So, when, during the 1916 campaign, he described America as “too proud to fight,” he was not rationalizing the nation’s disengagement from events in Europe, as critics thought. In his mind the phrase summed up why the United States had an absolute moral duty to stay aloof from those conflicts no matter what the provocation.
When the German peace offer landed on his desk at the White House, then, Wilson’s reaction was very different from that of leaders in Paris, London, and Petrograd. He saw it dovetailing perfectly with his own plans. Back in November, he had told his most intimate adviser, Colonel House—they often shared a bedroom while on the road—that he wanted to write a note to the belligerents demanding that they cease hostilities. Bethmann-Hollweg’s note was therefore the perfect opening for Wilson to begin drafting a peace note of his own, which he finished on December 18, 1916.
President Wilson’s peace note was passed along to America’s ambassador in London, Walter Hines Page. In introducing it, U.S. secretary of state Robert Lansing pointed out that President Wilson “is somewhat embarrassed to offer it at this particular time because it may now seem to have been prompted by the recent overtures of the Central powers. It is in no way associated with them in its origin,” Lansing hastened to add; he also pointed out that the president “can only beg that his suggestion be considered entirely on its own merits and as if it had been made in other circumstances.”
This preface by his secretary of state was, in effect, Wilson’s put-down of the Germans and their transparently disingenuous peace offer. Everyone, including Wilson, grasped that Bethmann-Hollweg’s note had been aimed not at suing for peace, but at breaking up the Entente. Yet, writing in the third person, Wilson then proceeded to administer the same medicine to the Allies: “[The U.S. president] takes the liberty of calling attention to the fact that the objects which the statesmen of the belligerents on both sides have in mind in this war are virtually the same.” Whether Germany or France or Britain or Russia, “each side desires to make the rights and privileges of weak people and small States as secure against aggression and denial in the future as the rights and privileges of the great and powerful States now at war.” By “small states” he meant Belgium on the Allied side and Bulgaria on the Central powers side.
“Each wishes itself to be made secure in the future . . . ,” the president went on. “Each would be jealous of the formation of any more rival leagues to preserve an uncertain balance of power amidst multiplying suspicions; but each is ready to consider the formation of a league of nations to insure peace and justice throughout the world.”
So, there it was: a “league of nations,” an idea that would have a controversial and bitter history before Wilson was done with it, but one that was injected into the discussion in order to offer the combatants in Europe a way out of the world order that had led to history’s bloodiest conflict.
“But,” Wilson warned, “the war must first be concluded.” It was not up to him or the American people to propose what terms were needed to end it, he hastened to add. However, regarding “the measures to be taken to secure the future peace of the world[,] the people and Government of the United States are as vitally and as directly interested as the Governments now at war.” Therefore, “the President feels altogether justified in suggesting an immediate opportunity for a comparison of views as to the terms which must precede those ultimate arrangements for the peace of the world.”
On what terms would the various combatants accept a final negotiated peace? “The leaders of the several belligerents have, as has been said, stated those objects in general terms. But, stated in general terms, they seem the same on both sides.” Perhaps “peace is nearer than we know; that the terms which the belligerents on the one side and on the other would deem it necessary to insist upon are not so irreconcilable as some have feared.” But now had come the time, Wilson insisted, to spell out those terms in more detail: what kinds of concrete guarantees, what kinds of territorial changes or readjustments, “what stage of military success even,” would be needed to bring the war to an end.
Wilson finished by saying that he was not proposing peace, or even offering to mediate. “He is merely proposing that soundings be taken in order that we may learn, the neutral nations with the belligerent, how near the haven of peace may be for which all mankind longs . . .” while “he confidently hopes for a response which will bring a new light into the affairs of the world.”26
The feelings in London, Paris, Berlin, and Petrograd when Wilson’s note arrived are not difficult to imagine. It’s not often that world leaders get lectured to by one of their own, admonished as if they were errant schoolchildren who needed to be brought to account. But it was a particularly bitter blow to the French and British. The French press declared it the worst blow the country had received in twenty-nine months of war. It is even said that King George V wept when he read it.27
What Wilson had done was declare a moral equivalence between the Entente and the Central powers. Both were fighting for the same thing, the American president said, a position London and Paris vehemently denied. From their perspective, the whole justification since August 1914 had been that they were the forces of civilization fighting against their opposite, while the Germans were ruthless and bloodthirsty Huns whose aggression and violations of international law knew no bounds.
However, both Lloyd George and Briand understood that how they answered the American president mattered a great deal more than how they had answered the German chancellor’s peace note. Both very much wanted the United States on their side, and both were very much relieved when, on December 27, Arthur Zimmermann, the new German foreign minister, gave Wilson’s proposal a vigorous thumbs-down. Lloyd George and Briand had another concern. They knew Wilson was very close to severing the financial lifeline on which Britain, France, and Russia were entirely dependent.
