Friday, March 23, found Senator Henry Fountain Ashurst in a solemn mood. That was not the stuff of headlines, but it was notable because Ashurst counted himself the least solemn member of the U.S. Senate. Proud son of pioneers who had brought him into the world in a covered wagon and raised him in a log cabin, Ashurst left school at thirteen to work on the family ranch. Possessed by the idea that he might one day hold a seat in the U.S. Senate, he continued his education on his own, studying the dictionary, reading the great works of literature, and training his voice by giving speeches while running uphill. He joined the Democratic Party of the Arizona Territory, won election to both houses of the territorial legislature, and realized his life’s ambition in 1912, when Arizona became a state and sent him to Washington. He was thirty-nine. Handsome, affable, and amusing, he affected the dress of senators past—batwing collar, spade-tail coat, striped trousers, and pince-nez dangling from a long black cord. Ashurst’s love of orating matched Woodrow Wilson’s, and he rarely passed up a chance to show off his vocabulary or his vast store of literary allusions. The long black cord and the pince-nez were twirled round and round, propeller-like, as he held forth. They called him “Five-Syllable Henry” and “the Silver-Tongued Sunbeam of the Painted Desert.”
The weeks since the break with Germany had stunned Senator Ashurst into something akin to plain speaking, at least in his diary. “The incredible has become the commonplace,” he wrote. “From inability to respond to each new amazement, the human mind now accepts multitudinous world-staggering events as matters of course. One day’s news of these times will fill volumes for future investigators, historians, and poets. We are too near these stupendous destinies to catch their meaning.”
First had come a shipping crisis. As threatened, the U-boats began executing their new orders on February 1 and within three weeks sank 128 ships, forty of them flying neutral flags. Two were American, but the more significant fact was that only five American cargo ships had sailed, because American shipping companies were now unwilling to risk a crossing. Harbors on the Atlantic seaboard were clogged with ships. Mountains of cargo rose on the piers, and freight trains were backed up for miles around the ports. In ten days, exports from New York shrank by 98 percent. Germany had paralyzed American trade.
Shipowners turned to Washington for help, and on February 8, Lansing informed them of their legal right to arm their vessels for self-defense. But with no suitable guns or trained gunners, the right was useless. For the next two weeks, as hundreds of cargo ships waited, Wilson and his cabinet worked their way to a solution: the government would authorize the navy to lend guns and gunners to the shipping companies.
In a speech at the Capitol on Monday, February 26, Wilson had asked for a law to meet the emergency. Mindful that Congress would adjourn on March 4 and not reconvene for months, he also asked for authority to deal with crises that might arise during the recess. The Constitution implied that he already had such powers, but given the uncertainties of the moment, he wished to feel that he had Congress behind him. He was not contemplating war, he said. What he wanted, in addition to the authority and the funds to equip American ships for self-defense, was the latitude to use any other methods needed to protect Americans who were making peaceful use of the seas. He closed with a move that had marred several of his recent speeches, a suggestion that those who differed with him were deficient in patriotism: “I cannot imagine any man with American principles at his heart hesitating to defend these things.”
The president’s allies in Congress introduced the Armed Ship Bill that afternoon, but the next day Wilson learned of a German plot that destroyed all hope of keeping the United States out of the world war. In a telegram sent six weeks before, Arthur Zimmermann, Germany’s foreign secretary, had given his minister to Mexico an astonishing order: if the United States declared war on Germany, the minister was to persuade President Carranza to attack the United States—with the help of Japan if possible. Zimmermann promised that Germany would fund the venture and help Mexico regain the 500,000 square miles of territory the United States seized in the Mexican-American War of 1848.
The Zimmermann telegram had reached Mexico City by a circuitous route. The German Foreign Office put it into cipher and cabled it to Ambassador Bernstorff in Washington, who sent it by Western Union to his man in Mexico. Washington learned of it from the British, who had intercepted and decoded the cable, then passed it along to the American ambassador to Britain, Walter Hines Page, who sent it straight to the State Department. Secretary Lansing was out of town when it arrived, so Frank Polk walked it over to the White House. Wilson was so outraged that he wanted to expose the plot at once, but Polk persuaded him to talk with Lansing first.
