On the other side, there were hyperactive peace groups, including, starting another tradition of prominent American businessmen who fancied themselves endowed with talents for international mediation, Henry Ford, who sent a “peace ship” to Europe, which accomplished nothing worthwhile. He proved the forerunner of such self-nominated corporate ambassadors as Cyrus Eaton in the fifties and Armand Hammer in the eighties. In Congress, there were moves to prevent Americans from traveling on armed vessels, as the Germans announced they had the right to sink merchant vessels that were armed.
Wilson faced these measures down, and defended the prerogatives of his office, and after the
Lusitania
showdown, he urged preparedness. He told an audience in Philadelphia just three days after the
Lusitania
was sunk that “There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight; there is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.” Roosevelt in particular raved and fumed in stentorian tones that this was pusillanimous claptrap, and it was a pious sentiment that didn’t have unlimited appeal. Americans generally wanted to avoid war if they were not provoked intolerably. It was a terrible war and the United States was economically flourishing as a neutral supplier to the Allies. But these were questions of practicality and self-interest, not pride and virtue. Wilson did conclude after the
Lusitania
incident that the country had to be ready for anything, and presented the Congress a comprehensive plan of enhanced war-making power, on December 7, 1915.
In March 1916, the German Navy torpedoed a French ferry boat in the English Channel, the
Sussex,
injuring several Americans. Wilson and Lansing considered this a violation of the pledge given after the sinking of the
Arabic,
and Lansing recommended breaking off diplomatic relations with Germany. Wilson declined to do that, but had Lansing inform the talented German ambassador in Washington, Count Bernstorff, that relations would be severed if Germany did not avoid such provocations. The German reply promised change if its opponents respected international law.
The National Defense Act of June 1916 raised the regular army from 175,000 to 223,000, called for a fully trained militia of 450,000, and raised defense production orders and capability. Britain purported to blacklist American companies that traded with its enemies, in July 1916, and Wilson replied with legislation authorizing refusal of entry to, or exit from, any U.S. ports of any ship that discriminated against any American company. He also sent the Congress, which approved it, the highest naval construction and maintenance budget in the country’s history. (In a moment of exasperation, on September 24, 1916, Wilson said to House: “Let us build a navy bigger than Britain’s and do what we please.”)
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Britain rapidly desisted from any such provocation as had been threatened. It was an infinitely stronger America than Jefferson and Madison had led a century before, but Wilson also dealt with all aspects of the international crisis a great deal more capably than they had. This was where the country stood opposite the warring powers as it entered another presidential election campaign.
3. THE 1916 ELECTION AND UNRESTRICTED SUBMARINE WARFARE
The Republicans met at Chicago in June and nominated Supreme Court justice and former New York governor Charles Evans Hughes for president and former vice president (under Theodore Roosevelt) Charles W. Fairbanks of Indiana for vice president. Hughes had been on the high court for the last six years and had been a moderate and reform governor of New York, and so was acceptable to followers of both former Republican presidents, Taft and Roosevelt. The party platform played everything down the center and called for readiness but avoidance of adventurism. The Democrats met at St. Louis a week later, and renominated President Wilson and Vice President Marshall without opposition, lauding the president’s reform program, his defense of American honor, and his avoidance of the slaughter in Europe. The slogan “He kept us out of war” was the rallying cry and was endlessly bandied about. It resonated well with most people, though Irish and German Americans resented a policy perceived as too friendly to Britain. The Progressives nominated Roosevelt, but he declined and supported Hughes, as then did most of the Progressives. The Socialists nominated Allan Benson by postal ballot, as Eugene Debs sat this election out. The Democrats accused Hughes of excessive reliance on “hyphenated-Americans,” implying people of compromised loyalty to the country, especially German and Irish Americans, but it was a relatively civilized campaign between two very urbane men. Some western states had accorded women the vote, and Wilson’s implicit promise to stay out of the war was especially popular with them.
On election day, Wilson won 9.13 million votes to 8.54 million for Hughes, 585,000 for Benson, and 221,000 for the Prohibitionists, and won 277 electoral votes to 254 for Hughes. It was 49 percent for Wilson to 46 percent for Hughes and 3 percent for Benson. Wilson’s popular-vote margin appeared sufficient, but the result came in very late, as it was decided by California. Hughes had failed to appear for an appointment with the governor of the state, former Progressive vice presidential candidate Hiram W, Johnson, who had been instrumental in carrying the state for Roosevelt in 1912. For this reason, Johnson withheld his endorsement from Hughes and Wilson took California and its 13 electoral votes by 3,773 popular votes, and was reelected—only the seventh man, of 27 who had served as president, to win two consecutive contested terms, and the first Democrat to do so since Jackson, 84 years before. Because of his reservations about aspects of the U.S. constitutional system, Wilson had planned, if Hughes had won, to appoint him secretary of state and resign with Marshall, to make Hughes president at once and not wait about, fussing impatiently, until March for his inauguration.
In September, Ambassador Count Bernstorff had asked whether Wilson would use his good offices to try to reconcile the parties if Germany undertook to restore Belgium. Wilson deferred consideration of that until after the election (instead of using the opportunity for electoral purposes, as many subsequent presidents might not have been able to resist the temptation to do). Wilson prepared a peace plan in November, but before presenting it, his soundings found the Allies implacably hostile to any peace overtures. Germany publicly declared on December 12 the willingness of the Central Powers to enter into comprehensive peace talks. The Allies refused because of German refusal to state peace terms in advance, but in fact they thought they were winning and were not interested. On December 18, Wilson asked the belligerent powers to state their war aims. Germany refused to do so, but the Allies, in a joint statement, demanded German withdrawal from all occupied territories, with indemnities and reparations; the liberation of all Italians, Czechs, Slovaks, Slavs, and Romanians from government by Austro-Hungarians; the expulsion of Turkey from Europe; and a new security regime for Europe guaranteeing the borders of all countries. The statement was vague about a reconstruction of Poland, and required the restoration of Alsace-Lorraine to France. On January 22, 1917, Wilson told the Congress that there would need to be an international organization to assure the peace, and called for “peace without victory.” It was a perceptive concept that only a peace that did not harvest the seeds of revenge would be durable, and that such a peace would enable the world to use the terrible destruction of the current war as an effective deterrent to a return to general war.
