by G. J. Meyer
Fighting continued in North America, too, but on a distinctly miniature scale. The Mexican rebels had forced the brutal and corrupt Huerta to flee to Spain; he was succeeded as president by Venustiano Carranza, a democrat and reformer. The civil war continued, however, and in its desperate search for a settlement, the United States invited Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia to send representatives to Niagara Falls to help work out a solution. The resulting ABC Conference called for a national election, the interim recognition of Carranza, and the retirement to the United States of the man who was now the chief troublemaker, the bandit-general Pancho Villa.
Villa and his guerrillas did not find these plans acceptable. To discredit the conference and precipitate a new and bigger Yankee intervention, thereby inflaming Mexican public opinion against the United States, they killed dozens of American citizens in a train robbery and an audacious dawn raid on Columbus, New Mexico. A force of some seven thousand U.S. cavalry was sent across the border with orders not to conquer or occupy anything but to pursue and disperse the Villistas. The expedition was led by a one-star general out of West Point named John Pershing. Its failure to accomplish anything was made inevitable, much to Pershing’s disgust, by the limitations placed on his operations by a White House that was increasingly focused on Europe and wanted as little trouble with Mexico as possible.
These were good times for the United States all the same, and for President Wilson. The country had never been as prosperous as it was now, with fortunes being made in sales to the Allies. The iron and steel industry was typical. Its exports, which generated revenues of $251 million in 1914, soon began rising at a rate that would pass the $600 million mark in 1916 and hit $1.1 billion in 1917. Profits rose even faster: $203 million representing a margin of 7.4 percent in 1915; $634 million and 21.3 percent in 1916; $1 billion and 28.7 percent in 1917. Farmers were prospering, too, and workers found jobs plentiful.
This was good news for an administration that would be going before the electorate in another six months. What was even better, from a personal perspective, the president was blissfully remarried. In December 1915, less than a year and a half after the death of Ellen Axson Wilson, he had wed a forty-three-year-old Washington widow named Edith White Bolling Galt, whom he had courted with an ardor that few adolescents could have surpassed. While courting her, he wrote to her almost every day, sometimes more than once a day in spite of seeing her almost daily also. “Oh, dear kindred spirit, my sweet incomparable friend,” he would write. Followed, almost before the first letter could be delivered, by “Ah, my precious friend and comrade, what happiness it was to be with you last night.”
Once he had persuaded the lady to become his wife, the former Mrs. Galt devoted herself to Wilson with a commitment equal to Ellen’s and a jealous ferocity of which the gentle Ellen would never have been capable. That the president’s three daughters were unreservedly in favor of the match testifies to Edith’s great charm and their understanding of how urgently their father needed a helpmeet.
Edith and Woodrow Wilson
The president’s second marriage was supremely happy.
The bride, like the president, had been born in Virginia—and was, remarkably enough, a descendant of Pocahontas. Her family, for generations part of the southern planter elite, had been ruined by the Civil War. Edith had been rescued from penury by marriage, cordial enough though evidently somewhat loveless on her side, to a successful Washington jeweler some years her senior. Their only child died in infancy, the father in 1908. In some ways she was a surprising choice for Wilson, having had only a few years of formal schooling and virtually no exposure to the world of ideas and great public issues. But her new husband could not endure life without a confidante who adored him unreservedly, and his connection to Colonel House (who continued to keep away from Washington except when invited by the president) was becoming frayed under the pressures of an uncertain neutrality.
Almost from the start of their relationship (they were introduced by a friend concerned about the president’s psychological state in the aftermath of Ellen’s death), Wilson confided in Edith about matters large and small. She was taught how to decode secret cables, embraced that as one of her domestic duties, and appears to have taken an almost instant dislike to Colonel House. She saw him as a yes-man, not understanding that his willingness to be exactly that was the foundation of his relationship with the president. She may have regarded him as a rival for her husband’s affection and trust. House praised her extravagantly, both to her face and to the president, but to no avail. Considering the intensity of the first years of their relationship, it comes as a surprise to find the president writing to Edith that House’s “mind is not of the first class. He is a counselor, not a statesman.” Obviously this was also an oblique way for Wilson to let his bride know that he, on the other hand, was the real thing.
With Berlin’s retreat, relations between Germany and the United States entered a less turbulent period. Bethmann, in spite of having been given no encouragement by the White House or the State Department, waited in nervous hopefulness for some indication that the president was now going to do something about the blockade. He was keenly aware that if nothing of the kind happened, and fairly soon, the kaiser’s military and naval chiefs would be resuming their demands for a lifting of U-boat restrictions. The American interventionists, meanwhile, waited expectantly for another Lusitania crisis.