By the time the president and his secretary of state sat down together, on February 27, Lansing had learned that the State Department had unwittingly played a part in the episode. Sometime in 1916, Bernstorff had romanced House into helping him secure a privilege he never should have had: use of the State Department’s wires to communicate, in cipher, with Berlin. The British had cut Germany’s transatlantic cable at the beginning of the war, forcing the Germans to send their diplomatic dispatches to other points in Europe for transmission to the United States. The process was slow and cumbersome, and the colonel had been seduced by the ambassador’s argument that use of the American cable would expedite his efforts to preserve the peace between Germany and the United States. A German embassy courier left coded messages at the State Department, which cabled them to the American embassy in Berlin, which forwarded them to the Wilhelmstrasse. Cables from the Wilhelmstrasse traveled the same path in reverse.
From time to time Lansing had expressed uneasiness with the arrangement, and when Bernstorff complained to House about Lansing’s attitude, House asked Wilson to intervene. Wilson decided that the Germans could continue using the wire if they promised to use it only for dispatches that contained nothing unneutral. Using the U.S. Department of State to transmit an order to incite a war between Mexico and the United States was unneutral in the extreme.
“Good Lord!” Wilson said as Lansing walked him through the maze. “Good Lord!” He wanted to inform the newspapers immediately, but Lansing explained that it would be unwise to act until they found a way around one more complication: if Germany knew how the United States had learned of the plot, it would know that Britain had cracked the German code. Lansing suggested sharing the gist of the telegram with a trusted journalist but not sharing the source. Zimmermann’s scheme was so outlandish that Lansing knew he would be asked about the source, and he planned to say that it had to remain confidential. Wilson gave his assent.
The next afternoon, Wilson spent an hour with a delegation from a coalition of peace organizations, the Emergency Peace Federation. The visitors admired the ideals Wilson had set forth in his “peace without victory” speech, and they thought that Wilson might avoid going to war by making a direct appeal to the German people. Wilson listened, but the Zimmermann telegram had killed his desire for peace overtures. One of the visitors, Jane Addams, was startled to hear him say that he would have no say in the peacemaking unless the United States entered the war.
For more than a year, House, Page, and Lansing had been making the same point, but Wilson had stuck to his conviction that only a nation unstained by war would have the moral authority to procure a just peace. The visiting pacifists were apparently the first to hear Wilson argue the opposite: there would be no just peace unless the United States went to war. For a man of another temperament, the about-face might have furnished a memorable lesson in the limitations of moral authority in world affairs, but if the situation prompted any reflections of that sort, Wilson did not record them.
On February 28 Lansing paraphrased the Zimmermann telegram for an Associated Press reporter and held his breath. The idea that Germany would form an alliance with Mexico and Japan to make war on the United States was so preposterous that Lansing expected Zimmermann to deny it and challenge the United States to produce proof. But Zimmermann readily admitted sending the message and asked why anyone should be surprised. In his mind, it went without saying that if the United States declared war on Germany, Germany would retaliate.
On March 1, the day the newspapers published the Associated Press story, Senator Lodge introduced a resolution calling on the president to vouch for the authenticity of the telegram. In truth, Lodge had no doubts about it, but he realized that if he could wring a verification from Wilson, Wilson would find it difficult to go on defending U.S. neutrality. The White House and the State Department quickly confirmed that the telegram was genuine.I
The House reacted to the news of the German plot by voting 403 to 13 in favor of the Armed Ship Bill, and the Senate voted unanimously to consider the House bill, but the discussion began when the Sixty-fourth Congress was only twenty-six hours away from its mandated hour of adjournment, noon on March 4. The Senate’s pacifists took the floor and ran out the clock, preventing any version of such a bill from coming to a vote. The Armed Ship Bill was dead, at least for the moment.
• • •
Wilson’s first term also expired at noon, and because March 4, 1917, fell on a Sunday, he had decided on a two-part inauguration, a private swearing-in on Sunday to fulfill the constitutional requirement and the customary public celebration on Monday. At ten-thirty on Sunday morning, in a hard rain, he and his wife were driven to the Capitol and escorted to the President’s Room, where a number of bills awaited his signature. Aware of the battle raging just across the hall in the Senate chamber, he did his best to ignore it. A reporter shuttling between the chamber and the President’s Room reported that Wilson seemed “chipper and lively . . . full of vigor and swing.”