On December 1, 1916, the bankers at J.P. Morgan had been set to issue a new Anglo-French bond worth at least $1.5 billion—the equivalent of the entire cost of the Somme offensive. On November 27, however, the Federal Reserve Board suddenly sent a letter to all its member banks stating that it was no longer desirable for American investors to increase their holdings in British and French securities. Wall Street immediately flew into a panic. The British pound sterling sank like a stone; J.P. Morgan, after hurriedly deciding to postpone its bond offering, had to use its own considerable reserves to prop up the pound, as did the UK treasury. Also, Britain had to suspend its support of French purchasing.28
In a single day, the Allies’ entire financial support network hovered on the brink of collapse.
It had all been Wilson’s doing, the response to a note he had sent to the Federal Reserve shortly before the election. The president was determined not to let America’s financial entanglement with the Allies’ cause draw it further into support of their war effort. The Allies were just as determined to use that leverage to get America “all in”—that is, unless Wilson decided to use their dependence on Wall Street to force them to sue for peace.
Everything depended, then, on how they replied to Wilson’s December 18 peace note. So, on January 10, 1917, even as the Entente powers were planning to meet in Petrograd to coordinate their strategy for the next phase of the war, they responded with a document carefully worded to elicit Wilson’s sympathy.
If they could not draw America into the war, the plan was at least to keep the money and supplies flowing.
For the first time after nearly two and a half years of war, the Allies were forced to state in detail what they were fighting for. The result was a revealing, even revolutionary document. With regard to Germany, their demands were easy: the evacuation of neutral Belgium and territory taken in western Russia; the restoration of the governments of Serbia and Romania; the return to France of Alsace and Lorraine, which Germany had taken in the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. With regard to Germany’s allies Turkey and Austria-Hungary, however, the Entente’s demands were more complicated. They include
d “the liberation of the Italians, as also of the Slavs, Romanians, and Czechoslovaks from foreign domination,” meaning domination by Austria, and “the freeing of the populations subject to the bloody tyranny,” meaning all the peoples living from Armenia and Mesopotamia to Syria, Arabia, and Palestine.
In a single swipe, the Allies were saying that peace would require the breakup of both the Habsburg and the Ottoman Empires, which together represented more than a thousand years of history. It said nothing about other empires, or about the liberation of the Poles, since Czar Nicholas was their ally. Nothing, of course, about Britain’s overseas empire, or France’s. (In fact, that spring, Britain had ruthlessly suppressed the one attempt at national liberation during the entire war, by the Irish in the Easter Rebellion.) Yet Britain and France were now on record as saying that they were fighting not just to defeat Germany but also to free subject peoples from centuries of imperial rule. In so doing, they put a new term on the diplomatic table for the first time: national self-determination. It was a concept deeply embedded in nineteenth-century liberalism, one that had roused up Europe (including Germany) once before, in the revolutions of 1848, and one they assumed (correctly) would connect with a self-declared Progressive such as Wilson.
Sure enough, Wilson was impressed. Just twelve days later, he responded with a speech that would be one of the most important of his career, one that fired the signal pistol for a new era in world affairs.
As such, January 22, 1917, also marked a milestone in American history. Wilson decided to deliver the speech before the Senate, the first time a president had done so since George Washington. Copies would be distributed to every major capital in Europe at the same time. He also did what no president had ever done, not Washington nor Jefferson nor Abraham Lincoln nor even Theodore Roosevelt: he explained why American leadership was essential to the world.
Wilson began by asserting that the Founding Fathers had set up their new nation in the hope that it would “show mankind the way to liberty.” It was up to America now not to withhold that solemn service, nor to try to offer the service alone. Instead, if it cooperated with other nations “through a formal and solemn adherence to a League for Peace” to guarantee peace, then Wilson was prepared to take that unprecedented step.
He made it very clear that his goal in the current world war was not to choose sides but to make peace. His term for it was “peace without victory.” He said that “victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor’s terms imposed upon the vanquished.” Such a peace would only breed shame and resentment on the part of the loser, “a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand.”
But a peace without victory America (or, more precisely, Woodrow Wilson himself) was prepared to help mediate. It would come, however, with certain inviolable principles. One would be, picking up on the phrase the Allies had used, national self-determination (“no right anywhere exists to hand peoples from sovereignty as if they were property”), along with freedom of the seas, a shot at Britain’s policy of stop-and-search naval blockades and at Germany’s conduct of submarine warfare. Another principle was formal limitations on armaments, which would allow countries to keep their armies and navies “a power for order merely, not an instrument of aggression or of selfish violence.” (Just how one decided which was which, especially among the Great Powers, was not explained.)
