Home from New Hampshire, Wilson handed himself over to the exigencies of the war. When McAdoo told him that the disruption of trade would leave the U.S. Treasury $100 million short for the year, Wilson hastened to the Capitol and asked for an emergency tax bill. He needed only twelve minutes to lay out his case, the gist of which was that although the United States had not caused the problem, it was obliged to solve it. He left the particulars to Congress but requested that the new levies, whatever they were, produce revenue immediately, steadily, and for as long as necessary. Within weeks the House and Senate agreed to tax a long list of financial instruments and nonessential consumer goods.
None of the nations at war had accepted Wilson’s offer to assist in restoring peace, and at the end of August, Bryan forwarded the refusals to the White House with a note saying that they called to mind “that passage in the Scriptures which says ‘that they all with one accord began to make excuses.’ Each one declares he is opposed to war and anxious to avoid it and then lays the blame upon someone else.” As undownable as Mr. Micawber, Bryan still believed that an opportunity for peacemaking would turn up and that when it did, Wilson would be able to capitalize on the antipathy to war expressed in all the letters.
But the war was scarcely a month old when Ambassador Page informed the State Department that the Allies would not welcome a peace overture anytime soon. Page had raised the subject at the Foreign Office only to be told by Sir Edward Grey that Britain had exhausted every honorable means to avoid war and now saw the kaiser as it had seen Napoleon: as “a world pest and an enemy of civilization.” The French were of a similar mind, and France, Great Britain, and Russia had agreed that they would make peace together or not at all.
Away when the war began, most of the European diplomats serving in Washington were back at their posts by the beginning of September. On landing in the United States, the German ambassador, Count Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff, had something to declare: Russia had started the war by meddling in a quarrel between Austria and Serbia, and when Russia mobilized its army, Germany had been forced to do the same, in self-defense. Bernstorff expressed confidence that Americans would understand as soon as they had the facts.
The British and French ambassadors, Sir Cecil Spring Rice and Jean Jules Jusserand, returned from Europe together on a crowded ocean liner. While their wives were quartered in relative comfort, the ambassadors were assigned to stifling cabins next to one of the ship’s funnels. They did much of their sleeping on deck. Spring Rice was distressed to find Jusserand and his wife “shattered and nervous.” Like Bernstorff, Spring Rice and Jusserand believed that their enemies had started the war. All three ambassadors carried instructions to hold the United States to its pledge of strict neutrality.
Spring Rice met with Wilson on September 3 and came away relieved. Wilson had told him that all he loved most in the world was at risk. Wilson also said that if the Germans won the war, the United States would be forced to enlarge its defenses to a point that would be fatal to American democracy. Both utterances confirmed the impression the ambassador had carried away from a meeting a few days before, when he mentioned Wordsworth’s “Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty,” written during the Napoleonic Wars. Wilson had replied that he knew the poems by heart and thought of them constantly. Seizing the moment, Spring Rice said, “You and Grey are fed on the same food and I think you understand.” Wilson teared up.
“I am sure we can, at the right moment, depend on an understanding heart here,” Spring Rice wrote Grey after the meeting. But he warned that Wilson should not be taken for granted. Americans saw no reason to involve themselves in a European war, and two huge blocs of American voters, German Americans and Irish Americans, had no sympathy for England. The president had to be “rather conspicuously neutral, and that he is trying to be,” Spring Rice explained. “Our line is to say that we are confident he will favor neither one party nor the other, and that we only ask a fair field.”
An able and experienced diplomat, Spring Rice had delighted Washington society in the 1880s, when he served as a junior secretary in the British legation. His pedigree included Eton and Oxford, a clerkship in the Foreign Office, and, after his first posting to Washington, assignments in Tehran, Cairo, Berlin, St. Petersburg, and Stockholm. Spring Rice should have been a highly successful ambassador to the United States, but his arrival in Washington in 1913 coincided with the onset of hyperthyroidism, which can elevate blood pressure and body temperature, affect digestion and muscle strength, and provoke operatic mood swings. Now categorized as an autoimmune disease, hyperthyroidism in Spring Rice’s day was seen as a nervous disorder, and nervous disorders were commonly regarded as character defects. Spring Rice’s friends knew him as a sharp analyst of geopolitics, a perceptive reader of his fellow humans, and a great wit—judgments borne out by his correspondence. But in his new condition, which triggered fears and angry outbursts that he could neither foresee nor control, he sometimes offended officials at the State Department. Not knowing the old Spring Rice, many in Wilson’s Washington regarded him as unfit for diplomacy. He was also suspect because of his long friendships with two vocal critics of Wilson, Roosevelt and Lodge.
