That stiff-arm apparently did not register with Wilson. When House came again to stay at the White House on January 3, Wilson told him he wanted to spell out a peace settlement based upon “the future security of the world against wars.” House suggested that the president should present his plan in a speech to Congress, and they discussed such peace terms as an autonomous Poland, restoration of Belgium, and dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. House encouraged him to “do this great and dramatic thing. I said, ‘you are now playing with what the poker players term “the blue chips,” and there is no use sitting by and letting great events swamp you.’” Yet some of Wilson’s thinking alarmed House, as when he said, “This country does not intend to become involved in this war. We are the only one of the great White nations that is free from war today, and it would be a crime against civilization for us to go in.”20
Wilson then drafted a speech and read it to House on January 11. The colonel called it “a noble document and one which I think will live,” but he got the president to make some verbal changes and asked if Lansing had seen the speech. Wilson said no, not yet, adding, House noted, that “[h]e thought Lansing was not in sympathy with his purpose to keep out of war.” He and House agreed that the text should be cabled in advance to the ambassadors in the belligerent capitals before he delivered it to the Senate. The next day, Wilson read the speech separately to Lansing and Senator Stone and sent it to the State Department for encoding and transmission on January 15. He had to wait a week to deliver the speech, to allow time for the cabled text to be received, decoded, and delivered in the foreign capitals. He worried about leaks, and at a press conference—his third since the election—he declined to say anything about peace. He also said that House had come to town only “to take dinner” and denied having summoned him for “a grand pow-wow.” That was misleading, although House had paid two visits in the past month to attend official events, including a gala dinner at the White House that allowed Edith to show her mettle as a hostess and wear one of her fashionable new gowns.21
On January 22, Wilson went to the Capitol with only an hour’s notice and appeared in the Senate chamber at one o’clock. Speaking at first in an uncharacteristically faint voice but quickly warming up, he declared, “The question upon which the whole future peace and policy of the world depends is this: Is the present war a struggle for a just and secure peace, or only for a new balance of power?” Plainly, the choice must be “not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace.” Just one path pointed to that goal: “It must be a peace without victory. … Only a peace between equals can last.” With those words, he offered another example of his eloquence, but he did not go beyond a gloss on the peace note until he set out the principles on which he believed a lasting peace must rest, such as equality of rights among nations and freely chosen governments, an example of which would be “a united, independent, and autonomous Poland.” He also called again for “freedom of the seas” and limitations on naval and land armaments, which would force world leaders to “plan for peace and nations [to] adjust and accommodate their policy to it as they have planned for war and made ready for pitiless contest and rivalry.”22
He closed with a plea to heed “the world’s yearning desire for peace,” and he claimed, “I am speaking for the silent mass of mankind everywhere who have as yet had no place or opportunity to speak their real hearts out concerning the death and ruin they see to have come already upon the persons and homes they hold most dear.” He promised that the United States would join in “guaranteeing the permanence of peace upon such terms as I have named,” and he maintained that he was proposing that all nations adopt the Monroe Doctrine “as the doctrine of the world,” so that they would “henceforth avoid entangling alliances which would draw them into competitions of power, catch them in a net of intrigue and selfish rivalry. … There is no entangling alliance in a concert of power. … These are American principles, American policies. We could stand for no others.”23
Wilson aimed to give a great speech, and he succeeded. The “peace without victory” address anticipated his most important future pronouncements about a just settlement and a new world order. Such components of the Fourteen Points as “freedom of the seas,” disarmament, an independent Poland, and national autonomy were here. A league of nations remained deliberately vague and general, although it was hard to miss where the president meant to go. Nor was there any mistaking what kind of peace he wanted and how he wished to attain it. Wilson believed that a lasting settlement could be attained only through compromise on all sides, where no one would be conquered or punished and no one would feel either the intoxication of victory or the vengefulness of defeat. It was a noble vision, and it had huge practical and emotional barriers in the way of its realization. But it was not necessarily an impossible dream. If both sets of belligerents, particularly the Germans, had been as truly chastened and desirous of peace as they professed to be, he might have been able to broker such a grand settlement among the warring powers, guaranteed by a league of nations. This was the fondest wish that he would have as president.
