by Jay Feldman
Wilson’s 1916 campaign slogan, “He Kept Us Out of War,” contained an implicit vow to stay that course, his escalating espousal of preparedness notwithstanding. Believing in Wilson’s sincerity, officials of the American Union Against Militarism, which represented the pacifist wing of the anti-preparedness movement, campaigned for his reelection. Only Villard was not taken in; he withheld his public support, believing that Wilson had “not a principle on earth he would not bargain away.”20 Still, Villard refrained from publicly renouncing Wilson, convinced that he was a lesser evil than his Republican opponent, the Supreme Court justice Charles Evans Hughes, who campaigned on a platform of increased preparedness. (Roosevelt, who had received the Progressive Party nomination, withdrew from the race and campaigned for Hughes.)
In the end, Wilson’s promise to keep the United States out of the war played a pivotal role in the race, as voters handed him a slim majority and a second term in office. Those who supported him on the basis of that promise would all too soon have a bitter pill to swallow.
On January 31, 1917, less than three months after the election, U.S.-German affairs approached the boiling point when Germany announced its resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare in the Atlantic. In restarting the attacks on merchant ships, which had been suspended following the outcry over the sinking of the Lusitania, the German high command was attempting to isolate Britain by cutting off all commerce to the islands, and thus forcing the British to surrender before the United States could enter the war and become a significant factor in the outcome. In response, Wilson broke off diplomatic relations with Germany on February 3, the same day the American merchant ship Housatonic was torpedoed and sunk near Sicily.
As international events simmered, the domestic front also heated up. On February 14, in a harbinger of things to come, Congress passed the Threats Against the President Act, which called for a $1,000 fine and up to five years’ imprisonment for “knowingly and willfully” making written or spoken threats against the president.21 The law, while understandably intended as a protection for the chief executive, was also a first step toward the criminalization of expression. In short order, a Texan was convicted for saying, “I wish Wilson was in hell, and if I had the power I would put him there”;22 the court’s instructions to the jury stated that “neither hostility to the President nor an intention to execute the threat, constituted essential elements of the crime. The knowing and willful utterance of such a threat was held to be sufficient.”23 The law was a portent of legislation restricting civil liberties and limiting dissent that would be enacted once the United States entered the war.
A major step in that direction was taken on March 1, when the infamous Zimmermann telegram was published in American newspapers. Dated January 19, the encoded cable was sent by the German foreign secretary to Germany’s ambassador in Mexico for transmission to the Mexican government. It proposed that if Germany’s renewed policy of unrestricted submarine warfare drew America into the war, Mexico—bolstered by German financial support—should in turn attack the United States. As a reward, Mexico would receive back the parts of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona that the United States had annexed during the Mexican-American War. The telegram further suggested that Mexico should act as an intermediary between Germany and Japan in the interest of drawing Japan into the conflict on Germany’s side and participating in the attack on the United States. American intelligence intercepted and decoded this dispatch, and its publication in the U.S. press raised a firestorm of public opinion.
While many Americans regarded the notion of Mexico and Japan invading the United States as an absurdity, they also took the Zimmermann telegram as a definitive statement of German hostility, in the face of which America’s entrance into the war now seemed inescapable. Antagonism toward Germany and Germans climbed another notch, prompting the Council of National Defense to issue a statement calling “upon all citizens” to treat aliens with “neither suspicion nor aggressiveness … [but] with unchanged manner and with unchanged mind.”24
Pacifist groups, a small but vocal minority, worked desperately to restrain the rising war fever. In response to the publication of the Zimmermann telegram, the Emergency Peace Federation, headquartered in New York City, distributed a million copies of a leaflet urging Americans not to be swept along by the tide. “Patriotism is love of country,” read the flyer. “Love your country enough to keep it out of war. What we dread is a stampede. ‘Remember the Maine’ made one war. Don’t let the newspapers make another.”25
A month and a half after the Housatonic went down, the sinking of three more American merchant ships during a twenty-four-hour period in the middle of March brought matters to a head. On March 21, the day after his cabinet had unanimously expressed its approval for war with Germany, Wilson called a special session of Congress for April 2 to hear his request for a declaration of war.