At 12:04, with his hand on the Bible, Wilson took the oath of office before his wife, his cabinet, and a sprinkling of political associates. The Bible lay open to the Forty-sixth Psalm, which begins, “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.” In the sixth verse the heathens rage, and in the eighth the Lord “maketh wars to cease unto the ends of the earth.” The Wilsons were back at the White House by twelve-thirty, and according to Colonel House, the president came in denouncing the senators who had blocked the vote. House urged him to tell the public what had happened and explain the consequences. Wilson appreciated the suggestion and promised to act on it later in the week. House thought he should seize the moment, and Wilson gave in, shutting himself up for the afternoon to write a statement for the press. He talked it over with House before dinner and after dinner consulted McAdoo, Burleson, and Tumulty. With their approval, it went off to the wire services.
Washington went to bed thinking that Monday would be a day of celebration but awoke to find the honoree in a terrible mood. His statement appeared on the Post’s front page under a headline eight columns wide. “A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible,” Wilson had written. In a moment when action was sorely needed, they had made action impossible, and unless the Senate’s rules were changed to limit debate, an extraordinary session of Congress would be pointless, because the paralysis of the Senate would remain.
In spite of the president’s fury, the inaugural show had to go on, and in its way it was as unsettling as the filibuster. J. Fred Essary of the Baltimore Sun, a veteran Washington correspondent and a member of the committee in charge of the 1917 inauguration, would write that the capital had not witnessed a ceremony as fraught with “uncertainty, uneasiness, and foreboding” since the second inauguration of Abraham Lincoln. The Wilsons traveled to the Capitol in a horse-drawn carriage protected by thirty-two Secret Service men augmented by columns of cavalry and mounted police. Armed National Guardsmen lined both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue. Sharpshooters kept a lookout from the rooftops. The crowds who had come out to see the president were thick with plainclothesmen.
It seemed to the reporters covering the extravaganza that Washington had never seen so many flags, and they were right. The inaugural subcommittee on street decorations had set itself one goal—“promote patriotism”—and had pursued it in every corner of the capital. Civic groups urged their members to fly the flag. Automobile dealerships and parking garages posted large signs asking motorists to decorate their cars with flags and, while they were at it, to encourage friends and neighbors to display the flag. The city’s schoolteachers were given a “fly the flag” letter to read to their pupils. The committee even persuaded women’s suffrage groups to furl their banners for the day, “leaving none but Old Glory flying in the breeze.”
Chief Justice Edward Douglass White administered the oath again, for the benefit of the crowd, and Edith stood at Woodrow’s side, a place no previous first lady had claimed at an inauguration. The sun shone brightly, but the wind blew hard. The temperature was just above freezing. Wilson, in silk hat and Chesterfield coat, looked elegant and commanding, but his inaugural address was a disappointment. For one thing, he was speaking into the wind, which made his words inaudible to the thousands gathered on the lawn. For another, much of the address was borrowed from his speeches of the last year. The one moving moment came last, in a sentence that read like a prayer for himself and the country: “The shadows that now lie dark upon our path will soon be dispelled, and we shall walk with the light all about us if we be but true to ourselves—to ourselves as we have wished to be known in the councils of the world and in the thought of all those who love liberty and justice and the right exalted.”
The Wilsons rode back to the White House through the sea of flags, but the mystic influence of the Stars and Stripes along Pennsylvania Avenue on March 5, 1917, produced none of the exuberance of the Democratic convention at St. Louis. This was a subdued show of patriotism, perhaps because of the stinging wind, perhaps because the president and first lady were barely visible behind the mounted police and the Secret Servicemen. Thomas W. Brahany, a member of the president’s office staff, suggested another possibility: “This is not a time for wild cheering. The country is in a serious state of mind.”
In the evening the family and Colonel House had a quiet dinner then gathered in the oval sitting room upstairs to view the fireworks over the Mall. Most of the group watched from the main windows, but Woodrow and Edith invited the colonel to join them at a side window. House was touched to see Woodrow holding Edith’s hand and leaning his face against hers.
• • •
By the next morning it was clear that the country sided with the president in the controversy over the filibuster. La Follette was hanged in effigy on the campus of the University of Illinois, and the town fathers of Wheeling, West Virginia, announced that they had canceled the speech he was scheduled to give later in the week. But the dozen senators who had held out against the Armed Ship Bill vehemently objected to Wilson’s aspersions. Their opposition had not been selfish or willful or unpatriotic, they said; they were convinced that arming the ships would lead to war.
