President Wilson remained noncommittal at Shadow Lawn, saying that he had no “official” knowledge of the sinkings. On Monday afternoon he issued a statement: “The country may rest assured that the German government will be held to the complete fulfillment of its promises to the government of the United States.”
Roosevelt followed up with a statement of his own. He sounded more sick at heart than outraged in affirming, “Now the war has been carried to our very shores.” The administration’s dismissive attitude to seaborne terrorism, going back to the Lusitania, had made it inevitable that something like this would happen. “President Wilson’s ignoble shirking of responsibility has been clothed in an utterly misleading phrase, the phrase of a coward, He kept us out of war. In actual reality, war has been creeping nearer and nearer, until it stares at us from just beyond our three-mile limit, and we face it without policy, plan, purpose or preparation.”
THE COLONEL’S PROMISED “swing” for Hughes—a high-speed tour of the West and Southwest—was marked by tumultuous, sometimes hysterical receptions. They left him unmoved. On his way back through Indiana, he turned fifty-eight. George Perkins and Henry L. Stoddard drove him back to Oyster Bay, raw-voiced and spent, in the small hours of 29 October.
“Old trumps,” he said as the car wound its way through Long Island fog, “let me tell you.… I’ve done my bit for Hughes.… I am positively through campaigning forever.”
“LET ME TELL YOU.… I’VE DONE MY BIT FOR HUGHES.”
TR on the campaign trail, fall 1916. (photo credit i24.3)
Yet he stayed at home only long enough to hear, two days later, that a pair of British steamers, the Marina and the Rowanmore, had been torpedoed in the Atlantic, with eight American travelers lost between them. The administration could argue—in fact, was arguing—that the U-53 had previously not broken international law in its sinkings off Nantucket. This double attack, however, proved that Germany had decided to ignore Wilson’s Sussex ultimatum of five months before.
The first of November found Roosevelt on a flying trip through Ohio. He felt he had to compensate for Hughes, who kept maundering about the tariff in order to avoid saying anything that might alienate antiwar voters. John Leary became concerned at Roosevelt’s red-faced fervor and told him that some reporters were saying he had arteriosclerosis.
“Just what is that?”
Leary explained.
“Well, they are right.”
His blood pressure was not reduced by an announcement that eleven of the nineteen Progressives who had helped him formulate his policies in 1912 were going to vote Democratic. On 2 November, Amos Pinchot publicly taunted him with an assertion that the Bull Moose platform had been “out-and-out pacifist.”
The Colonel contained himself for twenty-four hours, then wrote Pinchot, “Sir, when I spoke of the Progressive Party as having a lunatic fringe, I specifically had you in mind.”
That night he appeared at Cooper Union in New York. He was greeted with a whistling, stomping chorus of “We want Teddy!” that went on for ten minutes. There was not a single cry for Hughes.
A sense spread through the audience that Roosevelt was going to let rip, as he had when he jumped onto a table in Atlanta in 1912. But nothing he had said then, or since, compared with the attack on Woodrow Wilson that now rasped into every corner of the hall.
During the last three years and a half, hundreds of American men, women, and children have been murdered on the high seas and in Mexico. Mr. Wilson has not dared to stand up for them.… He wrote Germany that he would hold her to “strict accountability” if an American lost his life on an American or neutral ship by her submarine warfare. Forthwith the Arabic and the Gulflight were sunk. But Mr. Wilson dared not take any action.… Germany despised him; and the Lusitania was sunk in consequence. Thirteen hundred and ninety-four people were drowned, one hundred and three of them babies under two years of age. Two days later, when the dead mothers with their dead babies in their arms lay by the scores in the Queenstown morgue, Mr. Wilson selected the moment as opportune to utter his famous sentence about being “too proud to fight.”
Roosevelt threw his speech script to the floor and continued in near-absolute silence.
