THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES
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Bryan saw clearly where Wilson's policy was leading. The diplomatic note of May 13, though too timid for Theodore Roosevelt, who ridiculed it, was too aggressive for the pacifist Bryan, and he immediately resigned as secretary of state. Upon disembarkation in the United States, House was surrounded by reporters at the New York dock wanting to know if he would succeed Bryan. House took the occasion to publicly reject any possibility that he would serve as secretary of state; he rebuffed Wilson's proposal that he come to Washington, and instead retreated to Long Island, and then to the North Shore, where the President came to him on June 24.
On July 25 the American merchant ship Leelanaw, carrying flax, was sunk off the coast of Scotland by a German submarine. On August 13, the British passenger ship Arabic was sunk with Americans aboard. Wilson asked House's advice, and the latter proposed breaking off diplomatic relations with the Germans. Wilson, however, still hoped to avoid war, and before any more forceful American action was taken, Germany announced it was suspending operations against passenger liners. This was generally viewed in the United States as a triumph for Wilson and for moderation, but House knew the German policy could not hold for long. The submarine was Germany's only effective vessel to interdict the Atlantic sea lanes that her enemies controlled because the German fleet was bottled up in German ports and, except for the Battle of Jutland, played no important role in the war. While international law required belligerent ships to identify themselves in order to search neutral shipping, the lightly armored submarine was too vulnerable on the surface to risk this. Even the pledge to avoid passenger ships would have to be eventually sacrificed if the British stranglehold on German imports of foodstuffs was to be broken.
In the autumn, House came up with a new plan. The United States would propose a peace conference and fair terms for all participants. If any belligerent refused to attend, the United States would commit itself to joining that state's adversaries. It was a bold, if somewhat Machiavellian, maneuver. House moved carefully. First he wrote to Grey trying to flush out British peace terms. On September 22, 1915, Grey replied to House's inquiry whether a proposal to return to the status quo ante, followed by a broad reduction in armaments, would be welcome to the British government. Grey reported that “neither side is ready for such a proposal.” But before Grey's reply could reach House, House appended to another letter this note: “Please do not take too seriously the suggestion I made in my last letter in regard to peace. It was merely to let you know the President holds himself in readiness at any time to do what is thought best. As far as I can see, and from all that I can hear from Germany, it is utterly hopeless to think in that direction now.”42
But once House received Grey's reply, which can only be read as discouraging, he re-entered the game. Grey had added to his letter a long section devoted to postwar policy and this gave House the opening he sought. Grey asked: “Would the President propose that there should be a League of Nations binding themselves to side against any Power which broke a treaty; which broke certain rules of warfare on sea or land… or which refused, in case of dispute, to adopt some other method of settlement than that of war?”43
Now House wrote:
It has occurred to me that the time may soon come when this Government should intervene between the belligerents and demand that peace parleys begin upon the broad basis of the elimination of militarism and navalism…. It is in my mind that after conferring with your Government I should proceed to Berlin and tell them that it was the President's purpose to intervene and stop this destructive war, provided the weight of the United States thrown on the side that accepted our proposal could do it. I would not let Berlin know, of course, of any understanding had with the Allies, but would rather lead them to think our proposal would be rejected by the Allies. This might induce Berlin to adopt the proposal, but if they did not do so, it would nevertheless be the purpose to intervene. If the Central Powers were still obdurate, it would probably be necessary for us to join the allies and force the issue.44
Grey replied: “What is the proposal of the elimination of militarism and navalism you contemplate? Is it that suggested in [my last letter, i.e., the League of Nations]?” and House replied, “Yes.” Beneath House's copy of this note there is written in his hand, “Submitted for W's approval. Approved Nov. 11.”
Now Grey faltered. Pointing out that the French and the Russians planned winter offensives in which they had great confidence, the British foreign secretary wrote, “[T]he situation at the moment and the feelings here and among the Allies, and in Germany so far as I know, do not justify me in urging you to come on the ground that your presence would have any practical result at the moment.”
House was dejected. It seemed as if Grey did not appreciate what Britain was being offered—“the British,” House commented at this juncture, “are in many ways dull.”45 In fact, Grey saw all too clearly what was involved. For the Allies, the American goal was a war aim scarcely worthy of the name. If the Allies committed to it they would have to abandon goals that they cherished and for which millions had died. But for the Americans, a League of Nations that would end war against the democracies and outlaw war in the future was a goal worth fighting for. If the United States did not take part in the war, however, she would not be able to direct the peace. What was for Grey merely a supplementary plan that might protect postwar British interests had become, for House and Wilson, the only justifiable reason to act.
