In the Time of the Americans

by David Fromkin

  Retrospection distorts. Looking back, the events of the twenty-three months following the torpedoing of the Lusitania led to the American decision to fight Germany. But that is not how people saw those months as they were living through them—and not just because of the remoteness of the war or because of America’s lifelong isolationism. For those in their twenties and thirties, it also was because their generation—that of Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower—was at an age in which the normal focus of immediate concern is personal: marriage, family, and the first steps in a career.

  On a sunny Sunday south Texas afternoon in October 1915, Dwight Eisenhower was on guard duty at Camp Wilson on the edge of Fort Sam Houston when the wife of a superior officer called him over to meet Mary Geneva Doud. On Valentine’s Day 1916 he proposed; in July 1916 they married; during the Christmas season, they conceived a son.

  Some $12,500 in debt, Kansas farmer Harry Truman lost $7,500 more in a lead and zinc mining company, contrary to his hopes of earning enough money to marry Bess Wallace. He told Bess, “You would do better perhaps if you pitch me into the ash heap and pick someone with more sense and ability.…” Then a promoter persuaded him to go into an oil speculation—Truman borrowed $5,000 from his mother, who raised the money by mortgaging her farm—and that venture collapsed, too.

  In New York, Averell Harriman, one of the world’s richest men, was settling with his bride, Kitty, into the life of Manhattan high society. In his second year at the Harvard Law School, 1916–17, dashing Dean Acheson, who had become a school athlete under Harriman’s tutelage, was flowering intellectually under the inspiration of his new mentor, Felix Frankfurter.

  William Bullitt, once the carefree star of the college social set to which Acheson had belonged, wrote on March 23, 1917, to his friend Walter Lippmann that his wife, Ernesta, “bore a son day before yesterday, and I buried him today.” Bullitt had married only twelve months before, but it was the beginning of the end of their marriage; Ernesta could not have another child, and Bullitt wanted a child above all else.

  In March 1917 Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt had been married twelve years. Their fifth surviving child had been delivered the year before, but there was an emptiness in the marriage, and neither husband nor wife felt fulfilled in it. Franklin, indeed, now looked elsewhere for companionship and romance.

  Arthur Vandenberg, editing the Grand Rapids Herald in Michigan, was struggling to bring up his three children on his own after the death of his wife in 1916. In Cincinnati, a comfortably married Robert Taft in his mid-twenties was fully occupied with his growing law practice, his family, his work for the Legal Aid Society and the Boy Scouts, his fund-raising for charities, his position as secretary of the Cincinnati Yale Club, and his gardening and golfing.

  Despite a record of continuous success, George Marshall was not satisfied by his career in the army. He had remained a lieutenant for fourteen years before being promoted to captain in mid-1916, and had considered resigning to seek out a business career while he was still young enough to make a fresh start. In 1916 and early 1917 he was for the most part in San Francisco, training civilian volunteers who came to learn drilling and other military skills as part of the national enthusiasm for the “preparedness” cause that President Wilson had taken up. Marshall was disappointed by the assignment. He had wanted to see combat in the war.

  One of the many reasons Americans were not paying attention to the conflict with Germany, even when it was only months or weeks away, was that to them at the time, the war—the war that made headlines in the press, the war that Marshall meant—was not the one in Europe; it was the undeclared war that the United States was waging in Mexico.

  HENRY ADAMS WAS PROVEN RIGHT in his belief (c. 1913) that Woodrow Wilson (“loathed in advance by everyone within my circuit, Democrat or Republican”) would not stop the American military involvements south of the border that had been so conspicuous a feature of the Roosevelt and Taft administrations. Far from it; Wilson proved to be the most interventionist of America’s Presidents. Even young Vandenberg, an American imperialist and an admirer of TR, denounced Wilson for establishing a “protectorate against the will and best wishes of the central Americans themselves” that was “bound to damn us now and forever.”

