Wilson tried to make partial amends for his exchange with Trotter. A month later he received a delegation from the University Commission on the Southern Race Question, an organization of white racial moderates, and told them that “as a southern man” he sincerely desired “the good of the Negro and the advancement of his race on all sound and sensible lines.”22
Feeble as those words were, they might have helped if he had left matters there. Instead, he soon allowed himself to be dragged into an affair that made his racial views look worse than they were. At the beginning of 1915, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was protesting against and trying to prevent showings of D. W. Griffith’s newly released Birth of a Nation. Though a pathbreaking masterpiece of cinematography, this movie presents a lurid racist picture of the post-Civil War South and glorifies the Ku Klux Klan of that era. The Birth of a Nation took its story from The Clansman, a novel by Thomas Dixon, who had briefly been a fellow student with Wilson at Johns Hopkins in the 1880s. As a ploy to gain publicity and counter NAACP protests, Dixon called at the White House and disingenuously asked his old acquaintance to show the film there. Dixon bragged afterward that he had hidden “the real purpose of my film,” which was to spread southern white racial attitudes in the North: “What I told the President was that I would show him the birth of a new art—the launching of the mightiest engine for moulding public opinion in the history of the world.”23
Wilson fell into the trap. On February 18, Dixon and a projection crew gave the president, his family, cabinet officers, and their wives a showing of The Birth of a Nation in the East Room of the White House. How Wilson reacted is a matter of dispute. Twenty-two years later, a magazine writer alleged that he said about the film, “It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” It is extremely doubtful that Wilson uttered those words, and Dixon did not quote them later in his memoirs. Sixty-two years later, the last person then living who had been at the showing recalled that the president did not seem to pay much attention to the movie and left when it was over without saying a word. Regardless of what he did or did not say, Dixon and Griffith soon touted the event and insinuated that The Birth of a Nation enjoyed a presidential seal of approval.24
Far from dampening protests, these antics only fanned the controversy. The NAACP stepped up its campaign, and the incident caused political embarrassment. Two months later, Tumulty forwarded a clipping about protests in Boston organized by Trotter and advised the president to write a note saying he did not endorse the film. Wilson said he would if he did not appear to be responding to agitation “stirred up by that unspeakable fellow” Trotter. He found a way to do this when he drafted a statement for Tumulty to send under his own name to a Massachusetts Democrat: “It is true that ‘The Birth of a Nation’ was produced before the President and his family at the White House, but the President was entirely unaware of the character of the play before it was presented and has at no time expressed his approbation of it. Its exhibition at the White House was a courtesy extended to an old acquaintance.” Three years later, he told Tumulty that the movie was “a very unfortunate production” and he wished it would not be shown “in communities where there are so many colored people.”25 Once more, he deplored stirring up emotions and showing bad manners rather than deploring the racist messages of Dixon’s novel and Griffith’s movie. Even more than segregation policies, Wilson’s involvement with The Birth of a Nation would make him anathema to African Americans.
Another lapse in judgment during this time may also have owed something to his emotional turmoil. In this case it stemmed from the death of Justice Horace Lurton of the Supreme Court, in July 1914. Wilson and House had evidently agreed that Attorney General McReynolds should fill the first vacancy on the Court and that the colonel’s fellow Texan Thomas W. Gregory should become attorney general—as he did with McReynolds’s elevation. From Europe, House wrote to remind him of those choices. Whether Ellen’s illness and death and the outbreak of the war affected him when he appointed McReynolds to the Court is difficult to determine. Earlier, he had sometimes acted casually, almost thoughtlessly, in picking cabinet members and other officials, and this may have been another example of that weakness. McReynolds would make life unpleasant for fellow justices and bedevil presidents for more than twenty years, and appointing him would turn out to be one of the worst blunders Wilson committed as president. It was doubly unfortunate because McReynolds’s views of constitutional interpretation were totally at odds with his own, which stressed growth and adaptation rather than the imposition of rigidly held ideas. In his other two appointments to the Supreme Court, he would choose men whose thinking was much closer to his own.
Politically, the end of 1914 marked a difficult time for Wilson at home as well as abroad. The legislative triumphs of the preceding year and a half brought scant reward to his party in that November’s elections. In the House, Democrats lost forty-eight seats, though they still retained control. A few seats turned over in the Senate, but the party margins remained unchanged, with Democrats still holding a small majority. Most of the losses in the House and in governorships occurred in the Northeast and Midwest, particularly in New York, Ohio, and Illinois. Those states cast the big electoral votes, and Wilson had carried them in 1912. These results did not bode well for a run in 1916.
Yet Democrats were not the biggest losers in November 1914. Progressives lost everywhere except California, where Governor Hiram Johnson and his machine retained control. Republican insurgents likewise fared badly, even in Wisconsin, where La Follette’s followers lost to resurgent conservatives. Those outcomes appeared to vindicate the old guard Republicans’ reasoning in 1912—that progressivism was a passing fad and economic misfortune under the Democrats would bring voters to their senses. Roosevelt now agreed. “The fundamental trouble was that the country was sick and tired of reform,” he told William Allen White. Voters had “felt the pinch of poverty; … and compared with this they did not care a rap for social justice or industrial justice or clean politics or decency in public life.”26 That conclusion, together with his growing obsession with the world war, would lead Roosevelt to do everything he could to scuttle the Progressives and reunite with the Republicans.
