American Experiment (224 page)

In 1914 events appeared to be marching to Lenin’s arguments. One by one, the nations touched by the industrial revolution were drawn into the European war: Japan, Turkey, Italy, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece. Armies clashed in eastern Africa and the Arabian deserts; fleets battled off South America; men came from Saskatoon, Pretoria, and Auckland to fight in Flanders. Only one industrial power was still uninvolved—and for it too time might run out.

The outbreak of fighting in Europe came as a sudden shock to most Americans—“like lightning out of a clear sky,” one congressman wrote. Even Edward House, who from Berlin had warned Wilson in May that “an awful cataclysm” was in store, returned to the United States on July 21 confident that the situation in Europe was improving. Seven days later, Austria attacked Serbia; within another week eight countries were in the war.

In contrast to the galvanized chancelleries of Europe, the military and
diplomatic establishments in Washington hardly stirred in the August heat. The State, Navy, and War departments—all housed in a massive granite and iron pile that Henry Adams had dubbed the “architectural infant asylum”—responded but feebly to the distant crisis. Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt, after rushing back to his office from Cape Cod on July 30, was appalled to find that “nobody seemed the least bit excited” about the war. In Theodore Roosevelt style, the young Roosevelt struggled for several days to get the American fleet mobilized and concentrated for possible action, but he sparked little response from the officers and bureaucrats around him. The War Department, meanwhile—with its bare rudiments of a general staff and a peacetime army of just 100,000 men—was even more somnolent.

Over in the State wing of the building, Secretary Bryan tried to intervene on the side of peace. Roosevelt thought him hopelessly naive. “These dear good people like W.J.B.,” FDR wrote to his wife Eleanor, “… have as much conception of what a general European war means” as his four-year-old son had of higher mathematics. But it was neither naïveté nor unpreparedness that was frustrating Bryan; rather, it was the lack of direction from across the street, at the White House.

Wilson, who had never shown a strong interest in European affairs, now seemed to turn his back on the Continent. When reporters asked whether he would tender his good offices to the warring powers, Wilson snapped that tradition, forbade America to “take part” in Europe’s quarrels. Likewise he spurned repeated suggestions from Bryan that the President offer himself as a mediator. Wilson met with the Cabinet on August 4, approved a plan to evacuate Americans stranded in Europe by the war, and agreed to an immediate declaration of neutrality accompanied by a statement urging Americans to remain “neutral in fact as well as in name, impartial in thought as well as in action.” Then he hurried back to the sickbed of his wife, whose worsening health had preoccupied him throughout the crisis. Later that night he wrote to a friend, “The more I read about the conflict across the seas, the more open it seems to me to utter condemnation. The outcome no man can even conjecture.” Two days later Mrs. Wilson died, and the President briefly seemed on the verge of collapse.

Emotion shaped Wilson’s initial response to the war: contempt toward the Europeans for allowing it to occur, outrage at the German violation of Belgium, and most of all his personal sorrow. But underlying his emotional rejection of the war was a moral vision, and as the months passed and Wilson more dispassionately studied the deadlock in Europe, that vision came to dominate his thinking. America would redeem warring Europe (just as she sought to uplift Asia and Latin America) by holding aloft the
beacon of liberty and peace. By January 1915, he was calling on his countrymen to exult in their neutral stance. “Look abroad upon the troubled world. Only America at peace!

“Think of the deep-wrought destruction of economic resources, of life and of hope that is taking place in some parts of the world, and think of the reservoir of hope, the reservoir of energy, the reservoir of sustenance that there is in this great land of plenty. May we not look forward to the time when we shall be called blessed among the nations because we succored the nations of the world in their time of distress and dismay?”

