by G. J. Meyer
For that matter, is it likely that he remained so racked with doubt at this late point? It was now ten days since Congress had been advised to convene in special session on April 2—and to be prepared for a presidential address of the highest importance. This had led everyone to expect a call to war. Neither Wilson himself nor anyone in his administration had done anything to dampen those expectations. For him to go before Congress and not call for war would, under the circumstances, have brought an avalanche of abuse down on his head.
Conceivably the problem is a simple mix-up about dates. The White House visitors’ log shows that Cobb had been there some two weeks earlier, at a point where the intensified U-boat campaign and the release of the Zimmermann Telegram were sparking ever-louder calls for war. Earlier on that same day, just hours before Cobb’s arrival was noted in the log, there had been a cabinet meeting at which every one of the assembled secretaries had declared himself to be in favor of war. It is more than merely possible that Wilson and Cobb might have discussed the intervention question at that time; the president would certainly have had it on his mind, and Cobb as a journalist would have felt obligated to ask about it. It is likewise plausible that, feeling extraordinary pressure, Wilson might have become less reticent than usual in the company of the editor of one of the most consistently supportive Democratic newspapers in the country. Nor would it have been remarkable if he put the discussion off the record before unburdening himself. Many of his meetings with reporters were off the record.
Perhaps Cobb, in later gossiping with Anderson and Stallings, changed the date for dramatic effect. Perhaps Anderson and Stallings, or Heaton in his turn, did the changing and for the same reason. It is humanly possible, certainly, that the chronology just became garbled as the story was passed along. Assuming of course that it did in fact start with Cobb. It is perhaps not irrelevant that Maxwell Anderson was a crusading progressive and had been such an outspoken opponent of American intervention that his fervor had cost him at least one job. Or that Stallings, by the time he and Anderson could have been interviewed by Heaton, was a one-legged combat veteran, embittered by his experience of war.
Thomas Fleming, in The Illusion of Victory, puts forward the hypothesis that, in talking with Heaton, Anderson and Stallings intentionally embellished whatever Cobb told them. The two were among the many Americans disillusioned by the war and its aftermath, but this need not have kept them from wanting to absolve Woodrow Wilson, that great progressive icon, of blame. What better way than to depict him, on the very eve of intervention, as foreseeing the horrors that lay ahead (even the Constitution would “not survive”!) but powerless to avoid them. This is speculation, but not obviously less credible than the story Heaton told in his book.
Even if Anderson and Stallings (or they in cahoots with Heaton) made up the story out of whole cloth, it remains of interest. If an invention, it nevertheless expresses its inventors’ bleak view of the Great War—a view that was already widely held just a handful of years after the conflict’s end. If, on the other hand, Wilson said something like the words attributed to him, the story becomes intriguing in a different, more important way. It gives rise to the thought that, in foreseeing the war’s effects on American life, the subordination of civil liberties to a “spirit of ruthless brutality,” the president might have been lamenting his own fate no less than the nation’s. Or perhaps he was foreseeing it without lament. For his words anticipated not only what was going to happen—the creation of something previously unknown in the United States, something very like a police state—but what he himself was going to make happen. The darkest of the plausible theories is that he was cynically paving the way—justifying in advance, not only to the press but to himself—his own wartime transgressions by declaring them unavoidable.
After the fact—meaning after the war—the president would show no regret about what he had done and allowed to be done, and only one big regret about how it had all turned out. That can be taken as evidence that he never foresaw the horrors that the Heaton book said he foresaw. Alternatively, it can be interpreted as an indication of how profoundly the war had changed Wilson, hardening him to such an extent that what he dreaded in 1917 seemed acceptable in later years.
In fact we know, and know with certainty, that the president had already decided on war with Germany at least several days before April 2. He revealed himself to Colonel House when the latter, consumed with curiosity, traveled to Washington on his own initiative on March 27. House’s account of their talk on that date gives no suggestion that Wilson was still expressing the uncertainty or reluctance that had earlier caused him so much anxiety and the colonel so much chagrin. What the president talked about was not what he should do but how he should do it: whether to ask Congress for a declaration of war, or simply for a formal acknowledgment that because of Germany’s actions a state of war already existed. House advised the second course as the easier one.
When had Wilson made up his mind? We don’t know, exactly, but the wind had been thick with straws for weeks. They were visible as early as March 5, the day of the president’s second inauguration, the day after Congress had been obliged to adjourn without having passed the armed-ship bill. It was a cold spring Monday in Washington, wet and windy, and the formalities were kept to an austere minimum. Wilson delivered a brief address, making no effort to rise to the rhetorical heights that the nation had learned to expect of him. He limited himself to two clear and simple points. The first was essential to his whole position, the article of faith without which he could never have allowed himself to go to war. It was the conviction, the insistence, that the United States was entirely innocent, with no responsibility for the conflict with Germany. The crisis was a matter “over which we have no control,” he said, because it was entirely of Germany’s making. “We have been deeply wronged upon the seas, but we have no wish to wrong or injure in return.” America was not only blameless but selfless: “We wished nothing for ourselves that we were not ready to demand for all mankind….We desire neither conquest nor advantage.”