Wilson regretted giving in to his pique but was too proud (and perhaps too hurt) to apologize. In its closing days the Sixty-fourth Congress had rejected his request for broad and unspecified powers, thwarted his effort to arm the merchant fleet, and left the Senate no time to consider a long list of other major bills passed by the House. Now he would have to call for an extra session, which he had hoped to avoid. On March 7, Wilson did what he had so often done when the world turned against him: he took to his bed, staying in the family quarters for ten days. Cabinet meetings were postponed. Correspondence piled up on his desk downstairs. Appointments were canceled. A cold, said Dr. Grayson.
Woodrow clung to Edith, and for the first time she played a visible role in his work. At his request, she wrote a note to Lansing, asking him to review and comment on some documents from Daniels. Before the month was out, she went with Woodrow to a meeting with Daniels and one with Lansing. She was not making decisions or acting in his stead, but he seemed to need the comfort of her presence. On March 9 he asked the attorney general, Thomas Watt Gregory, whether a president could arm the ships without the approval of Congress. When Gregory assured him that he could, Wilson asked Lansing and Daniels to draw up the proper procedures and, Edith wrote, “They replied in long memoranda which I read to the president as he lay in bed.” On March 12, he gave the order.
In her diary on March 13, Edith noted that “W. did not get up until lunch-time; he still feels wretched.” On March 14: “Still raining. W. in bed until one, but seemed better.” The White House usher’s diary for the same day adds that there were no callers and that after joining the family for lunch, the president again retreated. On March 15, Edith reported that Woodrow was cheered by the news that the Russian people had forced Czar Nicholas II to abdicate, liberating themselves after 350 years under the Romanovs and promising to establish a democratic government.
Since the beginning of the war, it had galled Wilson to hear Britain and France speak of fighting a war against autocracy when their principal ally, Russia, lived under the heel of an autocrat as reprehensible as the kaiser. At a stroke, the Russian Revolution removed Wilson’s objection and ensured that he could support the Allies without a troubled conscience. In 1913 Wilson had been the first head of state to grant recognition to the Republic of China, and in 1917 he became the first to recognize the provisional government of Russia.
• • •
The final blow to Wilson’s hopes for continued neutrality landed on March 18, when the Germans torpedoed three American ships. Still, Wilson resisted. He summoned Lansing the next day to discuss the attacks, but he seemed to want the secretary of state to confirm that the United States could do no more than arm its ships. Lansing told Wilson that war was inevitable and the sooner the United States admitted it, the taller it would stand in the eyes of the world. Lansing hoped that Wilson would come around to his view but sensed that he resented abandoning the neutrality he had worked so hard to preserve. Depressed and anxious, Lansing dashed off a plea to Colonel House: “If you agree with me that we should act now, will you not please put your shoulder to the wheel?”
A few hours after seeing Lansing, Wilson unburdened himself in an off-the-record conversation with Frank I. Cobb, editor of the New York World. Although he had defended the order to arm the ships in his talk with Lansing, he admitted to Cobb that it was not going to work. Armed or unarmed, ships in the war zone were going to be torpedoed. He also confessed that he could no longer think of an alternative to war. He was hoping that Cobb might be able to see a way out. Cobb could not.
Wilson asked Cobb to consider the consequences of going to war. “It would mean that we should lose our heads along with the rest and stop weighing right and wrong,” Wilson said. “It would mean that a majority of the people in this hemisphere would go war-mad, quit thinking and devote their energies to destruction.” The Allies would win, and Germany would be forced to accept a punitive peace. It would mean the end of civil liberties in the United States. “To fight you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fiber of our national life, infecting Congress, the courts, the policeman on the beat, the man in the street,” Wilson said. “If there is any alternative, for God’s sake, let’s take it.”
Lansing brooded all day about Wilson’s indecision and late that night wrote him a long letter. He began on bended knee, saying he agreed with Wilson’s judgment that the latest submarine attacks on American ships were not sufficient cause for declaring war. But, he added, an armed American ship was bound to clash soon with a submarine, and after that, the United States would find it impossible to “maintain the fiction that peace exists.” He admitted that his argument made little sense unless one accepted the inevitability of war, but if he was right, the United States had much to gain by declaring war as soon as possible. It would hearten the Allies. It would strengthen the new Russian government and encourage the budding democratic insurgency in Germany, opportunities that might disappear if the United States delayed. And, he said, “prompt, vigorous and definite action in favor of Democracy and against Absolutism” would increase American influence at the peace negotiations after the war, when Germany would need “a merciful and unselfish foe” and the world would need reordering.