  Mexico was the principal theater of U.S. Army operations. The initial goal of the Wilson administration in 1913–14 was to overthrow the Mexican dictator, Victoriano Huerta; to accomplish this, Wilson ordered such actions as the occupation of Vera Cruz, the episode in 1914 in which Douglas MacArthur so distinguished himself.* Huerta resigned and fled the country in 1914. Huerta’s opponents then quarreled among themselves, and Wilson provided assistance to the forces of Venustiano Carranza, supported by Álvaro Obregón, against those of Pancho Villa, supported by Emiliano Zapata. In retaliation, Villa raided across the frontier in the United States, deliberately provoking Wilson to order U.S. Army troops into Mexico. Villa’s calculation apparently was that the invasion by the United States would be perceived as an intervention in support of President Carranza, which would so compromise the Mexican president as to unite all forces in the country against him.

  Having obtained the consent of the Carranza government, Wilson ordered American troops under the command of Brigadier General John J. Pershing to cross into Mexico in pursuit of Villa. On the morning of March 15, 1916, 5,000 of Pershing’s troops crossed the frontier, later to be followed by 10,000 more. Eventually four-fifths of the American regular army was occupied in the campaign on one side or the other of the border, and Wilson felt obliged to call up the National Guard. Forbidden the use of Mexico’s railroads by a government that did not want to appear to be a puppet of foreigners, the Americans had to bring along their supplies in horse-drawn covered wagons and in their few trucks. All eight of the U.S. Army airplanes intended for reconnaissance broke down in the first few weeks of the campaign. Pershing’s troops penetrated hundreds of miles into Mexico, through desert and rugged hill country, enduring temperatures as high as 122 degrees, riding and marching from one suspected haunt of the elusive Villa to another and never finding him.

  As the American troops crossed and crisscrossed Chihuahua province, Carranza turned against the gringo invaders and ordered the Mexican army to block their advance. The two armies clashed repeatedly but inconclusively. It was only to be expected that Mexico would turn for support to Japan or Germany.

  The American government knew that Mexican and Japanese officials had been in communication with one another, and knew, too, that German agents had been interested in embroiling the United States in a conflict with Mexico that would distract American attention from events in Europe. Urged to do so by Lansing, Wilson on January 25, 1917, ordered Pershing to withdraw from Mexico in order to strengthen the American position in dealing with warring Europe.

  Earlier that month Arthur Zimmermann, who had been promoted to foreign minister of Germany under pressure from the military, had traveled to Pless and obtained permission from the High Command to try to incite Mexico and Japan to attack the United States. In pursuance of his strategy, Zimmermann sent coded telegrams instructing the German imperial minister in Mexico to offer President Carranza an alliance: “MAKE WAR TOGETHER, GENEROUS FINANCIAL SUPPORT, AND AN UNDERSTANDING ON OUR PART THAT MEXICO IS TO RECONQUER … TEXAS, NEW MEXICO, AND ARIZONA.”

  Intercepted and decoded by British intelligence, the Zimmermann telegram was turned over to the United States government. On Wilson’s instructions, Lansing secretly released news of the cable to the Associated Press. The story provided banner headlines in the newspapers March 1. On March 3 Zimmermann, at a press conference in Berlin, admitted that the telegram was authentic.

  Predictably, publication of the Zimmermann telegram strengthened those who advocated intervening in the European war. But in his second inaugural address, delivered March 4, the President would take the country no further along the road to war, even while warning that events in Europe had “made us citizens of the world” and that “ther
e can be no turning back.”

  In pursuit of preparedness, the President ordered the arming of merchant vessels. But though he finally had brought the army back from Mexico, he still refused to bring the fleet back from the Caribbean.

  ON JANUARY 21, as German U-boat commanders readied their coming campaign against American shipping, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt left Washington to inspect American-occupied countries in the Caribbean. Roosevelt traveled with a party of friends in what was really a pleasure jaunt; he enjoyed the tropical sunshine, the sporting life, the daiquiris, the dancing, and the outdoor dining.

  Roosevelt had planned an itinerary for himself and his friends that consisted in touring Cuba and the two sides of Hispaniola, Haiti and Santo Domingo. The countries of Hispaniola were marine-occupied and navy-ruled, in theory to restore order but in practice to further American business interests. Roosevelt fell in with the official view that the American occupation was bringing civilization to savage lands.

