Allied cause in tolerating the British naval blockade of Germany, the strategy advocated by Mahan. The blockade prevented all neutral shipping from passing into Northern European ports and significantly curtailed the American export market. Recognizing that American trade with Germany was worth sacrificing for the sake of Anglo-American amity, however, Wilson rejected the confrontational precedent bequeathed by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and declined to challenge the Royal Navy’s dominance of the North Atlantic. American acquiescence to a British policy viewed by many as inhumane—starving Germans into submission was the aim, after all—earned Wilson enemies at home, abroad, and even within his own cabinet. William Jennings Bryan, for one, believed that Wilson had shown too much favoritism toward Britain.
The German government realized that an unchallenged blockade presaged its eventual defeat and launched a U-boat campaign around the British Isles on February 15, 1915, to target merchant shipping and hopefully sap London’s morale as well as its finances. Germany justified this policy as retaliation against the blockade. Prior to 1915, the submarine had played a minor part in armed conflict; this German deployment opened a new, more ignoble, era in naval warfare. While traditional naval engagements sought to avoid civilian casualties, submarine-launched torpedoes killed innocents without warning. Realizing the threats posed by these developments, the president declared that Germany would be held to “strict accountability” for any attacks that hurt American interests.78 Wilson’s response was not stern enough to satisfy Roosevelt (or, indeed, House) but was confrontational enough to worry Bryan. Plotting a middle course between the pugnacity and pacifism of these two men would become increasingly difficult.
In fact, these early Bryan-Wilson disagreements were ossifying to produce two very different visions of how the United States should comport itself in world affairs. As the fighting grew bloodier in Europe, with no apparent end in sight, Wilson began to take a far greater interest in military preparedness, repudiating the Bryanite tradition in Democratic foreign policy that a large standing military threatened the virtue of the republic. Rather than recoiling from the European war with haughty disgust, as Bryan assuredly did, Wilson sensed an opportunity to intervene so as to better serve the interests of the United States and indeed the world. His preference was that his intervention be diplomatic, that he should preside over negotiations to end the war evenhandedly at the conference table. But if American intervention became unavoidable, Wilson realized that defense spending had to rise sharply in anticipation. Step by laborious step, urged on by the Anglophile Colonel House, Wilson was beginning to display a clear preference, expressed discreetly at this stage, for Allied victory. When Theodore Roosevelt impugned the “Wilson-Bryan attitude of trusting to fantastic peace treaties … A milk and water righteousness unbacked by force,” he failed to perceive the way the president and his secretary of state were diverging in outlook.79
The Bryan-Wilson dispute came out into the open on May 7, 1915, when a German U-Boat torpedoed the British cruiser Lusitania. This vast luxury liner sank to the bottom of the ocean in eighteen minutes, and twelve hundred civilians perished. The harrowing casualty list included 94 children and, most significantly from Wilson’s perspective, 128 Americans. The brutality of the assault was scarcely mitigated by the fact that the Lusitania was carrying Allied munitions, as the U-boat captain suspected. Such details lost saliency as the bodies of children washed up on the Irish coast weeks after the sinking. Theodore Roosevelt railed against German “piracy,” demanded an immediate decla
ration of war, and observed that “as a nation, we have thought very little about foreign affairs; we don’t realize that the murder of the thousand men, women, and children on the Lusitania is due, solely, to Wilson’s abject cowardice and weakness in failing to take energetic action when the Gulflight [an American oil tanker] was sunk a few days previously.”80 Roosevelt and other Republicans were sensing an opportunity to land some significant blows on Wilson one year ahead of the general election.