The World Remade

by G. J. Meyer

  When on May 13 Wilson’s note was delivered to the German ambassador, acceptance appeared improbable. It seemed more likely that the president would soon be breaking off relations and, not long after that, asking Congress for a declaration of war.

  Bryan, however, could not let the matter drop. On May 17, after a conversation with Vienna’s ambassador, he wrote again to the president, repeating that a firm note of protest to the Entente would make it easier for Berlin to agree to Wilson’s demands; the Germans would no longer feel singled out for blame. “I believe it will have a splendid effect if our note to Great Britain can go at once….I have no doubt Germany would be willing to so change the rule in regard to submarines as to exempt from danger all passenger ships that did not carry munitions of war.”

  Bryan’s desperation, his bafflement in the face of presidential thinking that he confessed to finding incomprehensible, led him to use arguments that he must have known were likely to give offense. “A person would have to be very much biased in favor of the Allies,” he wrote in one appeal, “to insist that ammunition intended for one of the belligerents should be safe-guarded in transit by the lives of American citizens.”

  Even the pro-Entente Robert Lansing agreed that Britain no less than Germany should be sent an admonitory note. U.S. Ambassador Gerard, in Berlin, remained convinced that keeping munitions off passenger ships and passengers off munitions ships could end the crisis, and he said so in repeated cables to Washington. “Why,” he asked, “should we enter a great war because some American wants to cross on a ship where he can have a private bathroom?”

  Wilson was impervious, his mind made up. He would have no more talk of compromise, or of linking German actions to Britain’s blockade. On May 21 he issued a statement of support for an increase in the size of the U.S. Navy, delighting the barons of the steel industry. Colonel House, still in London, was like his friends there disappointed that the president’s note had not been stronger. He continued to press Wilson to require the Germans to submit or accept an American declaration of war. “There is no doubt that the position you have taken with both Germany and Great Britain is correct,” he cabled on May 25, “but I fear that our position with the Allies is somewhat different, for we are bound up more or less in their success, and I do not think we should do anything that can possibly be avoided to alienate the good feeling that they now have for us. If we lost their good will we will not be able to figure at all in peace negotiations.” House and Bryan were like two spirits perched on Wilson’s shoulders, each whispering into an ear. One appealed for neutrality and peace, the other for intervention in the war as a necessary prelude to peacemaking.

  It was not until May 28 that the Germans responded to the Lusitania note. They did so gingerly, sending what they described as a preliminary note and promising something more conclusive later. Berlin’s tardiness, and the tentative nature of its response, is explained by the box in which the German government found itself. Neither the kaiser nor his chancellor nor the foreign minister wanted trouble with the United States. In fact they dreaded it. And the U-boat fleet was still so small that not even Naval Minister Tirpitz was prepared to argue that a continuation of the current policy could produce benefits sufficient to justify the risks.

  The great problem continued to be public opinion. Ordinary German citizens, faced with an enemy avowedly committed to starving their children and grandparents, wanted exactly what the people of Britain or France or Tannu-Tuva would have wanted under similar circumstances: a solution or, if that was not possible, retribution. They would be furious if their government capitulated to demands that appeared, from their perspective, to be little more than gratuitous insults.

  Wilson dismissed Germany’s reply as an effort to buy time, which of course it was. But that he did not actually want war is evident in the way he began, at just this point, to complain with unprecedented vehemence about British disruption of transatlantic trade. He did so quietly, issuing no formal communications, at the same time resurrecting the idea of a compromise in which Britain would lift or loosen its blockade of food in return for a German pledge not to attack merchant ships without warning.

  The Asquith government was taken aback by this change in the president’s tone. It seemed to make nonsense of Colonel House’s assurances that the United States was within weeks of going to war. House’s position was becoming awkward—so much so that he decided that he needed to return to Washington and “stiffen,” as he put it, the president. When he booked passage on a homebound ship, Grey, in recognition of the value of Britain’s most indispensable American friend, arranged for a special destroyer escort through the U-boat danger zone.

  Seeing that he had moved too far ahead of the president, House reverted to talking about peacemaking rather than a break with Germany. He understood, if somewhat belatedly, that the bellicosity of his friends in London had caused him to become unwisely bellicose himself in his messages to the White House. That it was not war that the president wanted but the role of peacemaker, and that if he, House, wanted to maintain his place as Wilson’s principal instrument, he needed to demonstrate that the two of them still thought the same. Nothing more would be heard from him, for some time after his return home, about threatening the Germans with war.

  How to make peace was less clear than House may have been prepared to admit even to himself. Were negotiations possible? If so, on the basis of what preliminary understandings? How could the Entente nations enter into talks when the war was going so badly? In March the British had launched an offensive at Neuve-Chapelle that produced no result beyond a massive loss of life. May brought the joint British-French offensive that kicked off the Second Battle of Artois; when it ended, the French had suffered 100,000 casualties, Britain almost 30,000, and the breakthrough that was the purpose of the whole enterprise had not been achieved. Meanwhile, in the Second Battle of Ypres, the Germans captured valuable high ground while taking only half as many casualties as the Entente forces, and the Royal Navy’s failure to win control of the Dardanelles had been followed by the injection of ground forces that would turn into the disaster of Gallipoli. On the Eastern Front the Germans were driving the Russians relentlessly back and closing in on Warsaw.

