Worldmaking (19 page)

The Democratic Party had been changed irrevocably; never again would it propose pseudo-isolationism from European affairs as a position. The National Defense Act of June 1916 increased the regular army to 223,000 men over five years and increased the number of active members of the National Guard to 450,000. A Naval Expansion Act launched a flurry of construction activity at Virginia's shipyards, in which four dreadnoughts and eight cruisers were built in just one year. To pay for this military expansion, Wilson raised America's first income tax, which he had introduced in 1913. This action appeased some fellow Democrats by ensuring that the wealthy bore the preponderant financial burden of assuring America's safety from harm. Theodore Roosevelt's description of Wilson's program as “flintlock legislation” rang hollow in such remarkable circumstances.
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Wilson's decisive move toward military preparedness solidified a division in American politics between internationalists—who believed that greater U.S. engagement with the world at the socioeconomic-diplomatic level should be celebrated, not feared—and isolationists, who held that maintaining an arm's-length relationship with Europe (though not necessarily the rest of the world) was the best way to preserve American liberties and ensure its citizenry would spill no blood for the chicaneries of the Old World. These labels are approximate and can often obscure historical understanding, particularly when one considers that many individuals subscribed to elements of both. But the terms have a broad utility in capturing the tenor of those times.
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The isolationist strain in geopolitical thought was exemplified in the person of William Jennings Bryan, whose popularity in the South meant that his resignation badly hurt Wilson in Congress. The president's foreign-policy allies were increasingly to be found in a subdivision of the Grand Old Party, where the conservative internationalist William Howard Taft, who had raised Roosevelt's hackles in advocating arbitration in 1911, and other (mainly Ivy League, patrician) Atlanticists were beginning to view German victory as a scenario that the United States could not tolerate.

In June 1915, Taft announced the formation of the League to Enforce Peace with the grand aspiration of spurring on the creation of a world parliament that would arbitrate disputes and, in time, realize Immanuel Kant's ambition of securing perpetual peace. In foreign-policy matters, Republicans were divided between those, like Roosevelt and Mahan, who extolled war as ennobling and viewed arbitration as a dangerous illusion, and others, like Taft and Elihu Root, who were as shocked as Wilson by the human tragedy in Europe and consequently were intent on devising a comprehensive cure for the centuries-old malady of great power conflict. These three strains of foreign-policy ideology—isolationism, internationalism, and Mahanian realism—emerged with clarity in 1916.

Wilson had been thinking along similar lines to Taft, and a speech he delivered in June 1916 stated that the United States should “become a partner in any feasible association of nations” dedicated to preserving peace.
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As Election Day approached, Democratic strategists employed the sound bite “He kept us out of war” to persuasive effect across the nation, a gambit that immediately aroused Wilson's concern. In a revealing letter to Josephus Daniels, the president complained that “I can't keep the country out of the war. They talk of me as though I were a god. Any little German lieutenant can put us into war at any time by some calculated outrage.”
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Unsurprisingly, foreign policy was a more significant issue on the campaign trail in 1916 than it had been four years earlier. During a Roosevelt-less election, and up against the moderately pro-Allied and relatively characterless Republican candidate Charles Evans Hughes, Wilson was consistent in advocating the creation of a league of nations to ensure peace, and he accused his opponent, whom Theodore Roosevelt supported enthusiastically, of dangerous belligerency. To a popular backdrop that remained hostile to U.S. involvement in the European war, and one that was broadly impressed by the president's domestic accomplishments, Wilson secured a narrow victory: winning 277 electoral college votes to Hughes's 254. The most satisfying element of the election from Wilson's perspective was that he had prevailed against unified Republican opposition and had increased his share of the vote from 41 to 49 percent—not an outright majority but not far off either. It is difficult to claim that election was a ringing endorsement of Wilson, yet it still made him the first Democrat since Andrew Jackson to win two consecutive terms. In many ways it was a remarkable achievement that hinted at future electoral dominance for his party. But his margin of victory was narrow considering he was a national leader at a time of war.

Wilson had little time to savor his victory. Anticipating a moment when neutrality would be impossible to maintain, the president invited the Old World belligerents to state their final war aims and commence negotiations that he would broker evenhandedly in the New World. All sides rebuffed Wilson's offer with alacrity. British prime minister David Lloyd George formulated a list of demands patently unacceptable to Germany, while Berlin replied haughtily that if the belligerents did move to the conference table, it would insist on excluding Wilson's grandstanding participation. Germany believed it was gaining the upper hand on the western front, while Britain was confident that the blockade was close to forcing surrender through starvation—at this stage the average German was subsisting on just one thousand calories a day, insufficient for a small child, let alone a full-grown adult.
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Nobody was much interested in Wilson's peaceable platitudes. Britain wanted American participation to tilt the balance in its favor and crush the Hun. Germany was concerned that Wilson's urge to play peacemaker might deny them a victory that could be won quickly if it threw off the shackles and deployed the full force of its U-boat fleet.