Britain’s relations with the United States entered a prickly new phase at this point, mainly because of new naval initiatives. Wilson and the public reacted angrily when it became known that the British were opening mail on neutral ships intercepted on the high seas. Indignation became outrage with the coming to light of a British blacklist: hundreds of American companies had been banned from doing business with the Allies because London suspected them of selling to the Central Powers. Washington protested, but not really sharply or to any effect.
Then came the Easter Rising, a revolt against British rule of Ireland. It was a smallish affair, led by poets and teachers who knew that it had no chance of success, and it was not popular with the Irish public. But the savage response of the British authorities—much of central Dublin went up in flames, troops broke in to the homes of innocent civilians and shot them in cold blood, and among the killed were some forty children—transformed public opinion in Ireland and awoke the world to the realities of British rule. The hurried and secretive execution of the ringleaders in spite of appeals from America and elsewhere (the U.S. Senate approved an appeal for clemency while the White House remained silent) brought the tragedy to a close. The bitterness engendered both in Ireland and among Irish-Americans, however, led in short order to a bigger and bloodier rebellion and to the creation of an independent Irish republic. It also encouraged independence movements in other parts of the empire.
In the short term, the rising cast a shadow over Allied claims to be waging a war against tyranny. As an embarrassment, it surpassed the presence of Tsar Nicholas II’s Russia among the supposedly freedom-loving Allied powers. Revulsion was so powerful in the United States that the interventionists were for a brief period silenced. Bellicose figures as prominent as Roosevelt found themselves in danger of being discredited. Britain nevertheless continued to do as she wished and to bridle when anyone complained. “How difficult it is,” Wilson observed, “to be friends with Great Britain without doing whatever it is she wants us to do.” In a letter to House he said, “I am, I must admit, about at the end of my patience with Great Britain and the Allies. This blacklist business is the last straw.” He told the colonel that he was “seriously considering a ban on loans to the Entente, and a restriction of exports.” That he was serious about this is unlikely. Any such steps would have generated economic shock waves, hazardous things in an election year. And if Wilson really wanted to restrain the British, why did he ignore appeals from neutral nations as substantial as Sweden and Holland to join with them in pressuring London to change?
The elect
ion, as it drew near, became a convenient excuse for White House inaction on the blockade. Taking as usual the rhetorical high road, Wilson said he wanted to make no new commitments until it was known whether he or his Republican opponent, Charles Evans Hughes, would be setting policy in 1917. In response to Bethmann’s demands for an explanation of why nothing was happening, Bernstorff could reply only that no action could be expected until after the election.
At some point in the autumn of 1916, during this period of pre-election diplomatic passivity, Wilson dictated to a stenographer a lengthy rumination about why the war should not end in a decisive victory for either side. His words are uniquely revealing of where he stood on the day he spoke them, and they are impressively perceptive. At their core was an understanding of how the Europeans—France and Germany in particular—had for generations been locked in a cycle in which every conflict left the losing side aggrieved and determined to take revenge. Wilson thought that the horrors of the current war, by exposing the futility of that cycle, might destroy the appetite for war. This could happen, however, only if neither side achieved a decisive victory. “The aim of far-sighted statesmen,” he mused, “should be to make of this mightiest of conflicts an object lesson for the future by bringing it to a close with the objects of each group of belligerents still unaccomplished and all the magnificent sacrifices on both sides gone for naught. Only then would the Europeans see the futility of using war as a means of attaining national ambitions. The world would be free to build its new peace structure on the solidest foundation it has ever possessed.”
These words were not published and never used in a speech. In the run-up to the election they would have been dangerously controversial, angering pro-intervention voters and organizations. Three months after the election the president’s thinking would be so radically changed as to make them irrelevant.
Background
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Choosing Sides
Alexis de Tocqueville, in his classic Democracy in America, made note of what he thought the peculiarly strong tendency of the people of the United States to organize themselves into groups. This was in the 1830s, but the tendency had lost none of its potency eighty years later. The United States in the Great War years was a hodgepodge of fraternal organizations, political clubs, associations of farmers and tradesmen, and societies devoted to everything from quilting to the abolition of saloons. Tocqueville would have found it more of the same.
There were American antiwar organizations even before the war in Europe began. Among them was the Anti-Imperialist League, formed in 1898 to oppose American annexation of the Philippines. It made a national figure of Jane Addams, who over the next decade and a half campaigned for pacifism, woman suffrage, and attention to the plight of the urban poor. Within weeks of the start of the world war, she was at it again, helping to establish a Woman’s Peace Party (WPP) and becoming notorious in the process. When she appeared at Carnegie Hall to speak in defense of pacifism, The New York Times damned her as unpatriotic.