Mr. Wilson now dwells at Shadow Lawn. There should be shadows enough at Shadow Lawn: the shadows of men, women, and children who have risen from the ooze of the ocean bottom and from graves in foreign lands; the shadows of the helpless whom Mr. Wilson did not dare protect lest he might have to face danger; the shadows of babies gasping pitifully as they sank under the waves; the shadows of women outraged and slain by bandits; the shadows of … troopers who lay in the Mexican desert, the black blood crusted round their mouths, and their dim eyes looking upward, because President Wilson had sent them to do a task, and then shamefully abandoned them to the mercy of foes who knew no mercy.
Those are the shadows proper for Shadow Lawn: the shadows of deeds that were never done; the shadows of lofty words that were followed by no action; the shadows of the tortured dead.
ON THE FOLLOWING NIGHT, with thirty-six hours to go before the election, Roosevelt slumped in the back of Regis Post’s car, humming to himself. They were returning from a Republican rally in Connecticut.
“The old man’s working out something,” Post said to John Leary, who sat up front. “He always thinks hardest when he makes that queer noise. I wonder what’s up?”
What was up was a drift of voter sympathy toward Wilson that Roosevelt feared would erode the last of Charles Evans Hughes’s support. Leary had already, with a young man’s optimism, predicted that a defeat for Hughes would bode well for Roosevelt in 1920.
“You are wrong there,” the Colonel said. “This was my year—1916 was my high twelve. In four years I will be out of it.”
HUGHES MANAGED, all the same, to attract enough votes on 7 November that The New York Times called the election for him. Wilson took the news with a grace that said much for his inner equilibrium. But then returns from late-counting states showed that Republicans and former Progressives had deserted Hughes in the Midwest, canceling out his early gains elsewhere. The great bulk of those desertions could be ascribed to Roosevelt’s warlike rhetoric, which had made Hughes’s candidacy seem more pro-intervention than it actually was. In the end, after two days of statistical swings, the normally Republican state of California reelected Wilson by a margin of only 3,773 votes. Hughes was so angry in defeat that he did not concede until 22 November.
“I hope you are ashamed of Mr. Roosevelt,” Alice Hooper wrote Frederick Jackson Turner. “If one man was responsible for Mr. Wilson he was the man—thus perhaps Mr. Roosevelt ought to see the Shadows of Shadow Lawn and the dead babies in the ooze of the Sea!”
At Sagamore Hill, Roosevelt began to pack up his papers for deposit in the Library of Congress. Hamlin Garland came to visit and found him cheerful, clomping around in spurred boots, but grayer and more slowly spoken than before.
“I am of no use, Garland. I feel my years.”
IN A SERIES OF quick coincidences that seemed like coordination, Wilson’s election was followed by leadership changes in four of the belligerent powers. All portended a protraction of the war and a worsening of the fighting. Emperor Franz Joseph died, and was succeeded by his great-nephew Karl, an impulsive young man convinced that the Habsburg monarchy was eternal. Two new, aggressive prime ministers came to power: Alexander Trepov in Russia and David Lloyd George in Britain. At the Wilhelmstrasse, an even more aggressive commoner, Arthur Zimmermann, replaced Count Jagow as secretary of state for foreign affairs.
On 12 December, Count Bernstorff visited the White House with a surprise proposal from Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg. The German ambassador had never revealed what was in the letter Captain Rose had handed over in Newport, except to dismiss it as “unimportant.” It had certainly not advised him that Germany was about to moderate its war at sea. Since then, Britain and France had been losing shipments at the rate of sixty thousand tons a month. Sir Edward
Grey wrote a panicky envoi to Arthur Balfour, his successor as foreign minister: “The submarine danger seems to me to be increasing so rapidly that unless in the next two months or so we abate it, the Germans will see their way to victory.”
The document Bernstorff now gave to the President, copied to all the Allied powers, expressed Germany’s “willingness to enter henceforth into peace negotiations.” But its language—probably Zimmermann’s—was so truculent, warning of “further bloodshed” if it was rejected, that Wilson read it in disbelief.
He was put out because the proposal, already making headlines around the world, preempted one he had been secretly working on himself. Cecil Spring Rice had suspected for some time that Wilson was up to something. “The President’s great ambition,” the ambassador informed Balfour on 15 December, “is to play a high and moral part on a great stage.”