House sailed for England on December 28. His mission has been variously misconstrued by those historians who cannot quite take seriously the uniqueness of House's and Wilson's war aims. “At best his behavior in these talks could be described as duplicitous; at worst he was dishonest in his dealings with both the British and Wilson. While House was reporting to the president that the allies were sincerely interested in mediation, he was presenting his plan to the British as little more than a pretext for entering the war against Germany.”46 Such criticism ignores Wilson's objective: whether by mediation on the basis of American terms, or by American participation in the war and thus also in the postwar settlement, Wilson sought to bring into being a system of enforceable law to prevent future conflicts. Mediation—now or later—was the American war aim. With this goal in mind, House's mission was rather cleverly but hardly duplicitously devised. It failed because neither the Allies nor the Central Powers wanted an evenhanded peace nor believed they, at that point, had to accept one.
After two weeks in England, House proceeded to Berlin and then to Paris for discussions; he then returned to London, where he and Grey initialed a memorandum two weeks later. This document, however, was never approved by the cabinet nor circulated to what doubtless would have been horrified allies. The belligerents saw what the Americans had in mind; they were in no mood to have purchased what were essentially American war goals, with the suffering of their populations and the deaths of their soldiers. House returned to the States.
In late March the British liner Sussex was torpedoed with twenty-five Americans aboard.47 Throughout this period House was far more “hawkish” than Wilson, and more sensitive to the criticisms of former president Roosevelt. After the sinking of the Sussex, House rushed to Washington in order to prevent Wilson from sending a diplomatic note to the Germans that might have appeared insufficiently firm. On March 30 he spent a long afternoon meeting alone with the president, with the result that when Wilson emerged he threatened to break off diplomatic relations with Germany if submarine warfare continued. In the ensuing weeks, House undertook negotiations with the German ambassador, resulting in the May 4 “Sussex Pledge” by Germany that henceforth she would not use submarines in contravention of international law.
This success, though only temporary, as House expected, emboldened Wilson to try to resurrect the House-Grey Memorandum. The 1916 elections were approaching and Wilson was eager to bring peace to Europe lest the United States be drawn into war on terms, and for goals, that were unacceptable to the American public. The British were again
cool to the Memorandum. The United States and the United Kingdom simply understood the war in different terms. For the United States, the world war was to be fought for the future of democracy. Not only would this ensure that wars did not occur—because the democracies would resort to nonviolent methods of resolving disputes—but this also meant that nation-states would derive their legitimacy from the consent of the national peoples they represented, which Wilson believed would result in a change in attitude toward war itself. Nor was Wilson naive to believe this: when one recalls nineteenth century state-nation attitudes toward war—attitudes that exalted war, as was so passionately and eloquently done by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., among others48—it is striking how much views have changed in the nation-state democracies.
For the United Kingdom and for France, both states in the midst of the transition from imperial state-nation to mass nation-state, the point of the Great War was rather different. For Premier Clemenceau, it was simply to prepare for the next war: that is, so long as there was a Germany, there would be a Franco-German conflict, and the point of the current conflict was to give the French the best position possible in the next one. For the British cabinet, the point of the war was to prevent a single continental power from dominating Europe, a war aim shared over the centuries with Pitt and Marlborough and Elizabeth's counselors. Both states—indeed, all European parties to the conflict, whether they were unreconstructed state-nations like Russia or the fascist nation-state of Germany—had war aims that sought to enhance each state's freedom of action and avoid any externally imposed constraint on that freedom. None of the European states conceived the goal of the war as achieving statehood for all national peoples, and some, like Russia and Austria, may have greatly feared this.
After refusing to become chairman of the Democratic National Committee, House put forward a strategy for the Wilson campaign that proved successful. In every political campaign in the United States of any complexity, there is always a decision to determine whether to concentrate on getting out the votes you are certain to get or whether to go after marginal “swing” votes (in the wooing of which you may alienate the loyalists). What made House's strategy for Wilson successful was his embedding this question in the idiosyncrasies of that unique American institution, the electoral college. House urged Wilson to concentrate his resources on swing districts of no more than a hundred thousand voters in those states that could likely go for either candidate—the marginal districts in the marginal states. Because the result in the electoral college is calculated by state and is indifferent to the magnitude of a winner's popular vote in any particular state, a narrow win in a large state is more helpful than a landslide in a smaller state. Wilson had been elected by a minority of the voters in 1912; if the Republicans could hold their own loyalists and pick up the Republican Progressives who had voted for Roosevelt, then Wilson would be resoundingly defeated. On the other hand, if Roosevelt were not in the race, Wilson could have a free run for the Progressive vote, attacking the Republican nominee on those issues that had made him acceptable to the Republican party where Theodore Roosevelt was not, while using the war issue to drive Progressives away from the Republican party. Thus Wilson would partly stress the progressive legislation he had sponsored and signed into law, and partly he would associate Roosevelt's call for American intervention with the Republicans. If the Republican nominee disassociated himself from Roosevelt, then Wilson would be the beneficiary of one group of progressives; if, on the other hand, he endorsed intervention in an effort to propitiate TR's supporters, then Wilson would gain Western Progressives who, in contrast to those from the East, were solidly for peace.
