"These Deeply Momentous Things": United States Intervention into World War I (No. 6)

The United States Declares War: April 6, 1917

On this day--April 6--a hundred years ago, the United States declared war on Germany.

The history of America's entry into the Great War is complex and profound. It has intrinsic drama, no matter what one's attitude about the rights and wrongs of U.S. participation in the war--and there have been many.  

     Wartime Allied propaganda had Americans believing the Germans were solely guilty, and that the conflict was a war for democracy, when the most autocratic country in Europe, Russia, was on the Allied said. American entry, of course, was a necessity.

     Revisionist history in the twenties and thirties written by Barnes, Peterson, Borchard, Millis, and other American historians seemed ironclad in making the case that the United States was not "forced" to war, that American intervention led to higher death totals and a settlement that in many ways unhinged the world. In these works, Wilson's decisions often looked misguided or plain wrong.

     Yet from the late thirties, and with more momentum after World War II, American historians fell back on a positive interpretation of Wilson, the Man of Peace who was forced to War, with all the ancillary propositions that followed.

     Again, from the early sixties, the New Left historians--William A. Williams, Gabriel Kolko, Gar Alperovitz, and others--resurrected much of the old revisionist critique but with a more socialist and often Marxist spin.

     And a number of historians and others, especially psychologists.... and Juliette George, wrote more critical works about Wilson's state of mind and his motives.

     But the picture of the upright and moral Man of Peace struggling with the necessity of war never disappeared in a long list of biographies, above all the Wilson studies by Arthur Link.  

     Still, to tell the truth, the old sort of diplomatic history was abandoned a while back by academic historians, and direct issues like intervention have long since lost "relevance" within the halls of academe. It is true enough that in the many recent diplomatic studies that critique the "world systems" from a Marxist or other determinist direction, there has been some interest in the role of "capitalism" in the direction of state foreign policies. And, too, outside of the guild of academic historians, some economists, sociologists, and political scientists have been interested in detailed studies of specific episodes of international relation, and in specific questions of the of the kind suggested by Leopold von Ranke in the nineteenth century--all related to "what actually happened." (A notable exception here is Justus Doenecke's 2011 full-length study of Intervention.) 

     But the war is still relevant for a broader public. It was, after all, the primal event in the history of a terrible century. And in almost any telling of the history of World War I,  American entry intensified the war and reshaped the world in ways that made it anything but safe for democracy.

     In the current series of short essays, I have thrown out some general considerations and discussed some specific events. It is now time to recount briefly the dramatic last few weeks.

     The forty days before American entry were tempestuous. Once the Germans announced resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, on February 1, 1917, Wilson became increasingly bellicose, preparing bill after bill that aimed at military expenditures and "preparedness" and carrying measures of war security, even war hysteria, that anticipated wartime repression, spying, and information control.

     The news of these measures found a public almost, but not quite, ready for war. The Midwest and West were largely opposed to American entry. Many of the populist remnants, and indeed the agrarian and anarchist socialists rejected participation in the war since it was a war of the kind of "interests" Wilson had long railed against. The war was extremely unpopular among Irish immigrants and their children (few of whom seemed to have love to spare for the English) and among immigrants whose national origin was in the lands of the Central Powers. Then, too, a large number of women's associations rejected the war for a variety of reasons, as did Christian pacifists. Though many Progressives were in fact much more openly bellicose than Wilson himself, a number of Progressive intellectuals and activists opposed American intervention vehemently, including public intellectual Randolph Bourne and social theorist and activist Jane Addams.

     Yet as H. C. Peterson pointed out in his massive 1930s study of the propaganda against neutrality, the national press had already begun to lay the groundwork for intervention after the British cut the transatlantic cable from Germany to the United States in August 1914. The Entente essentially controlled the bulk of war news from the beginning.

     The German submarine policy resulted almost immediately in a string of torpedoed American carriers of war goods. At the same time, the famous--or infamous--Zimmermann Note chiefly served to crank up the steam for "preparedness" and war with the public and with the government itself. The note was an instruction from the Foreign Office in Berlin for the Ambassador in Mexico to approach the Mexican government about entering the war in alliance with Germany. The whole scheme was conditional on American entrance into the war. The quid pro quo for Mexico allying itself with Germany would agree to Mexico's reconquest of "the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona." (View a copy of the original German Foreign Office draft of theZimmermann Note, in German--for a full translation, see the World War I Document Archive.)

