The next night, Colonel House arrived at the White House, and the President read to him what he had drafted thus far. House thought it was “a wonderfully well written document” but that Wilson’s suggestion that “the causes and objects of the war are obscure” would enrage the Allies. House explained that such a remark suggested no understanding of the Allies’ viewpoint, which held “that Germany started the war for conquest; that she broke all international obligations and laws of humanity in pursuit of it.” The British claimed to be fighting “to make such another war impossible, and to so break Prussian militarism that a permanent peace may be established.”
Over the next two weeks, Wilson edited his “peace note.” In calling upon the leaders to articulate their objectives, Wilson believed he might get the antagonists to realize that “peace is nearer than we know; that the terms which the belligerents . . . would deem it necessary to insist upon are not so irreconcilable as some have feared.” On Friday, December 15, he read his revised version to his Cabinet. McAdoo and Houston strongly opposed sending it, as it “might be regarded as an act of friendship toward Germany and possibly as a threat.” After a lengthy discussion, the President said, “I will send this note or nothing.” And at 9:30 p.m. on December 18, he sent it. House revealed to his diary, “I find the President has nearly destroyed all the work I have done in Europe. He knows how I feel about this and how the Allies feel about it, and yet the refrain always appears in some form or other.” Although he kept his feelings private, he remained angry at the President for weeks—though not as angry as the President became with Secretary Lansing for a highly indiscreet blunder.
Feeling that the “peace note” gave the appearance of complicity with the Germans’ recent overtures, the Secretary of State issued his own statement, in which he indicated that the note had sprung from America’s increasing involvement with the belligerents. “I mean by that,” he added, digging a shallow grave for himself, “that we are drawing nearer the verge of war ourselves, and therefore we are entitled to know exactly what each belligerent seeks, in order that we may regulate our conduct in the future.” Wilson was furious. The note not only second-guessed him but provided what he considered an unnecessary addendum, one that would only further cloud the murky waters of diplomacy. Worse, it revealed that Lansing was not in sympathy with Wilson’s desire to stay out of this war. The stock market plummeted, as war jitters triggered the most precipitous one-day drop in fifteen years.
The President all but called for Lansing’s resignation. Instead, he dictated a follow-up statement for the Secretary to release—which offered both his correction and his contrition. Wall Street bounced back the next day. The “peace note” episode reminded the American foreign policy team that it was essentially a one-man band.
Twenty-two relatives gathered at the White House to celebrate Christmas 1916 and Wilson’s sixtieth birthday. “We thank God for all you mean to the World, and trust that your life and strength may be spared for many years,” wrote Cleveland Dodge, “to solve the great problems which you, better than anyone else, can solve.” Wilson believed as much himself. With the belligerents failing to reply with the terms he had requested, Wilson decided to state his own. He formulated a general resolution to the great conflict and something more—“making the keystone of the settlement arch the future security of the world against wars, and letting territorial adjustments be subordinate to the main purpose.” On January 3, 1917, he and Colonel House conferred, laying cornerstones of the foundation. The main tenet was “the right of nations to determine under what government they should continue to live.” Beyond that, Wilson thought Poland should be free and independent, Belgium and Serbia should be restored, and the vast Turkish Empire should be dismantled. House urged granting Russia maritime access to the south—“a warm seaport”—without which, he feared, they would surely go to war again. Wilson set to work on a speech that would outline not only an end of the war but also the start of a new age of peace.
For two weeks he toiled, and at one o’clock on January 22, 1917, he appeared before the Senate. While the nation’s legislators had grown accustomed to the President’s addressing them to explain any number of audacious programs, this visit was singular, for it came with little advance notice and no explanation of its purpose.
Wilson spoke of the duty of the American government in building a new structure of peace in the world. “It is inconceivable that the people of the United States should play no part in that great enterprise,” he said. He added that the country owed it to itself and the other nations of the world to “add their authority and their power to the authority and force of other nations to guarantee peace and justice throughout the world.” He wanted the American government to originate a “League for Peace.” In ending this war, he sought treaties and agreements “which will create a peace that is worth guaranteeing and preserving, a peace that will win the approval of mankind, not merely a peace that will serve the several interests and immediate aims of the nations engaged.”
Such a “covenant of cooperative peace,” Wilson said, must include the people of the New World if it was meant to “keep the future safe against war.” In reassembling a shattered world, Wilson said, there must be “not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace.” That, Wilson said in a statement that would resonate for generations, would require “a peace without victory.”
Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor’s terms imposed upon the vanquished. It would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, 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.
“Only a peace between equals can last,” he said.
Wilson was formulating a number of specific points—regarding Poland, armaments, and “freedom of the seas.” Above all, he proposed the ideas of “government by the consent of the governed” and that “no right anywhere exists to hand peoples about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were property.” Wilson concluded by insisting, “These are American principles, American policies. We could stand for no others. And they are also the principles and policies of forward looking men and women everywhere. . . . They are the principles of mankind and must prevail.”