House's strategy exploited this narrow seam in Republican solidarity. To do this successfully, however, required four conditions: (1) Roosevelt must not be nominated; (2) House must be able to tell, with accuracy, how votes in the Progressive camp were shifting and where, so that Wilson could move to capitalize on these shifts; (3) the Democrats must hold the conservative, non-Progressive South; (4) the Republican nominee must not be allowed to move left, in a Progressive direction.
When Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes was nominated by the Republicans, the first of these conditions was satisfied; Hughes's campaign satisfied the fourth. As a compromise candidate between the Republican old guard and the Progressives, Hughes was entirely unwilling to take positions that threatened to alienate either wing. He thus became a kind of stationary target for Wilson, who ridiculed Hughes's unwillingness to endorse progressive legislation passed during the Wilson administration. Wilson was careful not to alienate the South, but these votes, as House knew, had nowhere else to go, because the Republicans were so deeply identified with Reconstruction.
Everything then came down to House's strategy to organize districts of no more than one hundred thousand voters in those swing constituencies of the most important states. He thought that there were
twelve states that were debatable, and upon whose votes the election would turn. He divided each of these states into [“the smallest possible units that could be arranged with available campaign funds”49] and began by eliminating all states he knew the opposition party would certainly carry… He also ignored the states where his side was sure to win. In this way he was free to give his entire thoughts to [a very few districts]. Of [a unit of] five thousand, he roughly calculated there would be two thousand voters that no kind of persuasion could turn from the national party and two thousand that could not be changed from the opposition. This would leave one thousand doubtful ones to win over. So he had a careful poll made in each unit, and eliminated the strictly unpersuadable party men, and got down to a complete analysis of the debatable one thousand. Information was obtained as to their race, religion, occupation, and former political predilection.50
This allowed House to track the reactions among swing voters and tailor Wilson's speeches and literature accordingly. By concentrating on so few districts, the campaign was able to field an intensive organizational effort. “We must run the President,” House told Daniel C. Roper, the man in charge of organization, “for justice of the peace, and not for president; we need not consider the disposition of sixteen or seventeen million voters, but the disposition of the voters in individual precincts.”51
House gave to the president a list of favorable states that House regarded as certain. This would give Wilson 230 of the 266 electoral votes needed to be elected. Thirty-six more had to be found. Never before had a president been elected without Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Indiana, or Illinois, 52 but House's list proved accurate. Wilson narrowly won (277 to 254 for Hughes), the final tallies coming in the last hours with California's thirteen electoral votes. Wilson was the first Democratic president since Jackson to win a second consecutive term. Although today House's strategy might seem entirely routine given the techniques of snapshot polling and telephone banks, at the time it was considered highly risky and perhaps would not have been tried had Hughes not seemed so far ahead and so likely to win.
The election now over, Wilson and House turned their attention again to foreign affairs. Wilson had campaigned on a slogan, “He Kept Us Out of War,” though in truth he had been preparing for intervention for some months, should that ultimately become his chosen course. This did not trouble the pragmatic Colonel. Though acknowledging that he
had himself advocated a plan which under certain conditions would have brought the country into the war, [s]ince the attitude of the Allies had prevented the execution of the plan, it would have been rather Quixotic to have disregarded the political advantages resulting from the Allies' refusal.53
A stronger case can be made that House's and Wilson's war aims were not entirely the same as Theodore Roosevelt's, who wished to enter the war unequivocally in support of the allies.*
In retrospect, the obvious question that the House-Wilson war policy raises is: for what? For what did the Americans need to send 1.5 million infantrymen into battle? Surely not for the technical violations
of American neutrality; American-flagged ships were in fact being used to resupply and arm a belligerent, just as the Germans claimed. When the United States finally went to war, its disregard of the rights of neutral nations was as great as that previously exhibited by the Allies, to whom the United States was constantly protesting. The Germans could hardly be blamed for halting shipping in the only way the British Royal Navy permitted them, while the Royal Navy itself stopped U.S. ships illegally and simply seized them by virtue of its command of the ocean surface. Was it for the sinking of U.S. ships by German submarines, then, that the United States went to war? Surely the remedy for this, as for the attacks by terrorist states on American civilians, is retorsion. It can hardly be proportionate, or even rational, to decide that the death of innocent Americans requires a world war for just retaliation.