Four days later, Wilson cabled his own peace note to the belligerents, calling on them to make “an avowal of their respective views as to the terms upon which the war might be concluded.” He pointed out that none of the fourteen powers now variously at war had ever said, in precise words, what they wanted of one another. Precision was necessary, because to him their general objectives seemed to be “virtually the same.” He offered to serve as the facilitator of a conference that would result in “a league of nations to ensure peace and justice throughout the world.”
Wilson had touched on this idea before, in his address to the League to Enforce Peace, but now he zealously promulgated it to the world. “If the contest must continue to proceed toward undefined ends by slow attrition until the one group of belligerents or the other is exhausted; if million after million of human lives must continue to be offered up … hopes of peace and of the willing concert of free peoples will be rendered vain and idle.”
Secretary Lansing felt obliged to offer an extraordinary public qualification: “The sending of this note will indicate the possibility of our being forced into the war.” He was reprimanded by Wilson and tried to withdraw his words, but the effect of them remained.
Roosevelt, massively attired as Santa Claus for the Cove School Christmas party at Oyster Bay, guffawed. “The antics of the last few days have restored what self-respect I lost in supporting Hughes.”
PLAYING ALONG WITH WILSON, Germany replied more favorably than Britain or France to the notion of a peace conference. The Allies published a joint note on 11 January 1917 that took exception to the President’s remark about the similarity of the aims of the warring powers. They declined to specify all their settlement demands in advance of any negotiations, but provided a sample list so unacceptable to Germany (including liberation of the Slavs, and expulsion of the Turks from Europe) that Wilson saw that the time had come for him to exert rhetorical force, rather than mere argument, in separating nations bent on self-destruction.
Sneer as Roosevelt might about his preference for “elocution” over acts, a close reading of the President’s policy statements to date indicated a steadily increasing willingness to go to war in defense of democracy. Amid the camouflage of elegant circumlocutions, certain phrases glinted like gunmetal: thrust out into the great game of mankind.… America will unite her force and spill her blood.… The business of neutrality is over.… Even his campaign slogan, He kept us out of war, had always been carefully phrased in the past tense.
Wilson saw, now, the paradox that every belligerent was desperate for peace, yet determined to win without concession. The apocalyptic battles of Verdun and the Somme had only just come to an end, with no clear victor. Germany was malnourished by the blockade, yet energized industrially by its conquest of oil-rich Romania (the Kaiser’s new chief of staff, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, had tripled artillery and machine-gun production). Britain had lost ninety-six thousand men in the Somme alone, while developing a formidable new weapon, the tank. France was nearly prostrate, although triumphant that Verdun had not fallen. Russia was crippled by strikes and impoverished by the influx of three and a half million refugees, while the Tsar looked for protection to an army almost stripped of arms.
On 22 January, Wilson made one of his sudden appearances before Congress. He said he was speaking “for the great silent mass of mankind” in calling for “a peace without victory” in Europe. Victory achieved at the cost of more Verduns, and worse, “would mean peace forced upon the loser … at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand.”
It was inconceivable, he said, that the United States should not try to bring about some concord stronger and more liberal than this. He spelled out the essentials of the agreement he had in mind—freedom of the seas; general disarmament; self-determination for all nations (including “a united and autonomous Poland”); and common membership, after the war’s end, in a league of nations “which will make it virtually impossible that any such catastrophe would ever overwhelm us again.”
Congress heard the word us, and gave him only moderate applause.
GERMANY’S RESPONSE, on the last day of the month, was to announce an immediate resumption of all-out submarine warfare.
Count Bernstorff wept after he delivered this advisory to Lansing. The President’s first reaction, as he read it, was incredulity. If he could believe his eyes, the German foreign minister was offering him a special concession. One American passenger liner a week would be permitted to sail to Falmouth, England, provided it was painted with vertical white-and-red stripes, followed a specific course via the Scilly Isles, arrived on Sunday, and departed on Wednesday. With Prussian exactitude, Herr Zimmermann begged to state that the stripes were to be “one meter wide.” Any deviation from these requirements would result in the liner being sunk on sight.