Having sat through the speech in rapt silence, the audience in the gallery and the Senators on the floor broke into sharp applause, led by Republican Robert La Follette, who afterward commented, “We have just passed through a very important hour in the life of the world.” Senator “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman said it was “the most startling and noblest utterance that has fallen from human lips since the Declaration of Independence.” Other members of Congress suggested this expression of a new world vision was the most important pronouncement of an American President since the Monroe Doctrine. (Wilson had even suggested in his text that the rest of the world should adopt Monroe’s doctrine—that “no nation should seek to extend its polity over any other nation or people, but that every people should be left free to determine its own polity.” The New York Times wrote that the speech offered more than a contract for peace; it was “a moral transformation.”
But, as expected, Republican critics pounced. Senator Francis E. Warren of Wyoming gibed that “the President thinks he is the President of the world.” Others suggested that Wilson was abandoning the Monroe Doctrine, inviting non-Americans to tamper with the workings of the Western Hemisphere. Alice Roosevelt Longworth took wicked delight in the way Wilson had converted the Capitol into his own personal theater and turned each Presidential message into a “show.” On this occasion, she thought he had outdone himself. “Peace without victory,” she said, “amounted to nothing more than a continuation of cowardly temporizing.”
A sanguine Wilson told the press, “I have said what everybody has thought impossible. Now it appears to be possible.” He did not expect the Sen
ate to take specific action as a result of his remarks. This was simply a rare moment in the nation’s history in which a President asked the people and its representatives to embrace a philosophy.
Foreign reaction was mixed. Ambassador Page in London said the British admired the idealism of the speech but felt the defeat of Germany was essential for any long-term tranquillity, a peace with victory. Privately, some Allied Ambassadors in the United States questioned the President’s right to propose terms of a peace to a war in which he was not engaged. The most positive foreign reaction came from the Germans. Ambassador von Bernstorff was still pushing his government to respond to Wilson’s earlier request for peace, and he remained in quiet contact with Colonel House.
But on January 31, 1917, Germany announced a new policy, an offensive of unrestricted submarine warfare whereby all ships, belligerent or neutral, in the war zone surrounding Great Britain, France, and Italy, or in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, would be sunk. A specified route would be provided to permit a limited number of well-marked American ships to enter this zone. Bernstorff wrote Colonel House that Berlin had instructed him to inform Wilson that Germany had been prepared to meet virtually all the Allies’ peace terms back in December, but no longer. They now believed their new submarine policy would bring the war to its swiftest conclusion. As soon as Tumulty had the German bulletin in hand, he brought it to the President and watched as he read and reread it. Wilson turned gray, his lips tightened, and his jaw locked. Placing the paper back in Tumulty’s hand, Wilson quietly said, “This means war. The break that we have tried so hard to prevent now seems inevitable.”
Still, Wilson resisted. Despite resenting Germany for misleading him for so many months, he believed “it was for the good of the world for the United States to keep out of the war in the present circumstances.” He insisted that he would not allow this turn of events to incite military action “if it could possibly be avoided.” He was willing to bear the criticism and contempt that would come from all sides. On February 2, Secretary Lansing, voicing the sentiments of most of the Cabinet, wrote Wilson, “The situation can no longer be tolerated. The time for patience has passed.”
The next day, the President returned to Congress. After reviewing Germany’s provocative behavior, Wilson announced that he had directed the Secretary of State to inform His Excellency the German Ambassador “that all diplomatic relations between the United States and the German Empire are severed and that the American Ambassador at Berlin will immediately be withdrawn.” Should German naval commanders violate the laws of the sea and humanity, Wilson said, he would “take the liberty of coming again before the Congress, to ask that authority be given me to use any means that may be necessary for the protection of our seamen and our people in the prosecution of their peaceful and legitimate errands on the high seas.” Even at this late date, Wilson kept the diplomatic doors open. “We shall not believe that they are hostile to us unless and until we are obliged to believe it.”
At two o’clock that afternoon—as Wilson walked before both houses of Congress, an Assistant Solicitor for the State Department appeared at the German Embassy in Washington and handed Count von Bernstorff his passport. “I am not surprised,” Bernstorff said, wistfully granting that there was “nothing else left for the United States to do.” After eight years in Washington, he told the press that he was finished with politics and expected to retire to his farm to grow potatoes.
Colonel House recorded that Wilson was still of a mind that “it would be a crime for this Government to involve itself in the war to such an extent as to make it impossible to save Europe afterward.” The President maintained that his recent declaration was intended to lay “the bases of peace, not war.” Wilson spent much of the next week engaged in the same practice that he had as a young boy organizing his baseball team: he drafted a constitution. In this instance it was for that League of Peace to which he had referred, an organization of neutral nations that would be committed to a number of basic precepts—mutual guarantees of political independence, territorial integrity, arms limitation, and a refusal to take part “in any joint economic action by two or more nations which would in effect constitute an effort to throttle the industrial life of any nation or shut it off from fair and equal opportunities of trade.” Roosevelt wrote Lodge that he now doubted whether Wilson would go to war under any circumstances. “He is evidently trying his old tactics,” he said; “he is endeavoring to sneak out of going to war under any conditions. . . . He is yellow all through in the presence of danger. . . . Of course it costs him nothing, if the insult or injury is to the country, because I don’t believe he is capable of understanding what the words ‘pride of country’ mean. . . .”
