Germany, the President said, had attacked the United States by sinking three American vessels; and the only honorable course of action for America was to strike back.† The Germans had gone “beyond the pale of law” and should be treated as “pirates.” It was, said Wilson, with a “profound sense of the … tragical character of the step I am taking” that he asked the Congress to declare war.
The war that he asked Congress to declare was not to be in support of the Allies’ objectives, but of America’s, which were unlike theirs. “We have no selfish ends to serve,” he said, echoing the sentiments of his “peace without victory” proposal made ten weeks earlier. He distinguished the goals of the United States from those of England and France, who sought reparations for their losses and suffering, saying that Americans “seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make.”
The United States was responding to the attacks on its ships in March 1917. It still was not choosing sides in the conflict between rival coalitions about the rights and wrongs of the Sarajevo crisis of July 1914 and its immediate aftermath. So in his address that night, the President did not ask for declarations of war against Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire—Germany’s allies though they were in the 1914 war—for they had not joined in the 1917 attack against America. And as Wilson later was to make explicit, in fighting alongside England, France, Russia, and the others against Germany, the United States would be not an ally, but an associated power.
The United States would wage war against the German government but not against the German people. America was going to fight “for the ultimate peace of the world, and for the liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included.” The distinction that Wilson drew between the Germans and their government could be viewed as playing politics, for it enabled him to soften the impact of the blow he was striking at German-American voters. But even had no ethnic issue been involved, it would have been usual for an American leader to draw such a distinction—a distinction that was deeply rooted in the political thought of the United States. From the earliest days of the Republic, Americans had maintained that wars were caused only by the functioning of monarchies, and that there were no fundamental quarrels between peoples; if all countries were to become democracies, there would be no more wars.
These views always had sprung easily to the lips of an American politician, but in the First World War they were to have real consequences. For the difference between Wilson’s view of the challenge posed by the kaiser’s Germany and the views of Britain and France on that point were more than merely theoretical: they lay at the heart of the argument that Wilson had started with the Allies about the causes of the war and the terms of an eventual peace. The Allies believed that the fighting had its origins in Germany’s bid for mastery in Europe, and that the war was about power: Germany was too powerful relative to her neighbors, and she had to be radically weakened. Wilson, who already had indicated that he saw no point in blaming one side more than another, was arguing that the war was about political systems: Germany was militaristic in government and political culture, and she had to be radically changed—had, in fact, to be changed into a democracy.
But implicit in Wilson’s analysis was the proposition that it was not Germany alone that had to be changed; the rest of Europe had to be changed, too, as did the world that Europe had shaped in its own image in Africa and Asia. In a phrase that was to become famous, the President in his war message the night of April 2 invited Americans to join with him to “make the world safe for democracy.” There may have been some significance in the fact that the senator who first applauded that stirring phrase was deaf.‡ It is certainly doubtful whether the multitudes who acclaimed the President’s message that evening heard the overtones in his words—understood, that is, that he was summoning them to a crusade that could fairly be regarded, both in the noble sense and in the slighting one, as quixotic.
The theme upon which Wilson expanded was traditional: since George Washington’s day, the United States had refused to involve itself in Europe’s quarrels on the grounds that it would be dangerous and corrupting to do so. Wilson’s variation on the theme was to propose its converse: if the United States were forced nonetheless to become involved in the affairs of Europe’s world, America would be obliged to change that world so as not to be contaminated by it.
This was a natural extension of the thinking behind Wilson’s “peace without victory” speech ten weeks before, in which America now offered to emerge from isolation to play a continuing role in world affairs—but only on condition that the European powers forswear their own ambitions and make peace on America’s terms.
Now the United States, forced to take up arms, was going to fight not just to defeat and then remake the other side in the war, but to remake both sides: that is what Wilson was edging toward saying, without explaining how he was going to get victorious Britain, France, Russia, Italy, and the other Allies to change themselves and their ways once, with America’s help, they had won the war.
It was not until long afterward that such explanations were asked for and that Wilson’s seductive language was exposed to the cold glare of critical scrutiny. On the evening of April 2, all was given over to euphoria. The President concluded his address to cheers. As he left the Capitol, the crowds outside flocked around to shout their support. Within days the Senate and the House approved the war resolution that the President had proposed. He signed it on Good Friday, April 6, 1917, bringing the United States into the Great War. Wilson’s move, on a day normally reserved for commemoration of the Crucifixion, was inauspicious for those who feared that the war might be mankind’s road to Calvary.
At last America had found her new role in world affairs: she was to remake the world.
* See this page.
† In 1917 “honor” still was taken seriously. It was thought normal to go to war to uphold it—and shameful not to do so.
‡ Senator John Sharp Williams of Mississippi.
PART THREE
A CALLING HIGHER THAN SOLDIERING
12
A MISSED RENDEZVOUS
TO HEAR WOODROW WILSON’S war speech in person, the Michigan newspaper editor Arthur Vandenberg made the long trip to Washington. In the past he had accused Wilson of violating the spirit of American neutrality by not taking a strong stand against the British blockade. Now he thought the President was doing the right thing in making a stand against Germany. Often inconsistent and given to bursts of enthusiasm, Vandenberg was overwhelmed by the April 2 speech. Once he had idolized TR, but now he had found a new idol; he later wrote that “from that date Wilson was my President just as completely as though I had personally named him.”