On February 1, 1917, Emperor Wilhelm II made one of the most catastrophic errors of modern times, and the German government announced a return to unrestricted submarine warfare, with no regard to the nature or nationality of ships. The General Staff was persuaded, and persuaded the emperor (but not the civilian government) that Britain would break under the pressure before the United States could make its presence in the war in Europe felt. Wilson severed relations with Germany two days later, recalled his ambassador from Berlin, and expelled Bernstorff. The Congress passed a resolution of support on February 7. Germany allowed one American ship a week to go to Britain under conditions to be outlined, but this was obviously completely unacceptable. The first American merchantman sunk under this regime was the USS
Housatonic,
on February 3.
On March 1, a message was sent by the German foreign minister, Alfred Zimmerman, to the German minister in Mexico instructing him that if the U.S. looked likely to enter the war he should suggest to the Mexican government an alliance with Germany, for which Mexico would be rewarded with the restoration of territory lost in the Mexican War. The message was intercepted and decoded by British naval intelligence, and given to the U.S. ambassador in London, Walter Hines Page, who sent it to Lansing, who on Wilson’s order promptly released it to the press. American ships were being sunk regularly by German submarines on the high seas, and relations had clearly passed the point of no return. Having just been reelected on the slogan of keeping the country out of war, Wilson was waiting for his own reinauguration and a few more provocations to stir American opinion to prodigies of outrage, before leading America into the greatest war in history.
All through the period since the sinking of the
Lusitania,
the assistant secretary of the navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, had been playing a duplicitous double game with his cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, Senator Lodge, and Lodge’s son-in-law, Congressman Augustus Gardner, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, while professing complete loyalty to Wilson and to his direct chief, Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels, an outright pacifist. The younger Roosevelt was guilty of a campaign of leaks to the press through his Machiavellian and gnomish assistant, Louis McHenry Howe, that carried policy disagreements to the edge of outright treachery. He had no more use than his famous cousin did for Wilson’s pious humbug about being “too proud to fight.” Though he would not have agreed with TR’s description of Wilson as a “sophist ... a logothete ... a real doctrinaire,” and “not a real man,” he agreed that there was no doubt where America’s interest lay and that a German victory, which could occur if there were not American intervention, would be a disaster for civilization. (The younger Roosevelt knew Germany well, and spoke German fluently.)
On March 11, 1917, Franklin Roosevelt met in the afternoon with Wilson’s intimate adviser, Colonel House, who favored participation in the war, and in the evening with Republican participationists TR, General Leonard Wood (former proconsul in Cuba), Elihu Root, J.P. Morgan Jr., and the mayor of New York, John P. Mitchell. This was a tour de force in double-dealing. His experiences would be invaluable 25 years later, in even more desperate conditions for the world.
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In February and March 1917, Wilson armed American merchant vessels, following a 403–13 approval in the House of Representatives of Wilson’s request. And after a filibuster in the Senate by, as Wilson called them, “a little group of willful men,” led by Robert La Follette, Wilson and Lansing determined that he had the authority to do it without Senate approval. In Russia, a general revolt in the political classes and much of the officer corps led to the abdication of the Czar and the Romanov Dynasty, at first in favor of Prince Georgy Lvov’s provisional government, and then a moderate, democratic, republican government led by Alexander Kerensky, with the Bolsheviks led by V.I. Lenin in sinister opposition, fomenting the next phase of their pursuit of a totalitarian, Marxist revolution. Russia continued, unsteadily, in the war, and the Kerensky interlude, as it soon proved to be, at least spared the Western Allies the embarrassment of an undemocratic Russia as an ally. As German sinkings of American vessels continued, Wilson consulted his cabinet (in another gesture to British methods of governance) on March 20, and it was unanimously agreed that there was no choice but war. At last, America was moving to the center of the world stage.
The fiasco in Mexico and routine interventions in the Caribbean gave no indication that Wilson had any strategic thoughts. But he had captured the essence of enduring peace; a war so terrible to be a deterrent against future wars must not incite insupportable ambitions for vengeance and redress, and the peace must be preserved by an international organization. It was a brilliant vision—the most imaginative insight into world affairs any leader of a great nation had ever had, almost a jingo of righteousness.
Theodore Roosevelt’s naval construction, isthmian canal, and international activism, and Woodrow Wilson’s transformation of a response to maritime aggression into a crusade against belligerency and revanchism and in favor of international law, organization, and civility, were the first two forays of America into a foreign policy aimed at world influence: the big stick and bully pulpit, and the evangelization of militant democracy and constructive internationalism.
Neither would prove immediately consequential. But Theodore Roosevelt’s most important relative, who would also prove to be the most talented member of the Wilson administration, would learn the necessity of possessing military strength from his quasi-uncle and cousin, and of selling a moral mission in foreign policy initiatives from his president. He would blend the two successfully and impose this dual character on American foreign policy thereafter. Franklin Delano Roosevelt would prove the true heir and continuator of both TR and Wilson, enemies of each other though they were, would be more successful in the world than either, and would win more elections as president than the two combined.
4. THE UNITED STATES ENTERS THE WAR