Wilson read the returns in just the opposite light. The results discouraged him at first, but he soon saw a brighter side. He took satisfaction from Democrats’ winning new House and Senate seats in mountain and West Coast states, apparently by picking up formerly Progressive votes. “A party that has been called sectional is becoming national,” he exulted to a friend. “The sweep of its power and influence is immensely broadened. That puts tonic in my lungs.” He quickly sounded a new battle cry of progressivism. In December, he declared in the State of the Union address that Americans “do not wish to curtail the activities of this Government; they wish, rather, to enlarge them.” In January, at the Jackson Day dinner at which he spoke about “march[ing] with the discipline and with the zest of a conquering host,” he maintained, “The Democratic party, and only the Democratic party, has carried out the policies which the progressive people of this country have desired.” Wilson was warming once more to party and progressive politics. “[T]here is a real fight on,” he said privately, adding that “it is no time for mere manners. … I cannot fight rottenness with rosewater.”27
If he looked forward to concentrating on domestic politics, he was not reckoning with the world war. The beginning of 1915 marked the moment when it became the central, lasting fact of his presidency. In January, a diplomatic flap seemed about to erupt when the British threatened to seize the S.S. Dacia, a formerly German vessel purchased by an American businessman, but the affair blew over when, by coincidence, the French intercepted the ship. Britain’s ally Japan also caused friction, by following up its conquest of German-held areas in China with a sweeping set of demands for hegemony in much of northern China. Wilson agreed to send stiff diplomatic notes of protest, ther
eby setting off tensions with Japan that would last for the rest of his presidency.28
Far more serious trouble arose from the other side in the war. On February 4, 1915, the German Admiralty declared the waters surrounding Britain “a war zone.” Starting two weeks hence, the Germans announced, all merchant ships, neutral or belligerent, would be legitimate targets for attack and sinking by submarines. This “submarine declaration” by Germany stemmed from a combination of frustration and enthusiasm in Berlin. Lack of action by their surface ships irked the German naval high command, and submarines—with the ability to sneak beneath enemy ships and attack without warning—seemed to offer a golden opportunity to get into the war at sea and achieve positive results. In their enthusiasm, however, the champions of undersea warfare overlooked some big drawbacks. As yet, Germany had only thirty slow-moving submarines, and no more than a third of those could be deployed at any time. Moreover, by attacking and sinking merchant ships, Germany was committing the one act that could cause a diplomatic crisis with the United States. This submarine declaration was really a bluff, and one that carried enormous risks.29
Wilson reacted cautiously. At a cabinet meeting the next day, Secretary of War Garrison wanted to take a tough line, and he thought the president agreed with him. At his next press conference, however, Wilson told reporters he was waiting for more information from Berlin. He and Bryan approved a note that went to Germany on February 10, which asserted that sinking ships without warning was “an act so unprecedented in naval warfare” that the Germans should not contemplate it, and if they did, the United States would hold them to “a strict accountability for such acts of their naval authorities.” Those words sounded tough, and many interpreters would later point to them as further evidence of Wilson’s bias against Germany and in favor of the Allies. Actually, the note was a counterbluff. It did not specify what was meant by “strict accountability” or what might be done to hold the Germans to that standard. Wilson found the whole business nerve-racking and told Mary Hulbert that keeping a cool head involved “a nervous expenditure such as I never dreamed of.”30
As these events were unfolding, he was not just reacting to challenges thrown at him by the belligerents. For some time, he had been thinking more broadly about the best way to end the conflict and how to bring far-reaching reform to international affairs. In a confidential interview in December 1914 with Herbert Brougham of The New York Times, he admitted that he did not believe Germany was solely to blame for the war, and he asserted that neither side ought to win a big victory. He did not think American interests would suffer if the Allies won, but such a victory did not strike him as the best outcome: “I think that the chances of a just and lasting 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.” Two years later, he would publicly reiterate and expand this line of thinking and use the same phrases when he would attempt to end the war with “a peace without victory.”31
In February 1915, he outlined another, equally significant part of that later call for a compromise peace. Stockton Axson recalled that Wilson spelled out a four-point program for instituting a new world order. His first point was: “No nation shall ever again be permitted to acquire an inch of land by conquest.” Second, everyone must recognize “the reality of equal rights between small nations and great.” Third, the manufacture of munitions must no longer remain in private hands. The final and most important point was: “There must be an association of nations, all bound together for the protection and integrity of each, so that any one nation breaking from the bond will bring upon herself war; that is to say, punishment, automatically.” Wilson would publicly restate these ideas and again use similar phrases when he called for “peace without victory.”32 He would reiterate them again in 1918 in his Fourteen Points address, and in 1919 he would make them the heart of the Covenant of the League of Nations.