     The British had intercepted the message somewhat earlier, saving it as a trump card. They handed it to Ambassador Page in London February 23. Wilson released the text to the press five days later. Though the United States was already threatening Germany with war, the German note was largely seen as unfair, underhanded, and evil. Since the United States had invaded Mexico twice in the previous three years, the Mexicans didn't dismiss the Note out of hand. But after careful assessment, rejected the offer. As with other political decisions related to the war (including the reinstitution of the unrestricted submarine policy), the German record in the was not stellar. Ironically, Arthur Zimmermann, whose name we associate with the note and who was the top permanent official in the German Office, was one of the first contacts Colonel Edward House had made in Europe back in 1914, as Wilson's personal envoy. In any case, with American ships being sunk by U-Boats, the Zimmermann note was the most important straw that broke the camel's back in the USA.

     Politically, a small remnant of anti-intervention congressmen fought a desperate battle in the last weeks before intervention. Among them, Senator Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin, a Progressive himself, was foremost. "Fighting Bob" was the leader of Senate opposition to President Wilson's nearly complete departure from neutrality after the 1916 election. In particular, La Follette organized a coalition of Senators who opposed Wilson's Armed Ship Bill, sent to the Senate in late February 1917. The bill proposed arming American ships carrying war goods to Europe, asserting the rights of the neutrals to sail into war zones with full rights of the sea, including the right to engage hostile ships. To La Follette and his colleagues, "The Armed Ship Bill Meant War," and La Follette used this phrase in a position pamphlet published in late March 1917. La Follette charged that the administration tactic was to flood Congress with very large appropriations bills so close to the end of the session that Congress would never have time to deal with all of them with sufficient attention. As La Follette described it, "In the last hours of the 64th Congress, all of these bills [arrived], including finally the Armed Ship Bill, which reached Congress 63 hours before its recess and claimed sweeping discretionary power involving warlike acts."

     This small band of Senators organized a filibuster that defeated the passage of the Armed Ship Bill in early March 1917. The President, who rarely took opposition well, branded the Senators as a "little group of willful men" who, "representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible." If Wilson was wrong in assessing motive and wisdom, he was right in that they were certainly in the minority. Both parties had now become war parties. Henry Cabot Lodge and other prominent Republicans demanded an immediate declaration.

     From London, Ambassador Page informed Wilson that British gold reserves were nearly exhausted: "Perhaps our going to war is the only way in which our present preeminent trade position can be maintained and a panic averted."

     In the last days of March, Wilson weighed his options. His closest advisors had long since advised war. Wilson spoke with Colonel House on March 27 and asked if House thought he should address Congress and ask for a declaration or simply declare a state of war and request "the means to conduct the conflict." House, of course, advised the non-Constitutional route. On March 29, Wilson put the whole proposition of war to the Cabinet, which unanimously supported intervention. Some of the cabinet officers hoped to limit intervention to naval and supply assistance, and some even to financial aid. Wilson departed the meeting thoughtfully, telling his Cabinet officials "I think that there is no doubt as to what your advice is. Thank you."

     In the following days, Wilson made his decision and called a joint special session of Congress for April 2. The New Jersey governor had originally been chosen by House and others in part because he was a fine orator. In the biggest speech of his life, , he pulled out the stops.

     America, Wilson said, had been forced to war by the German submarine campaign on civilian ships, whether armed or not. During the course of this, Germans had killed Americans. He did not mention that these American ships were sailing through a designated war zone, or that many of them were carrying supplies and armament for the Entente powers.

     Wilson outlined a series of war measures to be taken immediately, including the introduction of conscription to enlarge the army to 500,000, at the same time increasing loans and subsidies to the Allies while reorganizing society for war. And he added,

"While we do these things, these deeply momentous things, let us be very clear, and make very clear to all the world what our motives and our objects are.... We are at the beginning of an age in which it will be insisted that the same standards of conduct and of responsibility for wrong done shall be observed among nations and their governments that are observed among the individual citizens of civilized states."

In the end, he said, the United States was forced to fight:

"The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied when those rights have been made as secure as the faith and the freedom of nations can make them."

     No doubt by the time Wilson began his speech, most national representatives had already made up their minds. The Senate voted for the declaration on April 4. Only six voted against: La Follette, Harry Lane, George Norris, William J. Stone, Asle J. Gronna, and James K. Vardaman. Eight senators abstained. The war resolution passed in the House at three in the morning on April 6. The vote was 373 to 50.

     The United States was at war. 