The country was polarized. The antimilitarists swung into high gear as the mood of the “patriots” simultaneously took an ugly turn toward anybody opposed to America’s entry. For their increasingly outspoken opposition to the headlong rush, pacifists were now branded, along with hyphenates, as disloyal by preparedness advocates. With war clearly looming on the horizon, tensions between “patriots” and pacifists broke loose at a March 23 Carnegie Hall meeting to celebrate the overthrow of Russia’s tsar, Nicholas II. When New York City’s mayor John Purroy Mitchel told the crowd, “It is now inevitable … that the United States is to be projected into this world war,” he was greeted by a chorus of “No! No!”26
Mitchel retorted, “And I say to you in the galleries that tonight we are divided into only two classes—Americans and traitors! … You are for America or you are against her.”
That night a prowar demonstration was held at Madison Square Garden, and the following evening pacifists called their own rally at the same location. More than twelve thousand people packed the auditorium, and another three thousand were turned away for lack of space.
One of the main speakers was the former Stanford University president David Starr Jordan, who was on an eleventh-hour whirlwind speaking tour of eastern cities in support of finding a peaceful solution to the crisis. In the next week, Jordan spoke in Boston, New Haven, Philadelphia, and Princeton, where Princeton University president John G. Hibben refused permission for a peace rally, forcing the sponsors to meet at a church.
On the evening of Sunday, April 1, the day before Wilson was scheduled to seek a declaration of war from Congress, Jordan was slated to speak at Baltimore’s Academy of Music. He had barely begun addressing an audience of five thousand about the need for peace when a loud commotion arose outside the hall. The manager of the building hurried onto the stage to inform the meeting’s organizers that an angry crowd of over a thousand had gathered outside, “howling, hissing and shaking their fists,” and that the thirty police officers assigned to maintain order could not control the throng.27 He urgently advised them to end the meeting.
Suddenly a group that included businessmen, students, and professors from local colleges and universities, led by a man carrying the American flag, broke through the police barrier, entered the hall, rushed up the aisle, and climbed onstage. Confronting the chairman of the meeting “with profane and foul epithets,” the standard-bearer thrust the flag forward and demanded, “What do you say to this?”28 The gathering was on the verge of erupting into a melee when one of the pacifists jumped onto a chair and began singing “The Star-Spangled Banner”; the entire assembly took up the song, and the belligerents were forced to remove their hats and join in. The national anthem was followed by “America” and “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” as members of the audience filed out the side doors. By this time, police reinforcements from all over the city had arrived. Swinging their clubs, the officers waded into the counterdemonstrators and carted off over twenty people, at least one of whom had to be hospitalized.
Jordan was able to leave the building safely, but for the next several hours the patr
iotic horde prowled the streets of Baltimore, singing, “We’ll hang Dave Jordan to a sour apple tree,” to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” They stopped in at all the hotels, trying to find Jordan, who was spending the night at a friend’s house.
The following morning, Jordan went to Washington and tried in vain to meet with Wilson as thousands of people poured into the “flag draped” capital to demonstrate support for either peace or war.29 Two special trains of prowar supporters—or “anti-pacifists,” as The New York Times called them—came from New York, and others arrived on their own, but they were outnumbered by representatives of the peace camp, “the most eager” of whom, according to the Times, “spoke with a pronounced German accent.” Police refused to allow parades or demonstrations of any kind and prevented about fifteen hundred antiwar partisans from holding a rally on the steps of the Capitol building.
