by G. J. Meyer
The most respectable of the pro-preparedness organizations, one whose legitimacy was beyond question, came into existence when the army appropriations bill for fiscal year 1916 provided the handsome sum of two hundred thousand dollars for a Council of National Defense. Its chairman was the secretary of war, Newton Baker, and it also included the secretary of the navy and the heads of the Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, and Labor Departments. They were joined by leading figures from industry and finance, along with Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor. The council’s mission was unarguably sensible: to develop new means of coordinating government, business, agriculture, labor, and national transportation so that all systems could work together in an effective national defense. Even so there were problems. Some conservatives fretted that systematic mobilization of the nation’s resources would lead to socialism—to the subordination of the economy to the government. The progressives, inclined as they were to see an active government as the solution to problems of many kinds, had few such qualms.
Chapter 6
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“A Dangerous Thing—To Inflame a People”
ACROSS GERMANY AND the Austro-Hungarian domains, the starvation blockade was earning its name. The population was hungry, much of it desperately so. Food riots were becoming something that the authorities had to expect and prepare for.
In the prewar decades, as Germany industrialized, she like Britain had abandoned the thought of feeding herself. There seemed no point—or no possibility. In each of the two years preceding the start of the war, imports had exceeded exports by $640 million, much of the imbalance reflecting a dependence on foreign food and raw materials. Thus the effectiveness of the blockade. As early as the autumn of 1914, the Central Powers were experiencing their first shortages of flour and bread. By early 1915 milk and potatoes were in short supply. By 1916 it was difficult to obtain things ranging from oil and sugar to eggs and soap. By 1917 fat intake per person was 12 percent of what it had been in 1913, and the death rate for civilians was a third higher. A year after that the people of Germany would be living on an average of one thousand calories per day.
Thus the pressure on the Berlin government to do something.
The British chose the end of the summer of 1916 to announce the creation of a new government ministry with one responsibility only: to manage the blockade. They thereby demonstrated that they regarded their starvation policy not as an expedient open to negotiation but as integral to their strategy for winning the war. And deepened the anger of a hungry German public.
All this left Chancellor Bethmann in a bind. Germany’s only way of responding to the public’s anger was to intensify the U-boat campaign against the shipping that was keeping the British population fed. But to do that was to risk further conflict—ultimately war—with the United States. And Bethmann was more certain than ever that American intervention would bring disaster down on Germany.
The generals of the high command did not disagree with him about how America was likely to respond to a lifting of restrictions on submarine warfare, but they did not share his fears. They expected that even if she intervened, the United States would have limited ability to participate in the fighting and might do so with her navy only. She had no army worth speaking of and, if confronted with a fully effective U-boat force, might never get any troops across the Atlantic. And regardless of how dangerous the United States might be militarily, the submarines seemed the only way to save the Central Powers. Their unrestricted use was coming to seem not an option but a necessity, an inevitability.
General Erich von Falkenhayn, who had once supported Bethmann and would soon be replaced as army chief of staff because of the failure of his Verdun offensive, said now that the Allies understood they could never defeat Germany by force of arms. They had decided instead to let the deadlock continue until the Central Powers, encircled and outnumbered and short of essentials of every kind, collapsed of sheer exhaustion. Falkenhayn thought this a workable strategy and saw little hope of foiling it. What hope was there, except to use the U-boats to starve Britain first? And why worry so much about preserving an American neutrality that had been a sham almost from the start?
Bethmann, as Falkenhayn and others saw the situation, was wasting precious time. He was doing so in the sterile hope of getting American help with the blockade. And with the equally futile thought that Britain and France, their lifeline to North America functioning so beautifully, might somehow agree to negotiate. Bethmann was blocking Germany’s only possible escape.
The chancellor, for his part, thought that Germany’s best hope still lay in the arrangement of a peace conference. But the obstacles were formidable. They began with the fact that for Berlin to publicly call for such a thing seemed out of the question. The Allies could be counted upon to jeer, saying that Germany wanted to talk peace only because her prospects were so bleak. And much of the German public, having lost hundreds of thousands of sons and fathers and husbands, would be hostile to the idea of ending the fighting before those seeking to destroy Germany had been rendered incapable of threatening her again.
Bethmann’s answer—an ironic variation on the misfired House-Grey Memorandum, about which he knew nothing—was to get the United States to convene a conference and to make it appear to be entirely President Wilson’s idea. He instructed Bernstorff in Washington, and urged Ambassador Gerard in Berlin, to let the president know that Germany was prepared to respond positively to an American summons. He emphasized that any such call would have to come soon. Told that this, too, would have to wait because of the approaching U.S. election, the chancellor was downcast. He doubted that he had that much time.