  The trip was cut short by the break in relations with Germany; Secretary Daniels sent for Roosevelt in early February. Expecting war, Roosevelt was disappointed on returning to Washington to find that Wilson still was waiting on events.

  On a day when Daniels was out of town, Roosevelt, briefly acting as secretary, went to see the President to ask permission to order the fleet, then anchored in Cuba, to steam north to be fitted out in preparation for whatever hostilities might arise. Wilson refused. As Roosevelt later recalled, the President said that “I want history to show not only that we have tried every diplomatic means to keep out of the war; to show that war has been forced upon us deliberately by Germany; but also that we have come into the court of history with clean hands.”

  The reply did not satisfy Roosevelt, who on the war issue was on a collision course with the administration in which he served. Briefly he indulged in thoughts of resigning, which led Thomas Lamont, the Morgan banker then living in Roosevelt’s Manhattan house as his tenant, to express the hope that Daniels would retire “so that we could have the satisfaction of seeing you Secretary of the Navy!” The Navy League’s leader was ready to urge that Daniels be replaced by Roosevelt—though Roosevelt asked him not to do so—and others went forward to do so without asking his permission. Louis Howe, Roosevelt’s devoted assistant, surreptitiously organized a campaign along these lines.

  On Sunday morning, March 11, Roosevelt visited Edward House in New York and privately complained of Daniels being too slow in getting the fleet ready for war. More dangerously Roosevelt met that night with TR and several of his most powerful colleagues. Around the table at the eight o’clock dinner in a private room at the Metropolitan Club on Fifth Avenue, Roosevelt and the Republican President, who was his idol and the leading figure in his family, concerted strategy to push the Democratic President, who was his political chief, into line with their interventionist thinking.

  Roosevelt was so committed to the interventionist cause that he took to intriguing even with the most rabid of Republican anti-Wilson, anti-liberal anti-Democrats: Robert McCormick, a fellow Groton student and now publisher of the reactionary Chicago Tribune, to whom Roosevelt secretly supplied news stories. Such disloyalty to President Wilson and Secretary Daniels—his leaders in the Democratic party and in the government, to whom he owed his glamorous and highly visible job—has been put down by biographers to youthful selfishness, arrogance, and indiscretion. Similarly his enthusiasm for intervening on the Allied side, expressed immediately on the outbreak of war in 1914 and unwaveringly thereafter, has been interpreted as the unthinking desire of a shallow young man to be involved in an adventure in which he might earn glory.

  There appears to be some truth in that portrait of the youthful Roosevelt. Yet somehow it misses something. For later in life, too, Roosevelt, though lacking in depth and intellect, was to see what the United States had to do before others did. In both of the world wars of the twentieth century, Franklin Roosevelt and Walter Lippmann understood that America’s interests obliged the United States to intervene; but in both cases Roosevelt, a person of great charm but supposedly without much of a mind, understood this before the brilliant and highly educated Lippmann did.

  Comparing Henry Cabot Lodge with his political protégé, TR, Henry Adams had written that “Lodge was a creature of teaching,” while “Roosevelts are born and never can be taught.” Franklin shared with his cousin Theodore a feel for how the world works, and an instinctive sense of the national interests of the United States. He had no need to learn about these things in books.

  It was the intellectually lightweight Roosevelt rather than Wilson, America’s only Ph.D. President, who had the truer appreciation of Europe’s thinking and motives during the winter of 1916–17, as the President watched and waited and worried, refusing to anticipate that which he dreaded and half-expected to happen.

  THEN, AT LAST, the long-threatened attack occurred. On March 18 the German U-boats struck, torpedoing and sinking three unarmed American merchant vessels: the City of Memphis, the Illinois, and the Vigilancia. Wilson met with his cabinet March 20 to solicit counsel from its members as to whether to call the Congress into extraordinary session. If he did convene such a session, what (Wilson asked cabinet members) should he ask Congress to do? The President then listened to what each member of the cabinet in turn had to say. Every one of them advised calling Congress into session, and each—even pacifist Secretary Daniels, though with tears in his eyes—advised the President to ask for a declaration of war. “I think there is no doubt as to what your advice is,” Wilson told the cabinet members.

