by David Milne
While shocked by the loss of life, Wilson still retained hope that his services as an honest broker might yet be deployed in the event of military stalemate in Europe, a prospect that would sink with the Lusitania if the United States declared war. And so he dispatched a note to Berlin criticizing submarine warfare as an assault on “sacred principles of justice and humanity” and making clear that further attacks on civilian ships would be perceived by him as “deliberately unfriendly.”81 It is difficult to see how Wilson could have avoided dispatching such a note in the circumstances—and the language deployed was critical but restrained. But William Jennings Bryan decided that his president had been unduly provocative and that his actions would drag the nation inevitably into this infernal war. The secretary of state believed that American citizens should simply desist from traveling on belligerent ships, and that the British naval embargo, though nonlethal to Americans, was a comparable affront to the nation’s neutral rights. When Wilson declined to accept this reasoning, Bryan tendered his resignation, removing himself as the primary antiwar voice from the administration. A path to war was becoming discernible.
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At the moment when the German torpedoes struck the Lusitania, the land war in Europe was stalemated. During the early skirmishes, the German army had driven to within thirty miles of Paris, at which point they were held and then repulsed by a French and British counteroffensive. At France’s eastern boundary, each side began digging trenches—in conformance with Dennis Hart Mahan’s teachings—two narrow lines 475 miles in length and just a few hundred yards apart, from the North Sea to the mountainous borders of neutral Switzerland. At the beginning of 1915, Germany controlled 19,500 square miles of French and Belgian territory. Twelve months later, after ferocious fighting, the Allies had recaptured just eight.82 It was from these fixed and filthy trenches—primarily efficient in their incubation of disease and vermin—that many of the men who fought on the western front lived and died.
There was little movement in the trench lines from November 1914 to March 1917, just wave after wave of inconclusive assaults that followed a broadly similar pattern. The attacking side was stalled by barbed wire, craters, and bodies, and then mowed down by defending machine gun fire. Then the roles were reversed to the same effect—the former defenders well able to visualize their fate—and battlefield deaths increased in multiples of thousands, then tens of thousands, and then hundreds of thousands. German and French casualties at the Battle of Verdun exceeded those of all Americans during the Civil War. Great Britain suffered four hundred thousand casualties during the inconclusive Somme offensive—some sixty thousand men died or were seriously wounded over the course of one day. The deployment of poison gas by both sides was an additional layer of horror. Wilson captured the nature of this war well when he described it as a “vast, gruesome contest of systematized destruction.”83
The bestiality of the First World War was harrowing, and it is in this context—a cataclysmic human tragedy at the heart of the supposedly most advanced and “civilized” continent on earth—that we must appraise Wilson’s authoring of a grand strategy that was similarly unprecedented. Through 1915 and 1916, Wilson devoted more and more of his time to considering how he might deploy American power, which would be embraced for the purity of its intentions, to end the war and prevent the outbreak of future conflicts on a comparable scale. What was required was nothing less than a rewriting of the rules of international engagement. His ultimate aspiration was to fashion a new world system in which geopolitical rivalry was solely commercial (and peaceable) in nature, and in which spheres of influence, alliances of convenience, and rapacious colonial acquisition were consigned to history. The entire balance-of-power system was to be jettisoned in favor of binding international collaboration, policed ultimately by the world’s preeminent economic power, which was biased in no particular direction.
His vision was also informed by his belief that democratization was the key to creating a more peaceable world, because democracies are far less likely to resort to war, a belief that was later developed by adherents of Democratic Peace theory.84 As Wilson would later put it: “A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations … Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honour steady to a common end and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow interest of their own.”85 This insight was conditioned by his political science background, which encouraged the unveiling of new behavioral norms. Wilson did not want to simply defeat Germany and its allies. He wanted to reveal new truths about the world and humanity’s essentially collaborative nature. Mahan was correct that he had departed from precedent. The president was practicing foreign policy as a science; the world at that time was his laboratory.
Of course, Wilson’s Presbyterian Universalism also played a role in shaping his idealistic solution to a conflict straight from the pages of the Old Testament. The president was propagating a radically new foreign-policy doctrine: America’s security was intertwined with the maintenance of a peaceable world, and its duty was to confront aggression wherever it threatened the global equilibrium. Observing humanity’s best effort yet at creating Armageddon, his visionary response, as expressed in fledgling form in his December 7, 1915, State of the Union address, appears both explicable and justifiable:
Because we demand unmolested development and the undisturbed government of our own lives upon our own principles of right and liberty, we resent, from whatever quarter it may come, the aggression we ourselves will not practice. We insist upon security in prosecuting our self-chosen lines of national development. We do more than that. We demand it also for others. We do not confine our enthusiasm for individual liberty and free national development to the incidents and movements of affairs which affect only ourselves. We feel it wherever there is a people that tries to walk in these difficult paths of independence and right.86
Throughout 1916 Wilson continued to craft his foreign-policy vision and prepare his nation for the worst. At the end of January, the president took a nine-day tour of the Northeast and Midwest in which he delivered eleven speeches emphasizing the importance of military preparedness. At one point Wilson even channeled Mahan, calling for the creation of “incomparably the greatest navy in the world.”87 Pacifists, Jeffersonian idealists, social reformers, and some Progressives were appalled. They suspected that his speeches portended greater profits for big business and the permanent militarization of American society. Wilson’s speaking tour, and the preparedness stance he adopted, more or less killed the Bryanite Democratic Party that Mahan had known and reviled. He paved the way for the passage of preparedness legislation through Congress, opposed by Bryanites in both chambers. But the overall balance of votes cast represented a powerful vindication of Wilson’s persuasive talents—only two Democrats in the Senate and a quarter of House Democrats voted against their president.
