Mr. Wilson's War

by John Dos Passos

  Though it demanded some stretch of the imagination, he declared that the terms of his note had been accepted, in principle, by both parties. “… We are that much nearer a definite discussion of the peace which shall end the present war … Such a settlement cannot be long postponed. It is right that before it comes this government should frankly formulate the conditions upon which it would feel justified in asking our people to approve its formal and solemn adherence to a league for peace. I am here to attempt to state those conditions.

  “The present war must first be ended … The treaties and agreements which bring it to an end must embody terms which will create a peace that is worth guaranteeing and preserving … There must be not a balance of power but a community of power: not organized rivalries but an organized common peace.”

  He had assurances from each group of belligerents, he said, that they did not intend completely to crush their antagonists. He must now make clear to all parties the implications of these assurances:

  “They imply first of all that it must be a peace without victory … Only a peace between equals can last … The equality of nations … must be an equality of rights … No peace can last or ought to last which does not recognize and accept the principle that governments derive all their just powers from the consent of the governed …

  “I am proposing, as it were, that the nations … adopt the doctrine of President Monroe as the doctrine of the world: that no nation shall seek to extend its polity over any other nation or people, but that every people should be left free to determine its own polity, its own way of development, unhindered, unthreatened, unafraid …”

  His final words were moving: “I am proposing government by the consent of the governed; that freedom of the seas which in international conference after conference representatives of the United States have urged … and that moderation of armaments which makes of armies and navies a power for order merely … These are American principles, American policies … They are the principles of mankind and must prevail.”

  The first senator to jump to his feet and applaud was La Follette of Wisconsin. Democrats and Progressives joined in an ovation. Some Republican regulars were so carried away that they had to explain later that they applauded the President’s eloquence rather than his proposals.

  The phrase “peace without victory,” which was to float as a banner over the aspirations of the liberals both in Great Britain and the United States, was culled from an editorial in The New Republic, a New York weekly financed by a wealthy Progressive named Willard Straight, where a group of ardent young optimists was at work reweaving the frazzled strands of the New Nationalism and the New Freedom into the New Liberalism.

  Herbert Croly, then editor, wrote that hearing the President pronounce those words was the greatest moment of his life. Lowes Dickinson in England called the speech “perhaps the most important international document in all history.” Woodrow Wilson’s leadership of collegebred idealists throughout the Englishspeaking world was assured from that moment.

  Count von Bernstorff’s Regrets

  The last day of January, while editorial approval of the President’s sentiments re-echoed through the American press, Ambassador von Bernstorff called up the State Department at ten in the morning to make an appointment with Secretary Lansing for that afternoon. Earlier still he had transmitted an order to the crews of interned German ships to disable their engines. He had on his desk Bethmann-Hollweg’s note announcing the new German effort to blockade Great Britain.

  Lansing carefully told the story of the interview in his memoirs:

  “That afternoon I was working on a letter to the President in regard to the arming of merchant vessels on the ground that Germany was undoubtedly preparing to renew vigorous submarine warfare … Before I had completed the letter the German Ambassador was announced … I noticed that, though he moved with his usual springy step, he did not smile with his customary assurance. After shaking hands and sitting down in the large easy chair by the side of my desk he drew forth from an envelope … several papers … He asked me if he should read them to me or if I would read them myself before he said anything about them. I replied that I would read the papers, which I did slowly and carefully for … I realized that it … would probably bring on the gravest crisis which this government had had to face … The note announced the renewal on the next day of indiscriminate submarine warfare.”

  Lansing remarked that he viewed the situation with the utmost gravity but preferred not to make any immediate comment. Von Bernstorff stammered out his private regrets.

  “I believe you do regret it,” answered Lansing, “for you know what the result will be.” He added that he wasn’t blaming the German ambassador personally.

  “ ‘You should not,’ he said with evident feeling. ‘You know how constantly I have worked for peace.’ ”

  Lansing answered drily he did not care to discuss the matter further. Von Bernstorff shook hands and left “not at all the jaunty carefree man-of-the-world he usually was. With a ghost of a smile he bowed as I said ‘Good afternoon’ and, turning, left the room.”

  When the Secretary of State arrived at the White House after dinner that night he found the President agitated. Wilson was still of two minds. He believed that von Bernstorff’s protestations that Germany still wanted a negotiated peace must represent some sector of civilian opinion in the governing circles about the Kaiser. Did this note mean that the militarists were completely in the saddle?

  Lansing set forth his arguments for an immediate break. As usual the President listened attentively. He would call a meeting of the cabinet. It was Lansing’s impression that Wilson was waiting for some overt act.

  The Secretary went home to bed in a frustrated state of mind. “Has the blood of patriotism ceased to throb in American veins?… Have we forgotten that our heritage of liberty was sealed with the lives of Americans and that it is a sacred trust which we must hold unimpaired for the generations to come?” he had written in his private diary after the Lusitania sinking. The President’s temporizing brought on a new storm of resentful thought. Robert Lansing’s sleep was fitful that night.