That evening, Wilson addressed a joint meeting of Congress that also included the justices of the Supreme Court and members of the diplomatic corps. When the president was introduced, he received “such a reception as Congress had never given him before in any of his visits to it.”30 Except for a small handful, including senators La Follette, James Vardaman of Mississippi, and George Norris of Nebraska and the House majority leader, Claude Kitchin of North Carolina, the assembled legislators each wore or carried a small American flag. They cheered Wilson for a full two minutes before allowing him to begin his speech, which history would remember for its keynote line, “The world must be made safe for democracy.”
Wilson started by reviewing a list of German crimes and American attempts to avoid war, which his audience listened to without interruption. When, in turning to recent events, he said, “We will not choose the path of submission,” the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Edward Douglass White, “with an expression of joy and thankfulness on his face, dropped the big soft hat he had been holding, raised his hands high in the air, and brought them together with a heartfelt bang; and House, Senate, and galleries followed him with a roar like a storm. It was a cheer so deep and so intense and so much from the heart that it sounded like a prayer.”
White led another outburst when Wilson urged Congress to “declare the course of the Imperial German Government to be in effect nothing less than war,” at which the chief justice, rising from his seat, “compressed his lips together as if he were trying to keep tears back, and again raised his hands as high as he could and brought his mighty palms together as if he were trying to split them.” At this display, the entire audience—minus the small group of dissenters—joined White and rose to deliver a standing ovation.
Listeners also applauded Wilson’s proposals to strengthen the Navy, expand the Army to half a million men, and institute a military draft. The final round of applause came when he touched upon the issue of German-Americans. Most of them, he affirmed, were “true and loyal Americans”; however, he warned, “if there should be disloyalty, it will be dealt with with a firm hand of stern repression.”
At the end of Wilson’s talk, “the great scene which had been enacted at his entrance was repeated.” As he left the chamber, senators and representatives, Democrats and Republicans alike, diplomats, Supreme Court justices, and people in the galleries stood and waved their flags, as those who had worn, rather than carried their banners, “tore them from their lapels or their sleeves and waved with the rest, and they all cheered wildly.”
All but a few, that is. La Follette, who had pointedly and defiantly chewed gum throughout the president’s address, “stood motionless with his arms folded tight and high on his chest, so that nobody could have any excuse for mistaking his attitude.”
La Follette was by this time one of the most maligned men in the country, a result of his unwavering opposition to the preparedness movement and the war momentum. He was condemned as a traitor and likened to Benedict Arnold and Judas Iscariot. The Cincinnati Times-Star said, “In a democracy majorities must rule. The vast majority of senators are patriotic Americans. They should use their power to deprive La Follette and his little group of perverts the opportunity of continuing to drag our flag in the dust and to make this great American Republic ridiculous and without honor in the eyes of the world.”31 In Roosevelt’s opinion, the Wisconsin senator had “shown himself to be an unhung traitor, and if the war should come, he ought to be hung.”32
As expected, La Follette delivered a solemn speech against the war resolution, which had been introduced in both houses immediately following Wilson’s April 2 address. In a four-hour talk during the Senate debate on April 4, he rebuked “the irresponsible and war-crazed press” for its “doctrine of ‘standing back of the president,’ without inquiring whether the president is right or wrong,” and accused Wilson of guaranteeing “to make this fair, free, and happy land of ours the same shambles and bottomless pit of horror that we see in Europe today.”33 He dared Wilson and the bill’s supporters to let the people vote on whether or not there should be a declaration of war. And, in possibly the most provocative of his remarks, he ridiculed the idea that the United States had ever been neutral in the conflict. “From early in the war [we] threw our neutrality to the winds … I say Germany has been patient with us.” At the end of his speech, wrote Amos Pinchot, La Follette “stood in silence, tears running down his face.”34
La Follette was not the only one to speak forcefully against American involvement. Echoing his Wisconsin colleague, James Vardaman stated that if the people, “the plain, honest people, the masses,” were consulted, the resolution would be defeated.35 George Norris, whose talk was greeted by shouts of “Treason!” declared that entering the war “would benefit only the class of people … who have already made millions of dollars, and who will make many hundreds of millions more … We are going into war upon the command of gold.… [W]e are about to put the dollar sign on the American flag.”36
House opponents argued no less ardently. When called upon to cast her vote, Jeannette Rankin of Montana, the first woman elected to Congress and only four days into her term, said, “I want to stand by my country, but I cannot vote for war. I vote no.”37 Isaac Sherwood of Ohio, who had fought in the Civil War and been forever after haunted by the carnage he witnessed, stated, “As I love my country, I feel it is my sacred duty to keep the stalwart young men of today out of a barbarous war 3,500 miles away, in which we have no vital interest.”38 But perhaps the most telling comment was made by Majority Leader Kitchin, who lamented, “For my vote I shall be not only criticized but denounced from one end of the country to the other. The whole yelping pack of defamers and revilers in the nation will at once be set upon my heels.”39
According to one historian of the period, the opponents of the war possessed “the greater abundance [of] the virtues of consistency, clarity of purpose, and prophetic accuracy,” but they were hopelessly outnumbered.40 The Senate adopted the war resolution by a vote of 82–6, the House by 373–50, and Wilson signed it on April 6. The “patriots” had their war.