Lansing’s letter went to the White House the next morning, and at the cabinet meeting that afternoon he was surprised by Wilson’s serenity. The president shook hands with everyone on his way into the room and after a few pleasantries said he wanted the cabinet’s advice on dealing with Germany. All were in favor of asking the Sixty-fifth Congress to begin its extraordinary session on April 2, two weeks earlier than planned, to expedite the declaration of war.
But the cabinet disagreed on what should happen after that. McAdoo, doubtful that the United States could raise an army large enough to end the war, proposed that Washington concentrate on financing the Allies. Houston concurred but added the thought that the U.S. Navy might prove useful to the Allies. Baker, the pacifist who had become secretary of war, was now as militant as any of the generals on his staff. He advocated raising a large army on the grounds that news of the American decision to train hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of soldiers, would force the Central Powers to realize that they were beaten.
Lansing recited the arguments he had been making to Wilson and added his belief that the American people were longing for strong leadership, ready to fight, and likely to be confused if the government wavered. Furthermore, he said, the war had to be a war for democracy, a point he made with such force that the president asked him to lower his voice lest it be heard in the corridor. When Wilson said he did not see how he could ask Congress for a declaration of war in the name of an abstraction, Lansing suggested that Wilson could propose a war against the inhumanity of German autocracy and remind Congress of Germany’s broken promises and its conspiracies against the United States. “Possibly,” Wilson said. Lansing pressed. Not everyone would agree that the two hundred Americans lost to submarine attacks justified a war, but the idea that autocracies like Germany had to be stopped because they threatened the United States and every other democracy would, he said, “appeal to every liberty-loving man the world over.”
Eventually Wilson called on Daniels. Left fatherless and destitute by the Civil War, he had been a pacifist all his life. His eyes filled with tears, and his voice trembled as he said that now that war was unavoidable, Congress ought to be summoned as soon as possible. The account of the cabinet meeting in his diary is brief and makes no mention of his own distress. But unlike Lansing, who had taken the president’s composure at face value, Daniels could see Wilson’s anguish, and it pained him. “President was solemn, very sad!” he wrote.
• • •
After hearing from the rest of the cabinet, Wilson said, “Well, gentlemen, I think that there is no doubt as to what your advice is. I thank you.” He was no more forthcoming with the fifty White House reporters waiting for news of the cabinet meeting. When they protested to his office, he issued a one-line statement as exasperating as his silence: “The international situation was thoroughly discussed in all its phases.”
Next morning, on his way out to golf with Grayson, Wilson gave his staff the text of the proclamation calling for an extraordinary session of Congress to begin at noon on April 2 “to receive a communication concerning grave matters of national policy.” For readers wondering what the grave matters might be, The Washington Post explained: “the United States and the German empire are about to go to war.”
Wilson and Grayson did not play golf. They rode around the countryside for several hours. When they returned, Wilson dropped by his office to sign the proclamation, then went upstairs. “Apparently he is not in a working mood these days,” a White House aide told his diary. “He spends nearly all his time with Mrs. Wilson, reading, playing pool or visiting.” As soon as the newspapermen read the proclamation, they wanted to know what the president planned to say, and they pestered his staff until one of them went upstairs to ask Wilson if he would grant them a few minutes. He would not.
Wilson fell prey to every kind of anxiety in the two weeks before his address to Congress. The cabinet saw a self-righteous version of it at a meeting on March 27, when McAdoo suggested removing the German crews from the ships they had disabled. McAdoo feared that when war was declared, the Germans would dynamite the ships, doing considerable damage to the ports. Wilson said firmly that the United States would not do anything that looked grasping or self-interested. When McAdoo raised the issue again a few days later, Wilson was even more adamant. As Daniels put it in his diary, “President said it offended him to see people covet these ships. America must set an example of splendid conduct in war.” McAdoo’s instinct was to protect the ports, which would be crucial in wartime. Wilson’s reaction seemed a page torn from a code of chivalry, irrational in an age of total war.