These can be read as the words of a man who has already decided for war, whose purpose is to assure the people that when called to arms, they will be able to respond with clean hands and hearts as pure as Galahad’s. The United States would not be going to war, if it came to that. The war—Germany—was forcing itself on the United States. The use of the past tense where one might expect the present—we wished nothing for ourselves—strikes a note of finality, of a mind made up.
Wilson’s second point was the need for national unity in this time of crisis. “The thing I shall count upon,” he said, “the thing without which neither counsel nor action will avail, is the unity of America—an America united in feeling, in purpose, and in its vision of duty, of opportunity and of service.” He cautioned his fellow citizens to “beware that no faction or disloyal intrigue break the harmony or embarrass the spirit of our people.” On its face this was unobjectionable—either inspiring or familiar political boilerplate, according to one’s taste. Only in hindsight does it take on a more troubling hue, becoming a portent of the lengths to which this president would show himself willing to go in suppressing “faction” and enforcing at least the appearance of unity. Few of the progressives who had made him president in 1912 could have imagined, in April 1917, that Woodrow Wilson of all people would soon be making it a crime to dispute his version of the truth.
The inauguration was followed by no festivities. The president and his little party returned to the White House, and he withdrew to his study. There he vented his fury at the previous day’s filibuster by typing out a statement that was released to the press later the same day and made headlines across the country. It was an attack on—a condemnation of—Robert La Follette and the senators who had joined him in the filibuster. Wilson called them “a little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own,” and said that by blocking passage of the armed-ship bill they had “rendered the great Government of the Un
ited States helpless and contemptible.” It takes no great leap of imagination to surmise that Wilson lashed out in this way because he felt that he himself had been made to appear helpless and contemptible. Whether the “willful men” really represented no opinion but their own remained to be seen. The immediate effect of the president’s statement was to make them fair game—subject to being depicted as traitors.
Having thus spent himself, the president retreated to his bed, where he spent much of the following ten days. The press was told that he had a cold. Edwin Weinstein, M.D., in his “medical and psychological biography,” calls this an improbable diagnosis and notes the frequency with which Wilson’s “colds” appear to have been a psychosomatic reaction to extreme stress. It was characteristic of him to cut off contact with others in times of difficulty, complaining of headache and going into deep seclusion where other politicians would have sought discussion and advice. One cabinet meeting was canceled during this period and another severely curtailed, making it easier to keep the whole of the administration in the dark about what lay ahead.
This period was eventful all the same, and even from his sickroom Wilson contributed to making it so. Measures as important as an appropriations bill to fund expansion of the army remained unpassed because of the filibuster, and so the calling of a special session of Congress could not be long postponed. On March 9 the president set April 16 as the date on which Congress would reconvene. The fact that he did not choose an earlier date—there was no practical or procedural obstacle to doing so—suggests that he was in no great hurry.
Shortly thereafter the White House announced that he was ordering the placement of guns and navy gun crews on American merchant ships on his own authority, without the approval of Congress. He invoked a 1797 antipiracy law as his basis for doing so. March 15 brought news that Tsar Nicholas II of Russia had abdicated. He was replaced by a revolutionary government that declared its commitment to democratic reform and to staying in the war. Though the tsar had exhausted his empire and destroyed his dynasty in sticking loyally with Britain and France as his armies were humiliated again and again and Russian society began to unravel, his fall caused jubilation in London, Paris, and Washington. The Allies, now that Russia was throwing off autocracy, would find it less awkward to claim to be a confederation of democracies at war with tyrants. Wilson, for his part, would soon be speaking in public of “the wonderful and heartening things” that were happening in Russia. In fact Russia was sliding into chaos, her government impotent, her population destitute, her armed forces disintegrating.
It remained true that since Germany’s introduction of unrestricted submarine warfare, the only American deaths resulting from U-boat attacks had been the mother and daughter who died in their lifeboat after the sinking of the Laconia on February 25 and a lone seaman lost in the destruction of a British freighter earlier that same month. Five U.S. merchantmen had been sunk in that same period, but without loss of life. March 18, however, brought news of the destruction of three American ships. The City of Memphis and the Illinois, both returning to the United States after delivering cargoes to Europe, had been torpedoed on March 17 and 18 respectively, but all aboard had survived. It was a tragically different story with the Vigilancia, a merchantman eastbound out of New York carrying iron, fruit, asbestos, and straw. Fifteen members of her crew perished, among them at least two and possibly as many as seven U.S. citizens. (Contemporary reports are inconclusive about the number.) This was the first time in a remarkable twenty-two months that Americans had died in a U-boat attack on a U.S.-registered ship. That when she left New York the Vigilancia was the first commercial ship to be armed by presidential order, or that the deaths resulted from the capsizing of a lifeboat as it was being launched, was of no interest to newspapers hungry for fresh examples of Germany’s homicidal rampage. If the sinking of the Laconia had not been the “actual overt act” that Wilson had said he required, the Vigilancia evidently qualified.