Jusserand, who was also fond of Roosevelt, fared better. Born in Lyon, he had come to the United States as ambassador in 1903, after serving France in Tunisia, Britain, and Denmark and spending several years at the French Foreign Ministry. In his spare time, Jusserand had pegged away at a doctorate in literature and over his life would write books on Shakespeare, Chaucer, diplomacy, sports, French literature, and other subjects. Although he had an American-born wife, she had been raised in France, and he came to Washington knowing next to nothing about the United States. To begin filling the void, he and his wife spent much of their first year in the United States traveling the country. He also read voluminously and, like Wilson, taught himself American history by writing it. One of his books, With Americans of Past and Present Days, would be awarded a Pulitzer Prize in history. Robert Lansing ranked Jusserand first among the ambassadors in Washington.
Depressed by the German army’s destruction of the cathedral at Reims (“his favorite spot on earth,” according to Spring Rice), Jusserand nevertheless waged a brilliant one-man battle for France in the first months of the war. In public he protested the Wilson administration’s plan to purchase the German ships, which were said to be worth at least $25 million. To anyone who would listen, Jusserand argued that it would be decidedly un-neutral for the United States to send millions of dollars to Germany while refusing to allow American banks to make loans to the Allies. In private he retained an American banker to find a way around the loan ban, and before long the banker persuaded the State Department that armies in need of supplies would purchase them elsewhere if they could not arrange financing in the United States. The banker suggested that the administration leave the loan ban in place but allow American banks to extend lines of credit.
So began the U.S. investment in an Allied victory. Although free to grant similar credits to the Central Powers, few American banks did. From the fall of 1914 until the spring of 1917, when the United States entered the war, American banks arranged $2.3 billion in financing for the Allies, nearly a hundred times more than the amount they furnished to Germany.
• • •
Neutrality, which seemed to ensure the safety of the United States, was actually a minefield. The laws of naval warfare barred neutrals from mounting military expeditions or recruiting troops for a foreign army but allowed them to ship whatever they chose, munitions included, wherever they pleased. The rub was that the same body of law allowed belligerents to interdict any neutral ship on the high seas and confiscate cargo deemed militarily useful to the enemy. Belligerents naturally cast a wary eye on neutral ships, and neutrals naturally resented the searches and seizures.
It stood to reason that a nation at war would ignore all rights that threatened its survival, but it also stood to reason that if a neutral did not vigorously defend its rights, belligerents would grow ever more aggressive in interfering with neutral trade. Stakes were high, tempers flared, and the neutral was in constant danger of being swept into the war. Sir Edward Grey would remember the management of this phase of the world war as “anxious work,” with each British interdiction of an American merchant ship setting off a chain reaction: U.S. protest, British rebuttal, U.S. irritation, British regrets and resolve. As Grey explained in his memoir, he went at his task with his eye fixed on one objective: “secure the maximum of blockade that could be enforced without a rupture with the United States.”
The defense of America’s neutral rights fell to Robert Lansing. A graduate of Amherst College, he had read law in his father’s firm and moved into international law through his father-in-law, John W. Foster, who served as secretary of state to President Benjamin Harrison. Over the next two decades Lansing represented the United States in four arbitration cases, represented several governments in his private practice, and co-founded the American Society for International Law.
Lansing had joined the State Department as counselor in 1914, at Wilson’s invitation. A year shy of fifty, he was five-foot-nine and had gray eyes, close-cropped gray hair, and a gray mustache. At the State Department he wore a gray cutaway and striped trousers, and away from the office he favored a gray hat and gray tweeds. He was an elder of the Presbyterian Church, a coin collector, and an amateur horticulturist. His manner was so mild that even the lowliest employees of the State Department felt free to make fun of him. On one slow ride up the department’s steam-driven elevator, Lansing remarked, in his gray voice, “Not much power this morning.” When he got off, the elevator operator winked at the other passenger, nodded in Lansing’s direction, and said, “Not much power this morning.”