*Wilson’s shift away from his previous insistence on neutrality and peace was undoubtedly influenced in part by political realities. The preparedness movement was dominated by Republicans—bankers, industrialists, and munitions manufacturers—which left the Democrats open to charges of being weak on national defense.
†As Arthur Link wrote in Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 1910–1917, “Americans were shocked and horrified” at the sinking of the Lusitania, but “except for a small group of ardent nationalists headed by Theodore Roosevelt, few Americans wanted to go to war to avenge the wrong” (p.164).
‡Wilson himself foresaw that such an alliance portended the loss of much of the Progressive Era’s gains. “Every reform we have won will be lost if we go into this war,” he told Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels. “War means autocracy. The people we have unhorsed will inevitably come into control of the country for we shall be dependent upon the steel, ore and financial magnates. They will run the nation” (Baker, Woodrow Wi
lson: Life and Letters, vol. 6, p. 506 n. 2).
CHAPTER 2
A Democracy Gone Mad
On the afternoon of July 1, three months after the United States entered the war, eight thousand Socialists and trade unionists gathered outside Socialist Party headquarters on Boston’s Park Square for a peace parade. The march was scheduled to start at 2:45, but even as prospective participants were assembling, the hint of trouble was already in the air.
A group of onlooking uniformed servicemen took umbrage at some of the placards they saw. “Who Stole Panama, Who Crushes Haiti?—American Democracy,” read one. “If This Is a Popular War, Why Conscription?” asked another. “A Six-Hour Day in Socialist Russia. Why Not Here?” demanded a third.1 But the sign that was most offensive to the men in uniform was the one that claimed, “The United States Government Has Ordered 200,000 Coffins for Our Boys.”
Determined to do something about the affront, the soldiers and sailors left the square and walked a few blocks to Boston Common, where they rounded up all the uniformed men they could find. At an officer’s command, they marched in double-rank formation back to Park Square, where they planted themselves directly in the line of the parade and announced that the protest would not happen. Hoping to avoid a repeat of a riot that had taken place five weeks earlier at a Chicago peace demonstration, police intervened, and the servicemen withdrew.2 A noncommissioned officer “congratulated them … and advised them to disperse without further disturbance,” but the enlisted men had other ideas.
Meanwhile, the marchers—including women, “many of whom carried babies”—had set out, fronted by an American flag and a huge red banner borne by a dozen men, with the gilt inscription “Workers of the World, Unite, You Have Nothing to Lose but Your Chains, and the World to Gain.” When the march reached the military recruiting tents on Tremont Street, the soldiers and sailors, whose ranks were steadily increasing, advanced and met the parade head-on. They pulled down the red banner with its revolutionary slogan and tore it to shreds, but the police once again stepped in to prevent events from escalating out of control.