American Experiment (225 page)

Ironically, the submarine threat gradually receded after Bryan’s resignation. When, in August, two Americans died in the torpedoing of the British steamer
Arabic,
the Germans offered an apology and indemnity. More important, Wilson extracted from German Ambassador Johann von Bernstorff the so-called
Arabic
pledge that no more passenger ships would be
attacked, a pledge that Berlin finally confirmed nine months—and another torpedoed passenger ship—later with the
Sussex
pledge. The German submarine skippers, meanwhile, turned their attention back to sinking Allied warships and freighters.

The threat of war between Germany and America really had never been serious. The phlegmatic Colonel House may briefly have lost control, warning the President that Americans “can no longer remain neutral spectators” after the
Lusitania
sinking, but the overwhelming majority of the public seemed opposed to an outright break with Germany. The editors of the Chicago
Standard,
echoing the sentiments of publicists and politicians across the country, urged its readers to view the incident with calmness and deliberation: “We must protect our citizens, but we must find some other way than war.” Thus, when Wilson spoke of America being “too proud to fight” over the submarine sinkings, too sure of its own righteousness to descend into the morass of war with Germany, he struck a responsive chord.

Some of Wilson’s critics, however, responded with anger rather than applause. Theodore Roosevelt characterized the President’s course in the submarine controversy as “supine inaction,” mere “milk and water” diplomacy. Wilson, the old Rough Rider growled, spoke for “all the hyphenated Americans … the solid flubdub and pacifist vote … every soft creature, every coward and weakling, every man who can’t look more than six inches ahead.” The
Lusitania
galvanized partisan opposition to the President in Congress, and guaranteed him the enmity of the small but influential band still clustered around Roosevelt. Foremost among its members was Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, senior Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee.

The British were quick to capitalize on American revulsion at the submarine attacks. British spokesmen linked the
Lusitania
to other alleged German atrocities in France and Belgium, played up the theme of Prussian autocracy and militarism, and sought to persuade Americans that a victory by the Central Powers would endanger the safety of the United States. The Germans, however, countered with an extremely effective propaganda campaign of their own, playing in part on the sentiments of German-Americans and the anti-British feelings of Irish-Americans. The latter received a particular boost in mid-1916, when the British bloodily suppressed an uprising in Ireland and, over the formal protest of the U.S. Senate, executed several Irish leaders. In the end, scholars have concluded, the propaganda efforts of the two sides largely canceled each other
out, and in the process left the American public with a better grasp of the war situation than the populations of the belligerent countries.

Wilson thus faced challenges to his policies from his political opponents, from abroad—and also from within his own party. William Jennings Bryan had not renounced his belief that the Administration’s hard line toward Germany was leading to war, nor had he stopped trying to change it. While Wilson was struggling in early 1916 to get the German government to confirm von Bernstorff’s
Arabic
pledge, two Bryan supporters—Thomas Gore of Oklahoma and A. Jefferson McLemore of Texas—introduced legislation in Congress to bar Americans from traveling on armed ships of the warring powers. Bryan and others hoped by this means to induce the British to disarm their commercial steamers, thus allowing German submarines to stop the ships and search them as per the old rules of cruiser warfare. Failing that, at least U.S. citizens would be kept out of the way of German torpedoes. Wilson handily defeated these Gore-McLemore resolutions, but the price in lost congressional goodwill was high.

The President further alienated the peace wing of the Democratic party when he pushed through Congress, with considerable Republican support, a “preparedness” program involving major increases in land and naval forces. Taking these defeats in good grace, Bryan continued to pledge his personal support to the President. However, the Nebraskan also kept up his public warnings against the “Jingoes” within the Administration who would “drive us into war.”

In Europe, 1916 was another year of bloody stalemate. The German attack on Verdun and Britain’s counteroffensive along the Somme both ended in defeat. In the east, the Central Powers and Russia traded staggering blows without altering the strategic balance. The British and German fleets clashed off Jutland in the North Sea, to no avail. Likewise, Italy’s armies were checked on the southern front by the Austrians.

