The World Remade

by G. J. Meyer

  The Justice Department, not to be outdone, was drafting legislation to empower itself to ferret out enemy agents and discourage (to put it mildly) criticism of government policy. In March the Council of National Defense, the recently created body that had the secretary of war as its chairman, established a Munitions Standards Board to impose order on the rapidly growing and largely unregulated armaments industry. Before the month ended, this body would be absorbed into a new General Munitions Board with responsibility for coordinating and facilitating the production of ammunition on an ever more massive scale. Many such organizations were being called into existence and expanded and expanded again. All were intended to put the whole national economy at the service of the war.

  The sense of crisis was spreading beyond Washington. East Coast ports were clogged with ships, the owners of which were unwilling to order them to sea because of the heightened U-boat threat. Warehouses and docks overflowed with material that was intended for Europe but could not be moved. The railways, in their turn, became jammed with cars that could not be unloaded. One of the concomitants of warfare, inflation, was already a dangerous problem, especially in the East. February 20 brought a riot by working-class housewives in New York City. Enraged by the rocketing price of ordinary foodstuffs, female mobs pillaged and burned grocery stores, overturned the carts of street-side vendors, marched on City Hall, and fought the police sent to restrain them.

  The government of Britain, freshly emboldened by the assurances of Colonel House and Ambassador Page that this time intervention really was imminent, on February 21 announced a further tightening of the blockade. The Lloyd George government decreed that henceforth all ships traveling to or from a neutral port with connections to the Central Powers must stop at an Allied port en route or be assumed to be doing business with the enemy. This was the equivalent of saying, Lord Justice Devlin would later observe, “that anyone who failed to call at a police station should be presumed guilty.”

  That the British felt free to make this fresh intrusion upon the rights of neutral nations shows that they now saw almost no possibility of their losing the support of Washington. And indeed, Washington did not object or even comment. London’s confidence is all the more striking when one considers that Britain was now spending five million pounds per day on the war, 40 percent of that staggering sum borrowed in the United States.

  On the continent the Germans were bringing to completion a project that would change the shape of the deadlocked Western Front to an extent not seen since the two sides first dug their trenches at the end of 1914. All through the winter of 1916–17 they had been constructing a new, massive, and radically innovative system of defenses that they called the Siegfriedstellung and that the British and Americans would call the Hindenburg Line. Intended to be virtually impregnable, this staggeringly ambitious undertaking (which began with the digging of a trench ten feet deep, twelve feet across, and almost a hundred miles long) would when put into operation shorten by twenty-five miles the sector of the front from Arras on the north to Soissons on the south. This promised a huge reduction in the Germans’ manpower needs at a time when the Allies had almost a million and a half more men than they on the Western Front.

  The Siegfriedstellung was the work of Erich Ludendorff. It expressed what he believed as the war approached the end of its third year: that victory in the west was no longer possible for the Germans, outmanned as they were. At first he intended the new system to be a contingency, something to fall back to if the British and French finally mounted an offensive gigantic enough to achieve breakthrough. Such an option had first been made necessary by the removal of worryingly large numbers of troops from the west in the summer of 1916, when a Russian offensive showed the Austro-Hungarian forces to be unable to hold their ground unassisted. Later Romania’s entry into the war on the Allied side required the transfer eastward of still more German troops. Finally, when an intercepted message revealed that the French and British were planning yet another massive offensive for April 1917, one even bigger than 1916’s Somme campaign, Ludendorff decided that withdrawal should not be delayed.

  American opponents of intervention remained plentiful after the break with Germany and were determined to make themselves heard despite the contempt with which they were treated by nearly every newspaper in the country. William Jennings Bryan brought fresh abuse down on himself by urging the public to pressure the White House to stay out of the war. Across the nation, the pro-war and antiwar factions together were almost certainly outnumbered by the skeptical, the undecided, and the indifferent. The president remained unreadable. In a conversation with French philosopher Henri Bergson, dispatched to Washington to do his part in selling the Allied cause, Wilson drily observed that in his opinion Britain was fighting not to save Belgium or for any similarly grand purpose but to preserve her world leadership in commerce. On February 23, during a cabinet discussion of whether the United States should arm her merchant ships (all the secretaries present were in favor), he declared impatiently that “the country is not willing that we should take any risks of war.” He displayed so much uncertainty on so many occasions that it is impossible to agree with those who claim that he had long since made up his mind and was simply waiting for events to bring public opinion into alignment with his thinking. Colonel House, watching for signs that Wilson had accepted the need for war, could detect none.

  The president was not wrong about the public’s unwillingness. Outside Washington and beyond the East Coast, even at this point most Americans appear to have found the arguments for war less than compelling. Many rejected them outright. But the day after the aforementioned cabinet meeting, on a quiet Saturday evening in Washington, there arrived at the State Department the most sensational message to reach American shores in the entire course of the war, one that would reshape public opinion and free the president from the weightiest of his doubts.