House happened to be on hand after the cabinet’s first discussion of the German crews, and he was not surprised when Wilson complained of a headache. Eager to soothe, House told his friend that managing the war would not prove as difficult as challenges he had already met but that this challenge conflicted with the kind of man he was: “too refined, too civilized, too intellectual, too cultivated not to see the incongruity and absurdity of war.” War required “a man of coarser fiber,” House said. The flattery seemed to please Wilson but did not convince him that he could succeed. He said he did not feel fit to be a war president. House assured him that everything he would have to do had already been done by the Allied leaders. Wilson took heart.
On March 30, Wilson began writing his communication on grave matters, and at the cabinet meeting that afternoon, he stood and put himself through a series of physical exercises, explaining that he was stiff from writing all morning. Wilson had often complained of a stiff arm after hours of writing, and it was his writing arm that was temporarily paralyzed in the two strokes at Princeton, but this is the first report of tension throughout his body.
To stretch his muscles and relax his mind, Wilson remained faithful to his golf regimen, going out almost every morning with his wife or with Grayson. He spent the morning of March 31 on the links with Edith, lunched with her, then told the household staff that he was going to his study and wanted quiet. Hoover, the head usher, sent a subordinate to close the study door. Wilson lit into him. He did not want the door closed, he said. He wanted quiet. “I have never known him to be more peevish,” Hoover told a member of Wilson’s office staff. “He is out of sorts.” Wilson’s anxiety was also apparent to Starling, who would remember the president “with a melancholy, preoccupied air. When he spoke his voice was soft, as if the whole world were a sickroom through which he was tiptoeing. I was sorry for him.”
• • •
On Sunday morning, April 1, Woodrow and Edith went to church, and that afternoon he finished his speech. April 2 was given over to golf with Edith and an afternoon of killing time with her and House as they waited for Congress to come to order and inform the president that it was ready to receive his communication.
Sometime during the afternoon Wilson read his speech to House, who thought it excellent and in his diary did not hesitate to compliment himself: “it contains all that I have been urging upon him since the war began.” When House asked Wilson why he had not shared a draft with the cabinet, Wilson said they would have picked it to pieces.
Wilson’s decision to keep the speech to himself was a lapse of judgment as well as a measure of his anxiety. The speech was sure to be the most consequential Wilson had ever given, for the country and perhaps the world. At the very least it ought to have been vetted by the secretary of state, and Wilson would have risked nothing by showing a draft to the whole cabinet. He would have had the benefit of their counsel, could have declined their suggestions, and might well have been given a warm bath of reassurance. But he was apparently too distraught to submit to any kind of review, even a review he was free to ignore.
At about three o’clock the White House learned that Congress would be ready to receive the president at eight-thirty. Dinner, shared with Edith, Margaret, cousin Helen, and the colonel, was a quiet affair with conversation of the sort the president liked with his meals. “We talked of everything excepting the matter in hand,” House noted in his diary. The Wilsons, accompanied by Grayson, left for the Capitol at 8:20 in a limousine protected by the Secret Service, mounted cavalry, and a motorcycle escort. The Capitol dome, illuminated and heavily patrolled, glowed through the mist of a light rain.
Members of the House were already in their seats. The senators, almost all of them wearing or carrying small American flags, had marched in together. The justices of the Supreme Court had been ushered to an improvised first row of chairs. And for the first time in memory, the diplomatic corps was seated on the House floor rather than in the galleries. At 8:32, when the speaker of the House announced the president, the Supreme Court rose to applaud and the rest of the room followed.
Wilson customarily allowed himself a gesture now and then as he delivered a speech, but on this evening he scarcely moved. He held his manuscript in both hands and rested an arm on the clerk’s desk, as if to steady himself. He began with a review of Germany’s offenses, particularly “the cruel and unmanly business” of a submarine war with no restrictions. The United States could not submit to it, he said. “The wrongs against which we now array ourselves are no common wrongs; they cut to the very roots of human life.” He was well into the speech before he made his request of Congress:
With a profound sense of the solemn and even tragical character of the step I am taking and of the grave responsibilities which it involves, but in unhesitating obedience to what I deem my constitutional duty, I advise that the Congress declare the recent course of the Imperial German Government to be in fact nothing less than war against the government and people of the United States; that it formally accept the status of belligerent which has thus been thrust upon it, and that it take immediate steps not only to put the country in a more thorough state of defense but also to exert all its power and employ all its resources to bring the Government of the German Empire to terms and end the war.