Amid the whirl of events during late 1915 and early 1916, as Wilson was spun about in the European maelstrom, the President moved at home and abroad toward new strategies that would mark one of the transcendent acts of political leadership in American history—an act rivaling Jefferson’s assuming command of the republican movement in the 1790s and Lincoln’s decision for Emancipation during the Civil War. In all these transforming acts, the leader sensed profound human needs on the part of followers, took action, raised supporters’ hopes and expectations, and worked with followers-turned-leaders in a supreme enterprise in collective leadership.

Wilson had followed a wavering middle-of-the-road course since the
New Freedom’s glory days of 1913–14. His tariff, banking, and other reforms stood proudly on the legislative books, but he appeared to compromise them by some of his appointments—notably of conservatives to the new Federal Reserve Board and Federal Trade Commission. He supported trade unionism but straddled the issue of labor’s immunity to the antitrust laws. He favored the curbing of child labor—but not a
federal
child labor law because he deemed it unconstitutional; he favored woman suffrage, but preferred to leave the matter to the states, and hence to the reactionary state legislatures; he had promised that Negroes too would share in the New Freedom, but tolerated increased segregation in federal employment. For a time, he welcomed controversial business leaders like Henry Ford and even J. P. Morgan to the White House.

In foreign policy, the man who had denounced Republican imperialism in 1912 put American troops into Veracruz in 1914, established a
de facto
United States protectorate over Haiti in 1915, and perpetuated American intervention in Nicaragua and Santo Domingo. The Administration that ruled against loans by American bankers to European belligerents in August 1914 allowed American investors to buy over $2 billion in bonds from the Allies within the next two and a half years. The President who urged Americans to remain neutral in thought as well as in deed kept in London a U.S. ambassador more rabidly anti-German than many Englishmen. As the Central and Allied powers grappled and tottered, at times Wilson seemed bound for war, at other times bound to peace.

Like most changes in grand strategy, Wilson’s did not result from a sudden revelation but from his and his party’s close watch of the shifting balance of political forces at home and military forces abroad. Like most acts of creative leadership, Wilson’s was compounded of commitment, opportunism, and chance. His shift in strategy was signaled at the end of January 1916 in a decision of calculated audacity—his nomination of Louis Brandeis as associate justice of the Supreme Court.

“I tell Louis, if he is going to retire, he is certainly doing it with a burst of fireworks,” Brandeis’s wife, Alice, wrote on reading the press reaction to his nomination. The fireworks continued to burst from that time to the day five months later when she proudly greeted her husband, returning from his law office to their Dedham home, with “Good evening, Mr. Justice Brandeis.” Progressives and conservatives waged a battle over the nomination all the more bitter for being partly under cover. Financial and industrial interests opposed the “people’s lawyer” on the public grounds of lack of judicial temperament and the like, but in fact attacked this radical—and a Jewish radical, to boot—because they did not want his economic and social views represented on the High Court.

Brandeis himself, while publicly standing mute, supplied his supporters with reams of material to rebut the opposition, wrote a partial brief defending his own “high reputation,” and personally and secretly lobbied two Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Boston Brahmins, headed by Brahmin-in-chief A. Lawrence Lowell, circulated an anti-Brandeis petition. Brandeis’s supporters, including Rabbi Stephen Wise and Henry Morgenthau, threw themselves into the battle. Brandeis’s young friend Felix Frankfurter wrote unsigned editorials for the
New Republic;
Walter Lippmann campaigned day after day on Capitol Hill. Following this counterattack, and a public statement by Wilson that constituted one of the most generous endorsements of an Administration nominee in presidential history, the Senate voted for confirmation, 47 to 22, with only one Democrat deserting the President and his nominee.

During the spring and summer months of 1916, Wilson shifted steadily toward a progressive stance in both politics and policy. In part, he was moving into the void left by the disintegrating Progressive party. Not only had the Democrats lost seats in the 1914 elections—predictably for the party in power—but the Bull Moosers too suffered setbacks across the country, though the indomitable Hiram Johnson won reelection as governor of California. Progressive leadership was more divided than ever, as Theodore Roosevelt edged back toward the GOP and Pinchot progressives eyed the liberalizing Democracy with rising hopes. A great Democratic party opportunity was beckoning.