  Wilson gave no indication of his own views; but he did remark on the “apparent apathy of the Middle West.” This touched not only on his domestic political problem but on the more profound dilemma Wilson faced as the leader of a country of immigrants: Was it reasonable to expect the tens of millions of Americans born in Europe or of a European parent to sever blood ties to their native lands? Would it be fair to draft those born in Germany or of a German parent—about 10 percent of the population—and order them to kill Germans? Had their adopted country the right to ask that of them?

  It could be argued that until the melting pot process was completed, the United States was by its nature disabled from taking sides in a war in Europe. Wilson, as the British ambassador had reported to London some time before, feared that if America were drawn into the conflict between Britain and Germany, the United States might dissolve into ethnic tribes whose mutual antagonisms could well erupt into civil war.

  One thing was clear: even Americans who might be willing to fight against Germany would not be willing to do so merely to help Britain or France. Joseph Patrick Tumulty, the President’s faithful and longtime private secretary, wrote to him on March 24 that editorial opinion in newspapers all over the country was overwhelming; if the United States went to war against the Germans, “it should be on an issue directly between us and them.”

  Of course, choosing to fight Germany—even on an issue in contention just between Americans and Germans—inescapably meant fighting alongside the Allies. But that no longer was an unpalatable option: in mid-March the tsar’s regime collapsed in the first of the Russian revolutions of 1917. Tsarist government, loathed by Americans as tyrannical and reactionary, had tainted the Allied cause. A Russia seemingly moving toward democracy, on the other hand, was a fitting comrade in arms.

  After asking the Congress to reconvene in extraordinary session on April 2, the President, on the morning after his cabinet meeting, gave himself a sabbatical week. He played pool, went on outings, and spent time with his wife. Not until the week had ended did he start (on March 28) to flesh out an outline of the topics to be covered when he addressed Congress.

  Leaving word that he “did not wish to be disturbed by anyone,” Wilson then secluded himself in his library beginning March 30. He worked there by himself for days. His was the most agonizing decision for a President to make since April 1861, when Abraham Lincoln wa
s called upon to respond to the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter. What Wilson was about to do would mean a change in America’s relations with the outside world greater than any since July 4, 1776, when the Continental Congress voted in favor of a Declaration of Independence from Great Britain. Nobody had to remind Woodrow Wilson, once a professor of history, that his was the most fateful decision that an American leader had been called upon to make in the twentieth century.

  On April 2 the tensed, high-strung American leader was ready to do what had to be done, but the Congress was not; it took that deliberative body all day to get organized, while Wilson, under strain, waited at the White House. He showed his speech in advance only to Edward House, who had come down from New York to be with him. Afternoon came and went. At 6:30 p.m. the President, a few family members, and House sat down to dinner. After dinner, the time finally came; the President left the White House to go up the Hill.

  WASHINGTON, D.C., Monday evening, April 2. Bathed in floodlights, the shining white Capitol stood out against the darkness of the night sky as President Wilson drove toward it through the rain to ask Congress for a declaration of war against the German empire. Wilson’s career had been based on his eloquence as a public speaker, but this was to be more than eloquent: it was to be the speech of his life.

  Once arrived in an antechamber of the Capitol, he paused to prepare. Chin shaking, skin flushed, features distraught, he stared steadily at himself in a large mirror for a time as, by an effort of will, he made his face calm. Then, shortly after 8:30 p.m., he entered the chambers of the House of Representatives, where both houses of Congress had assembled. Squeezed just as Roosevelt and Daniels were into seats on the floor or in the visitors galleries were justices of the Supreme Court, members of the cabinet, foreign diplomats, and other dignitaries; but the President, as everyone present must have known, spoke that night to an audience far beyond the bounds of the Capitol building.