On January 22, 1917, Wilson delivered a speech in the Senate that took aim at such false hopes and proposed a radical new approach to international affairs. The president declared that the war must conclude with “peace without victory,” the only course available that was guaranteed to prevent the onset of future hostilities based on unfinished business. It was one of Wilson's most memorable phrases, for it contained a fundamental diplomatic truism that none of the belligerents were willing to accept. The speech did not end there. Wilson further contended that for peace to be enduring, a “community of power” must replace the nineteenth-century concept of the “balance of power,” which was no longer fit for purpose. All nations must be accorded equal standing and protection under international law, Wilson believed. He again called for the creation of an international organization whose central purpose was to ensure “no such catastrophe shall ever overwhelm us again.” In a concluding salvo against isolationism, Wilson warned that without engaged American leadership, “no covenant of cooperative peace [could] keep the future safe against war.”
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Wilson also tried to connect his broader ambitions regarding the establishment of “international concert of peace” to long-standing traditions on American foreign policy:

I am proposing, as it were, that the nations should with one accord adopt the doctrine of President Monroe as the doctrine of the world: that no nation should seek to extend its polity over any other nation or people, but that every people should be left free to determine its own polity; its own way of development—unhindered, unthreatened, unafraid, the little along with the great and powerful.

I am proposing that all nations henceforth avoid entangling alliances which would draw them into competitions of power, catch them in a net of intrigue and selfish rivalry, and disturb their own affairs with influences intruded from without. There is no entangling alliance in a concert of power. When all unite to act in the same sense and with the same purpose, all act in the common interest and are free to live their own lives under a common protection.
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It was smart politics for Wilson to cite precedent for his ambitions in the Monroe Doctrine and George Washington's farewell warning against “entangling alliances.” He was likely correct in surmising that summoning these totemic foreign-policy pronouncements would reassure.

But of course Wilson was proposing not simply the logical broadening of an established principle. He was taking two distinctly American foreign policy axioms and universalizing them to the point where their original purpose was unrecognizable. The 1823 Monroe Doctrine—warning European nations against interference in any part of the western hemisphere—served the U.S. national interest above all, pacifying the hemisphere in which it resided. And it was sustained, first and foremost, by the Royal Navy's dominance in the Atlantic, not by American military power or moral legitimacy per se. The Monroe Doctrine claimed U.S. dominance over Latin America, riling the citizens of those nations the doctrine claimed to protect. It is doubtful that many Mexicans, for example, felt themselves “free to determine” their own polity. The idea that there was “no entangling alliance in a concert of power” would not have instilled much confidence in the “little” nations. And it was optimistic of Wilson to suppose that the “great and powerful” nations might take risks with their national sovereignty. There was no precedent for the world system Wilson had in mind.

It did not take long for Theodore Roosevelt to register his disapproval: “Peace without victory is the natural ideal of the man who is too proud to fight.”
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And for all its eloquence, Wilson's “peace without victory” speech did not produce the desired mellowing of the protagonists when confronted with a more palatable future. Suffering grave depredations under the British blockade, Germany removed all restrictions on U-boat warfare on February 1, 1917, a policy that treated as fair game any vessel detected in the North Atlantic. Fully aware that an unrestricted U-boat campaign was likely to provoke American belligerency, Germany's goal was to destroy British resolve before the United States had time to marshal its vast resources and bring them to bear on the western front. It was a calculated gamble that did not come off.

Wilson immediately broke diplomatic relations with Germany and assembled his cabinet to discuss the American response. All were at one in their advice that American participation in the war was now inevitable. Yet even at this stage, Wilson strove to avoid an American declaration of war. The president's equivocation led Theodore Roosevelt to complain to California governor Hiram Johnson that the United States was being led by “a very cold and selfish man, a very timid man when it comes to dealing with physical danger … As for shame, he has none, and if anyone kicks him, he brushes his clothes, and utters some lofty sentence.”
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The president's options were finally exhausted when he received news on February 19 that Germany was attempting to formalize a military alliance with Mexico against the United States.

On January 16, 1917, the German foreign secretary, Arthur Zimmermann, had cabled the German embassy in Mexico instructing the ambassador to explore the possibility of a German-Mexican military alliance with President Venustiano Carranza. If Mexico assisted Germany in the event of war with the United States, Zimmermann proposed that Carranza should be amply rewarded with the Mexican recovery of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The proposal was fanciful in the extreme but held incendiary potential if the details were made public. This worst-case scenario materialized when the Zimmermann Telegram was decoded by British cryptographers, who gleefully forwarded it to the U.S. embassy in London on February 19. It took awhile for American intelligence analysts and members of the Wilson administration to accept that the intercept was genuine and not just British propaganda (a dark art at which London was adept). Convincing Wilson of the cable's provenance was further complicated by the British requirement that it would not reveal the full extent of its highly sophisticated intelligence-gathering operations, which mopped up American as well as German telegraphic traffic. When the cable's authenticity was proved beyond doubt, Wilson reluctantly accepted the mantle of war that events had thrust upon him. On April 2, 1917, he delivered a thirty-six-minute speech to Congress requesting a declaration of war against Germany:

It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war … But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts, for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.
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The manner in which Wilson declared war—for congressional approval was all but guaranteed—was remarkable. While Wilson took aim at Germany's “cruel and unmanly” U-boat attacks on neutral shipping, the broad casus belli he offered to justify American participation in the deadliest conflict in human history was purposefully grandiose, and some might say unattainable. The United States had to defeat Germany because “a steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations … The world must be made safe for democracy,” a phrase that echoed through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.
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As Wilson spoke those visionary words, Senator John Sharp of Mississippi stood up and clapped alone. The rest of the chamber followed, creating a stirring cacophony that instead struck Wilson as dissonant. “Think what it was they were applauding,” he later observed. “My message today was a message of death for our young men. How strange it seems to applaud that.”
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