1917

by Arthur Herman, PhD

  The debate raged from midmorning until six that evening. Emotions ran red hot, as they would in the debate over the Armed Ship Bill, which was put off until March 4, the last day of the congressional session. At stake for many were existential questions: What kind of country was America going to be? What would be its place in the world, and how would it be received by other nations once it committed itself to a war far beyond its shores? Lodge knew the battle would be intense; it was one reason Senator La Follette carried a gun with him in those tense days (his fear that he would have to defend himself physically against the bill’s proponents proved unfounded: the gun went home unused). Either way, America was headed with great rapidity toward a dark and indefinite shore, and there were some in its highest deliberative body who feared others might not stop at violence to prevent its ever reaching that distant landing.

  At six o’clock, the debate finally ebbed. A redrafted resolution, merely asking the president to provide whatever information he safely could regarding the telegram, passed unanimously in the Senate. Lodge was satisfied. The ball was now in Wilson’s court.

  Wilson, for once, did not hold back or retreat into the recesses of his mind and conscience before responding to the resolution. By eight o’clock, the senators (those who were still in session) had their answer. Wilson could indeed vouch for the authenticity of the Zimmermann telegram, although he could not disclose exactly how he knew it was genuine. He also made it clear that he had received it “during the present week,” blowing away speculation that he had been sitting on the telegram for a month, waiting for the right moment to expose it. Other than that, President Woodrow Wilson had nothing to say about the telegram, its contents, or their implications.18

  As the president’s note was read, Lodge was ecstatic. “We have tied the note to Wilson,” he wrote to Theodore Roosevelt. “We have got Wilson in a position where he cannot deny it.” As the significance of what Germany had proposed—nothing less than the reannexation of Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico by Mexico, and a possible Japanese invasion of the West Coast—sank in, the public would demand war, and Wilson would be helpless to stand in their way. “[Wilson] does not mean to go to war,” Lodge concluded, “but I think he is in the grip of events.” And Lodge, Roosevelt, and their Republican allies would do everything in their power to keep him there.19

  Still, Lodge did not count on the resilience of the antiwar party. Even after the president’s testimony that the telegram was genuine, newspaper editors and some senators simply refused to believe it. Publisher William Randolph Hearst told his editors to continue branding the Zimmermann telegram as “in all probability a fake and forgery.”20 It wasn’t just antiwar ideologues or isolationists who doubted the telegram’s bona fides. Captain Guy Gaunt, British Naval Intelligence’s man in Washington, was at a swank dinner at the Knickerbocker Club in New York City when the guests, almost all of whom were Anglophiles but resolutely anti-interventionist, “went after me,” as he recalled later. They were unanimous in their conviction that the whole thing was a forgery and a setup, and they demanded from him proof that the telegram was real, even though Gaunt warned them that to provide proof would put many lives at risk.

  Finally, he told them he was surprised they were willing to interrogate him “instead of accepting the word of your President.” That halted the cross-examination, but Gaunt was forced to finish his meal surrounded by a table of skeptics who included a former U.S. ambassador to Britain, a former U.S. secretary of state, and the president of Columbia University.21

  Even when Wilson met with his Cabinet the next day, March 2, there were several skeptics sitting around the table. What chiefly worried the Cabinet, however, was what would happen if Zimmermann himself called a press conference and denounced the document as a fake. (So far, the German government had maintained a stony silence regarding the entire affair, while the Mexicans and the Japanese had delivered steadfast denials.) Then it would be the president’s word against that of a minister of a foreign country that was busy sinking American ships, and there was some concern about which one the American public would believe.

  The opponents of the Armed Ship Bill were not put off by the president’s avowal. On March 4, hopes for passing the bill died, as the senators Bob La Follette of Wisconsin and George Norris of Nebraska led a filibuster against it until time ran out. Wilson received the news as he was putting on his formal dress pants and cutaway coat. March 4, as it happened, was the day of his second inauguration. Wilson’s ringing words on receiving the news—“a little band of wilful men representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great Government of the United States helpless and contemptible”—would become famous. But there was no denying it was a bad way to start a second term.

