Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  Another, still more potent, entanglement involved merchant ships. The British began at once to impose a naval blockade of Germany and the other Central powers, but an accident of geography threatened to undermine the effectiveness of this move. The Rhine—the main artery for waterborne German commerce—empties into the North Sea in the Netherlands, and in peacetime more goods bound to and from Germany flowed through Rotterdam than through any other port. Now, with the outbreak of the war, shipments to that neutral Dutch port rose sharply, along with shipments to ports in neutral Scandinavian countries adjacent to Germany. The British were determined to close those loopholes, even at the cost of clashes with the largest neutral trading nation, the United States. Wilson first faced this aspect of the war at the end of September, when Britain published an expanded contraband list that included such unprecedented items as the important American exports of cotton and copper. The State Department drafted a diplomatic note strongly protesting the action and forwarded it to the president. House, who happened to be visiting, noted that he found the draft “exceedingly undiplomatic and … urged the President not to permit it to be sent.” He also suggested that Wilson have him confer with the British ambassador, who was by then Sir Cecil Spring-Rice.8

  The colonel met with the ambassador the next day and apprised him of how seriously the American government regarded this expansion of the contraband list. Meanwhile, Wilson used his literary skills to soften the draft, and a shortened, revised note went to Ambassador Page for presentation to the British. In coming years, many interpreters would make much of this episode, alleging that House and Wilson showed an unneutral bias in favor of the Allies and passed up a golden opportunity to oppose their blockade. Such allegations are wrong because the revised note, though more politely phrased, made the same points as the original draft. This decision and others regarding responses to the blockade in 1914 sprang mainly from a desire to avoid trouble. Fittingly, Bryan, whom no one ever accused of harboring unneutral sentiments, approved of the decision. This episode also revealed another element in Wilson’s thinking: his fear of being drawn into the war. He read House a passage from his own History of the American People about how public anger had made it impossible for President Madison to avoid going to war in 1812 and said, “Madison and I are the only two Princeton men that have become President. The circumstances of the War of 1812 and now run parallel.” Stockton Axson also recalled that when they returned from Ellen’s burial, Wilson told him, “I am afraid something will happen on the high seas that will make it impossible for us to keep out of the war.”9

  Intentionally or not, invocation of the War of 1812 sent a useful signal to the British. House repeated Wilson’s statement to Spring-Rice, who passed the story on to the foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, and quoted the president as saying about Madison, “I only hope I shall be wiser.” This signal buttressed Grey’s already set determination to avoid conflict with the Americans. Earlier than most leaders in London and Paris, he recognized how dependent the Allies were on munitions and other supplies from the United States. The British removed cotton from the contraband list for the present, and they began preemptively buying up cotton and other commodities, both to keep them out of German hands and to mitigate any economic damage in the United States. For their part, Wilson and his advisers decided against further protests and suggestions regarding the blockade, and they said nothing when Britain escalated the naval war by mining shipping lanes in the North Sea in November 1914. Matters subsided into little more than small frictions until after the beginning of the next year.10

  The visit of House’s, in which he conferred with the president on the subject of the blockade, was one of thirteen that he made between August 1914 and January 1915. As in the first year of Wilson’s presidency, when he came to Washington, he usually stayed at the White House for two or three days. He continued to advise Wilson on party affairs and to meet with Democrats on and off Capitol Hill, but he increasingly pursued his bent toward foreign affairs. Besides Spring-Rice, he likewise met and corresponded frequently with the German ambassador, Count Johann-Heinrich von Bernstorff. These months marked the high point in the closeness between House and Wilson. The colonel was one of the few people outside his family with whom the president shared his agony of soul. “He said he was broken in spirit by Mrs. Wilson’s death and was not fit to be President because he did not think straight any longer, and had no heart in what he was doing,” House noted.11

  The soft-spoken Texan came as a godsend in this ordeal. Stockton Axson and other family members spent as much time as they could with Wilson, and Dr. Grayson offered pleasant, undemanding companionship. But the colonel was the only male friend of his own age with whom Wilson shared both work and personal feelings. House’s warm, easygoing presence, sensitive reading of moods, and availability made the president’s life more bearable during these awful months. But House’s help came at a price. For all his genuine sympathy, the colonel dispensed aid to the president in the spirit of protecting a valuable investment and repairing an irreplaceable instrument. He had his own ends to serve, and he intended to use Wilson as his means toward those ends. House was as determined as ever to pursue his grand design for a great-power directorate to manage world affairs. But Wilson’s level of engagement did not satisfy him, and he worked to make the president pay more attention to the European situation. House also continued to try to undermine Bryan, and he got the president to agree not to tell the secretary about House’s big project. They talked about the colonel going abroad to assess conditions, but House thought that such a mission might be premature and advised Wilson “to keep the threads in your hands as now and not push unduly.”12 That meant keeping “the threads” in House’s hands, and he would soon decide that the situation was ready for him.