  Even if the Entente’s situation had been less dismal, hard questions would have remained for both sides. What kind of settlement would justify the terrible costs of the conflict? Was it reasonable—was it even sane, in the conditions of 1915—for the Entente to hold out for a settlement that reduced Germany to a second-rate power? How could such a thing possibly be achieved?

  As May ended, Kaiser Wilhelm and his ministers gathered at the imperial castle at Pless, behind the Eastern Front in what is now Poland. They were struggling to arrive at a consensus on what kind of definitive reply to make to President Wilson’s demands, which were now more than two weeks old. Admiral Tirpitz was adamant as always that no restrictions must be imposed on the U-boats. General Falkenhayn doubted as before that continuing the submarine campaign could possibly be worth the risks. Chancellor Bethmann and Foreign Minister Gottlieb von Jagow, to no one’s surprise, agreed with Falkenhayn. The kaiser, who alone could settle the question, was in an agony of indecision. Consensus proved impossible, nothing was decided, and submarines continued to set out for the English and Irish Channels with orders to sink without warning all ships flying Entente flags.

  On the first day of June, President Wilson, impatient and annoyed, shared with his cabinet his draft of a second note to Germany, another stern one. There ensued a heated discussion, with Bryan again alone and again becoming emotional. Agriculture Secretary David Houston left a vivid account of an exchange that marked the end of the line for the secretary of state. It begins with War Secretary Lindley Garrison complaining that the Germans, in replying to the president’s Lusitania note, had not so much as acknowledged what Garrison called an “elemental principle” of international law: the right to safety of citizens of neutral nations even when traveling on belligerent s
hips. Bryan’s response, as described by Houston, was something of a non sequitur: he said that “he had all along insisted on a note to England; that she was illegally preventing our exports from going where we had a right to send them; and that the Cabinet seemed to be pro-Ally.” As at the preceding cabinet meeting, Bryan was “sharply rebuked” by the president, who said his remarks were “unfair and unjust” and that he had “no right to say that any one was pro-Ally or pro-German. Each one was merely trying to be a good American.”

  Wilson closed the subject by saying that he had not decided whether to send the new note. When the meeting adjourned, an unhappy Bryan stayed behind and told the president that if the new note were sent, he would be unable to sign it.

  Count Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff

  As Germany’s ambassador in Washington, he had the most difficult diplomatic assignment in the world.

  Meanwhile the German ambassador, Count Johann von Bernstorff, was casting about for ways to lower the tension. He had the most difficult assignment in the diplomatic world of the time, trying to represent Germany in a Washington where official and fashionable society was so pro-Entente that he and his American wife were no longer welcome at many functions. He went about it with considerable skill, though not always calmly. Fifty-three years old, the tall and gangly Bernstorff was unusually well qualified for his task. He had not only been born in England but had lived there until he was eleven years old, his father being Prussia’s and then the newly created Imperial Germany’s ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. He wanted to follow his father into politics and diplomacy, but the way forward turned out to be difficult. His father made the mistake of getting at cross-purposes with Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the supreme European politician of the day. Not only was his career wrecked as a result, but the Bernstorff name became non grata in official Berlin.

  Young Johann had to go into the army instead of the foreign service but managed to wangle assignments as military attaché and the like in Constantinople, Belgrade, St. Petersburg, London, and Cairo. Having thus acquired much experience of the world, he left the army and won election to the Reichstag. Once settled in Berlin, he was able to make new connections with influential people. With Bismarck first out of office and then dead, doors long shut began to open. In 1908 he was appointed ambassador to the United States, so that by the time the war came, he had been in Washington six years and was considered the dean of the city’s diplomatic corps. Wilson and Lansing claimed to find him devious and untrustworthy, but he had been generally well liked until the war turned him into a pariah. Colonel House enjoyed dealing with him.

  For a good many weeks now, Bernstorff had been warning Berlin that although Wilson appeared to be trying to avoid war, he was under heavy pressure to do otherwise. He grew increasingly worried as the diplomatic tension increased but held out the hope that if Germany yielded on the U-boat issue, Washington would reciprocate by pressuring the Entente to relax the blockade. His messages produced an odd result. In the aftermath of the Lusitania disaster, Chancellor Bethmann used Bernstorff’s warnings to persuade the kaiser to sign an order to the effect that the U-boats were not to attack large passenger liners without warning (which meant, in light of the practicalities, not attacking them at all). Though this change was intended to avoid further conflict with the United States, it was kept secret. The high command feared that, if it became known, the Entente would celebrate it as proof of German weakness and desperation. The result was absurd: the effectiveness of the submarine campaign was reduced, but Germany got no credit for reducing it. Not even Bernstorff in Washington was told of the change in policy. Meanwhile Wilson was being ridiculed by Roosevelt and other Republicans for corresponding with the Germans instead of demanding submission.