In this he did not speak for the Middle West as a whole. The region’s popular Progressive Republican leaders, Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin and Senator George Norris of Nebraska, denounced the war as serving only the purposes of European imperialism. So did the Socialist leaders, presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs and former Milwaukee Congressman Victor Berger. Though ethnic passions ran high (“I do like the Kaiser. I am a German and will fight for Germany” was a statement not untypical of those made by Wisconsin defendants who were prosecuted during the war for unpatriotic speech or conduct), it was not only the German-American electorate to whom La Follette and the others appealed. These men also attracted strands of idealist opinion that President Wilson thought of as his own, and Wilson resented them much as lovers resent rivals.
Walter Lippmann’s particular value to Wilson and House was that he was seemingly able to bring over to their side the Progressive and Socialist idealists who might otherwise have followed La Follette, Norris, Debs, and Berger—or even the former Progressive presidential candidate Theodore Roosevelt, who attacked the President from the other political flank. Lippmann, whose first political love, like Vandenberg’s, had been TR, wrote to President Wilson April 3 that “I have tried to say a little of wha
t I feel about your address in the following words, which are to appear in The New Republic this week.” In the paragraph that followed, and that appeared in the magazine a few days later, Lippmann wrote: “For having seen … that this is a war between democracy and autocracy … our debt and the world’s debt to Woodrow Wilson is immeasurable.… Only a statesman who will be called great could have made America’s intervention mean so much to the generous forces of the world, could have lifted the inevitable horror of war into a deed so full of meaning.”
It was Lippmann’s special gift to be able to articulate what others felt but could not put into words. Among the outstanding men in their twenties and early thirties who had grown up worshiping TR and now transferred their allegiance to Woodrow Wilson, there seems to have been a sense that the President was supplying something that they had needed but until then had lacked: a moral framework for the sense of mission that TR initially had inspired in them. Theodore Roosevelt, who thought war glorious, had urged them to do battle in order to prove that they were tough enough to meet the best that other countries could field; while Wilson, who thought war terrible, called on them to fight only in order to make the world better—to make it a world in which there would be no more wars. Wilson appealed to their belief that they and their country were exceptional: that their goal was not (as TR’s was) to prove that America now was the equal of Europe, but rather to make Europe, now morally inferior, as good as America. Unlike TR, Wilson did not ask them to undergo hardship or horrors for their own sake; he asked them to do so in pursuit of a moral ideal. To that which they were about to experience in the trenches of the western front, Wilson thereby had given, in Lippmann’s word, a meaning.
THE WILSON ADMINISTRATION, facing the question of how America could best contribute to the war effort, at first thought in terms of fulfilling a support function: of supplying loans, financial credits, food, war matériel, and transport to the Allies and their armies. When British and French statesmen arrived in Washington in April 1917 to coordinate war plans, they made it evident that this was not enough: they needed soldiers, too.
The American army of which President Wilson was commander in chief in April 1917 was smaller than that which had fought under General Washington’s command in the eighteenth century; and it had been designed for Indian fighting. Without committing himself on the issue of what role U.S. ground forces would play in the warfare on the continent of Europe once America’s armies were raised and ready, Wilson, in response to Allied pleas, ordered a buildup of the U.S. Army.
The President was determined to plan the war effort in a rational and systematic way. His administration instituted a draft, after opposition had been overcome through a public relations campaign led for the War Department by Major Douglas MacArthur. Wilson’s conscription program—selective service, as it was called—was designed to call able-bodied young men to the colors without disrupting the flow of industrial and agricultural production that the President expected would provide the United States with the key to victory. Emphasis was placed on exempting from military or combat service those who could make a greater contribution in some other capacity.
Those who were rejected for military service as physically unfit, or who obtained exemption from service, were of course in various frames of mind as to how to think about it. Some took it for granted that if they could accomplish more for their country in some civilian or staff position, it would be wrong for them to serve in combat. Others were persuaded that they were shirking their duty—or at any rate would be thought by others to be cowards—if they were not engaged in battle. As happens in wartime, the country was swept by patriotic ardor and challenged by such examples of bravery as that of Alan Seeger.
Seeger, born in New York City and a college classmate of Walter Lippmann’s and John Reed’s, was a poet little known before the war, whose works sometimes were published in The New Republic. When the European war began in the summer of 1914, he embraced the Allied cause and enlisted in the French Foreign Legion. He served almost continuously in combat for the next two years. Attacking a German-held village in northern France in 1916, he was mortally wounded by machine-gun fire on July 4, and died the next day.
Of all the poems out of the United States about the war, Seeger’s “I Have a Rendezvous with Death” became the most famous: “I have a rendezvous with Death/ At some disputed barricade,” he wrote, and “I shall not fail that rendezvous.” Others of the elite of his generation—Groton boys, and Yale and Harvard men—were bound to be affected by their sense of whether their appointed place, too, had been at some disputed barricade.