  As was the second inaugural ceremony, one of the strangest, an observer said, that anyone could remember. It was a miserable, wet day. Armed guards watched from rooftops all along the parade route, the heaviest security for an inauguration since the Civil War. Wilson’s speech was perfunctory, hastily written, and read in such a driving wind that only those closest to the rostrum could hear it. Wilson repeated the theme of the need for the United States to remain neutral, but also warned that the day might come when it would be drawn into “a more immediate association with the great struggle itself.”

  Wilson concluded on an almost plaintive note: “I beg your tolerance, your countenance and your continued aid. The shadows that now lie dark upon our path will soon be dispelled and we shall walk with the light all about us if we be but true to ourselves.”22 Then the weather cleared somewhat, and he and Mrs. Wilson held hands as they sat on the porch of the White House to watch the inaugural fireworks.

  One of those shadows he had mentioned was the lingering doubt over the authorship of the Zimmermann telegram and Wilson’s motive for releasing it. In fact, as the week progressed, skepticism regarding the telegram refused to fade. It was becoming clear that there was only one way the skeptics would be persuaded that the Zimmermann telegram was the real thing. (Even if the British government had made a clean breast of the whole thing, including Room 40, the announcement would probably have fallen on deaf ears.) That would be for someone in the German or Mexican or Japanese government, or even Zimmermann himself, to confirm that it was true—although no one could imagine anyone involved making such a bald-faced blunder.

  Then, almost unbelievably, that’s exactly what Arthur Zimmermann did.

  On March 3, Zimmermann had called a press conference, almost certainly to comment on the story raging in the United States regarding the telegram he had allegedly sent and what proof President Wilson had that it was genuine. One of the American reporters, a pro-German journalist named William Bayard Hale, who, it later turned out, was secretly in the pay of the German government, buttonholed Zimmermann before the conference began.

  “Of course Your Excellency will deny this story,” Hale blurted out. Zimmermann turned to him. “I cannot deny it,” he replied glumly; “it is true.”23

  “Zimmermann’s admission,” writes historian Barbara Tuchman, “shattered the indifference with which three-quarters of the United States had regarded the war until that moment.” It was a far greater national shock than the sinking of the Lusitania two years earlier. That disaster had involved a catastrophic but, still, accidental loss of life, however barbaric the deed. This was a deliberate plot against America, a proposed alliance of Teutonic, Latin, and Oriental despotism to tear the country apart. Almost overnight, opinion in newspapers around the country experienced a seismic shift. The Prussian Invasion Plot, as it was now called, rallied patriotic sentiment like nothing since the British set fire to the White House during the War of 1812. It also changed the perception of the war raging in Europe, and about which side was right and which wrong. “The issue shifts,” wrote the Omaha World-Herald, “from Germany against Great Britain to Germany against the United States.”24

  Under the circumstances, Congress probably would have demanded Wilson come to a joi
nt session and declare war on Germany—would have dragged him there, if need be. But Congress was out of session, and would be until April 16. Until then, Wilson was on his own, and he still was not willing to commit himself or the country to an act that would irrevocably change its destiny, and his, to light the future of the world.

  On March 12, even as Czar Nicholas was ordering General Ivanov to take command of Petrograd and declare martial law, a German submarine, U-62, sank the American steamship Algonquin near the Isles of Scilly off Great Britain. No lives were lost, but it was a warning that “armed neutrality” might no longer be enough.

  On March 18 came even worse news. Three ships, the steamship Vigilancia, the City of Memphis, and the oil tanker Illinois, had all gone down to German U-boats in the waters surrounding the British Isles. Fifteen Americans were dead. The possibility of heading off the pressure for war was fast diminishing even for a man as determined as Woodrow Wilson.

  Two days later, the Cabinet met. Every member recommended a declaration of war against Germany.25 It is doubtful that, even then, Wilson would have moved to accept their verdict if other news had not broken a few days before.

  Russia’s czar, Nicholas II, had abdicated his throne, and a new Provisional Government composed of members of the Duma had taken over. After nearly three hundred years, the Romanov dynasty of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great was at an end, and Russia was poised to become a parliamentary democracy for the first time in its history.

