Colonel Roosevelt (107 page)

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 whose 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:

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.”

“S
HORT, 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.

Among his urgent priorities was the securing of all foreign ships held in
American harbors from further acts of sabotage, and rapid action to prevent the Panama Canal from being blocked at either end. He had also to prepare for a possible order from Congress to raise, train, and equip a million-man army, by whatever means Wilson thought best. That order might never come: a group of isolationists in the Senate, led by Robert La Follette, was already ganging up in opposition to it. But whatever happened, Baker was determined not to send Theodore Roosevelt into battle.

Ironically, on 5 February he had to slash his zigzag beneath the commission of Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., as a major of infantry in the Officers’ Reserve Corps. The President countersigned.

SIR CECIL SPRING RICE
sent Arthur Balfour a cogent explanation as to why Wilson would have to resort to a draft to get a million men into uniform. “
It is not immediately evident to an American citizen of German descent resident in Omaha, Nebraska, that he should shed his German blood because an American negro from New Orleans has been drowned on a British ship, carrying munitions to France.”

The ambassador did, all the same, see signs of domestic bellicosity spreading as U-boats continued to destroy neutral ships. A majority of the President’s cabinet now favored intervention. Wilson went back before Congress on the twenty-seventh to ask for authority to arm American merchantmen.
He emphasized that he was not “proposing or contemplating war.” However, a great nation had a right and a duty to defend itself. The House Democratic leadership introduced a bill appropriating $1,000,000,000 for the purpose. As a result, the word
billion
began to creep into everyday speech, along with a new Wilsonism,
armed neutrality
.

Nothing in the President’s stately demeanor that day betrayed the fact that he was in possession of intelligence so explosive as to remove all doubt that he would soon be forced to ask for a declaration of war. British cryptographers had provided him with the decoded text of an incendiary telegram from Arthur Zimmermann to the German minister in Mexico. Wilson was waiting for a State Department retranslation of the decode, but some of the original, operative words leaped out bold and clear:

U-boat warfare had begun. Germany would try to keep America neutral. Contract an alliance with Mexico if unsuccessful. Declare joint war against
the United States. Provide finances. Mexico could recover Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Japan might join in.…

On the face of it, the Zimmermann telegram looked delusional. Carranza was currently well-disposed toward the Wilson administration, and Japan was allied with Britain. However, if Britain collapsed (German submarines had sunk 536,000 deadweight tons of her shipping this month alone), who doubted that the Japanese would realign themselves?

Certainly not Theodore Roosevelt. He had never felt easy about “
that polite, silent and inscrutable race of selfish and efficient fighting men.” Zimmermann’s plot jibed with the scenario he had tried to impress on President Taft in 1910 (“
a war in which Mexico was backed by Japan or some other big powers”), and also with
one he had sketched out in 1914, of Germany defeating Britain, then forming an alliance with Japan against the United States.

Wilson released the verified text of the telegram to the press overnight on 28 February. The sun rose next morning, Thursday, 1 March, on a nation shocked from its complacency. Everything the Colonel had been saying for two and a half years, at the cost of becoming a screechy-voiced scold, now sounded prophetic—as did the supporting chorus of his fellow interventionists.
A new degree of neurosis attached to Texan memories of the Alamo, and to Californian dread of the Yellow Peril. Irish and German hyphenates clung to their sentimental notions of “home,” but no longer flaunted them.

With only four days to go before the end of the Sixty-fourth Congress, events accelerated toward decisive action, if not—yet—a declaration of war. The House at once passed the Armed Ships bill. It would have cleared the Senate, but for a last-minute filibuster by Robert La Follette. Wilson issued a statement blaming him and ten other isolationist senators for thwarting popular desire: “
A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible.”

There was now as much of a sense of emergency on Capitol Hill as in the White House.
Republicans and Democrats alike appealed to the President to summon a premature session of the Sixty-fifth Congress, which otherwise would not assemble until December.

On Monday, 5 March, the President drove in gusty rain to the Capitol to deliver his second inaugural address. He had been sworn in privately the day before. Thirty-two secret service agents guarded his carriage, and more than twice as many swordsmen of the Second Cavalry framed them in a nervously jiggling square. Pennsylvania Avenue was lined on both sides with National Guardsmen in olive drab, rifles at the ready. Many of them were bronzed from recent service in Mexico. The roofs of neighboring buildings bristled with sharpshooters. Machine gunners covered the crowd waiting in East Capitol Park.

“
I beg your tolerance, your countenance, and your united aid,” Wilson shouted into the wind. He gave no hint of when, or even whether, he would ask Americans to take up arms, but talked of “the shadows that now lie dark across our path,” and prayed to God to give him “wisdom and prudence” in the days that lay ahead. Few spectators could hear what he was saying, but they were visually reassured by the long jaw jutting over the balustrade, the confident poise, and the statuesque proximity of Edith Wilson. Rolling cheers followed the presidential car all the way back downtown, along with impromptu choruses of “America.”