In truth Lansing possessed considerable force of will, all of it subterranean except for his exquisite penmanship, which revealed a wealth of self-discipline. His preoccupation with the fine points of international law made him seem dull and narrow to Wilson, but the successful defense of neutral rights often rested on small moves and intricate calculations. Wilson had little experience with the legal side of international relations, and Bryan’s authority in the field was of the “I feel strongly” variety. Although Lansing shared Wilson’s belief that democracies were less warlike than other forms of government, he did not share the president’s idealism in foreign affairs. Lansing believed that ideals had no place in foreign policy unless they served the national interest.
Lansing worked under constant fire from the belligerents’ ambassadors and from American exporters frustrated by the difficulties of delivering their goods to Europe. Copper, for example, was quickly shifted from the category of conditional contraband (materials that might be militarily useful) to absolute contraband (materials of obvious military value). Britain had realized that while copper did have industrial uses, it would be used primarily in munitions during the war. Britain could not ban U.S. exports to Holland, Denmark, Sweden, or any other neutral, but it served notice that a copper-laden ship was liable to seizure.
Hoping to avoid such interference, American exporters of copper began heading for the Mediterranean rather than the North Atlantic. But as soon as the British learned that most of the copper going ashore at the neutral ports of Genoa and Naples was forwarded to Germany, they began stopping merchant ships entering the Mediterranean at the Strait of Gibraltar. Americans skeptical of British intelligence were shown the numbers and the evidence. At one point, Grey learned that although the Swedish government had prohibited copper exports to Germany, it had not stopped the export of artworks. An enterprising Swede began manufacturing copper statues of German generals and shipping them to Germany, where, it seems safe to say, they were melted down for munitions.
The State Department instructed Page to tell Grey that the United States could not consent to the confiscations without proof that the copper was headed for Germany. Grey put the burden of proof on the Americans: unless they could show that the copper would not end up in German bullets aimed at British troops, Britain would confiscate it and compensate the owners of the cargo.
Lansing and Bryan were soon knee-deep in the tears of the copper lobby. The governor of Montana predicted that thousands of miners would be thrown out of work, the Chamber of Commerce reminded Bryan that the United States supplied nearly half the world’s copper, and the American Mining Congress noted that the industry had a workforce of 100,000, who of course supported uncountable wives and children not to mention the grocers and barbers of towns across the West.
Spring Rice understood the American pique and begged Grey to find a means of depriving Germany without ruining the mining states, which had powerful supporters in Congress. Spring Rice also worked to persuade the United States that Britain was fighting for its life under conditions far more serious than Americans realized. In the very first days of the war, he told Lansing, shiploads of food unloaded in Holland had gone straight to the German army in Belgium. Copper, petroleum, and rubber entering Germany were also being used in service of the German conquest of Europe.
In the war’s first year London ceded only one contraband quarrel to Washington. The commodity in question was cotton, which the world’s armies treated with nitric acid and packed into munitions to increase their explosive power. Raw cotton was not only the leading export of the United States, it was also the crop most dependent on exports: two-thirds of it was sold abroad. In the spring of 1914, anticipating another good year, cotton planters had borrowed heavily to expand production, and when September 1914’s cotton exports proved to be less than one-tenth the size of September 1913’s, cotton prices collapsed.
For a time it looked as if the federal government would rescue the South, but Wilson decided to let the market correct itself. His refusal to intervene infuriated the Southern congressmen and senators who had voted for his economic reforms. Although the crisis would pass before the year was out, it lasted long enough to give Grey time for a diplomatic coup: ignoring the wishes of the French, he refused to add cotton to the contraband list. Grey feared that the United States would demand a ban on munitions exports or assign naval convoys to merchant vessels carrying cotton. To avoid war with the United States, Britain would have had to let the convoys pass, and once merchant ships enjoyed the protection of a convoy, they could carry any cargo with impunity.
The war forced Wilson to defer his legislative plans, but there was no way to postpone the midterm congressional elections of 1914. Still grieving, he had no energy for campaigning and contributed only a long letter detailing the administration’s accomplishments. In a mere eighteen months, he and the Democrats in Congress put the federal government in charge of the nation’s money supply, broadened access to credit, shifted a large share of the tax burden from imports to incomes, put labor and capital on a more equal footing, and required businesses large and small to play by the same rules. The White House encouraged Democratic candidates to use the letter to remind voters of the party’s record and urge them to keep the Democrats in power.
On Election Day the country gave the administration mixed reviews. The Democrats retained their congressional majorities and even gained five seats in the Senate, but they lost sixty-one seats in the House. Republicans painted the losses as a repudiation of Woodrow Wilson and the New Freedom, which, they said, had upset trade and increased unemployment. Extrapolating from the voting patterns of the previous four decades, the editorial class predicted that Wilson would not be reelected in 1916.