"These Deeply Momentous Things": United States Intervention into World War I (No. 5)

Armaments, U-Boats, Politics, and Banks: Going to War

     When the war broke out in Europe during the early days of August 1914, President Wilson immediately proclaimed American neutrality. In mid-August, he called for Americans to be "impartial in thought as well as action." Wilson's Secretary of State, populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan, the Great Commoner, assumed that traditional neutrality would also preclude financial support of one side or the other by American big business and financial interests. "Money," he said, "is the worst of all contrabands because it commands everything else." Bryan tried to keep the United States on good terms with all countries by promoting treaties of friendship and conciliation.

Berryman Cartoon: Bryan Reading War News

     Yet the ties of perhaps most American Progressives and of much of Wall Street to Britain were many. A vast number of Americans were of German heritage, it is true. And the Midwest, especially, seemed unwilling to go to war. Indeed, if one counts the Midwest, much of the socialist left, anarchists, and populists, and many peace-oriented religious and social groups, opposition to the war was substantial. Yet the influence of the Anglophile tradition was strong on the East coast, and the Wilson Progressives remained firm in their allegiance to Britain, as did the bankers themselves, many of whom had affiliate banks in London and Paris. Moreover, from 1914 onward, British agents offered monetary subventions to newspapers across the United States in exchange for war news and opinion favorable to the Entente. 

     As for the presence of Bryan in the Cabinet, the Commoner had been appointed by Wilson reluctantly and only as repayment for Bryan's support in the 1912 election. He had little influence on the President, apart from occasions when Colonel House insisted that the President humor the Secretary of State, usually in small matters of prestige and precedent. Certainly, Bryan's populist anti-imperialism had little support from a chief executive who aimed at a new kind of American expansiveness and a revamped, American-led organization of the world. Indeed, since Colonel House had assumed the role of negotiator and fixer-in-chief, with the beginning of House's European travels just before the war, most Washington insiders assumed that Bryan and the State Department had little influence anyway.

     These insiders were largely correct. Three months before U-Boat U-20 torpedoed the Lusitania, Wilson's alter ego, Colonel House, had met in London with British cabinet members and, as historian Justus Doenecke has put it recently in his outstanding work on American intervention, "he committed his nation, under certain conditions, to enter the conflict on the Allied side."  

     Hence, Bryan's denunciation of the British Blockade of Germany had little effect, and in Washington the lonely voices of Bryan and a few anti-war legislators seemed to be completely overwhelmed by the sinking of the Cunard liner Lusitania on May 7, 1915. Among the 1198 dead were 128 United States citizens.

     

Lusitania

The torpedoing of the Lusitania came to form, along with the so-called Bryce Report on German atrocities in Belgium and finally the Zimmermann Note, the central triad of orienting America to war. It is true that the German Embassy in Washington had taken out ads in fifty American newspapers warning Americans that the liner would be entering a zone of war, and that any vessel flying the British flag would be "liable to destruction" in those waters. And it was still true, as Bryan insisted, that the naval interdiction of food from Germany certainly constituted a war against civilians, and civilians with no such choice as those sailing on armed civilian vessels or vessels carrying armaments.

     (Note: the British government denied that the ship was carrying armaments, but in the last decade, both archival and underwater archeological research has now shown that the Lusitania carried a very large load of armaments, including gun cotton for shells, shell fuses, and something like four million rounds of U.S.-manufactured .303 Remington bullets.)

     But in the United States and throughout the Entente countries the sinking represented, as the Progressive journal The Nation put it, "a deed for which a Hun would blush, a Turk be ashamed, and a Barbary pirate apologize."

     At the State Department, Bryan argued that the United States should use the Lusitania as part of a diplomatic offensive to persuade both British and Germans to cease their brutal warfare against civilians, steering the Germans from their ruthless unlimited submarine war, the British from their unrelenting, starvation Blockade.

     But with House making increasingly specific promises to Entente leaders, and in his quiet way moving Wilson in the same direction, arguments against the Blockade were a dead letter. Resigning in June 1915, Bryan asked, "why be so shocked by the drowning of a few people, if there is to be no objection to starving a nation?”^[

     Throughout the circles of Colonel House's non-Presidential intimates, Bryan's departure was a relief from embarrassment. The American Ambassador in London, Walter Hines Page, a sycophantic Wilson loyalist, wrote to House that the London Embassy had hardly noticed. In any case, Page added, Bryan was one of those men who had "talked themselves into greatness and, not knowing when to stop, also talked themselves out of it."

     

Robert Lansing

Relief also came in the choice of successor. The State Department Counsel, Robert Lansing, replaced Bryan as Secretary. Lansing, an international lawyer of wide experience had gotten along with Bryan but had confidentially harbored strong pro-intervention sentiments. Like others who hoped to steer Wilson by giving advice, Lansing learned that indirection and suggestion constituted the best approach. At Colonel House's urging, Lansing's replacement as department legal counsel was Frank Polk, a New York corporate lawyer and New York City corporate counsel. Coincidentally, Polk was married to the daughter of the Philadelphia Cunard Liner representative, James Potter.