The Democratic Party had been changed irrevocably; never again would it propose pseudo-isolationism from European affairs as a position. The National Defense Act of June 1916 increased the regular army to 223,000 men over five years and increased the number of active members of the National Guard to 450,000. A Naval Expansion Act launched a flurry of construction activity at Virginia’s shipyards, in which four dreadnoughts and eight cruisers were built in just one year. To pay for this military expansion, Wilson raised America’s first income tax, which he had introduced in 1913. This action appeased some fellow Democrats by ensuring that the wealthy bore the preponderant financial burden of assuring America’s safety from harm. Theodore Roosevelt’s description of Wilson’s program as “flintlock legislation” rang hollow in such remarkable circumstances.88
Wilson’s decisive move toward military preparedness solidified a division in American politics between internationalists—who believed that greater U.S. engagement with the world at the socioeconomic-diplomatic level should be celebrated, not feared—and isolationists, who held that maintaining an arm�
��s-length relationship with Europe (though not necessarily the rest of the world) was the best way to preserve American liberties and ensure its citizenry would spill no blood for the chicaneries of the Old World. These labels are approximate and can often obscure historical understanding, particularly when one considers that many individuals subscribed to elements of both. But the terms have a broad utility in capturing the tenor of those times.89 The isolationist strain in geopolitical thought was exemplified in the person of William Jennings Bryan, whose popularity in the South meant that his resignation badly hurt Wilson in Congress. The president’s foreign-policy allies were increasingly to be found in a subdivision of the Grand Old Party, where the conservative internationalist William Howard Taft, who had raised Roosevelt’s hackles in advocating arbitration in 1911, and other (mainly Ivy League, patrician) Atlanticists were beginning to view German victory as a scenario that the United States could not tolerate.
In June 1915, Taft announced the formation of the League to Enforce Peace with the grand aspiration of spurring on the creation of a world parliament that would arbitrate disputes and, in time, realize Immanuel Kant’s ambition of securing perpetual peace. In foreign-policy matters, Republicans were divided between those, like Roosevelt and Mahan, who extolled war as ennobling and viewed arbitration as a dangerous illusion, and others, like Taft and Elihu Root, who were as shocked as Wilson by the human tragedy in Europe and consequently were intent on devising a comprehensive cure for the centuries-old malady of great power conflict. These three strains of foreign-policy ideology—isolationism, internationalism, and Mahanian realism—emerged with clarity in 1916.
Wilson had been thinking along similar lines to Taft, and a speech he delivered in June 1916 stated that the United States should “become a partner in any feasible association of nations” dedicated to preserving peace.90 As Election Day approached, Democratic strategists employed the sound bite “He kept us out of war” to persuasive effect across the nation, a gambit that immediately aroused Wilson’s concern. In a revealing letter to Josephus Daniels, the president complained that “I can’t keep the country out of the war. They talk of me as though I were a god. Any little German lieutenant can put us into war at any time by some calculated outrage.”91
Unsurprisingly, foreign policy was a more significant issue on the campaign trail in 1916 than it had been four years earlier. During a Roosevelt-less election, and up against the moderately pro-Allied and relatively characterless Republican candidate Charles Evans Hughes, Wilson was consistent in advocating the creation of a league of nations to ensure peace, and he accused his opponent, whom Theodore Roosevelt supported enthusiastically, of dangerous belligerency. To a popular backdrop that remained hostile to U.S. involvement in the European war, and one that was broadly impressed by the president’s domestic accomplishments, Wilson secured a narrow victory: winning 277 electoral college votes to Hughes’s 254. The most satisfying element of the election from Wilson’s perspective was that he had prevailed against unified Republican opposition and had increased his share of the vote from 41 to 49 percent—not an outright majority but not far off either. It is difficult to claim that election was a ringing endorsement of Wilson, yet it still made him the first Democrat since Andrew Jackson to win two consecutive terms. In many ways it was a remarkable achievement that hinted at future electoral dominance for his party. But his margin of victory was narrow considering he was a national leader at a time of war.