  It came from London, from Ambassador Page, and it forwarded to the president the text of a secret message—infamous ever since as the Zimmermann Telegram—that had been sent from Berlin to the German ambassador in Mexico City five weeks earlier. In it, German foreign minister Arthur Zimmermann reported that Berlin was hoping to keep the United States neutral despite the start of unrestricted submarine warfare but, if this proved impossible, wished to offer an alliance to the government of Mexico. The ambassador was instructed, “as soon as the outbreak of war with the United States is certain,” to inform the president of Mexico that in return for making war on the United States his nation would receive “generous financial support” as well as Germany’s assistance in recovering its lost territories of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. As if all this were not fanciful enough, the ambassador was to encourage the Mexican president to—“on his own initiative”—invite Japan to become a third partner in the proposed alliance.

  Arthur Zimmermann, German foreign minister, 1916–1917

  His infamous telegram outraged America—but was it really outrageous?

  The interception and decoding of this telegram was the supreme triumph of Britain’s wartime intelligence service. The authorities in London were left, nevertheless, with the challenge of making its contents known to the United States and the world without alerting the Germans to the fact that their supposedly most secret diplomatic communications were not secret at all. That problem remained unsolved when, chafing to detonate their bombshell in Washington, the British let Ambassador Page in on the secret. He, of course, was thrilled. Lately he had been losing hope that anything, even the submarine campaign, was going to induce President Wilson to intervene. But this was something new, something to stir even hearts worn down by repeated disappointment. Everyone who learned of the Zimmermann Telegram saw how explosive it was. Sir Edward Grey’s replacement in the Lloyd George coalition, Arthur Balfour, was no newcomer to the international stage and no stranger to high political drama. His experience included three years as Conservative prime minister. Even he would recall, however, that giving a cop
y of the telegram to Page was “the most dramatic moment of my life.”

  The next morning Page sent a cable to Frank Polk, who had succeeded Lansing as State Department counselor and that weekend was filling in as secretary of state while Lansing was away on holiday. It advised him to stand by for a message of the highest importance. The length of the message and the laboriousness of the encryption process delayed transmission until late in the day. Then, in Washington, it had to be decoded. As soon as that was done, Polk hurried it to the White House.

  Wilson was stunned, infuriated, offended. He took the telegram as proof that Berlin had been toying with him, pretending to be open to peace talks while scheming to spread the war to North America. (Actually, to the extent that the president had been misled, this was the fault of the German ambassador in Washington rather than his superiors in Berlin. Bernstorff’s dread of the consequences of unrestricted U-boat operations had driven him to depict the new Ludendorff regime as more flexible, more open to American mediation, than it was or indeed cared to appear to be.)

  Wilson’s first impulse was to make the telegram public immediately. There was no longer any concern about revealing Britain’s message-interception capabilities, Page and the Foreign Office having concocted a story about obtaining a copy of the telegram in Mexico through bribery. Polk, however, persuaded the president to wait until Lansing could be summoned back to Washington. Lansing, when he arrived, urged deferring release until the telegram could be used to achieve some specific and substantial objective. The telegram therefore produced its first significant effect before its existence was known outside the White House. It prompted President Wilson to go before Congress on Monday, February 26, and request approval of an action for which many members had been clamoring: “armed neutrality.” This was the president’s term for the equipping of American merchant ships with artillery. He asked for authority not only to put guns and navy gun crews on merchantmen but “to employ any other instrumentalities or methods that may be necessary and adequate to protect our ships and our people in their legitimate and peaceful pursuits on the seas.” The vagueness of this language raised eyebrows, but Wilson assured his listeners that there was no cause for concern. “I am not now proposing or contemplating,” he said, “war or any steps that need lead to it.”

  The publicity given the U-boat campaign and the intensity of feeling that it aroused created the impression, which endures to the present day, that Germany’s submarines were committing wholesale slaughter on the high seas, sending innocent Americans to watery deaths in droves. The truth, though certainly tragic enough, is not so dire. From the start of the war through 1915 and 1916 and on into the middle of March 1917, exactly two Americans, both merchant seamen, died as a result of a U-boat attack on a U.S.-registered ship. This happened in the Irish Sea on May 1, 1915, and was a mistake: a submarine commander mistook the American tanker Gulflight for British. The ship was not sunk but later towed to safety. The German government accepted responsibility, expressed regrets, and paid compensation. Even as attacks and sinkings increased in frequency from February 1, 1917, onward, for a month and a half not one of them resulted in loss of life.

  It is likewise astonishing that, in the two and a half years between the start of hostilities in 1914 and American intervention, only six Americans, aside from the 128 who died in the Lusitania tragedy, lost their lives as a result of U-boat attacks on British ships. The first four were Leon C. Thrasher, whose story was told earlier, the two American victims of the sinking of the White Star liner Arabic in August 1915, and a crewman lost when the freighter Eaveston was torpedoed in February 1917. The last two were a Chicago mother and daughter who died in their lifeboat—the cause has never been satisfactorily explained—after the liner Laconia was torpedoed off the coast of Ireland. This happened on February 25, and news of it made headlines when it reached Washington the day before the president’s call for armed neutrality. The Laconia was another of Britain’s “armed merchant cruisers,” equipped with heavy guns, but this was not immediately clear in Washington. The president’s response was to strengthen his armed-ship bill before sending it to Congress.