     Lansing's nephew was the rising star John Foster Dulles, only 27 in 1915, but a member of the influential international corporate law firm Sullivan & Cromwell--which had worked closely with the J. P. Morgan interests since the early 1880s. Lansing immediately recruited his nephew for negotiations to secure Latin American aid in the coming war--a year and half before the United States entered.

     The new Secretary's Wall Street connections are an important part of the decision-making that led to American intervention. Wilson had ridden to power on rhetoric against the "interests." His alter ego was closely associated with these same "interests." How do these dots connect?

     Woodrow Wilson is of course the central character in this drama. All those around him recognized his strong opinions, but all recognized that he could be swayed by "expert" advice. Later on, Wilson and House would organize the famous "Inquiry" comprising academic experts on world affairs to accompany him to the Paris Peace Conference, and his charge to this scholars is telling: "Tell me what is right," he told his Inquiry, "and I will fight for it." In the true Positivist mode outlined by Auguste Comte and Edward House, Wilson was the heroic philosopher king, hopeful of using the war and the peace to reform the world system. From 1914 to 1916, although by his own admission Wilson thought a lot about intervening directly, for the moment he saw his role as that of World Mediator--the lonely leader who would bring peace through the systematic and scientific reorganization of the world through knowledgeable bureaucrats. Through the adulation and flattery of House, Charles R. Crane, and other educated, wealthy men of affairs (and intermediaries between Wall Street and the government), he became increasingly willing to accept the indirect suggestions and advice of the financial elite he had thundered against during his early political years. These were men, in any case, who could grasp a bold design and cut through red tape and outmoded bourgeois institutions to achieve their ends.

    On the basis a great deal of historical research by a wide range of scholars, journalists, and observers since 1919, it seems to me that the plans and energies of the financial world that Wilson knew he was embracing in 1917 fall into two separate categories. On the one hand, the Morgan financial empire became the conduit of both massive American loans to the Allies in 1915 and of massive Allied purchases of American war matériel thereafter. But on a separate track, the J. P. Morgan Empire and other international financial interests saw the war as an opportunity expand massively the whole pre-war pattern of imperial finance, described earlier in this series of short essays--in close collusion with the state.

     To deal with the broader view first, the whole issue of "world power"--discussed previously in this series of essays--had a clear impact on decisions leading to war. One very important stage in this development was the creation of the Federal Reserve System. In the weeks before the United States declared war on the Central Powers in April 1917, Wilson would mourn the fact that America's entry would put the financial interests in the saddle again. But Wilson's Progressive measures had done much to keep high finance intimately involved in foreign policy decisions. After Wilson's election, the international bankers had refined the jargon of the expansionist "dollar diplomacy" of pre-Wilson years, learning to speak Wilson's Progressive language. In particular, they learned to justify measures favorable to them in the name of efficiency and bold leadership.

     One perfect example of this process was the Federal Reserve System (1913), which the leading bankers of Wall Street constructed, and for which Wilson initiated the supporting legislative measures. Colonel House and others played vital intermediary roles, selling the Federal Reserve to Wilson as a social reform for efficiency of government. Part of the appeal for Wilson the ease with which the Federal Reserve System would produce a fiscal "flexibility" that would ease administration projects in general. It dawned on the President only slowly just how useful this flexibility would be in wartime. Wilson paid for the 1916 invasion of Mexico by using the other new 1913 boon for Federal finance, the income tax, both by raising taxes and by pushing through the Revenue Act of 1916. The Act was designed to make sudden tax hikes more palatable for voters by introducing what one historian has called a "highly progressive" element. Yet in 1917, Wilson would see the advantages of money manipulation through the Fed for fighting a much larger and more important war. (For an a concise but detailed analysis of exactly how Wilson used the Federal Reserve helped pay for World War I, see the article by John Paul Koning .)

     On the Wall Street side, during the period from the outbreak of the war in Europe until American entry, the financial and business circles of J. P. Morgan, the Rockefellers, Jacob Schiff, Kuhn, Loeb & Co, and their affiliates saw in the war the opportunity to replace British and French investments and loans throughout the imperial world. These plans represented a sea change in the distribution of funds within the future "developing world," but they also represented a reliance on close cooperation with the crusading visions of Wilson's administration. 