Colonel House visited the White House the next morning and found Wilson in near despair, saying he felt “as if the world had suddenly reversed itself.”
House knew what Roosevelt was psychologically barred from believing: that Wilson the man had wanted to go to war with Germany for almost a year and a half. However, Wilson the politician was constrained by the enormity of such a step, involving as it would a regearing of the entire economy of the United States—and requiring a degree of popular support unimaginable even now. Germany’s insolent note was not just a provocation. It was a casus belli, like the list of demands Austria-Hungary had sent Serbia after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. Both instruments were phrased in such a way as to be unacceptable. Unless he was truly the “coward” Roosevelt kept calling him, Wilson had no choice now but to sever diplomatic relations with Germany, and then, if the Reich sent one more torpedo into any American ship, ask Congress for a declaration of war.
Captain Rose of the U-53 obliged on 3 February by sinking the USS Housatonic off the Scillies. At 2 P.M. Count Bernstorff was handed his passports. Wilson went back to Capitol Hill to announce that he had instructed Secretary Lansing to recall Ambassador Gerard from Berlin. He did not mention the attack on the Housatonic, details of which were still coming through to the State Department. But he did significantly say: “If American ships and American lives should in fact be sacrificed … I shall take the liberty of coming again before the Congress to ask that authority be given to me to use any means that may be necessary for the protection of our seamen and our people … on the high seas.”
Even as Wilson’s threat was being released to the press, an awareness that war was coming provoked various acts of vandalism along the Eastern seaboard. The water cocks of an American submarine in Philadelphia were opened in an effort to scuttle her. The crew of an Austrian freighter interned in New York harbor wrecked their own engine room. The Kronzprinzessin Cecilie was disabled in Boston by direct order of the German government.
Overnight, the youngest and least prepossessing member of Wilson’s cabinet became the second most powerful man in Washington. Secretary of War Newton Diehl Baker was short, pale, bookish, and bespectacled, a lawyer whos
e only previous distinction was a spell as mayor of Cleveland. He was also—ludicrously, in view of his title—a pacifist who had spoken out against militarism within days of the attack on the Lusitania.
Here he was now, deciding as one of his first emergency responsibilities what to do about a letter from a former President of the United States. Roosevelt had not bothered to wait for Wilson’s speech before sending it:
Sir:
I have already on file in your Department, my application to be permitted to raise a Division of Infantry, with a divisional brigade of cavalry in the event of war.… In view of the recent German note, and of the fact that my wife and I are booked to sail next week for a month in Jamaica, I respectfully write as follows.
If you believe that there will be war, and a call for volunteers to go to war, immediately, I respectfully and earnestly request that you notify me at once, so that I may not sail.
Baker’s reply was dismissive. “No situation has arisen which would justify my suggesting a postponement of the trip you propose.” He wrote too late to block another letter from the Colonel, scribbled in extreme haste: “In view of the breaking of relations with Germany I shall of course not go to Jamaica, and will hold myself in readiness for any message from you as to the division. I and my four sons will of course go if volunteers are called for against Germany.”
“SHORT, PALE, BOOKISH, AND BESPECTACLED.”
Secretary of War Newton D. Baker. (photo credit i24.4)
The secretary could see further correspondence looming. In peacetime, his job was one of the laziest sinecures in Washington, involving little more than supervision of a small army spread out thin as pepper grains across the tablecloth of the country. But he had never doubted that should the United States ever mobilize, he would be transformed into a converter of energies sweeping back and forth between Congress and the armed services, the press and secret agencies, commission seekers and their backers, contractors and quartermasters, and dozens of other conduits that were bound to multiply for as long as the war lasted. Over the past eleven months, Baker had prepared himself for such an emergency in ways slightly comic—practicing, for example, a one-stroke zigzag signature. But his main asset was a brain that saw most clearly under stress.
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