On February 28, Wilson granted an audience to a delegation of peace advocates—church leaders, a Socialist labor organizer, a historian, and Jane Addams among them. Their mission was to impress upon the President his own comments in his “peace without victory” speech and to offer historical examples and moral imperatives for why America should stay out of the war. When Professor William Isaac Hull, one of his former students, urged Wilson to send an appeal to the German people, circumventing the militaristic hierarchy, the President brought the conversation to a close. “Dr. Hull,” he said, “if you knew what I know at the present moment, and what you will see reported in tomorrow morning’s newspapers, you would not ask me to attempt further peaceful dealings with the Germans.”
“GERMANY SEEKS AN ALLIANCE AGAINST US; ASKS JAPAN AND MEXICO TO JOIN HER; FULL TEXT OF HER PROPOSAL MADE PUBLIC,” blared the New York Times headline the next day. This exposed plot had come in the form of a coded telegram from Foreign Minister Zimmermann to the German Ambassador in Mexico, who was to encourage President Carranza to ally with Germany and to invite Japan to do the same. In return, Mexico would not only receive financial reward but could also reclaim Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.
In truth, the British had intercepted Zimmermann’s note in mid-January but had not relayed it to Wilson, via Ambassador Page, until February 25. The following afternoon, the President appeared before a joint session of Congress. With just days until the arrival of the new legislature, he called upon the Sixty-fourth Congress to take one more bold position. “Since it has unhappily proved impossible to safeguard our neutral rights by diplomatic means,” he said, “. . . there may be no recourse but to armed neutrality.” Without proposing war, Wilson requested certain tools with which to fight German weapons—most especially the authority to supply American merchant ships with defensive arms. That day, a German U-Boat sank the Laconia, a former British ocean liner converted to an armed merchant cruiser, as it approached Ireland. Twelve people from among the 75 passengers and crew of 217 died, including a mother and daughter from Chicago.
The House immediately passed an armed ship bill by a vote of 403 to 13, but the Senate balked. Several Senators believed arming merchantmen left the nation only one incident away from war. Midwesterners such as La Follette, along with O’Gorman from New York and Vardaman from Mississippi, decided to dramatize their opposition with a filibuster. In this case, they had only to delay for the two days before the Sixty-fourth Congress would terminate—at noon on March 4. Although seventy-six Senators said they would approve the bill, eleven men held the government hostage.
Because March 4 fell on a Sunday, the formal inauguration of the President was scheduled for the next day. But, as required, Chief Justice White swore Woodrow Wilson in for the second time, in a quiet ceremony. Wilson had been in the President’s Room since 10:30 that rainy morning, attending to business and monitoring the filibuster down the hall. The Cabinet gathered over the next hour, along with Tumulty, Colonel House, and Dr. Grayson. No more than thirty people witnessed Wilson take the oath. Edith, the only woman present, stood behind him. Afterward, Wilson kissed the Bible, which was opened to the Forty-sixth Psalm: “God is our refuge and strength: a very present help in trouble.”
There were no festivities that day, only complaints about the filibuster. With the bill killed, a seething President returned to the White House, where he went to his desk. That night he released a long statement to the press, taking the Senate to task. “In the immediate presence of a crisis fraught with more subtle and far-reaching possibilities of national danger than any other the Government has known within the whole history of its international relations,” the President raged, “the Congress has been unable to act either to safeguard the country or to vindicate the elementary rights of its citizens.” He felt the United States, especially in times of crisis, could not proceed in this manner. “A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own,” he said, “have rendered the great Government of the United States helpless and contemptible,” making it “the only legislative body in the world which cannot act when its majority is ready for action.” The President saw a single remedy—a change in the rules. Within days, Wilson would call upon the newly seated Sixty-fifth Congress to institute an essential of Senatorial procedure—the rule of “cloture,” by which a (then) two-thirds majority of the Senate could end a filibuster.
A cold wind blew across the East Portico of the Capitol that Monday, March 5, as the sun tried to burn through the clouds that remained from a recent storm. “The inauguration was not a festival,” one onlooker observed; “it was a momentary interlude in a grave business, and it must be got over with as briefly and as simply as possible.” Because of new threats against Wilson’s life, security was reinforced, with twenty Secret Service agents surrounding him. Only fifty thousand people gathered for the ceremonies; the inaugural parade was half the length of the first; and, again, there would be no Inaugural Ball. For the first time, a First Lady accompanied her husband to and from the Capitol and stood by his side while he delivered a brief speech of 1,500 words.
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