Indignation increased when, on March 21, word came of the sinking of the tanker Healdon off the coast of Holland. Among the twenty-one men lost were six Americans. It is now accepted that the cause was not a U-boat attack but one of the thousand mines laid in the area a day earlier by British warships. This was not known at the time, and German denials of responsibility, though correct, were dismissed with scorn.
It has to have been at this point, if it had not happened earlier, that Wilson made his decision. On the day of the Healdon tragedy, he moved the starting date for the special session of Congress forward to what was now the earliest feasible date: Monday, April 2. He sent word to both houses that on that day he would go before them to deliver a communication “concerning grave matters of national policy,” matters requiring to be taken “immediately under consideration.” Though he appears to have told no one except possibly his wife what matters he had in mind, most people thought it obvious.
But why? Why now? For the old guard Republicans, led by the likes of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and former secretary of state Elihu Root, the answer was too obvious to require statement. The United States had to go to war—under a better man than Wilson it would already be at war—to put right the Rape of Little Belgium, save Britain and France from being enslaved by a cruel tyranny, and liberate all the populations that had for centuries been captives of the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires. Men of Theodore Roosevelt’s stamp, devotees of “the strenuous life,” would have added a quasi-spiritual argument: Americans needed a good war to lift them out of the dull and soulless materialism into which they were sinking under the weight of their fabulous new wealth. TR had been saying such things since 1914.
Overall there was tremendous pressure for war—more pressure, probably, than many presidents would have been able, or would even have wished, to resist. It was evident in such events as a huge pro-war rally held at New York’s Madison Square Garden on March 22. Elihu Root told cheering thousands that “every true American heart should respond with joy, amid its sorrow,” to the opportunity to go to war in fellowship with democracies that now included, “God be praised, the great democracy of Russia.” He made no secret of sharing Roosevelt’s and Taft’s disdain for the president. “We have had weak presidents and wrong-headed presidents,” he told a friend, “but never until Wilson have we had an unscrupulous and dishonest president.”
To accuse President Wilson of allowing himself to be pressured into going to war by such criticism is, however, to misread him badly. He was not the sort of man to be bullied in any such way. Yielding would have been virtually impossible for such a stiff-necked, self-righteous puritan, and he undoubtedly would have chosen political martyrdom before doing so. In another two and a half years, in fact, we will find him embracing a martyr’s role with a kind of bitter satisfaction. Allowing himself to be pushed into war would have made it impossible for him to believe one of the things he most needed to believe about himself: that it was his destiny to do the right thing, regardless of the consequences for himself.
It must not be forgotten that throughout the country, in the Midwest and West and South especially but also among the Irish, Germans, and Jews of the East, there remained much opposition to intervention. This did not translate readily into political pressure on Washington because the newspapers treated it with contempt when they could not ignore it and the administration discouraged it in ways large and small. Wilson certainly could have mobilized and legitimated it, however, had he sought support for nonintervention.
Nothing could have been more obvious, in March 1917, than the importance of the U-boats in the president’s thinking. It was so obvious, in fact, that perhaps it is given more weight than it should. The shock of the Lusitania was now two years in the past, and nothing remotely comparable had happened since. The force of Wilson’s reaction to tiny numbers of deaths at sea at a time when hundreds were being killed even on “quiet” days on the Western Front and when central Europe was being brought to the edge of starvation may seem curious, but t
hat it is true there can be no doubt. Weinstein has traced it to stories that Wilson’s mother had told him of nearly perishing in a storm at sea when she emigrated from Scotland to the United States; this seems a stretch. Be all that as it may, deaths by twos and by threes were not exactly a compelling reason to take a largely reluctant nation into a war that measured its casualties in the millions. Wilson himself understood this. Thus the persistence with which he talked not about numbers of lives lost but about abstractions: sacred rights of all humanity et cetera.
The most cynical explanation of the president’s motives has always been that he opted for war because by 1917 the Entente, Britain especially, was so deeply in debt to the United States that its defeat would have plunged the nation into depression. Wilson was accused from the start of being in thrall to Wall Street; George Norris of Nebraska infuriated many of his fellow Republicans by claiming on the floor of the Senate that “we are going into this war at the command of gold” and that doing so was “putting the dollar sign on the American flag.”
Such words were not indefensible. Between August 1914 and March 1917, the Allied nations spent almost $1.7 billion buying a huge variety of materials from the United States. This total included $700 million for explosives, $92 million for firearms, $322 million for other iron and steel products, and almost half a billion dollars for copper. These sums rose at a faster rate every year. The wealth of rural America exploded little less spectacularly: farm profits from sales of wheat, $56 million in 1913, totaled $319 million just a year later and $642 million in 1917.
By April 1917 Britain owed more than $1 billion to the United States. Canada owed $425 million, France more than $300 million, Russia $121 million, and so on down to Italy and China. Even Germany, early in the war, had somehow succeeded in borrowing $45 million in the United States. A German victory would have put much of this debt in default. Intervention, on the other hand, would not only continue the boom but shift it into a higher gear.