For Woodrow Wilson the World War offered both horror and hope. Like Lenin, Wilson believed that a radically different world order could be built from the international system that the war was smashing to pieces. Both men, from their neutral sanctuaries, saw the holocaust engulfing Europe as the product of fundamental flaws in the old order. Beyond that, however, their agreement ended. For Lenin, Europe’s crime was capitalism; for Wilson it was selfish power politics. Lenin took his blueprint for change from
Das Kapital,
Wilson from the New Testament and his father’s Presbyterian sermons. And while Lenin commanded only a dispirited handful of revolutionaries, Wilson led one of the most powerful nations on earth.

Wilson’s conception of America’s potential role in the war was a positive and activist one. He sought to keep his nation neutral, Barbara Tuchman suggests, in order to “make America a larger, rather than a lesser, force in the world.” The British historian Lord Devlin concluded that Wilson was from nearly the beginning animated by the desire to use the neutral power of the United States for “restoring the peace of the world.” From that desire would flow three years of tortuous diplomacy that would end, in seeming failure, in April of 1917.

Wilson tried to take the long view. “I have tried to look at this war ten years ahead,” he told Ida Tarbell, “to be a historian at the same time I was an actor. A hundred years from now it will not be the bloody details that the world will think of in this war: it will be the causes behind it, the readjustments which it will force.” Since he saw those causes as lying in the actions of both sides, he felt qualified to act as an impartial mediator.

Several obstacles stood in the way of Wilson’s attempts to mediate the conflict and in so doing to guide the peace talks to the higher goal of fashioning a new world order. One was the propaganda efforts of the belligerents, by which they tried to draw America into the war or at least to bend her neutrality to serve their own purposes. Another was the domestic agitation, both for and against America’s entering the war, led by such figures as Theodore Roosevelt for intervention and Jane Addams for pacifism. Indeed, the controversy reached even into Wilson’s inner
councils, dividing the isolationist Secretary of State Bryan from Wilson’s more belligerent advisors, Robert Lansing and Edward House.

The greatest barrier to Wilson’s goal of a negotiated peace, however, was the European powers’ imprisonment within the military juggernaut they had unleashed. Only a total victory would seem to justify the tremendous sacrifices of lives and wealth that they were making. Every new weapon—the submarine, the tank, poison gas—and every new ally tempted the side possessing it to believe that one more great push would bring complete military success.

These delusions of victory were never stronger than in the first months of the war. With German armies nearing the outskirts of Paris, and a Russian force thrusting deep into East Prussia, Wilson despaired of being able to put his principles into effect. To House he wrote that “there is nothing that we can as yet do or even attempt. What a pathetic thing to have this come.” The German advance finally was halted in the Battle of the Marne, and an entire Russian army was destroyed at Tannenberg; still it took several more months for the two sides to exhaust their first efforts. Only at the end of 1914 could the first moves toward peace be made.

Wilson’s Secretary of State was to play a key role in shaping America’s first peace initiatives. William Jennings Bryan was no longer the stentorian “Boy Orator” who had shocked and aroused the country in 1896. Four Democratic conventions, and two more runs for the presidency, lay in between. The onetime “demagogue” from the West had made his share of partisan compromises in the intervening two decades: seeking a commission in the Spanish war and then campaigning against imperialism in 1900; supporting free silver but not disavowing the conservative, Alton Parker, whom his party nominated in 1904. Bryan’s receding hair and expanding paunch seemed to confirm his evolution into a conventional, albeit progressive, politician.

But Bryan the moral visionary was in fact far from dead. Indeed, he often outstripped Wilson in applying idealistic principles to foreign policy. Bryan was the guiding force behind the negotiation of conciliation treaties between the United States and thirty other nations. He also was Wilson’s chief prop in the struggle to avoid war with Mexico. For the Secretary as much as the President, World War I represented a crowning opportunity to bring to life his most cherished visions of a new world order based upon the tenets of Christian charity and fellowship.

Like Wilson, Bryan was committed to the belief that “war could be exorcised by making moral principles as binding upon nations as upon
individuals,” Paolo Coletta noted. But he conceived America’s neutral role in the war differently from Wilson. While the President searched with increasing desperation for some form of diplomatic leverage that would enable him to force the belligerents to the peace table, Bryan advocated what he called a “Real Neutrality” where America would remain even-handed, uninvolved, and thus free to influence Europe by its moral example. Wilson’s principles led eventually to the internationalist ideas embodied in the League of Nations and the United Nations; Bryan’s evolved into the isolationism of the 1930s.

