Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  Winning another term as president did not cool Wilson’s sense of urgency about the perils of the submarine situation. At the middle of November, he told House he intended to try to mediate the war before America was dragged in. House tried to talk him out of the idea and urged delay, fearing “that the Allies would consider it an unfriendly act.” Wilson brushed those objections aside, and later in November he wrote what he called a prolegomenon about the war—probably intended for a speech—and a draft of a diplomatic note. In the prolegomenon, he deplored “this vast, gruesome contest of systematized destruction” and argued that if either “German militarism” or “British navalism” prevailed, there would be no lasting peace: “We see it abundantly demonstrated in the pages of history that the decisive victories and defeats of wars are seldom the conclusive ones.” Instead, all nations must recognize the uselessness of this “mechanical slaughter” and join in eliminating war as “a means of attaining national ambition. The world would then be free to build its new peace structure on the solidest foundations it has ever possessed.”1

  In the draft of the diplomatic note, Wilson stressed that the war was disrupting life all over the world and threatened to draw neutrals in. He noted that all the belligerents claimed to be fighting for the same things—self-preservation, security from aggression, and equality of nations—and all disclaimed the goal of conquest or destruction of their foes. Americans sympathized with those objectives and were “ready to join a league of nations that will pledge itself to their accomplishment and definitely unite in the organization not only of purpose but of force as well that will be adequate to assure their realization.” The belligerents should, therefore, state their peace terms and agree to come to a conference to be held under neutral auspices. He disavowed any notion of trying to foist a premature peace on the warring nations and maintained that he wanted to know what the belligerents were fighting for so that the United States “can intelligently determine its future course of action.”2 Together with the prolegomenon, this draft note laid out the central ideas for the peace offensive that Wilson was about to launch.

  House continued to resist because he thought this note would drive “the Allies frantic with rage.” The plan also posed a personal problem for the colonel. Wilson wanted him to be in London when the note was presented to the British. House countered that such a move would offend Walter Page, but Edith Wilson suggested that House should replace the ambassador: “She thought I ought to do so during the war. The President also expressed a wish that I accept it.”3 House protested that such a move would hamper his ability to move among the belligerent capitals, but his real reason was that he did not want to be separated from Wilson. He did not seem to recognize what an enemy he had in Edith.

  Lansing was equally upset over the planned peace initiative. When Wilson read the draft to him, Lansing likewise advised not to rush things, and he privately brooded that the plan could not be implemented, and “I am not sure that it would be a good thing for the world if it could be.” If America entered the war, “we must go in on the side of the Allies, for we are a democracy.” Lansing worried what might happen if the Germans accepted the mediation offer and the Allies refused.4

  Skepticism and foot-dragging by his closest foreign policy advisers did not deter Wilson. He was also abetting a move by the Federal Reserve that showed his newfound appreciation of the intricacies of relations with the warring nations. Huge Allied purchases in the United States had nearly exhausted Britain’s capacity to borrow against secured assets. In November 1916, officers of the Morgan firm, the Allies’ financial agent, suggested to the Federal Reserve Board that unsecured loans be permitted. The proposal offended the board, which drafted a statement warning against such loans. The chairman of the board, William P. G. Harding, went to the White House on November 25 to show the warning statement to the president. Wilson approved the action and suggested that the board make it a strong, pointed warning, “rather than convey a mere caution.” The warning was not lost on the British, whose ambassador reported that the president was probably behind it.5

  The planned peace move crowded out nearly everything else on Wilson’s agenda. Despite his talk about transforming the Democrats into a more progressive party, he neglected domestic politics. He had no plans to shuffle cabinet posts unless McAdoo decided to resign from the Treasury. Edith and House talked him into trying to get rid of Tumulty, who balked at a proposed shift to a U.S. customs board. The journalist David Lawrence, who was also a friend of Tumulty’s, went to see the president and told him that “a political cabal” was railroading Tumulty and that his removal would open the president to charges of ingratitude. Wilson relented, and Tumulty would remain his secretary for the rest of his presidency.6 Wilson also neglected domestic politics in his State of the Union address on December 5, except for appealing to enact provisions to regulate transportation and labor relations that had been left out of the Adamson Act. He did thank the members of the Sixty-fourth Congress for “the measures of constructive policy with which you have enriched the legislative annals of the country”—pallid praise for men who had put through the second installment of the New Freedom.7

  Wilson resented even minor distractions from preparing the peace note. “Members of Congress have been sucking the life out of me, about appointments and other matters affecting the destiny of the world,” he told House, “and I have been prevented from perfecting the document. I shall go out of town (on the MAYFLOWER no doubt) for the purpose, if it can be done in no other way.” House was also trying to distract Wilson from the peace initiative with the excuse that a change of government in Britain had brought Lloyd George in as prime minister and removed Grey as foreign secretary. He suggested reviving his own combined scheme of mediation and promised intervention on the Allied side, but Wilson would have none of it. “The time is at hand for something!” he shot back. “We cannot go back to those old plans. We must shape new ones.”8