None of this is to say that Bethmann should be seen as some kind of angel of peace, offering to give up everything that Germany had gained in the fighting in order to bring the killing to a halt. Even had he wished to do any such thing, it would have been impossible for him to offer terms that an impartial observer could have regarded as generous or perhaps even realistic. No one in official Berlin, not even the kaiser, could have put Alsace and Lorraine on the bargaining table—or Russian Poland, or even the portion of Belgium that the high command had publicly declared to be essential to German security. To do so would have been political, and in the kaiser’s case dynastic, suicide. This does not mean that Bethmann’s hopes were entirely misplaced, however. The need, at this juncture, was to get both sides to sit down together and talk. Only then would specific terms have to be brought forward. That finding a middle ground would be immensely difficult did not make it impossible. Bethmann was at least attempting a first step.
Any possibility that the Allies might respond positively, if only at the insistence of the United States, was brought to a rude end on September 28. David Lloyd George, now Britain’s war minister, declared in an interview with an American journalist that a negotiated settlement was out of the question. “The fight,” he said, “must be to the finish—to a knockout.” To this he added that “outside interference”—by which he could only have meant an American attempt at mediation—would not be tolerated. Prime Minister Asquith and Sir Edward Grey had been given no warning that Lloyd George was going to say such things and were nonplussed when they heard. But the Welshman’s words were taken by Washington and Berlin to be official British policy, and they were so lavishly praised in the London press that it was impossible for the prime minister or the foreign secretary to gainsay or even qualify them. They contributed to establishing Lloyd George in the minds of his countrymen as the leader most committed to the defeat of Germany. They prepared the way for Asquith’s fall two months later and Lloyd George’s rise to the top.
At about this same time the German navy, without abandoning cruiser rules, was expanding the intensity and geographic reach of its submarine operations. This was possible because almost sixty U-boats were now in service, compared with the mere sixteen of a year and a half earlier. In short order, more tonnage was being sunk monthly than had been the case at the
previous peak, before the Arabic crisis. And bigger, improved submarines were being launched at five times the rate of loss. All this provided ammunition for the naval authorities in Berlin as they argued that a lifting of restrictions could turn the tables on Britain and bring victory within reach.
Britain meanwhile was arming more and more of her merchant ships, providing them with trained gun crews, and ordering them to fire on any submarines they sighted. This made cruiser rules more hazardous than ever, while rendering the merchantmen ineligible for the protection of those rules. These complications made fresh trouble inevitable. Late in the year there were two instances of armed British freighters being sunk without warning. In one of these cases, six Americans died. They were not passengers, however, but crew members. This new twist made it difficult for Washington to know how much it should be outraged.
David Lloyd George, prime minister of Great Britain, 1916–1922
The “Welsh Wizard” rose to the top by insisting that “the fight must be to the finish—to a knockout.”
The election was bearing down on Wilson, and with the Republicans once again united, it was not at all clear that he was going to be reelected. To rally the voters who had given him the White House in 1912, he became a progressive activist once again, pushing to pass bills providing farm credits and regulating child labor. (The fate of the law putting limits on child labor shows just how much resistance there still was to government involvement in such matters. In 1918 the Supreme Court would find it unconstitutional, after which Congress would pass it in revised form, only to have the Court throw it out again.) Wilson also supported a tax measure that was remarkably progressive by the standards of the time. His ability to adjust his reformist impulses upward and downward was viewed skeptically in both parties, chiefly but not only in the ranks of the progressives. Former president Taft, not a spiteful man and free of bitterness over his defeat in the election of 1912 (he called the White House “the loneliest place in the world”), came to see Wilson as unburdened by principles. “I regard him as a ruthless hypocrite,” he wrote a friend, “who has no convictions that he would not barter at once for votes.”
Charles Evans Hughes, 1916 U.S. presidential candidate, and his wife, Antoinette
Thoughtful and honorable, ambivalent about the war, he offered no clear alternative to Wilson.
The election drew as much attention to the ongoing Mexican imbroglio as to the European war. Republican candidate Charles Evans Hughes, lacking Roosevelt’s fire and bite and being himself ambivalent about intervention, made no effort to turn the election into a referendum on foreign policy. Many voters found it difficult to distinguish between the candidates where the war and foreign policy were concerned.
A more striking aspect of the campaign, not a new subject for Wilson but one with which he appeared to be increasingly obsessed, was his sharp questioning of the loyalty of German-American and Irish-American organizations and citizens and other “hyphenates,” as he called them. In doing this he worsened a climate of opinion in which it was now acceptable, even praiseworthy, for some Americans to condemn others as suspect or subversive on no evidence except their ethnic origins. The claim that hyphenates were “pouring poison into the veins of our national life” became a commonplace of his speeches. There was however no place, in the darkening Wilsonian worldview, for parallel complaints about those calling for American entry into the war on the side of Allies. Such people were accepted as natural, American, properly patriotic.
In the end the election was so close that Wilson could not be certain that he had won until, three days after the polls closed, it was established that California had gone for the Democratic ticket by the thinnest of margins. The Democrats’ net loss of two seats in the Senate still left them with a twelve-seat majority. But the reunified Republicans, with Roosevelt back in their camp, wiped out the twenty-eight-seat majority that the Democrats had enjoyed in the House. For the first time ever, the two major parties emerged from the election with exactly the same number of seats in the lower chamber: 215 each. The Democrats were able to cobble together a majority, however, thanks to the support of five members belonging to minor parties.