He outlined the necessities: close cooperation with the Allies, continued production of their matériel, industrial mobilization, immediate improvements in the navy, and an army of at least 500,000 men “who should, in my opinion, be chosen upon the principle of universal liability to service.” (He could not bring himself to say “conscription.”) He also asked Congress to fund the war mainly with new taxes rather than loans so that the cost would not be passed on to future generations.
The United States had no quarrel with the German people, Wilson said. Its quarrel was with the German autocracy. No autocracy could be trusted to honor the principles of a partnership of the world’s democracies. He spoke briefly of the Russian Revolution and his joy that “the great, generous Russian people,” having overthrown their autocracy, had added their “majesty and might to the forces that are fighting for freedom in the world.”
Wilson’s peroration was the most stirring rhetoric heard in the United States since the days of Lincoln:
The world must be made safe for democracy. . . . 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.
It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. 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. To such a task we can dedicate ourselves and our fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other.
The speech was followed by a silence of several seconds that to Robert Lansing felt like several minutes—“the finest tribute ever paid to eloquence,” he wrote. Then nearly everyone rose and applauded and cheered. As Wilson left the chamber, Lodge took his hand and said, “Mr. Wilson, you have expressed in the loftiest manner possible the sentiments of the American people.”
Wilson had taken Lansing’s advice to go to war as a champion of democracy, but only after the U-boats and the Zimmermann telegram made it impossible to go on defending neutrality, after the Russian revolutionaries relieved him of his qualms about the Allies, and after he accepted that he would have no role in shaping the postwar world unless the United States entered the war. But he was sickened by the prospect of sending troops into the hell of the Western Front, where millions had died and no one knew when the killing would end. When Wilson left the Capitol, his face was ashen, his step leaden. Tumulty would remember Wilson saying to him after the speech, “Think what it was they were applauding. My message today was a message of death for our young men.”
• • •
Quickly but not without debate Congress approved the war resolution with votes of 82 to 6 in the Senate and 373 to 50 in the House. The senators opposed included Robert La Follette, who addressed himself to Wilson: “The poor, sir, who are the ones called upon to rot in the trenches, have no organized power, but oh, Mr. President, at some time they will be heard.”
A congressional courier delivered the resolution to the White House at one o’clock in the afternoon on April 6, Good Friday. In 134 words it indicted Germany for repeated acts of war against the American people and their government, asserted that those acts had created a state of war between the United States and Germany, formally declared the United States at war, and authorized the president to use the army, navy, and resources of the United States “to carry on war against the Imperial German Government; and to bring the conflict to a successful termination.” The president was having lunch with his wife and a cousin when the messenger arrived, and they immediately went to Ike Hoover’s office, where Wilson added his signature to those of the speaker of the House and the president of the Senate. With that, the United States was at war. Hoover pressed a button to notify the Navy Department, and an aide telephoned the executive offices to alert the newspaper reporters who were standing by. There would be no statement from the president.
“Step by step the president had been pursued and brought to bay,” Winston Churchill would write in his history of the Great War. “By slow merciless degrees, against his dearest hopes, against his gravest doubts, against his deepest inclinations, in stultification of all he had said and done and left undone in thirty months of carnage, he was forced to give the signal he dreaded and abhorred.” Churchill went on to excoriate him for not entering the war two years earlier, after the attack on the Lusitania, and to wonder how much agony and ruin might have been prevented if Woodrow Wilson had not told his countrymen that there is such a thing as being too proud to fight. Theodore Roosevelt, Robert Lansing, and many other influential Northeasterners had similar convictions, but until the Zimmermann telegram came to light, most Americans did not. Musing on the moment in his diary, Senator Ashurst predicted that “When the excitement of these days is forgotten, the impartial historian will say that W.W. valiantly strove to avert war.” That he had.
I. The telegram was real, but Zimmermann’s offer was not. Soon after Americans learned of his telegram, Zimmermann confided to his colleagues that Germany had no intention of helping Mexico regain its lost territory and no faith that Japan would join such an alliance. He said he was simply trying to lure Mexico into attacking the United States “as quickly as possible, thus preventing American troops from being sent to the European continent.” (Friedrich Katz, The Secret War in Mexico, [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981], 352–53.)
