Penguin History of the United States of America (89 page)

Wilson showed his sense of relief at this narrow escape by taking vigorous steps to ensure that he would never again be caught in such a trap. He was learning. In America he launched what he called the ‘Preparedness’ campaign, winning Congressional approval for an immense programme of shipbuilding which would give the United States a navy second to none with which to protect its maritime interests. The idea was that this would deter Germany from further provocation. Abroad, he set out seriously to discover a means of ending the war and thus of saving America from all possibility of being sucked into it. He sent a trusted personal emissary, Edward House, to sound out the governments of the warring powers, and exerted himself to display his neutrality. He did this chiefly by quarrelling with the Allies, especially Great Britain.

The British command of the sea was nearly absolute, and so much resented by the Americans that they began to talk of ‘navalism’ as a sin of the same order as German militarism: ‘freedom of the seas’ was a potent cry. The British strictly forbade neutrals to trade with Germany and Austria; neighbours of the Central Powers, such as Holland and Denmark, were forbidden to import anything by sea which might find its way across their frontiers (as a result the war was a period of acute hardship for these little countries). American vessels trading across the Atlantic were regularly stopped and searched by British ships; contraband goods were confiscated. A black list was compiled of firms guilty or suspected of trading with
Germany, whose shipments were therefore liable to instant seizure. The mails were intercepted and censored. As the war went on the British, nicely judging the American temper, slowly increased the pressure. Woodrow Wilson protested in vain. By the summer of 1916 he admitted that he was ‘about at the end of my patience with Great Britain and the Allies’. On top of everything else, Britain’s savage repression of the Easter Rising in Dublin had done almost as much damage to her moral standing in the eyes of the American public as the attack on Belgium had done to that of Germany. Wilson’s resolution to commit the full strength of the United States to the search for peace grew: it was plainer and plainer that the war was a major hurt to American interests, whether the country was a belligerent or not.

Before any decisive new departure could be undertaken there was a Presidential election to be held. Wilson had done his best to prepare for it by appropriating the more tempting items in his enemies’ domestic programmes; but somewhat to his surprise, somewhat to his dismay, the winning issue turned out to be the slogan ‘He Kept Us Out Of The War’. The mood of the country, understandably enough, was overwhelmingly pacific. Wilson privately doubted his ability to live up to the slogan: he knew that the decision really lay with Germany, which might at any minute resume submarine warfare. But he had of course no objection to winning the peace vote, and was narrowly re-elected, receiving 277 electoral votes to the 254 given to his Republican opponent, Charles Evans Hughes (the Progressive party was dissolving).

That matter out of the way, Wilson set earnestly to work as a peace-maker. On 18 December he sent identical diplomatic notes to the belligerents asking them to state their war-aims. He hoped that, if they could be induced to do this, they might also be induced to accept America as a mediator in the search for a compromise peace. So they might have done, had their quest for victory been all it seemed: had both sides believed what they proclaimed, that they were only fighting in self-defence. Unfortunately the belligerents had war-aims they could not decently avow. Germany, for example, wanted the Belgian Congo, and the reduction of Belgium herself to satellite status; while the Allies had their own plans for carving up Turkey and destroying for good the strength of the Central Powers. They were fighting for conquest; besides, any compromise peace in 1916 or 1917 must have been a thinly disguised German victory, for Belgium and northern France were still occupied: if Allied blood was no longer to be shed, then Allied diplomacy would have had to make many concessions to get this territory evacuated. Yet Britain and France felt themselves far from defeated. It is not surprising, therefore, that Wilson’s
demarche
was received with dismay in London and Paris, and that the only question it raised in the minds of the Allied governments was how it might be painlessly frustrated.

A similar reaction might have been expected from the Germans: if they defined their war-aims in terms acceptable to American opinion, they would be throwing away the fruits of their victories; if they replied frankly, they
would discredit themselves. Best to reply evasively. But it so happened that Wilson’s intervention coincided with a fateful change in German policy. Tirpitz had now built up a large submarine fleet; Tsarist Russia was plainly on the brink of defeat; the time had come, the high command determined, for an all-out effort against Britain. Before it was taken, however, the diplomatists were allowed one last attempt at negotiation. Accordingly Bethmann-Hollweg, the German Chancellor, returned a surprisingly conciliatory answer to Wilson’s note, and the President for some weeks was able to sun himself in the illusion that a compromise peace was possible. He was so pleased with the German attitude that he began to put heavy pressure on the British, going so far as to order that no more loans should be made to them, since they seemed uncooperative.

For the Allies it was perhaps the most dangerous moment of the war and, had the Germans had the wit to see it, it might have been decisive. But Hindenburg and Ludendorff were bent on settling matters their own way – by blood and iron. At a conference at Pless Castle in eastern Prussia it was decided, over the anguished protests of Bethmann-Hollweg, to re-open the submarine offensive. It was assumed that this would bring America into the war but that, the generals thought, did not matter. Before US strength could be brought to bear, the Russians would have been forced to make peace and the U-boat campaign would have starved Britain into asking for terms. The decision was taken in early January 1917 – at the very time that Wilson was assuring House that ‘there will be no war’.

It was a bold scheme, which almost succeeded. But the Germans had overreached themselves. The British convoy system blunted the submarine offensive. Russia was totally defeated, but the terms that Germany exacted were so unbearably harsh that an army had to be kept in the East to enforce them; consequently the great Western offensive, when it came (in March 1918), was not sufficiently overwhelming, and the Anglo-French front held. Worse yet, the Americans were indeed forced into war by the consequences of the Pless decision, and this fact guaranteed German defeat.