  In a new draft of the note early in December, Wilson dropped the suggestion for a conference of belligerents and neutrals; otherwise, the document was largely unchanged. Lansing approved the note but recommended omitting the promise of a league of nations because he did not agree with the idea of enforcing peace. He also gingerly aired his concern about how the Allies might reply to this note and said that to enter the war against them would be “a calamity for this nation and for all mankind.” House, who was staying at the White House, also tried to warn of the danger of entering the war against the Allies. Again revealing the new strain in their relationship, he wrote, “I am convinced that the President’s place in history is dependent to a large degree upon luck. If we should get into a serious war and it should turn out disastrously, he would be one of the most discredited Presidents we have had.” The colonel was also back at his old game of collecting complaints from members of the cabinet. “Domestic legislation is the President’s forte,” he observed. “No one has done that better or perhaps so well. But as an administrator he is a failure, and it is only because of a generally efficient Cabinet that things go as well as they do.”9

  Meanwhile, the Germans made an offer to discuss peace terms with the Allies, and Wilson decided to proceed with his own initiative before a harsh Allied reply might spoil the chances for peace. In the final draft of the note, he partially followed Lansing’s advice by dropping the promise to enter a peace-enforcing league but said that Americans stood “ready, and even eager, to cooperate in the accomplishment of these ends” after the war. He also inserted a new sentence: “He [the president] takes the liberty of calling attention to the fact that the objects which the statesmen of the belligerents have in mind in this war are virtually the same.” House, who did not see the note before it was sent, despaired over that insertion when he saw it. “That one sentence will enrage them [the Allies],” he wrote. “I find that the President has nearly destroyed all the work I have done in Europe. He knows how I feel about this and how the Allies feel about it, and yet the refrain alway
s appears in some form or another.”10

  Lansing did see the note and suggested only minor verbal changes; with those alterations, the note went out over the State Department cables to the ambassadors in the belligerent capitals on December 18 and was released to the press two days later. Then Lansing tried to undercut the president’s move. On December 20, he called in the French ambassador, Jean-Jules Jusserand, and explained that this was not a peace note and that Wilson favored the Allies. Lansing also told Jusserand that he believed France should demand the restoration of Alsace-Lorraine, an indemnity for Belgium, and democratic reforms in Germany. He likewise revealed his skepticism about a league of nations.11 Two days later, he said the same things to the British ambassador, Cecil Spring-Rice, and he added that the Allies should demand an autonomous Poland, territory for Italy from Austria-Hungary, and the dissolution of Turkey.

  Between his meetings with the ambassadors, Lansing went public with his attempt at sabotage. On December 21—the day the peace note appeared in newspapers—he called in reporters and gave them a statement. The reason for sending the diplomatic note was, he explained, “that the situation is becoming increasingly critical. I mean by that that we are drawing nearer the verge of war ourselves, and therefore we are entitled to know exactly what each belligerent seeks, in order that we may regulate our conduct in the future.” To underscore the point, he reiterated, “The sending of this note will indicate the possibility of our being forced into the war.” This was a blatant act of betrayal and threatened to undo Wilson’s peace initiative. Within an hour or so, Tumulty forwarded a copy of Lansing’s statement to the president, with part of one sentence underlined: “I mean by that that we are drawing nearer the verge of war ourselves.”12

  Wilson was incensed. “I came very near to asking for his resignation when he gave out that statement to the press,” House quoted him saying shortly afterward. Instead, the president immediately told Lansing in a letter, “I quite understand that you did not realize the impression of your statement of this morning would make.” He instructed the secretary to tell reporters that his statement “had been radically misinterpreted, … and that it was not at all in your mind to intimate any change in the policy of neutrality which the country has so far so consistently pursued in the face of accumulating difficulties.” When Wilson saw Lansing later in the day, he repeated what he had said in the letter. Lansing claimed afterward that he agreed to follow the president’s orders only if he did not have to contradict his earlier statement. That was retrospective rationalization: his second statement to the press, given out right after his meeting with Wilson, parroted what the president had told him to say.13

  This was a sorry affair and reflected well on no one involved. Lansing committed a dastardly act of duplicity aimed at destroying Wilson’s peace initiative. It was only the latest in a string of betrayals. The difference this time was that he had come out in the open. Previously, Lansing had acted stealthily, such as when he had gone behind Bryan’s back after the sinking of the Lusitania and when he surreptitiously contradicted the president to the British and French ambassadors. Wilson should have fired him on the spot. He probably did not remove him because this was a delicate moment in international relations. Later, wartime conditions would make the secretary’s ouster seem similarly inopportune. Wilson’s keeping Lansing on may also have stemmed from the president’s extraordinary tolerance for disagreement and disloyalty among subordinates, particularly in foreign policy. He retained Page as ambassador in London out of a comparable combination of convenience and indifference.