Wilson had little time to savor his victory. Anticipating a moment when neutrality would be impossible to maintain, the president invited the Old World belligerents to state their final war aims and commence negotiations that he would broker evenhandedly in the New World. All sides rebuffed Wilson’s offer with alacrity. British prime minister David Lloyd George formulated a list of demands patently unacceptable to Germany, while Berlin replied haughtily that if the belligerents did move to the conference table, it would insist on excluding Wilson’s grandstanding participation. Germany believed it was gaining the upper hand on the western front, while Britain was confident that the blockade was close to forcing surrender through starvation—at this stage the average German was subsisting on just one thousand calories a day, insufficient for a small child, let alone a full-grown adult.92 Nobody was much interested in Wilson’s peaceable platitudes. Britain wanted American participation to tilt the balance in its favor and crush the Hun. Germany was concerned that Wilson’s urge to play peacemaker might deny them a victory that could be won quickly if it threw off the shackles and deployed the full force of its U-boat fleet.
On January 22, 1917, Wilson delivered a speech in the Senate that took aim at such false hopes and proposed a radical new approach to international affairs. The president declared that the war must conclude with “peace without victory,” the only course available that was guaranteed to prevent the onset of future hostilities based on unfinished business. It was one of Wilson’s most memorable phrases, for it contained a fundamental diplomatic truism that none of the belligerents were willing to accept. The speech did not end there. Wilson further contended that for peace to be enduring, a “community of power” must replace the nineteenth-century concept of the “balance of power,” which was no longer fit for purpose. All nations must be accorded equal standing and protection under international law, Wilson believed. He again called for the creation of an international organization whose central purpose was to ensure “no such catastrophe shall ever overwhelm us again.” In a concluding salvo against isolationism, Wilson warned that without engaged American leadership, “no covenant of cooperative peace [could] keep the future safe against war.”93
Wilson also tried to connect his broader ambitions regarding the establishment of “international concert of peace” to long-standing traditions on American foreign policy:
I am proposing, as it were, that the nations should with one accord adopt the doctrine of President Monroe as the doctrine of the world: that no nation should seek to extend its polity over any other nation or people, but that every people should be left free to determine its own polity; its own way of development—unhindered, unthreatened, unafraid, the little along with the great and powerful.
I am proposing that all nations henceforth avoid entangling alliances which would draw them into competitions of power, catch them in a net of intrigue and selfish rivalry, and disturb their own affairs with influences intruded from without. There is no entangling alliance in a concert of power. When all unite to act in the same sense and with the same purpose, all act in the common interest and are free to live their own lives under a common protection.94
It was smart politics for Wilson to cite precedent for his ambitions in the Monroe Doctrine and George Washington’s farewell warning against “entangling alliances.” He was likely correct in surmising that summoning these totemic foreign-policy pronouncements would reassure.
But of course Wilson was proposing not simply the logical broadening of an established principle. He was taking two distinctly American foreign policy axioms and universalizing them to the point where their original purpose was unrecognizable. The 1823 Monroe Doctrine—warning European nations against interference in any part of the western hemisphere—served the U.S. national interest above all, pacifying the hemisphere in which it resided. And it was sustained, first and foremost, by the Royal Navy’s dominance in the Atlantic, not by American military power or moral legitimacy per se. The Monroe Doctrine claimed U.S. dominance over Latin America, riling the citizens of those nations the doctrine claimed to protect. It is doubtful that many Mexicans, for example, felt themselves “free to determine” their own polity. The idea that there was “no entangling alliance in a concert of power” would not have instilled much confidence in the “little” nations. And it was optimistic of Wilson to suppose that the “great and powerful” nations might take risks with their national sovereignty. There was no precedent for the world system Wilson had in mind.
It did not take long for Theodore
Roosevelt to register his disapproval: “Peace without victory is the natural ideal of the man who is too proud to fight.”95 And for all its eloquence, Wilson’s “peace without victory” speech did not produce the desired mellowing of the protagonists when confronted with a more palatable future. Suffering grave depredations under the British blockade, Germany removed all restrictions on U-boat warfare on February 1, 1917, a policy that treated as fair game any vessel detected in the North Atlantic. Fully aware that an unrestricted U-boat campaign was likely to provoke American belligerency, Germany’s goal was to destroy British resolve before the United States had time to marshal its vast resources and bring them to bear on the western front. It was a calculated gamble that did not come off.
Wilson immediately broke diplomatic relations with Germany and assembled his cabinet to discuss the American response. All were at one in their advice that American participation in the war was now inevitable. Yet even at this stage, Wilson strove to avoid an American declaration of war. The president’s equivocation led Theodore Roosevelt to complain to California governor Hiram Johnson that the United States was being led by “a very cold and selfish man, a very timid man when it comes to dealing with physical danger … As for shame, he has none, and if anyone kicks him, he brushes his clothes, and utters some lofty sentence.”96 The president’s options were finally exhausted when he received news on February 19 that Germany was attempting to formalize a military alliance with Mexico against the United States.