ROBERT A. TAFT WAS NOTHING if not honest. The prosaic young Ohio lawyer admitted that he did not want to be a soldier; but he had a strong sense of duty that led him to try to enlist in the armed forces. He was rejected as physically unfit (his eyes were weak).
Determined nonetheless to perform national service in wartime, Taft went to work for Herbert Hoover’s Food Administration in Washington, D.C. He served as one of the four attorneys designated as assistant counsel. As such, he dealt with such regulatory matters as the pricing and grading of food products. It was congenial work for a young lawyer who enjoyed paying attention to detail, and he was good at it. He probably would have made an indifferent soldier; he served his country far more effectively as the capable attorney he was. Yet as he rightly observed, “My failure to enter the army requires and always will require explanation, and I shall always feel that those who have suffered in the war … are regarding me as one who failed to do his real duty.”
Arthur Vandenberg seemed to be troubled by no such feelings. Though an ardent supporter of TR and an enthusiast for the American side of the world war (“the greatest revival the world has known since Christ came upon the earth”), the young newspaperman, a widower with three young children, felt that family responsibilities precluded him from enlisting or serving in the armed forces.
The outbreak of war found international lawyer John Foster Dulles in Central America on a secret mission for his uncle, Secretary of State Lansing. Dulles, who was experienced in doing business in that part of the hemisphere on behalf of corporate clients, had been instructed by Lansing to make sure that whenever the United States declared war on Germany, Panama—site of the canal vital to the U.S. Navy—declared war, too. His mission accomplished, Dulles returned to the United States to be appointed by Lansing as state’s special counsel for Central American affairs. Dulles applied for entrance into Officer Training School in the summer of 1917, but like Taft, he was rejected because of poor eyesight. Dulles succeeded, however, in obtaining a direct commission as a captain in the Signal Corps, assigned to intelligence duties, and became head of the economic section of the Military Intelligence General Staff. It was a position for which he was well qualified, and he had become even more of an enthusiast for Woodrow Wilson, whose teaching had meant so much to him in college. Dulles was enthralled by Wilson’s vision of making the Allied war effort into something higher: into “an idealistic crusade” for a world based on international cooperation.
James Forrestal, if he had to serve, wanted to do so as an officer, too. The Wall Street bond salesman, facing a call by the Naval Reserve, applied instead for a commission in the Marine Corps, but was turned away by a recruiting sergeant who said (as Forrestal later recalled), “I see that you’re another one of those goddamn leaders. Well, we’ve got enough of them, and we don’t need any more.” Called to service in the navy, Forrestal trained as an aviator and spent his war at staff headquarters in the United States.
Joseph P. Kennedy pulled political strings to get a job that would exempt him from the draft. He became accountant and assistant general manager of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation’s Fore River Shipyard at Quincy, Massachusetts. Though lacking in physical courage, he was tough as a businessman, and made money out of avoiding military service: he was earning a base salary of $20,000 a year (then a large sum of money), plus a bonus, and profited in addition by owning the c
afeteria at which many of the 22,000 workers ate. Though most of the credit belonged to others, Kennedy’s shipyards broke production records. But according to Ralph Lowell, a Boston patrician, the Harvard class of ’12 to which they both belonged “didn’t appreciate a man not going into the war, as, for instance, in the case of Joe”; and one of Kennedy’s biographers writes that later, “Kennedy confessed to a twinge of regret at having remained a civilian.”
Averell Harriman also went into shipbuilding. With money borrowed from his mother, he bought an interest in a shipyard in February 1917, after the United States broke relations with Germany, and acquired the rest in April after the declaration of war. He then acquired a second shipyard and financially consolidated the two companies. He and his associates put $9 million in the venture and obtained favorable contracts from the government—initially, as he wrote to his brother, to build eighty-seven ships. The government put in $92 million and guaranteed him profits on the vessels he was to construct. Harriman undertook also to create a new town, a new plant, and new shipbuilding facilities; but under his management, the record was dismal. He was able to launch only one vessel during the war. When the director-general of the United States Shipping Board wrote to him on August 23, 1918, to ask where the ships were and to remark, “This seems to me to be an awfully bad record,” Harriman wrote (but did not send) a reply blaming conditions inherited from previous management.
In a magazine interview in 1920, Harriman remarked of his wartime shipbuilding that “I felt that in no other way could I contribute half as much to the urgent needs of the nation in the supreme emergency that had arisen.” But in a book published more than a half-century later, he was paraphrased as saying that “he had long regretted the family and business circumstances that had kept him out of action in the world war.” He went on to say that “I felt very strongly there should be a draft. Intellectually, I could reason that I had done the right thing, because I thought that shipping was the real bottleneck of World War I. But emotionally, I never felt entirely comfortable.” He went on to suggest that this emotional discomfort may have been responsible for the missions he later was to undertake in the Second World War: “That tended to square the balance.”
In the Time of the Americans Page 17