  As time passed after Ellen’s death, Wilson appeared to bear his grief better. In December he told a friend, referring to two political opponents, that such men as Lodge and Gardner “do not annoy me.” Partisan squabbles likewise did not bother him, and he avoided reading the newspapers so as to maintain his composure. “Somebody must keep cool while our people grow hotter with discussing the war and all that it involves! There seems to be this advantage in having suffered the keenest, most mortal blow one can receive, that nothing else seems capable of hurting you!” The men he named were two Massachusetts Republicans, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and his son-in-law, Representative Augustus (Gussie) Peabody Gardner, and he mentioned them because they had taken the lead in fomenting the first political controversy to arise out of the war. This pair of patrician conservatives had been making their accustomed summer grand tour in Europe when the war broke out. After they returned, Gussie Gardner, who tended to be more outspoken than his haughty father-in-law, declared that he had come back “entirely convinced that the German cause is unholy, and moreover a menace to civilization.” He charged that American armed forces were pitifully inadequate to meet the dangers that would arise out of the war.13

  Wilson responded by joking publicly that Gardner’s charges were harmless “mental exercise” and the sort of talk he had been hearing since he was a boy of ten. This dismissal did not dispose of the problem. Lodge and other Republicans were working with Roosevelt to mount an attack when Congress reconvened in December. Some observers predicted that their efforts would reunite Republicans and Progressives in common cause against Wilson. The president met the challenge in his second State of the Union address, on December 8, 1914, when he defended modest increases in the army and navy. Reportedly looking Gardner straight in the eye, he declared, “More than this, proposed at this time, permit me to say, would mean merely that we had lost our self-possession, that we had been thrown off our balance by a war with which we have nothing to do, whose causes can not touch us, whose very existence affords us opportunities of friendship and disinterested service which should make us ashamed of any thought of hostility or fearful preparation for trouble.” The move succeeded brilliantly. Democrats rallied to his s
ide, and Republicans displayed their disunity. Insurgents such as La Follette dismissed talk of strengthening the armed forces, as did some conservatives, particularly Taft, who enjoyed taking a swipe at Roosevelt.14 In fact, Wilson succeeded too well. Within months, he would have to eat his words about “a war with which we have nothing to do” and reverse himself on the preparedness issue.

  When he overstated the nation’s remoteness from the war, Wilson had other motives besides repelling a political attack. He was again trying to cool down public feelings. He had good reason to reiterate such counsels of calm and coolness. Gardner’s calling Germany’s cause “unholy” expressed a widely shared sentiment. Germany’s violation of Belgian neutrality and its conquest of that little country had whipped up a storm of condemnation around the world, including in the United States. Roosevelt, in particular, denounced Germany and cheered the Allies in the fall of 1914. Privately, Taft and some other Republicans felt the same way, as did Colonel House. In November, a poll of newspaper editors by The Literary Digest found a quarter of them expressing the same sentiment, as compared with about 5 percent who sympathized with the Central powers.15

  With his Scottish heritage, English-born mother, Anglophilic literary tastes, and long-standing admiration for British political institutions, Wilson could easily have shared such pro-Allied sentiments. In fact, he did harbor some of them. At the end of August, House recorded that Wilson expressed an opinion “to the effect that if Germany won it would change the course of our civilization and make the United States a military nation,” and he condemned the Germans’ actions in Belgium. Around the same time, Spring-Rice reported to Grey that Wilson had said, “Every thing that I love most in the world is at stake,” and about the Germans, “If they succeed, we shall be forced to take such measures of defence here as would be fatal to our form of Government and American ideals.” As with his response to the blockade, some interpreters would later seize upon such statements as proof that Wilson was unneutral and pro-Allied. Actually, those views had little impact on his policies and basic approach to the war. He declined to protest against alleged German atrocities in Belgium, as Roosevelt and some others were demanding, and he told Bryan he did not know “in sufficient detail the actual facts … [and] the time for clearing up all these matters will come when the war is over and the nations gather in sober counsel again.”16

  Such pro-Allied and anti-German sentiments, combined with determination to keep the war at arm’s length, were in tune with broader public opinion. The Literary Digest claimed that sympathy for belligerents was “that of a detached observer,” and a journalist later compared such sympathizers to baseball fans cheering from the bleachers. The first political trouble to arise out of public sympathy for belligerents came from the other side. Pro-Central powers sentiment flourished almost entirely among people of German extraction, whose sympathies were sharply focused and well organized. More than a decade before, the major brewing companies—with such names as Anheuser-Busch, Pabst, and Schlitz—had formed and financed the National German-American Alliance to lobby against prohibition. Soon after the outbreak of the war, the German embassy had taken over this organization and used it to agitate for a prohibition on the shipment of munitions to belligerents. The rationale for such an arms embargo had what The New Republic called “catchy reasonableness”—the idea that America should not add to the killing and destruction. But its main effect—and the reason the Germans were pushing it—would be to cut off the Allies from a vital source of munitions.17