The announcement that Germany was resorting to unrestricted submarine warfare (that is to say, that all Allied or neutral vessels on the Atlantic would be torpedoed without warning, whatever their mission) abruptly awoke Wilson from his dream that the belligerents would accept his proposals for ‘peace without victors’. This was no unplanned
Trent
affair, no ‘calculated outrage’ from ‘any little German lieutenant’ such as Wilson had feared. It was an attempt by the imperial German government to drive all American shipping off the high seas, in order to starve a people into surrender. To acquiesce in this murderous humiliation was unthinkable; but Wilson shrank from the obvious alternative. The German note was received on 31 January 1917; three days later Wilson broke off diplomatic relations. News of sunken shipping began to come in; but still the President did not go to war.

His instincts were profoundly pacific. He had been a child in the South
during Civil War and Reconstruction: he knew, as no other President has known, what the costs of war might be. Among them he could reckon soldiers dead or mutilated and families wrecked by the loss of their ‘boys’, as he always thought and spoke of them (he had no sons, but he had taught young males for years at Princeton, who always stayed the same age while he got older). He knew how war could defeat the hopes of those who entered upon it and warp the course of social and political development: he foresaw the end of the New Freedom in war fever. In a war, a united America must win, of course; but she might be transformed for the worse. Even the diplomatic price would be high: the tradition of more than a century would be abandoned when the United States consented to embroil itself in the quarrels of Europe.

The sinkings went on. The British gave Wilson the text of a German cable which they had intercepted and decoded. It was from Alfred Zimmermann, Under Foreign Secretary, and was so monumentally provocative that it deserves to be extensively quoted:

Berlin, January 19, 1917. On the first of February we intend to begin submarine warfare unrestricted. In spite of this it is our intention to keep neutral the United States of America. If this attempt is not successful we propose an alliance on the following basis with Mexico: that we shall make war together and together make peace. We shall give general financial support, and it is understood that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona… Please call to the attention of the President of Mexico that the employment of ruthless submarine warfare now promises to compel England to make peace in a few months.

Wilson published the text of this interesting document; Zimmermann, to the astonishment of the government in Washington, admitted that it was genuine; and the American people were left to contemplate what seemed to them a monstrous plot against their national integrity. The point about ‘ruthless submarine warfare’ reminded them of their losses at sea and of the Germans’ reputation for frightfulness. The sorry state of Mexican-American relations lent an air of reality to Zimmermann’s scheme which it did not deserve, for Mexico showed no interest. At last the people knew their own mind. Wilson asked Congress to approve the arming of merchantmen; when a little group of Senators filibustered the proposal to death, he authorized the measure under an ancient Act of 1797, relic of an earlier international crisis. The Russian Revolution of March overthrew the Tsardom, thus making the Allied cause more attractive to democratic Americans. The President bowed to necessity, and on 2 April 1917 went before a joint session of Congress to ask for a declaration that a state of war existed between Germany and the United States. He got what he wanted by a nearly unanimous vote in the small hours of Good Friday. It fell on 6 April that year: for the third time the cruellest month thrust the American people into a major war.

In his address to Congress Wilson set the country on a new course. He did not mention the Zimmermann telegram, perhaps because he thought so foolish a plot to be unworthy of serious notice, but he reviewed the question of unrestricted submarine warfare at length, making the point that, if America wanted to preserve her property and, especially, the lives of her citizens, she must either submit to German bullying or retaliate with war: ‘armed neutrality, it now appears, is impracticable’. America would not, could not, submit: she would defend her rights and the hitherto sacrosanct principles of civilized maritime warfare. So far, it was a prescription for war on the Atlantic. But Wilson had convinced himself, and now tried to convince his hearers, that Germany’s conduct showed that her government could not safely be allowed to co-exist with democratic nations. ‘We are glad, now that we see the facts with no veil of false pretence about them, to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included… The world must be made safe for democracy.’
⁴
So he proposed all help to the Allies, and the raising of a huge American army, initially of half a million men. And he ended by painting a glorious vision of what might be achieved:

It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts — for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own Governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.

He was rewarded with tumultuous cheers, led by the Chief Justice of the United States. It did not comfort him. ‘My message today was a message of death for our young men,’ he said afterwards, in a moment of Lincolnian insight. ‘How strange it seems to applaud that.’

Wilson’s address carried a substantially united America into war; but he risked a great deal. If his promises of universal peace and democracy could not be kept, disappointment might be as bitter as hopes in 1917 were high. It is worth asking why the promises were made. In part, the answer must be that Wilson had been convinced by the outbreak and conduct of the war that, in Norman Angell’s famous phrase, there was a state of international anarchy, and that, until it was remedied, the world could not be safe either for democracy or for the American people. He had already, in the previous year, announced himself ready to abandon the isolationist tradition if, by signing a treaty or forming an alliance, America could help to bring into
being and to sustain ‘a concert of free peoples’ – a league of nations, that is, such as was becoming the popular remedy for the ills of the world. In 1917 he took advantage of the need to declare war to commit his country firmly to this policy.

But there was more to it than that. There was the matter of national tradition. Jefferson and Lincoln had dedicated the Revolution and the Civil War to the cause of humanity; Wilson would do the same with his war. Finally, he was under a compulsion common to all modern societies. The British, for instance, believed (or the civilians did) that they were fighting a war to end war. Mere national self-defence, let alone the lure of conquest, was no longer cause enough. The best that can be said for Wilson as he declared a war for democracy, an ideological war, is that any other man in his place would have had to offer such a justification for his actions, and that few others could so eloquently have articulated one so noble and so plausible.