If these requirements seemed unrealistic, that did not bother Wilson. He was convinced he was “speaking for the silent mass of mankind everywhere who have as yet had no place or opportunity to speak their real hearts out concerning the death and ruin they see to have come already upon the persons and the homes they hold most dear.” So, having spoken for mankind, Wilson left the podium.29
Some were bowled over by the speech, which made “peace without victory” an international catchphrase just as Wilson’s note of December 18 had done with “league of nations.” Editor Herbert Croly of the New Republic, the house organ of high-grade Progressivism, was quoted as calling it the greatest event of his life. Wilson’s secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, told the president that “the basis of peace you propose is a new philosophy . . . that is, new to governments but as old as the Christian religion.” It would put Wilson, Bryan averred, “among the Immortals.”30
Theodore Roosevelt was less impressed. He wrote that “peace without victory is the natural ideal of the man who is too proud to fight”—a sideways shot at Wilson’s manhood and his naïveté. Roosevelt also reminded Americans that in 1776 it was the Tories, the loyalists to Britain, who had preached “peace without victory,” and likewise the Copperheads, or sympathizers with the slave-owning South, who preached the same during the Civil War. “Now Mr. Wilson is asking the world to accept a Copperhead peace of dishonor; a peace without victory for the right; a peace designed to let wrong triumph; a peace championed in neutral countries by the apostles of timidity and greed.”31
Another critic was Roosevelt’s friend the senator from Massachusetts Henry Cabot Lodge. Lodge had once been a supporter of the League to Enforce Peace, the organization founded by former U.S. president William Howard Taft, who had applauded Wilson’s efforts to end the war without entering the conflict. Now Lodge found the speech to be “collections of double-dealing words under which men can hide and say they mean anything and nothing.”32 His criticism, like Roosevelt’s, stung the sensitive president to the quick. Wilson and Lodge were slated to speak together at a centennial celebration at St. John’s Church in Washington, DC. When Wilson learned that Lodge was on the program, he declined to appear.33
The accusation that Wilson was either a coward or a hypocritical double-dealer was as unfair as it was inaccurate. But just what did he mean by pushing a program of “peace without victory”?
In looking over that remarkable speech, it’s clear that Wilson was raising America up as the new global colossus based on its moral authority as a universal nation. The United States already had the world’s leading economy; now it was poised to be the world’s moral master as well, towering over the course of world civilization. There is no doubt that Wilson was a strong believer in American exceptionalism. But his version of American exceptionalism was one that put other nations at a severe disadvantage, as benighted and ignorant of the true course of history, which Wilson (and Wilson alone of world leaders) understood. The outbreak and course of world war only confirmed that verdict. This was why Wilson was willing to set aside arguments about whether Germany had “caused” the war. The war was a disease that all the Great Powers of Europe had carried in their political DNA, as it were. Now it was up to America, and Woodrow Wilson, to point the way to the cure.
Yet, by making that argument, Wilson had also done something unexpected. He had put America and Germany at the same starting point, as far as peace negotiations went. Bethmann-Hollweg’s December 12 offer and Wilson’s “Peace Without Victory” note had suddenly converged.
Only one man saw this, and realized what an opportunity for Germany it had opened up. That was the German ambassador in Washington, Johann von Bernstorff. He sent a note to his supervisor, pointing out that if Germany were to accept Wilson’s terms for negotiation now, on the basis of his speech, it would be able to keep all its conquests, using the ones it didn’t want as bargaining chips in a final peace settlement brokered by Wilson and the United States.
Indeed, right after the speech, Wilson told House, “If Germany really wants peace, she can get it, and get it soon, if she will but confide in me and let me have a chance . . . Do they in fact want me to help?” Bernstorff was urging Berlin to say yes before it was too late.34
In the end, Berlin said no. It ranks among the great missed opportunities in history, of which there would be several more as 1917 unfolded. That January, Germany had never looked stronger; by accepting peace without victory, it would actually have been the clear winner, while Wilson could have used America’s financial leverage to force Britain, France, and Rus
sia to go along.
In fact, Wilson’s offer was already too late. On January 9, Ludendorff had overridden the objections of Bethmann-Hollweg and compelled the government to restart unrestricted submarine warfare on the last day of the month, January 31. Even as Wilson was striding to the podium to deliver his “Peace Without Victory” speech, German U-boats were silently headed deep into the Atlantic, to form a wide arc of death along the French and British coastlines.35 When he learned of the government’s decision, Bernstorff made one last stab at stopping the madness of resuming unrestricted attacks on neutral ships, including American ones. “If submarine warfare is now begun without further ado,” he wrote in an anguished note on January 27, “the President will take this as a slap in the face and war with the United States cannot be avoided . . . In my view the end of the war will be unforeseeable because—despite all that can be said to the contrary—the power and resources of the United States are very great.”36
The note was useless. Even if Ludendorff had wanted to accept Wilson’s offer, there was no way to halt the U-boats on their deadly mission. But Ludendorff and the other German generals were not so convinced that Wilson would enter the war. Their gamble was that even when American ships began to be sunk in greater numbers, Wilson would still hesitate to choose sides in a conflict that, as he had stated over and over again, was of no concern to the United States—and now with his peace offer on the table, it would be even more imperative that the United States not choose sides, in order to preserve its moral leadership over the planet.
That was, of course, the Allies’ worst fear: that Wilson’s high-minded message and assumption of world leadership—Wilson “thinks he’s president of the world,” one disgruntled listener said after the speech37—had doomed America to the sidelines for good. In Britain, a young treasury official named John Maynard Keynes was issuing warnings about how the entire Allied war effort now depended on Wilson’s keeping the credit flowing from America. Britain’s prime minister, Lloyd George, was more convinced than ever that only American intervention could break the stalemate.
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