  The German ambassador was not the only man in Washington experiencing severe difficulty. On June 5 a sleepless and distraught William Jennings Bryan sought out Treasury Secretary William Gibbs McAdoo, a tough former businessman who a year earlier had become President Wilson’s son-in-law. Bryan declared that he had been forced to the conclusion that his usefulness as secretary of state was ended and he had to resign. He wanted McAdoo to help him do so in a way that would minimize embarrassment to the administration. The treasury secretary tried to dissuade him, but to no effect. Bryan said he was convinced that the administration’s actions were carrying the nation toward war and that remaining in the cabinet under such conditions was, for him, impossible.

  In what was under the circumstances an extraordinarily generous letter of resignation, Bryan informed the president that “obedient to your sense of duty, and actuated by the highest motives, you have prepared for transmission to the German Government a note in which I cannot join you without violating what I deem to be an obligation to my country. To remain a member of the Cabinet would be as unfair to you as it would be to the cause which is nearest to my heart, namely, the prevention of war.” Wilson, like McAdoo, tried to dissuade him from quitting. Bryan replied that he had never had the president’s confidence and had never been able to function as a secretary of state should. He was right about that where the European conflict was concerned, although it is equally true that with regular exposure Wilson had come to respect and to like the conscientious, guileless, and openhearted Bryan, of whom he had once been so scornful. This is apparent in what the president now wrote to Bryan. “I accept your resignation only because you insist on its acceptance; and I accept it with much more than deep regret, with a feeling of personal sorrow. Our two years of close association have been very delightful to me.”

  Until the difficulties over the U-boats and the blockade, Wilson and Bryan had worked together with an ease that must have surprised the president. They found that they had a shared interest in supporting democracy in the Caribbean and South America and peace around the world, and though the results of their attempts to do so sometimes became rather messy, they did not blame each other. Bryan became the only cabinet member Wilson was willing to meet with daily, and it is perhaps a tribute to the secretary’s ingenuousness, his obvious lack of any kind of selfish or hidden motives, that he was very nearly the only person who could disagree with the president on a question of importance without becoming the object of bitter scorn.

  The decision to resign was painful for Bryan and for his wife as well. He was proud to be secretary of state, the first office he had held since leaving the House of Representatives two decades before, and had worked zealously (his critics said with naïve zeal) to promote peace around the world. Life in Washington had been a joy for his wife, a welcome change from the years that she had spent raising three children and maintaining a base of operations for her famous husband as he traveled the nation and the world as an orator, campaigner, and political celebrity.

  Bryan and his family understood that they were going to pay for his resignation and were accustomed to abuse. Theodore Roosevelt had called Bryan “the most contemptible figure we have ever had as secretary of state” (along with describing the president he served in equally biting terms). Still, the price of departure proved to be higher than the Bryans had foreseen. As soon as the resignation became known, newspapers across the country began attacking the former secretary savagely, calling him a traitor not only to the president but to the nation. That he was a coward could almost go without saying, as far as his critics were concerned. The abuse came mainly from the factions and publications that were most hostile to Germany, but these were numerous and influential enough to inflict grave damage. At the time of his appointment Bryan had been at least as popular and influential among grassroots Democrats as the new president. He left office a diminished figure, still adored by millions but with no possibility of ever again holding national office. After twenty years as one of the most famous and controversial men in America, he was, politically, a spent force. Still only fifty-five years old, he was becoming the semipathetic vestige of an America that was passing out of existence.

  None of the opprobrium fell on Wilson
. For much of the public, he was the man who, while determined to do everything that honor permitted to keep the country out of Europe’s war, also had the backbone to oppose Imperial Germany’s contempt for “humanity” and trampling of “sacred” rights and principles. That made him admirable even in the eyes of citizens who did not want war.

  With Bryan gone, Wilson was relieved of having close at hand anyone who questioned his decisions. He appointed State Department counselor Lansing, as strong as Colonel House in his friendship for Britain but otherwise pliable, to take charge of the State Department on an acting basis. House supported Lansing’s promotion, describing him to the president as “a man with not too many ideas of his own,” who therefore “will be entirely guided by you.” It would not be surprising if the colonel’s enthusiasm was heightened by the perception that Lansing was unlikely ever to become his rival. In due course the appointment was made permanent, to the satisfaction of everyone concerned. Lansing understood that he was to run the State Department but not intrude upon the president’s management of major issues and not interfere with House. He found this an acceptable arrangement and would continue to do so for the next two years. His principal interest, which only occasionally complicated his efforts to support the Entente and satisfy the president, was in the proper interpretation and application of international law. In this he displayed considerable integrity—within whatever limits the president chose to set down. He felt no compulsion to be making policy or even to be included when policy was being made. His new title brought with it gratifying prestige and invitations to all the best dinner parties.