Wilson took some comfort from the fact that the losses were confined largely to the Northeast, where the plutocrats still reigned, but when Colonel House went to Washington the day after the election, he found his friend weary and heartsick. What was the point of working so hard for so little reward? the president wanted to know. House reminded him that the voters had been electing members of Congress, not a president, an observation that drew a snappish reply. People were not stupid, Wilson said. They knew that a vote against a Democratic ticket was a vote against his leadership. He said he was no longer fit to be president. He could not think straight anymore, and his heart was not in the work. House tried to brace him up with visions of the great work to be done in foreign affairs but, he told his diary, “it was useless.”
• • •
The problem of segregation in the civil service flared up again, on November 12, when Wilson met with a delegation from the National Equal Rights League. Their spokesman, William Monroe Trotter, was a Harvard-educated real estate investor and co-founder of the Boston Guardian, one of the more militant voices of the era’s civil rights movement. In 1912 the National Equal Rights League and several other black organizations had endorsed Woodrow Wilson on the basis of his progressive record and his promise that black citizens could count on his fairness. While disturbed by reports of segregation in the Post Office and the Treasury in the spring and summer of 1913, Trotter had taken heart from a conference with the president, whose parting words to him were, “I assure you that it will be worked out.”
The situation did not improve, and Trotter returned to the White House in November 1914 with a delegation from the league. He began his side of the conversation by reminding Wilson of his campaign promise and asking him to undo the segregation. In 1912, black voters had hoped that Wilson would prove to be another Lincoln, but now, Trotter said, the black leaders who had advocated his election were “hounded as false leaders and traitors to their race.”
Wilson was incensed. “If the colored people made a mistake in voting for me, they ought to correct it and vote against me,” he said. In his view, friction between blacks and whites was “a human problem, not a political problem,” and the president of the United States could not simply decree an end to it. Wilson advised Trotter and his colleagues to “see that the race makes good and nobody can say that there is any kind of work that they can’t do as well as anybody else.”
Ignoring the point, Trotter asked the president for his thoughts on Negro workers having to use separate lunch rooms and lavatories far removed from their offices. Were such practices not humiliating? Wilson testily replied that the new arrangements were not intended to humiliate. Trotter insisted that all segregation was humiliating. Wilson lost his temper and accused Trotter of being the only American who had ever come into the Oval Office and spoken to him in such a passionate tone. Perhaps Wilson had forgotten, but Oswald Garrison Villard had been ablaze with passion when he came to the White House for a talk about segregation. And on that occasion Wilson had linked the problem and its solution directly to politics, predicting that the South’s elected officials would not change their attitudes until they needed black votes.
Trotter apologized and tried once more to explain. Black citizens wanted nothing more than a return to the old working conditions in the civil service, he said. “We would be false, Mr. President, false to ourselves and false to you, if we went out and led you to believe that we could convince the colored people that there was anything but degradation.”
“I don’t think it’s degradation,” Wilson replied. “That is your interpretation of it.” Although he promised to look into the matter again, the promise was delivered with one more warning not to politicize race by threatening to vote Republican: “to put it plainly, that is a form of blackmail.”
After his bruising quarrel with Villard, Wilson had gone to bed and stayed there for days. This time he asked Grayson to arrange a getaway to Manhattan. They boarded an overnight train, and at six o’clock the next morning, House met them at Penn Station. After breakfast in the president’s car, they motored out to the Piping Rock Club on Long Island for a morning on the links. Back in Manhattan, at House’s apartment, the president and the colonel settled down to work.
That evening, the two strolled from House’s apartment on East Fifty-third Street to Broadway, pausing now and then to listen to a soapbox orator. As soon as the president was recognized by people in the crowd, he and House would move on, but eventually they had a crowd of their own. When escape seemed in order, they ducked into a hotel, caught an elevator, and made for an exit on another street.
The president seemed to enjoy himself while they were out, but as soon as they got home, House wrote, Wilson “began to tell me how lonely and sad his life was since Mrs. Wilson’s death, and he could not help wishing when we were out tonight that someone would kill him. He has told me this before. His eyes were moist when he spoke of not wanting to live longer, and of not being fit to do the work he had in hand. He said he had himself so well disciplined that he knew perfectly well that unless someone killed him, he would go on to the end doing the best he could.”