Wilson realized that policy, not rhetoric, would be the acid test of his own shift toward progressivism. By early summer 1916, he was not only supporting a rural credits bill and a child labor bill but personally lobbying members of Congress. As the President moved left, progressives increasingly flocked to his standard: Jane Addams, John Dewey, Lillian Wald, Herbert Croly, Lincoln Steffens, and a host of other national and grassroots leaders of progressivism. Wilson met with another convert, Walter Lippmann, to mutual enchantment.

The President had virtually dished the Bull Moosers by the time they convened in Chicago early in June 1916, at the same time as the Republicans and only a mile away. Under pressure from Taft and other Old Guard leaders, the GOP drafted Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes as the ideal compromise candidate who might unite the fractured ranks of Republicanism. Since Taft’s preconvention stance was “anyone but Roosevelt,” and TR’s “anyone but Taft or Root,” the old rivals could at least unite behind the mildly progressive candidacy of the former New York governor—and behind their ultimate war cry, “anyone but Wilson.”

The end came for the Bull Moosers during the Republican convention.
From his home in Oyster Bay, Roosevelt had been negotiating with Republican leaders, using the only leverage he had left—his threat to run again under the Bull Moose banner. But his heart was not in it; by now he was far more interested in the nation’s foreign and war policies. At the last moment, after the indignant and frustrated Progressive convention nominated Roosevelt anyway, he declined the honor—and then had the audacity to urge his old comrades to draft Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, a moderate standpatter and the Colonel’s longtime confidant. Two weeks later, the Progressive party leadership disbanded the party, but progressivism would not die. Early in August, a rump of the Progressive party held a new convention in Indianapolis, repudiated Roosevelt, and endorsed Wilson.

The Democratic convention in St. Louis was a far happier affair and a far more momentous one. For at this convention the antiwar forces in the Democracy spoke up with a power and passion the party leadership could not ignore. It had been planned not as a peace convention but as a patriotic one. The President had directed that “Americanism” and “preparedness” be the keynotes, and the flag-bedecked hall was full of spread-eagle symbolism. When the keynoter, Governor Martin Glynn of New York, dutifully sounded these themes, however, the response seemed so tepid that Glynn decided to hurry through pages of his address that listed historical precedents when the United States did
not
go to war. But this was the red meat the crowd wanted, and as he began to recite the provocations that the nation had not converted into war, the crowd picked up the refrain, chanting again and again: “What did we do? What did we do?” and Glynn roared back: “We didn’t go to war! We didn’t go to war!”

The convention delegates—leaders in their own precincts but relegated to mere followership at these party conclaves—were exerting a leadership of their own. Other speakers responded with thunderous peace oratory. The delegates called Bryan from his seat in the press gallery—the Peerless Orator had been denied a convention seat—and Bryan thanked God that the people had a President who did not want war. Wilson, the “peace President,” was nominated by acclamation.

Sounding the peace theme, and passing a strongly progressive platform that Wilson had largely framed, the Democratic convention set the tone of the fall contest. The President, who had been preaching both peace and preparedness, both Americanism and internationalism, now moved strongly toward the stance that would make his 1916 campaign famous: “He kept us out of war.” Pamphlets by the millions and newspaper ads by the thousands amplified the keynote of peace. Hughes not only made tactical errors—most notably tying himself to the Republican Old Guard in California and unwittingly snubbing the prickly Hiram Johnson—but he
failed to work out an effective strategy beyond carping at the Administration record. His potential big break came in early September after Wilson, in order to head off a nationwide rail strike, forced through Congress the Adamson Act requiring an eight-hour day on interstate railroads. Hughes quite reasonably seized on this as a campaign issue, protesting that Wilson had given in to organized labor to win its votes, but the Republican candidate may have done little more than polarize the contest, as more businessmen moved to his side and more laborites and progressives to Wilson’s.