Among the senators who listened to the speech, some warmed to this move toward peace, others scoffed at a deluded dream, and still others recoiled from a nightmare prospect of entanglement in international power politics. Most Democrats applauded and made effusive statements to the press or on the Senate floor. La Follette led in the cheering and said afterward, “We have just passed through a very important hour in the life of the world.” His fellow insurgent George Norris also endorsed the idea of a league of nations, and another Republican, Porter J. McCumber of North Dakota, announced himself in favor of “a world-enforced peace organization in which the United States shall take an honored part.” Such support from Republican senators was the exception. The party’s leader in the chamber, Jacob Gallinger of New Hampshire, dubbed it “ill-timed and utterly impossible of accomplishment,” and Lawrence Sherman of Illinois said this speech would “make Don Quixote wish he had not died so soon.” Borah warned, “Once in the maelstrom of European politics and it will be impossible to get out.” The only way to promote peace was for America to stand apart, Borah declared, “a great, untrammeled, courageous neutral power, representing not bias, not prejudice, not hate, not conflict, but order and law and justice.”24
Lodge weighed in with a lengthy attack on both “peace without victory” and the league idea. He dismissed Wilson’s principles as meaningless and his proposed compromise as fallacious because true peace could come only through military victory and must rest “upon justice and righteousness.” Wilson’s claim to be extending the Monroe Doctrine was nonsense: “If we have a Monroe doctrine everywhere we may be perfectly certain that it will not exist anywhere.” Lodge confessed to have changed his mind about the idea of enforcing peace because coercion would be required. He claimed to have “no superstition” about traditional American isolation, but he saw nothing “but peril in abandoning our long and well-established policies” for the sake of Wilson’s proposals, which were “collections of double-dealing words under which men can hide and say they mean anything or nothing.”25 Those reactions to “peace without victory” in the Senate were a dress rehearsal for the full-fledged debate that would come two years later over membership in the League of Nations. Partisan divisions would remain as sharp then as they were now, and Borah and Lodge would emerge again as two of Wilson’s strongest opponents.
Reactions in the press likewise divided mainly along party lines, with Democratic newspapers praising the move and Republican journals criticizing it. Exceptions were William Randolph Hearst’s nominally Democratic paper, which lambasted the league idea, and Republican organs that backed Taft’s work with the LEP, which applauded the speech. Taft announced that all members of his organization “rejoice sincerely” at the president’s words and action. In fact, several Republicans who had previously sided with Taft now broke with the LEP. Roosevelt responded with a
sneer: “Peace without victory is the natural ideal of the man who is too proud to fight. … The Tories of 1776 demanded peace without victory. The Copperheads of 1864 demanded peace without victory. These men were Mr. Wilson’s spiritual forbears.” By contrast, Bryan told Wilson, “The phrase ‘Peace without Victory’ was ‘a shot heard round the world’—no one can underestimate its power for good.” Publicly, Bryan said he believed he and the president could work out their previous differences about a league to enforce peace.26
Wilson tried to take reactions at home and abroad in stride. He confessed to Cleveland Dodge that he felt “a little low in my mind” because Republican senators failed to grasp what he meant, but he had “an invincible confidence in the prevalence of the right if it is fearlessly set forth.” Foreign reactions concerned him more. As with the peace note, the press and public spokesmen in Britain, France, and Germany had harsh words for “peace without victory,” although some British liberals praised the move. The belligerent governments, however, remained silent—not only in communicating with the United States but also in their internal discussions—because for them “peace without victory” was a moot point. One side had already made up its mind to escalate the war, and the other side knew what its adversaries were about to do. The days immediately following Wilson’s speech were a time when the leaders of the warring nations were holding their collective breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop.27
It dropped on January 31, realizing Wilson’s worst fear. At ten minutes after four in the afternoon, Bernstorff called Lansing to deliver a diplomatic note. The note stated that Germany would resume “the full employment of all the weapons which are at its disposal. … From February 1, 1917, all sea traffic will be stopped with every available weapon and without further notice … around Great Britain, France, Italy and in the Eastern Mediterranean.”28 The note implemented a decision made three weeks earlier. On the evening of January 9, an imperial council had met at the baroque Pless Castle in the hills of Silesia. The hour and a quarter of discussion around a big table there was a charade. The army chiefs, who effectively controlled the government, had already browbeaten the weak-willed kaiser into unleashing the submarines. The naval chief of staff had also swung around and now maintained that the navy had sufficient submarines to knock Britain out of the war long before the United States could transport any forces across the Atlantic. The kaiser himself signed an order to open the submarine campaign at the beginning of February, and he said he expected America to declare war.