  Bryan, despite having backed a similar scheme with his abortive ban on loans, took the lead in opposing an arms embargo as unneutral. He and Wilson persuaded Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill to keep embargo resolutions bottled up in committee. They also received strong backing from Lodge and other Republican senators. On the other side stood perennially dissident Democrats such as Gilbert Hitchcock of Nebraska, together with La Follette, Albert Cummins, and other Republican insurgents, many of whose states contained substantial German American constituencies. On February 15, 1915, those dissidents and insurgents mustered thirty-seven votes in the Senate for an amendment to a ship-purchase bill that would have barred shipments of munitions. Such support for the arms embargo spelled trouble for Wilson if he sought congressional support for tough diplomacy toward Germany.18

  Also at the beginning of 1915, the president was having problems on Capitol Hill on another war-related issue—purchase of foreign-owned ships stranded by the war for use by a government-owned corporation in the transatlantic trade. During the three months of this lame-duck session of Congress, Wilson tried to exercise the party leadership that had worked so well for the past two years. In January, at the Democrats’ Jackson Day dinner, he breathed some of Old Hickory’s fire as he denounced “any group of men [who] should dare to break the solidarity of the Democratic team for any purpose or from any motive” and admonished the party to “march with the discipline and with the zest of a conquering host.” This time his magic did not work. The House passed a ship-purchase bill on February 17, by a vote of 215 to 122, but the other chamber did not follow suit. Seven Democrats refused to support the administration’s bill, and all but four Republicans opposed the measure. They balked at an expansion of government power, and some of them cited British threats to seize converted German vessels. Wilson might have gotten a bill through if he had been willing to promise that the government would not purchase ships owned by belligerents, but for him that was half a loaf not worth having. Asked at a press conference on February 2 about accepting changes in the bill, he shot back, “No changes of any sort that are not consistent with the principle of the bill.” The ship-purchase bill did not come up for a vote before the Congress expired on March 4. It was Wilson’s first real defeat as president.19

  Disappointment on Capitol Hill added to the emotional strain Wilson had been laboring under since Ellen’s death, and on one occasion during this time he failed to maintain his prized self-control. That was on November 12, 1914, when he again met with a delegation headed by the Boston editor William Monroe Trotter, who opened with a fierce statement: “Only two years ago you were heralded as perhaps the second Lincoln, and now the Afro-American leaders who supported you are hounded as false leaders and traitors to their race. What a change segregation has wrought!” As he had done earlier, Wilson responded with bland assurances and evasions, claiming that “it takes the world generations to outlive all its prejudices” and nobody could be “cocksure about what should be done.” Trotter lashed back, “We are not here as wards. We are not here as dependents. We are here as full-fledged American citizens.” Trotter charged that the government’s effort at segregation sprang only from prejudice, and he reminded the president of black support he had received in 1912. “Please leave me out,” Wilson snapped back. “Let me say this, if you will, that if this organization wishes to approach me again, it must choose another spokesman. … You are an American citizen, as fully an American citizen as I am, but you are the only American citizen that has ever come into this office who has talked to me with a tone with a background of passion that was evident.” Trotter rejoined, “I am from a part of the people, Mr. President.” Wilson answered, “You have spoiled the whole cause for which you came.”20

  None of the exchange between Trotter and Wilson was made public. Trotter’s opening statement was published in the Chicago Defender, but not in the white press. Mainstream papers did quote him saying after the meeting, “What the President told us was entirely disappointing. His statement that segregation was intended to prevent racial friction is not supported by the facts.” Wilson knew he had mishandled the encounter. The secretary of the navy recalled that the president told him soon afterward, “Daniels, never raise an incident into an issue. … I was damn fool enough to lose my temper and to point them to the door. What I ought to have done would have been to have listened, restrained my resentment, and, when they had finished, to have said to them that, of course, their petition would receive
consideration. They would have withdrawn quietly and no more would have been heard about the matter. But I lost my temper and played the fool.”21

  His remorse was sad and revealing. It was sad that he did not respond to what Trotter was telling him and did not grasp the facts of racial injustice that the editor was laying before him. By even friendly accounts, Trotter could be abrasive and imperious, but those qualities did not detract from the truth and power of his message. Wilson’s regret involved only the way he had handled himself. He had lost his self-control; he had surrendered to the “passion” he accused Trotter of bringing into the president’s office. More was involved here than Wilson’s usual desire to avoid issues involving race. It was revealing that he suffered this breakdown of self-control not long after Ellen’s death. Nothing like it would happen again while he was president, except in smaller, less conspicuous ways after he suffered his stroke. He rarely let personal turmoil and heartache affect his conduct of public affairs, at least not consciously. Except possibly for the ban on loans, this was almost the only time when the shadow of grief may have clouded the intelligence and discipline he relied upon to guide him as president.