The Woman’s Peace Party was quick to make itself felt. Many of its members came like Addams out of the woman suffrage movement. They had experience in organizing as a result and were connected to a national network of tens of thousands of politically active kindred spirits. Not all suffragettes opposed the war, but most of those who did followed Addams when she led the WPP into a broad-based alliance called the Emergency Peace Federation. This was an umbrella group created to enable a variety of organizations (civic, religious, political, labor) to work together for the one objective they had in common: stopping the United States from intervening in the war. The “emergency” to which the title referred was members’ perception that intervention was a very real possibility and would be a calamity.
To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and before 1914 ended, the Emergency Peace Federation met its answer in the new National Security League. It had an impeccable pedigree, the guiding spirit in its creation being Congressman Augustus Peabody Gardner, who in addition to being a scion of two of Boston’s Brahmin families was the son-in-law of one of the Republican Party’s most powerful figures, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. Its roster was studded with such eminent Americans as former secretary of war and secretary of state Elihu Root and Major General Leonard Wood, a former army chief of staff and still the nation’s best-known soldier. Its governing committee included prominent educators and industrial and banking magnates.
It professed to be nonpartisan and struggled to be so in its first years. It became a driving force behind the Preparedness Movement and the campaign for an amorphous, never-quite-defined thing called “One Hundred Percent Americanism.” Ultimately, it went to extremes that demonstrated just how completely war fever could consume even the most sophisticated elements of society. It opposed the teaching of foreign languages, mainly but not only German. It questioned the loyalty of labor unions, universities, the churches of German-Americans, and, later, the League of Women Voters. From 1915 to 1917 it received contributions of a quarter of a million dollars (only about fifty thousand dollars less than the army’s annual budget at the time), much of it donated by such families as the Morgans, du Ponts, and Guggenheims, many of whom were profiting handsomely from the war.
The pendulum continued to swing, and late in 1915 another anti-intervention group came into existence and quickly achieved high visibility. The American Union Against Militarism (AUAM), based in New York, had the advantage of representing the pacifist and antiwar elements of the country’s more respectable classes and interest groups. It, too, drew funding from wealthy families—Philadelphia Quakers, for example—and was able to maintain a full-time staff with satellite operations in twenty-one cities. Its members and sympathizers were largely from the elite strata: lawyers, clergymen, editors, and products of the Ivy League. This had disadvantages. Though the AUAM sought to collaborate with groups representing working people, farmers, socialists, and anyone else opposed to intervention, the roughhewn populists of the South and the prairie states and the embattled workers of urban America viewed them warily from across a yawning class divide. This was a small problem, however, in comparison with the increasingly virulent criticism to which all the antiwar groups found themselves subjected.
The Emergency Peace Federation, being more militant than the AUAM and more closely linked to radical unions and socialist organizations, became an early target. It was harassed so relentlessly by local law enforcement and spontaneously formed patriotic groups that it had difficulty holding meetings. Demonstrations became nearly impossible. The AUAM, with its social connections and less provocative tactics, had fewer difficulties of this kind.
The tensions of the time deepened old divisions in American society and opened new ones that spread in all directions. The difficulties of trying to be nonpartisan finally broke the National Security League apart. Many members and potential members felt that it was not sufficiently critical of the Wilson administration and not sufficiently zealous in preaching intervention. In 1915 these dissidents created their own organization, the American Defense Society (ADS). It was like the league, only vehemently more so. It demanded compulsory military training for every American male between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, the internment of “enemy” aliens and their sympathizers, the exclusion of socialists from the nation’s political life, and intervention to be followed by total victory over Germany without possibility of a negotiated settlement. It was as well connected as the league; Theodore Roosevelt became honorary president.
The ADS went beyond depicting the Berlin regime as evil—it encouraged almost every variety of anti-German hysteria and did so with the implied approval of President Wilson. Actually, if German-Americans were notable for anything by 1915, it was for political invisibility. Few of those who hoped for a German victory in the war, or even regretted the hostility toward Germany that increasingly pervaded the country, were willing to say anything that might attract attention. But Wilson was saying, when the war was barel
y a year old, “I am sure that the country is honeycombed with German intrigue and infested with German spies.” Three months later he used his State of the Union speech as a platform from which to complain that “there are citizens of the United States, I blush to admit, born under other flags but welcomed under our generous naturalization laws to the full freedom and opportunity of America, who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life; who have sought to bring the authority and good name of our Government into contempt, to destroy our industries wherever they thought it effective for their vindictive purposes to strike at them, and to debase our politics to the uses of foreign intrigue.”
Small wonder if patriotic citizens took alarm at hearing their president utter such words and accepted it as their duty to keep suspicious eyes on neighbors lacking English-sounding names. Or if large numbers of German-Americans quietly gave their support to Republican Charles Evans Hughes in the 1916 presidential election, in the process getting Hughes himself accused by zealous Democrats of being the tool of Germany.