That decision would seal Germany’s fate in World War I. The men around the table at Pless were acting out of a combination of ignorance, willfulness, deceit, and prejudice. After the war, John Maynard Keynes discovered that his opposite numbers in Berlin had known nothing of Britain’s financial plight. Lack of credit was about to crimp and possibly cut off the Allies’ stream of munitions and foodstuffs—the job the submarines were expected to do—with no risk of bringing America into the war. Claims about the number and effectiveness of submarines were overly optimistic and sometimes fraudulent. A good chance existed that a limited submarine campaign might not bring the Americans in; yet no one explored that possibility. Most important, the army chiefs demanded a crushing military victory, to be won either in the field or at sea. These military aristocrats disdained such bourgeois, civilian instruments as economics—“a shopkeeper’s peace”—and diplomacy. In sum, the Germans would richly deserve their future defeat.29
The Germans compounded their blunder by unwittingly tipping their hand to the enemy. In order to make trouble for the United States as a likely future adversary, Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann cabled the German embassy in Mexico on January 16 with instructions to offer a military alliance to Carranza, holding out, as spoils, recovery of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. This was the soon-to-be-famous Zimmermann Telegram, and its sender abused a courtesy recently extended by the American embassy that allowed the German foreign office to transmit coded messages over its cables. The telegram began, “It is our purpose on the 1st of February to commence the unrestricted U-boat warfare.” Within hours, the telegram was decoded at Room 40 of the Admiralty in London (which had cracked the German diplomatic codes and was tapping nearly every nation’s diplomatic cables) and given to the director of naval intelligence, Captain William Reginald Hall. Possession of this intelligence posed a problem for Hall, who had to take extreme care not to reveal his code-breaking operation. When and with whom in the British government Hall shared this news is not clear, but the near total lack of internal discussion about “peace without victory” strongly suggests that a number of people knew they did not have to take Wilson’s latest peace overture seriously.30
For Wilson, unrestricted submarine warfare turned the world upside down. Now, instead of pressing forward with his peace offensive, he had to grapple with the specter of war. Ironically, earlier on the day that the Germans announced the unrestricted submarine campaign, he rejected an attempt by Lansing to commit him to go to war if they resumed any kind of submarine warfare, and he left the clear impression that he might be willing to accept the use of submarines against armed Allied merchant ships. When he heard the news about unrestricted submarine warfare just after 4 p.m. on January 31, he acted the way he did at such critical times—by keeping to himself and taking the time to think. When Lansing came to see him in the evening and pushed for an immediate break in diplomatic relations, Wilson said he was “not sure of that” and “he would be willing to bear all the criticism and abuse which would surely follow our failure to break with Germany.”31
House rushed to Washington by overnight train and met with Wilson after breakfast the next day. The president seemed sad and depressed, and although he had evidently decided overnight to break relations, he insisted “he would not allow it to lead to war if it could possibly be avoided.” Wilson believed it would be “a crime” for the United States to get involved in such a way “as to make it impossible to save Europe afterward.” The two men waited “listlessly” for Lansing to join them. Wilson paced around the upstairs study and rearranged books, and the men played two games of pool. When Lansing arrived, just before noon, Wilson agreed to break relations three days hence. The journalist Louis Lochner, who saw the president that afternoon, found him looking “haggard and worried,” and when Lochner said he hoped Wilson might find a peaceful way out of the present crisis, the president answered, “[I]f it can be done, I certainly wish it with all my heart.”32
The following day, February 2, Wilson discussed the situation with the cabinet. He opened the meeting by asking, “Shall I break diplomatic relations with Germany?” and he stated, “With the terrific slaughter taking place in Europe, if we, also, entered the war, what effect would the depletion of man power have upon the relations of the white and yellow races? Would the yellow races take advantage of it and attempt to subjugate the white races?” All of the cabinet members supported a diplomatic break. Secretary of the Treasury McAdoo and Secretary of Agriculture Houston took a tough line against the Germans and wanted to help the Allies, while Secretary of War Baker and Secretary of the Navy Daniels shared the president’s wish to avoid war. In the afternoon, he went to the Capitol, where he spent forty minutes alone with Senator Stone in the Foreign Relations Committee’s ornate hearing room. Then he walked down the corridor to the President’s Room, where he sat in the midst of a hastily gathered group of sixteen senators. Through an open door, reporters could see what was going on—animated talk with much gesturing by senators and the president speaking in a low, grave voice—but they could not distinctly hear what was said.33
After the cabinet meeting, Josephus Daniels told the president, “I was glad to hear you say you could not at this time fully trust anybody’s judgment, not even your own.” He later recalled that Wilson commended him for his strong stand against war and said he based his own opposition on his not wanting to sacrifice the lives of young men and his fear of losing “[e]very reform we have won since 1912.” W
ar would require cooperation with “Big Business,” which would regain control of government, “and neither you nor I will live to see government returned to the people. More than that—Free Speech and the other rights will be endangered. War is autocratic.” The next day, Wilson aired some of his thinking in public when he spoke to a joint session of Congress. In view of the Germans’ sudden announcement of unrestricted submarine warfare, he asserted that the United States had “no alternative” but to break diplomatic relations, but he refused to believe that the Germans would do “what they have warned us they will feel at liberty to do. … Only actual overt acts on their part can make me believe it even now.” If that hope proved wrong, he promised to ask Congress for “any means that may be necessary” to protect Americans on the seas.34
The speech lasted just fifteen minutes and got a good reception. Reporters noticed that senators Lodge and Benjamin R. Tillman led the applause at the announcement of the diplomatic break. They also heard Wilson’s voice quaver at the end. Lodge soon regretted his applause. “His one desire is to avoid war at any cost,” he told Roosevelt, “simply because he is afraid.” Roosevelt agreed, telling Hiram Johnson, “Whether we go to war or not, Heaven only knows, and certainly Mr. Wilson does not.” Such interventionist voices were few and mostly private. Publicly, editors and others nearly unanimously applauded the break with Germany, but most of them also seconded Wilson’s wish to avoid war. The Senate passed a resolution approving the president’s action, 78 to 5, with most of the supporters of the resolution likewise claiming that they wanted to stay out of the war. Peace activists held rallies in several cities and staged a march to the Capitol on February 12. Some of them called for the requirement of a popular referendum in order to declare war. The “double wish” remained as strong as ever.35
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