In 1914, the two men were still working in harmony. At first, they had to grapple with foreign actions that threatened both American leverage and American neutrality. Early in the war, the British government took decisive steps to cut off all commerce with Germany, steps that severely infringed upon the previously accepted rights of neutrals to trade with belligerents. Through their Orders in Council, the British extended the category of contraband to include foodstuffs and most other materials and used the doctrine of the continuous voyage to limit the trade not only of Germany but also of her neutral neighbors. Additional British actions particularly aroused resentment in America: the opening of U.S. mail to Europe; the blacklisting of American firms that did business with the Central Powers; the flying of neutral flags by British ships.

Bryan drafted a series of protests against Britain’s infringements of America’s neutral rights, but he had his misgivings about the use of force. The Secretary would countenance no implied threat of retaliation against Britain, nor any American military buildup that might alarm the European powers. An arms embargo would have been perhaps the best means of forcing the Allies to change their maritime practices; yet Bryan actively opposed legislation that would have cut off arms shipments the combatants needed.

Instead he sought a humanitarian solution to the impasse over neutral trade. In February 1915, at Bryan’s urging, Wilson proposed to the belligerents a plan for reopening trade, at least in foodstuffs, to the Central Powers. Only food for Germany’s and Austria’s civilian population would be admitted through the British blockade, and the United States would undertake to monitor German compliance with those conditions. Britain and Germany were quick to see the tremendous power that control over food shipments to Europe would give Wilson; both sides rejected the offer. Thus the closest collaboration between Bryan and Wilson ended in failure.

The two men were increasingly forced apart as Germany radically changed the stakes in the debate over neutral rights. In the same month that Wilson made his offer to supervise food imports, the German navy
unleashed its U-boats against shipping around the British Isles. This initial submarine campaign, undertaken with only a handful of boats, was aimed more at forcing the British to negotiate than seriously challenging their command of the seas. Still, the Germans were sinking ships and killing people—including, on March 28, 1915, an American named Leon Thrasher, who was traveling on the unarmed British liner
Falaba.

The death of Thrasher divided the American government. Bryan urged that the President bar Americans from traveling on the ships of belligerents, even circumscribe U.S. trade with Europe if necessary, in order to preserve the impartial position of the United States. Lansing, on the other hand, termed the sinking of the
Falaba
a “wanton act... in direct violation of the principles of humanity as well as the law of nations.” He called for a strong protest against Germany’s U-boat campaign. Wilson temporized between the opinions of his two advisors, and meanwhile had warned the Germans that he would hold them to “strict accountability” for any further American deaths. The debate within the Administration continued for another five weeks, until a U-boat commander dramatically forced the issue.

On May 7, 1915, the British passenger steamer
Lusitania
was torpedoed and sunk off the Irish coast. Nearly 1,200 people died in the sinking, including 128 Americans. Bryan immediately suggested—and historians have subsequently confirmed—that the
Lusitania
was secretly carrying munitions and thus was a legitimate target of war. He used the public outcry over the sinking to reiterate his case: that Americans be warned off traveling on belligerent ships, that any apology or compensation for the incident could be postponed until the war in Europe ended, and that in the meantime an evenhanded protest to both Germany and Britain be sent. The alternative, Bryan feared, was war.

Wilson disagreed. A retreat into isolation, he told Bryan, might save lives, but in the long run it would only diminish the chances of finding a way to lasting peace. “To show this sort of yielding to threat and danger would only make matters worse.” When the German government quibbled over Wilson’s first note protesting the
Lusitania
incident, the President drafted a second in which he demanded that the Germans give specific guarantees not to attack unarmed ships. Unwilling to sign the note, Bryan resigned on June 7, and Lansing replaced him as Secretary of State.