Chancellor Bethmann had made it past the election without being overruled on the submarine question, and with Wilson reelected he was once again hopeful. But Wilson continued to do nothing visible to the Germans about either a peace conference or the blockade. Instead he repaired to his typewriter and began to work on a diplomatic note.
On November 14 he confided to House the details of this note. It was to be addressed to all the belligerents and was almost peremptory in tone, in effect a demand that they come together and find a way to bring the slaughter to an end. The colonel was taken aback. He predicted that the Allies would see the president as putting the two sides on the same moral plane, when they of course saw Germany as in the wrong in every way that mattered. He said, no doubt rightly, that they would accuse Wilson of siding with Germany. He urged delay, a wait until the situation clarified. When Wilson suggested that House should prepare to return to Europe, the colonel was for once reluctant. “I was entirely willing to do this if it were thought best,” he would recall, “although my feeling was that I would prefer Hades for the moment rather than those countries when such a proposal [the demand for peace talks] was put to them.” Obviously he did not want the job of delivering to his friends in London a presidential message that they were certain to hate.
Both ideas, the note and the trip, were held in abeyance. Wilson put his draft aside, giving little thought if any to the effect his doing so might have in Berlin. He began instead to work on a speech. All that Bethmann could see was that Wilson appeared to have no understanding of the pressure the kaiser was under to lift the restrictions on the U-boats. If he did understand, he clearly did not care.
Solitary composition and the delivery of orations and diplomatic notes had become Wilson’s principal way of governing. More congenial and potentially more effective ways of exerting influence—inviting members of Congress to the White House, or talking things over with experts and opinion leaders—almost never happened during his tenure.
Descriptions of life in the White House at this time invariably draw attention to the president’s self-imposed solitude, which became the rule years before bad health made it unavoidable. On a typical day he spent the morning alone in his study, lunched with a few family members, and went off for a drive or a round of golf or both. He was usually accompanied by his wife and his physician, rarely by anyone else. It was not usual for anyone but family to join him for dinner. Colonel House in his diary observed that he had never known a man as isolated as the president, and he attributed this to his discomfort in meeting people. He also commented on the strength of Wilson’s dislikes and prejudices, saying that almost every time they met, the president had someone new to complain of, and he complained bitterly. House, too, had a complaint—about the burden imposed on him by his access to the White House. Because “no one can see [the president] to explain matters or get his advice,” House said, frustrated officials and others took their problems to the colonel and asked him to intervene on their behalf.
“It is difficult to explain exactly the way business is conducted here,” British ambassador Spring-Rice reported to London. “The president rarely sees anybody. He practically never sees ambassadors and when he does, exchanges no ideas with them. Mr. Lansing is treated as a clerk who receives orders which he has to obey at once and without question.”
Walter Hines Page, who had been on friendly terms with Wilson for years before being offered the embassy in London, mused that the president “does his own thinking, untouched by other men’s ideas. He receives nothing from the outside.” Page’s description of the organization of the Wilson White House, written at the end of a visit to Washington, is not flattering: “The president dominates everything in a most extraordinary way. The men about him (and he sees them only on ‘business’) are very nearly all very small fry or worse
, the narrowest twopenny lot I have ever come across. He has no real companions. Nobody talks to him freely and frankly. I have never known such conditions in American life.”
A man who receives “nothing from the outside,” who has no curiosity and responds to disagreement with annoyance that is poorly concealed when concealed at all, has little protection from his own limitations. He is restricted in his ability to know what is really happening, and vulnerable to stumbling when he ventures beyond his own door.
The war continued to spread like an epidemic even as it remained deadlocked. Bulgaria had joined the Central Powers, while her neighbor and rival Romania went with the Allies. Each had been promised territorial goodies at the expense of the other, but in the early going Bulgaria came out best. General Falkenhayn, upon being displaced as chief of staff, took command of an attack on Romania that knocked her out of the war almost as soon as she came in.
Falkenhayn’s successor at the high command was, fatefully, the elderly General Paul von Hindenburg, who at the start of the war had returned to active duty from retirement and found himself a national hero when the forces under his command routed the invading Russian armies in 1914’s epic Battle of Tannenberg. That victory was largely the work of Hindenburg’s second in command, Erich Ludendorff, who was young enough to be his son, and since then the pair had been achieving great things on the Eastern Front. Hindenburg’s promotion to chief of staff was momentous mainly because it brought Ludendorff to general headquarters and to a position from which he could take charge of the entire war effort. Ludendorff was physically unprepossessing, dumpy and double-chinned with strangely short legs, but he was a brilliant tactician and strategist and a superb executive, with an iron will and a driving impulse to command. He was also impatient, short-tempered, socially awkward, and out of his depth when dealing with anything other than military matters. The stolid, grandfatherly Hindenburg, though not really in charge, was more than a mere figurehead. He was a source of calm and steady good sense, balancing the volatile Ludendorff, providing a kind of shield behind which the younger man was able to make himself master first of Germany’s military and naval operations and ultimately of the economy, the government, even Kaiser Wilhelm.