Even as he responded to the Germans’ submarine declaration and shared his thoughts with Axson, Wilson was sending out his first feeler on mediation of the war. In January, House informed him that the time was ripe for the trip to Europe they had talked about the month before. The two men met at the White House, devised a private code for communicating by telegram, and had an emotional leave-taking. “The President’s eyes were moist when he said his last words of farewell,” House wrote. On January 31, the colonel sailed on the largest and most luxurious ship afloat, the British liner Lusitania. He carried with him a letter from Wilson giving him “my commission to go, as my personal representative … without any official standing or authority,” and stating that his talks were not meant “to urge action upon another government.” Wilson said his “single object” was to help the warring nations take “the first step towards discussing and determining the conditions of peace” by ascertaining on each side “what is the real disposition, the real wish, the real purpose of the other.” Two years later, Wilson would put forward the same idea and use similar words when, as a prelude to “peace without victory,” he would ask the belligerents to state their terms for ending the war.33
It is difficult to judge how much stock he took in this effort and what House was expected to accomplish. Nor is it clear what House did accomplish, beyond cozying up to Sir Edward Grey and conveying the impression that Wilson was more pro-Allied than he really was. House would spend the next four months on the other side of the Atlantic, reporting on his conversations in the belligerent capitals and, in the last month, taking a strongly pro-Allied line. Despite his affection for House, Wilson would not take everything he said at face value, and upon his return the colonel would not enjoy the same degree of intimacy with Wilson as before.
The submarine challenge left the president little time to think about trying to end the war or reform international affairs. The Germans started using their new weapon during the latter part of February 1915. The British retaliated by tightening their blockade further, now including foodstuffs among the list of contraband—another potential blow to American exports. Submarines torpedoed a few American ships, including a freighter carrying grain and an oil tanker, during March and April, but for the most part their commanders obeyed secret orders to spare vessels flying the Stars and Stripes. That was no great sacrifice because the United States did not have many ships plying the North Atlantic. A potentially more dangerous issue involved the safety of American citizens traveling as passengers and crewmen on vessels of Allied countries. The danger became real at the end of March, when a submarine sank a small British passenger ship, the Falaba, and one of the those who perished was an American engineer, Leon Thresher. The Wilson administration now faced its first serious controversy with Germany over the submarine issue.
Wilson had feared such an incident. At the beginning of March, he had issued a statement to the press warning that the war might soon test Americans’ self-control and urging citizens “to think, to purpose, and to act with patience, with disinterested fairness, and without excitement.” The sinking of the Falaba and the death of Thresher confirmed the president’s forebodings. “I do not like this case,” he told Bryan. “It is full of disturbing possibilities.” He believed that the Germans had violated international law and that the United States would probably have to demand that its citizens’ lives not be endangered. Bryan reacted differently. He did not want to respond quickly to the Germans, and he worried about “whether an American citizen can, by putting his business above his regard for his country, assume for his own advantage unnecessary risks and thus involve his country in international complications.” He was sure that “the almost unanimous desire of our country is that we shall not become involved in this war” and that one man, “acting purely for himself and his own interests, and without consulting his government,” should not be allowed to put the country at risk of war.34
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bsp; Wilson did not immediately push the question of a diplomatic response. Instead, he delivered a series of foreboding speeches in April in an effort to prepare the public for trying times. At a meeting of the Associated Press in New York, he avowed, “I am not speaking in a selfish spirit when I say that our whole duty, for the present, at any rate, is summed up in this motto: ‘America first.’ Let us think of America before we think of Europe, in order that we may be Europe’s friend when the day of tested friendship comes.” America must remain neutral, he declared, “because there is something better to do than fight; there is a distinction waiting for this country that no nation has ever yet got. That is the distinction of absolute self-control and self-mastery.” Wilson was staking out the position that he would cling to not just for the next two months but for the next two years, in spite of conflicts within and without his administration and with great political consequences. Ironically, in “America first” he coined the motto of the isolationists who would later oppose him and the next Democratic president.35
When he turned to the diplomatic response to the Falaba incident, his thinking did not mesh with Bryan’s. He proposed sending a note that assumed that Germany would abide by international law “with regard to the safety of non-combatants and of the citizens of neutral countries” and suggested that submarines conform to established practices of providing for their safety—all to be stated in restrained but firm protest. He wanted the note to be predicated “not on the loss of this single man’s life, but on the interests of mankind.” Bryan was not satisfied. He urged a public effort at mediation because the United States might be drawn into the war, and he again asked, was it right “to risk the provoking of war on account of one man?”36 Wilson opposed mediation as unwise at that time, but when he and Bryan thrashed things out at a cabinet meeting, he conceded that it might be better not to send a note. Wilson was trying to devise a strategy to deal with small-scale incidents such as the British seizure of cargo or ships and German submarine attacks like the one on the Falaba—situations resembling events a century earlier that had dragged Madison into war. Whether that strategy would have worked can be only a matter for speculation because a huge incident was about to transform America’s whole stance toward the world war.
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