     Hence, high finance was forging closer and closer ties with an activist state driven by the visions of Wilson and House for efficient Progressive world management. The result would be top-down leadership with American organizers of the world, both colonial and non-colonial. Fears that Britain might lose the war in early 1917--discussed in an earlier essay--opened up the vista of supplanting Britain as the world's banker, but with more efficiency, coordination, and control by the United States.

     Murray Rothbard and others have chronicled the role of Willard Straight and the American International Corporation, founded in late 1915. Coordinating most of the major banking branches and Wall Street factions, the group was designed to take advantage of wartime strains on British and French international capital to invest in areas formerly dominated by those colonial powers. Many other initiatives supplemented and supported this vision, which laid the groundwork for the financial diplomacy of the twenties and thirties.

     On this broader strategic track, then, Wall Street was operating in parallel to the program of Wilson, providing ways and means advantageous to both high finance and the administration. Once the war came, it represented both opportunity and intensification of this program for both entities.   

     On what we might call the tactical side, the story of Wall Street dominance relative to the war during the "neutrality" period is fairly straightforward. The stalemate of the Western Front had hardly set in before France and Britain began to realize the need for more funds. The Shell Crisis following the Western Front Battle of Neuve Chapelle (March 1916), during which the British failed to exploit their victory owing to lack of shells, made the issue of armaments shortages public and acrimonious. The French and British immediately applied for loans from the J. P. Morgan banking group. The United States approved, over the objections of Secretary of States Bryan just before he resigned. The loan structure was worked out between spring and fall, and the result was a loan of half a billion dollars (1915 dollars) with two billion more to follow before the war was over.

     Moreover, the anti-Wall Street administration of Wilson okayed the appointment of J. P. Morgan, Jr., as Allied purchasing agent. In fact, the arms manufacturers that formed a central component of New York international banking conglomerates were the first recipients of the flood of orders from Europe. These elements of banking influence were probably more dominant in political considerations than the facts themselves suggest. Trade disruptions during the first months of the war were drastic: the British Blockade of Germany cut American exports to Germany from $169 million to just a million. But business with the Entente powers soon replaced these lost orders many times over.

     As for purely political side of this narrative, the election of 1916 forms the backdrop to the declaration of war. Woodrow Wilson had won the election of 1912 comfortably, but against two opponents, one of them Theodore Roosevelt. Democratic prognosticators were much less sure of a shoe-in for 1916. For all the hue and cry of "Americanism" and "preparedness" that emerged in late 1915 and in 1916, Wilson led a country which would most certainly not have supported intervention except in the case of a direct assault by one side on the United States. The President had calmed the Lusitania uproar in his famous "too proud to fight" speech, and the crisis passed when the Germans agreed--under pressure from Wilson--to put a halt to unrestricted submarine warfare. Running on the slogan, "He Kept Us Out of War," Wilson carefully advertised himself as a man of peace (though in March 1916, the United States had invaded Mexico with an army of 10,000).

War Preparedness

     In the event, every promise and rhetorical advantage counted. Wilson defeated Charles Evans Hughes by only three percentage points. In the Electoral College things could have gone either way: the President won some crucial states by tiny margins. In the end, the Electoral College vote would be 277 to 254. If, for example, Hughes had won Kentucky (where Wilson won with 51.9 percent), the election would have gone to Hughes.

     Winning the race, Wilson achieved his own political "New Freedom." Britain seemed in disastrous shape. Wall Street was fully integrated into the Entente cause. Many American elites desired and actively promoted intervention, seeing in the coming war--in Murray Rothbard's brilliant description--fulfillment of their particular cause or goal. And behind it all, as Colonel House wrote in his diary as early as late September 1915, "Much to my surprise, he [Wilson] said he had never been sure that we ought not to take part in the conflict, and, if it seemed evident that Germany and her militaristic ideas were to win, the obligation upon us was greater than ever." By the time the Germans decided to reinstate unlimited submarine war against secretly armed British civilian ships once more, (February 1, 1917) a whole structure of military expenditures, extensive revisions of the definition of "neutrality," and an amazing increase in the level of shipments to the Allied powers were in place. To top it all off, in February 1917, the British handed over an intercepted cable from the State Secretary of the German Foreign Office, Arthur Zimmermann, offering an alliance with Mexico against the United States should the US declare war on Germany. The Germans had already announced that they would resume submarine war on ships carrying supplies to the Entente, including neutral carriers, and in the next weeks, five American ships were torpedoed.

    

 On April 2, 1917, Wilson addressed a joint session of Congress, calling for a declaration of war against the German Empire, in order "to make the world safe for democracy."

     During the next four days, Congress deliberated.

     This all seems like the ancient past. But it happened only a hundred years ago.