  On February 1 the German note drove everything else off the front pages. Atlantic shipping was paralyzed. House’s friend Dudley Field Malone took it upon himself to close the port of New York. Reports came in of glutted dockside warehouses and of goods piling up at the railheads. The stockmarket slumped. While Allied partisans stormed in the east coast newspapers, pacifist groups held meetings urging the President not to submit to provocation. Editorials were full of uneasy conjecture on what the German-American societies might do in case of war. Would the United States face a situation akin to the Easter rebellion?

  Colonel House was reported to have escaped a throng of reporters waiting for him in the Pennsylvania Station by having himself smuggled by a back stairway into his stateroom on the night train to Washington.

  The confidential colonel found President Wilson “sad and depressed … The President said he felt as if the world had suddenly reversed itself; that after going from east to west, it had begun to go from west to east, and that he could not get his balance … The question we discussed longest was whether it was better to give Bernstorff his passports immediately or wait till the Germans committed some overt act. When Lansing came this discussion was renewed, and we all agreed that it was best to give him his passports at once.”

  The argument his advisers used to convince the President was that breaking off relations might bring the Germans to their senses. Lansing was sent back to his office to write out an explanatory note.

  Even then the President was insisting to House that he would not allow the break to lead to war. He spoke of Germany as “a madman to be curbed.” House asked if it was fair to the Allies to let them do all the curbing. “He noticeably winced at this,” said House when he dictated his private notes to the indispensable Miss Denton.

  The colonel described the events of the next day with some gu
sto in his diary: “We sat listlessly during the morning until Lansing arrived … The President nervously arranged his books and walked up and down the floor. Mrs. Wilson spoke of golf and asked whether I thought it would look badly if the President went out on the links. I thought the American people would feel that he should not do anything so trivial at such a time.

  “In great governmental crises of this sort the public have no conception of what is happening on the stage behind the curtain … When the decision has been made nothing further can be done until it is time for the curtain to rise … Meanwhile we were listlessly killing time … The President at last suggested that we play a game of pool.” House used to tell his friends afterwards what poor poolplayers both he and the President were. Towards the end of the second game, Lansing was announced.

  “The President, Lansing and I then returned to the study. Lansing was so nearly of our mind that there was little discussion. He read what he had written and we accepted it …”

  In the cabinet meeting that afternoon the President went into all the arguments pro and con once more. The cabinet members were edgy. Houston and McAdoo wanted action. Jolly Franklin K. Lane wrote a friend: “He comes out right but he’s slower than a glacier and things are mighty disagreeable whenever anything has to be done.”

  Lansing sat quiet. Since his talk with the President and Colonel House that morning he was convinced that the President had made up his mind. “I slept soundly that night,” he noted in his diary, “feeling sure that the President would act vigorously.”

  A Little Group of Wilful Men

  Next day the President addressed the two houses of Congress to explain why he had to give von Bernstorff his passports. He was applauded. Only the Progressives were mum.

  The President’s relations with Congress had been deteriorating all through the winter. Though the Senate was still safely Democratic, the House was split 213 to 213. Even his most loyal supporters were losing the unity of purpose of the happy days of the New Freedom. The Republican regulars were grouped in a bitter phalanx around Senator Lodge of Massachusetts. The Progressives, formerly so cooperative, were balky.

  In mid-January after months of White House pressure, which Tumulty was adept in masking under a velvet glove, President and Mrs. Wilson learned with relief that the appointment of their dear Dr. Grayson as Rear Admiral was finally approved by the Senate. His promotion jumped him over a list of a hundred and one names. The fight went on for months. Satisfying this presidential whim caused Wilson’s legislative managers many a sleepless night. The Grayson appointment left bitter feelings in the Senate.

  Wilson seized on Lansing’s suggestion of arming merchantships and letting them fight their way across the sealanes as a way of emulating the “armed neutrality” policies of the Scandinavian countries during the Napoleonic wars. The President believed he already had the authority as Commander in Chief of the armed forces but he wanted congressional endorsement of his plan. The Armed Ship Bill was introduced.

  Though it passed the House, the Armed Ship Bill became entangled in the political strategy of the Republicans, panting for a return to power in 1920. The Republican leadership had no intention of giving the Democratic administration a free hand after the President’s second inauguration. They wanted to force a special session. The Progressives in the Senate, who had stood by the President in the long fight for public ownership of emergency shipping, opposed the plan to arm merchantships as the first step towards war against Germany in the interests of British trade and the New York banks. It was putting the dollar sign on the American flag said Norris of Nebraska.

  La Follette of Wisconsin seized on the arming of merchantships as the dramatic issue in the struggle for peace. As usual, once he had made up his mind, black was black and white was white. When it became obvious that the bill had enough votes to pass, his passionate denunciation turned into a filibuster. Twelve men, in spite of the crescendo of vituperation raised up against them by the war spirit now sweeping the country, decided to hold out until the Sixtyfourth Congress expired on Inauguration Day.