  PETROGRAD, MARCH 13

  WHAT HAD HAPPENED? The what-ifs surrounding the Russian Revolution, including the so-called February Revolution (so called because events took place according to a Russian calendar that was thirteen days behind the calendar used in the United States and the rest of the West), are many, but one in particular stands out. When Czar Nicholas left Mogilev to return to the capital in the early morning hours of March 13, in order to avoid slowing up Ivanov’s advance on Petrograd, his train did not take the direct route to his residence at Tsarskoye. Instead, the czar took a roundabout route by rail, traveling first in the direction of Moscow and then turning back northwestward, toward Tsarskoye. Had he taken the more direct route, he would have been back with the czarina on March 14, and she might have saved him from the series of blunders he would make in the next forty-eight hours.26

  Instead, he would not reach Tsarskoye until March 17. By the time his wife finally saw him, he was no longer czar.

  The extraordinary breakdown of law and order in Petrograd that began in the first week of March had created an authority vacuum in the capital. Two other institutions were ready to step forward and assume control of the city, and therefore of Russia. One was the workers’ soviet that sprang up in the early days of the Petrograd revolution and that became the object of discussion of two Mensheviks, K. A. Gvozdev and B. Bogdanov (no relation to Lenin’s adversary A. A. Bogdanov), who had been freed from prison by the revolutionary mob on March 12. Their idea was to turn the Petrograd Soviet into a democratic governing body, with soldiers, workers, and other citizens of Petrograd coming to the Tauride Palace to elect their representatives. In short, the Petrograd Soviet was a Menshevik project from the start; the formation of its Provisional Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, or Ispolkom, was done on the spur of the moment that night, with fewer than two hundred fifty people present, of whom only forty were actually considered eligible to vote.27

  The entire membership of the Ispolkom at the time consisted of eight or nine men, including some Mensheviks and two self-styled Socialist Revolutionaries, Nikolai Chkheidze, who became chairman, and Alexander Kerensky. The committee resolved to publish a newspaper, Izvestia, to spread its revolutionary message, and to ask the Provisional Government that the Duma was putting together to withhold funds from the State Bank and other institutions. It was a modest request from an institution that soon would become crucial to the future of Russia, but in the tumultuous days of March 1917, no one anticipated how potentially powerful the Ispolkom would become or how whoever was a member and whoever had the dominant voice would determine the future of Russia.

  The Petrograd Soviet’s Ispolkom was one institution trying to fill the authority vacuum; the other was the Duma. At first, its chairman, Mikhail Rodzianko, had refused other members’ requests that he disobey the czar’s order to dissolve the parliamentary body. But he did ask Nicholas for permission to form a new Cabinet. When he heard no reply, he consented to a meeting of the entire Duma to decide what to do next. It met on March 12, even as General Ivanov was receiving his marching orders. As one eyewitness described it, the members were “frightened, excited, somehow spiritually clinging to one another” for support. What scared them wasn’t the prospect of loyal czarist troops descending on Petrograd; it was the hundreds of thousands of armed rioters swarming in and around the Duma building. “One could feel its hot breath” as the Duma members agreed to form an executive committee of twelve members, a “Provisional Committee of Duma Members for the Restoration of Order in the Capital.”28 Chaired by Rodzianko, it included other members of the so-called Progressive Bloc, along with Chkheidze and Alexander Kerensky. Since these two also happened to be members of the new workers’ soviet executive committee, the Ispolkom, and since they would emerge as the dominant players on the Duma’s own committee, both men are worth a closer look.

  Chkheidze was born to a Georgian aristocratic family and in 1907 was elected to the Duma, where he soon became chief spokesman for the Menshevik group. From the perspective of a Czar Nicholas, he was a wild-eyed radical. From the perspective of a Lenin, however, he was a contemptible moderate representing the Eduard Bernstein faction of European Marxism, with its belief in gradualism and in working through representative institutions. In the next several months, some of Lenin’s most vicious verbal attacks would be aimed not at the czar or even at “counterrevolutionaries,” but at Chkheidze and his ilk.