  Lansing’s behavior was even more puzzling than Wilson’s. Why had this normally furtive man crept out of the shadows to commit, by his lights, an act of courage? Why, having done that, did he not avail himself of a golden opportunity to stand up for his convictions and follow the example of his predecessor by resigning in protest? Instead, Lansing knuckled under and stayed on. He would betray the president again, and he would continue to fester in disagreement with Wilson’s most cherished policies and in resentment at being left out of the biggest decisions and weightiest negotiations. It would have been far better if these two men had parted company at this point.14

  House likewise busied himself with attempts to undermine the peace initiative, though, characteristically, he did not operate so openly. He was engaging in more of his private diplomacy with the British. After a meeting with the colonel at his apartment in New York on December 22, Sir Horace Plunkett, a friend of Grey’s successor as foreign secretary, Arthur James Balfour, cabled Balfour with House’s assurance that Wilson was still pro-Allied. Five days later, a pro-Allied newspaper publisher, Roy Howard, cabled the British press baron Lord Northcliffe to say that House had told him Lansing’s “verge of war” revealed the real purpose of the peace note. In his diary, House gloomily remarked that he had promised Lansing he would go to Washington and talk to Wilson, “but I have no stomach for it. It is practically impossible to get the President to have a general consultation.”15

  Even without the fireworks surrounding Lansing’s statement, the peace note was bound to create a stir at home. Lansing’s first pronouncement set off a stock market panic, although his retraction seemed to soothe the nervous men on Wall Street. Most commentators took the note for what it was—a peace move. Democratic senators lauded Wilson as a peacemaker and introduced a resolution commending the note. More belligerent and pro-Allied sorts first privately and then publicly damned him for playing Germany’s game. On January 3, Lodge accused the president of siding against the nations that were “fighting the battle of freedom and democracy as against military autocracy.” He also condemned Wilson for promising to plunge America into European power politics and break with the nation’s traditional isolation. The same day, Roosevelt scorned the note as “profoundly immoral and misleading” and declared that Wilson’s “most preposterous absurdity” was the offer to “guarantee the peace of the world.” That would require “a policy of violent meddling in every European quarrel, and in return invite Old World nations violently to meddle in everything American.”16

  Attacks from that quarter on grounds of pro-Germanism were predictable. What was unexpected and disturbing was the way they pounced on the idea of enforcing peace. Debate on a Senate resolution to commend the peace note provided a forum for such attacks. That was where Lodge gave this public sign of having shifted his stand and now opposed the league idea, and another Republican senator, William Borah of Idaho, took an even stronger stand against it. Borah was an insurgent orator with a square jaw and flowing hair who had previously said little about foreign policy but now condemned Wilson’s implied commitment to a league as requiring automatic entry into foreign wars: “This approaches, to my mind, moral treason.” This debate marked the first skirmish in what would grow into the biggest political fight of Wilson’s life. Lodge and Borah’s stand pointed toward a major realignment of the two parties’ foreign policy positions. Up to then, the bulk of resistance to greater involvement abroad, particularly outside the Western Hemisphere, had come from Democrats, whereas Republicans generally—and, most notably, Roosevelt and Lodge in particular—had advocated a bigger, more committed American role in world politics. The Republicans as a whole were not becoming isolationists, but they were beginning to make common cause with isolationists and talk some of their language, and Borah was embarking on a career that would make him the most prominent isolationist in American politics. Now, however, the Senate adopted the resolution commending the peace note, amended to exclude any mention of a league of nations, by a vote of 48 to 17.17

  Of more pressing concern to Wilson than those political straws in the wind was how the belligerent governments would respond to the peace note. Contrary to House’s and Lansing’s fears, the Allies did not spurn the overture. The French government was initially inclined to reject the note out of hand, but a different mood prevailed in London. The new prime minister, Lloyd George, believed that rejection would play into the Germans’
hands and that it was essential to maintain American goodwill. Why Lloyd George, who had previously taken a harsh line toward the United States, shifted his ground is not clear. Some interpreters have credited Lansing’s statement with keeping Lloyd George and others in the British cabinet in a receptive frame of mind. Others have stressed the warnings of the British Treasury’s brilliant young economist, John Maynard Keynes, who held that the Allied war effort was becoming totally dependent on supplies and credit from America. The Federal Reserve Board’s statement had also served as a wake-up call to their financial peril. Most important, perhaps, Lloyd George harbored deep suspicions about the promises of his military leaders to win the war by sacrificing still more thousands of men on the Western Front—suspicions that led him to believe that only American intervention could break the stalemate. At any event, after some negotiating, the British and French produced a joint reply at the middle of January stating moderate terms and a desire for peace based upon liberty and justice.18

  It was a different story in Berlin. Nearly everyone in the highest civilian and military circles was infuriated by Wilson’s note, and some took Lansing’s statement as proof that this overture was merely a pretext for American intervention against them. The military high command, which now effectively ruled the country, insisted on steering clear of any mediation schemes. The generals were also pressing for unrestricted submarine warfare, and they were about to get their way. As a result, Germany and Austria-Hungary replied on December 26 that only negotiations among the belligerents could end the war and that consideration of new peacekeeping arrangements must await its conclusion. In the polite equivocations of diplomacy, they were telling the Americans to butt out.19