  The filibuster produced vast bitterness. According to Capitol gossip, Ollie James of Kentucky at one moment advanced threateningly toward La Follette across the Senate floor, with his hand on his gunpocket. The filibustering senators were excoriated in the press as “flirting with treason,” as “knaves who betrayed the nation,” or as “La Follette and his little group of perverts.” La Follette was hung in effigy by the students at Massachusetts Tech. He was denounced by professors at Columbia. Even at home in Wisconsin old supporters turned against him.

  Public indignation was exacerbated by the publication of the Zimmermann telegram. On February 25 a translation was handed to Page in London. He promptly cabled it to Washington where Polk and Lansing originated a search for the original cypher message in the telegraph company’s files. The versions matched. Lansing hurried to the White House to show the President the telegram.

  Lansing reported in his diary that Mr. Wilson “cried out, ‘Good Lord,’ several times in the course of its perusal.” His first thought was that it might be a forgery. It was hard for him to swallow having been taken in by fast talking von Bernstorff.

  As soon as he was convinced that Zimmermann’s message was genuine, the President decided that the State Department should leak it to the press. The head of the Washington bureau of the Associated Press was sworn to secrecy as to the origin of the text and on March 31 it was spread over the front pages of the nation’s newspapers.

  The Zimmermann telegram, which the German foreign office, with characteristic German bluntness, soon admitted to be genuine, proved a great help to President Wilson in his difficulties with Congress over the Armed Ship Bill. It turned La Follette’s filibuster into a futile gesture. “Fought it through to the finish” the old warrior for righteousness wired his wife after the Sixtyfourth Congress disbanded on Inauguration Day. “Feeling here intense. I must take the gaff for a while.”

  The Red Man had won.

  In his heart Woodrow Wilson still felt as great a loathing for war as the senators he now denounced as “a little group of wilful men representing no opinion but their own.” He had consistently held in check the “preparedness” campaigns that were whooping up the warfever. He even tried to discourage the War College from making plans for some possible eventual campaign in Europe. As late as early January 1917 he was telling House, “This country does not intend to become involved in this war … it would be a crime against civilization for us to go in.”

  In his agony of mind in the final hour he got his old friend Frank Cobb up from New York and talked to him through most of the night.

  “It would mean,” he told the editor of the New York World, “that we would lose our heads along with the rest and stop weighing right and wrong. It would mean that a majority of people in this hemisphere would go war mad, quit thinking, and devote their energies to destruction … Conformity will be the only virtue. And every man who refuses to conform will have to pay the penalty … Once lead this people into war and they’ll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance … If there is any alternative for God’s sake let’s take it.”

  We Will Not Choose the Path of Submission

  The German authorities were doing their best to make any alternative to war impossible. They lost no time in presenting the American public with overt acts to force the President’s hand. During the month of February the U-boats sank seven hundred eightyone thousand five hundred tons of shipping, including two American ships warned in time to allow the crews to escape. When the Cunard liner Laconia was torpedoed two American women lost their lives.

  March 12 the U.S.S. Algonquin went down off the Scilly Islands. On March 19 the news reached Washington of three American steamers torpedoed on a single day. On the Vigilancia fifteen seamen were lost.

  The President called a special session of the Sixtyfifth Congress for April 2.

  Colonel House arrived the day before on the night train
from New York. Reaching the White House in time for breakfast he found the President and Mrs. Wilson up betimes and getting ready to play a little golf. Woodrow Wilson’s night had been sleepless. Again he was complaining of headaches.

  While the President and his party were out on the links Colonel House was pestered by cabinet members calling up to ask what the President was going to say in the speech he was planning to deliver as soon as the two houses had finished organizing.

  Since Colonel House didn’t know himself, he held them off with noncommittal murmurs. It wasn’t till after lunch that the President got around to going over his manuscript with the confidential colonel. “No address he has yet made pleased me more than this one,” noted House. Though others considered the President unnaturally calm, House noted signs of nervousness as the afternoon dragged on. “Neither of us did anything except kill time until he was called to the Capitol.”

  After the usual family dinner the presidential party drove to the Capitol. It was a night of gusty rain with fitful flickering of lightning on the heavy clouds. Secretary Baker had ordered out two troops of cavalry to protect the President. The wet Washington streets were crowded with sightseers come to see him drive by in this hour of emergency. The House galleries were filled early and thousands stood in the occasional splatters of rain, looking up at the dome of the Capitol which was lit by floodlights from below, while the President asked Congress for a joint resolution declaring that a state of war existed between the United States and the Imperial German Government.

  Except for La Follette, who stood with his arms crossed and the lines deep and grim about his bulldog jaw, almost every congressman and even the Supreme Court justices wore a little American flag in the lapel.

  The President’s entrance was greeted with cheers and handclapping. In tones clearer and cooler even than usual, he described his efforts to keep the peace against Germany’s everincreasing provocations. He described the possible reactions short of war that were left to him. “There is one choice we cannot make, we are incapable of making: we will not choose the path of submission.”