  Three years younger than Lenin, and thirty-five years old in March 1917, Alexander Kerensky came from the same hometown, where his father had been Lenin’s teacher, headmaster, and almost mentor. Like Lenin, Kerensky had earned himself a law degree, and for the next decade he built a reputation as a fearless advocate for political dissidents, a kind of William Kunstler for Russian radicals. Winning a seat in the Duma in 1912, Kerensky had been one of the first to call for the czar to abdicate; his speech on February 27 had fired the first verbal shot of the revolution, as it were, and he had been one of those most insistent that the Duma disobey the czar’s order to dissolve and instead choose its own government to lead Russia. Now, over the next three days, he would be one of the pivotal figures in Russia’s transition, as he put it later, “from pure absolutism to absolute democracy.”29

  Czar Nicholas and the imperial train never reached Tsarskoye. Instead, warnings about rebellious or “unfriendly” troops occupying parts of the tracks leading to Petrograd led to a series of diversions by rail until, on March 14, the train came to a halt at Pskov, less than two hundred miles from the capital. There the czar found himself confronted by the commander of the Northern Front, Gen. Nikolai Ruzskii, “his face pale and sickly, an unfriendly gleam from under his eyeglasses,” who urged him to accept a Duma Cabinet. From acting commander in chief Gen. Mikhail Alekseev came more dire warnings. Sending General Ivanov to Petrograd to restore order was a hopeless mission. There were so few loyal troops left in the capital, Alekseev averred, that Ivanov’s men would be unable to halt the revolution. Indeed, Mikhail Rodzianko also cabled that “the troops [here] are completely demoralized, they not only disobey but kill their officers.” The same might happen with Ivanov’s troops, was the implication, if they reached the city and became infected with the revolutionary contagion.

  This barrage of resigned pessimism convinced Czar Nicholas. On March 14, he sent a note to Ivanov: “Until my arrival and receipt of your report, please undertake no action.”30 He had surrendered his last chance to restore law and order in his name.
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  Nicholas also heeded the advice that he accept the ministry formed by the Duma as his new government, and allow it to form a Cabinet. After some discussion, at a single stroke, Russia had taken a major step toward becoming a constitutional monarchy. The former autocrat agreed to welcome as heads of his government men he had despised and scorned less than two days before.

  It was a startling turnaround. In the early morning hours of March 15, however, his advisers, including Rodzianko, convinced themselves that this was still not enough to quell the unrest. The only possible solution was for Nicholas himself to step down from his throne and to pass it to someone less hated by the revolutionary mobs. The issue was not just the czar: “Hatred of Her Majesty [i.e., Czarina Alexandra] has reached extreme limits,” Rodzianko wired in response to General Ruzskii’s telegram informing him that Nicholas would accept a Cabinet chosen by the Duma. “I must inform you what you propose is no longer adequate, and the dynastic question has been raised point-blank.”

  This telegram reached Nicholas in the predawn hours of March 15, after he had spent a sleepless night haunted by the realization that his authority, which had seemed so ironclad and secure just days before, was steadily slipping away.

  It was 10:45 a.m. In the czar’s carriage, Nicholas read the exchange of telegrams between Rodzianko and Ruzskii, and then stood motionless, gazing out across the snowy fields. Then he turned around and said it was clear he had brought great misfortune to his nation. Although he believed the people would not understand his giving up his throne, “If it is necessary, for Russia’s welfare, that I step aside, I am prepared to do so.”31

  Then came a cable from General Alekseev, Nicholas’s stand-in as commander in chief. The general had read Rodzianko’s telegram to the czar and had sent his own cable to Nicholas. Alekseev’s view coincided with that of the others weighing in on the issue of abdication. The czar would have to abdicate; there was, the general added, no other way in which Russia would remain in the war. Alekseev knew that this argument (that by sacrificing his throne, the czar would spare Russia a humiliating defeat and save the army from complete collapse) would overcome any lingering objections the czar had, and it did.