  Press and congressional indignation at the Laconia sinking made passage of the bill seem certain. Still, muffled by the howls about German treachery but unmistakable all the same, there were rumblings of dissent. In the House of Representatives, an amendment to prohibit armed merchant ships from carrying munitions as cargo received 125 votes in the process of going down to defeat. At the other end of the combativeness spectrum, old guard Republicans mocked the very idea of armed neutrality and mocked Wilson for not acting more forcefully. The Senate Republican leader, Henry Cabot Lodge, described the president’s position as “deplorable.”

  Lansing thought the time had come to unleash the Zimmermann Telegram. Its release would make passage of the armed-ship bill a certainty, at the same time silencing all but the most intransigent of the president’s critics. Late on February 28, the contents of the telegram were handed over to the Associated Press, ensuring that the next morning they would appear at the top of page one in every daily paper in the country. The result was a firestorm of outrage and an explosive boost to anti-German and pro-war sentiment. Members of Congress struggled to outdo one another in expressing their horror at the Hun’s perfidy. Before the day was over, the House passed the armed-ship bill by a vote of 403 to 13.

  The Senate posed a greater challenge. The margin of support for the president’s bill was almost as impressive among the senators as in the House, but the upper chamber’s arcane rules meant that even an overwhelming majority was not necessarily enough. Eleven senators—five rebellious Democrats and half a dozen die-hard Republican progressives—joined forces to form an opposition. They made use of one of the hoariest of their chamber’s traditions, the filibuster, to keep the armed-ship bill from coming to a vote before the congressional session expired on Sunday, March 4.

  A filibuster uses unchecked oratory to paralyze the Senate. As the hour when the Senate would have to adjourn approached and speeches for and against the armed-ship bill went on and on, emotions ran high. A threat of physical violence hung over the proceedings. At one point a group of senators who favored passage rose menacingly from their seats when the leader of the opposition, Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, demanded the floor. As they advanced on La Follette, one of them, Ollie James of Wisconsin, was seen to be carrying a revolver. Another member of the opposition, Harry Lane of Oregon, then brandished a rattail file that he had brought into the chamber after hearing that La Follette might be in danger. Lane said later that he was prepared to drive the sharp point that gave the file its name into Ollie James’s heart if necessary. It did not come to that, but in the final moments before adjournment, when La Follette saw that he was to be given no opportunity to deliver the speech with which he hoped to explain his position, he took up a brass spittoon from the floor. He said he was going to brain the presiding senator with it. He was restrained by an ally who imploringly pointed out that the filibuster had achieved its aim. The hour of adjournment had come. There would be no vote.

  It hardly need be said that the Zimmermann Telegram was an act of horrendous stupidity. And it was absolutely pointless: what it proposed could never have been accomplished. Mexico, even if she had not been ravaged by revolution and civil war, was far too feeble to pose a threat to the United States. Germany’s financial situation was far too bad to make possible “generous financial support.” And the suggestion that Mexico should invite Japan to join her in alliance with Germany was absurd. Japan was by this time a member of the Allies, having been promised the Chinese province of Shantung and islands in the Pacific as her reward for joining. The only result of the telegram’s mention of Japan was to inflame American fears of Japanese territorial ambitions. President Wilson himself was much concerned about this “yellow peril,” so much so that he sometimes mused that intervention in Europe might leave the western United States vulnerable to invasion from across th
e Pacific. Obsession with Japan was epidemic on the West Coast, and the telegram caused previously indifferent Californians to become hostile toward Germany.

  But was the telegram as villainous as Congress and the newspapers proclaimed it to be? Did it make the case for war unanswerable? No answer is satisfactory that does not make note of the fact that an alliance of Germany and Mexico was not to be proposed until after an American declaration of war. To condemn this as an outrage is to deny nations the right to respond to direct and deadly threat by seeking allies.

  It is likewise worth remembering that, in holding out to Mexico the hope of recovering territories seized by force just a single lifetime earlier, Germany was taking a position not easily distinguished from the demand that Alsace and Lorraine be returned to France. Nor is the German offer obviously different in kind from what Britain and France had done in using deeply secret promises of territorial gain to bring Italy, Romania, and Japan into their alliance.

  In his undelivered speech, which he soon afterward had printed and distributed nationally, La Follette had wanted to call attention to the passage in the bill authorizing the president to “employ any other instrumentalities or methods” to counter the German threat. This, he argued, would have conferred on the executive branch undefined and therefore unlimited powers—even the power to make war without the approval of Congress. Such power, in his view, was not only unwise but blatantly unconstitutional. He pointed out, too, that the bill would have appropriated $100 million for the president to use, without oversight, in implementing the new law. La Follette was not wrong about the substance of the bill, or the use the president was undoubtedly prepared to make of it. Though it was not passed, it serves as an early indication of how far the president was willing to go in demanding powers that would allow him to fight the war in whatever way he chose.