Emotionally, morally, and politically, the decision to lead the country into war was the most wrenching of Wilson’s life. Once past it, though, he was resolute and clearheaded, determined to pour the full might of the United States into the war, and certain that he could avoid entanglements with the Allies. Rather than join them, the United States would fight as an Associated Power, aligned with their aim of defeating Germany but not bound by their treaties with one another.
The Allies met Wilson’s decision for war with high praise and its customary sequel, supplication. By the spring of 1917, they were desperate for American help—at sea, in their land war, and on the financial front. As soon as the United States declared war, Britain, France, Italy, and Russia asked to send delegations to Washington. Wilson gave his consent, but not without trepidation. The British were coming first, and while he understood the importance of connecting His Majesty’s generals, admirals, and technical experts with their American opposites, he feared that the newspapers of William Randolph Hearst and other Anglophobes would paint the mission as a British attempt to seize control of the U.S. war effort. Spring Rice alerted London and urged the envoys to tread lightly.
Arthur Balfour, Britain’s new foreign secretary and head of its delegation to the United States, had his first audience with Wilson and Lansing on April 23. The president emphasized the U.S. government’s commitment to the war in spite of his decision to stand apart from the Allies. As he explained to Balfour, he was planning for the day when one or another of the Allies would have a treaty dispute, and if that happened, the Associate, having no vested interest in the outcome, might prove useful as an umpire. Balfour noticed that the American war effort had barely begun, but he believed that Wilson understood the magnitude of the challenges.
Balfour was invited for a quiet family dinner at the White House, and House met with him in advance to go over the territorial “adjustments” the Allies expected to make after the war. Balfour’s idea was that he and House could identify the ones on which the United States and Britain were likely to agree, then House could brief the president for an after-dinner discussion. As Balfour was speaking of Trieste, on the northern end of the Adriatic, it became apparent that he was headed down a path that House wanted Wilson to avoid, a path into a thicket of secret Allied treaties. Trieste was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but Balfour was saying that it would go to Italy after the war.
House foresaw trouble and asked the difficult question: what did the Allies’ treaties actually say about the division of spoils? Balfour admitted that the treaty with the Italians promised them virtually everything they wanted, including control of much of the eastern coast of the Adriatic. The new territory had been Italy’s price for entering the war. Wilson deplored that sort of bargain, because it took no account of the wishes of the inhabitants. It is not clear from House’s diary whether he made the point aloud, but Balfour sensed his disapproval and, House wrote, “spoke with regret of the spectacle of great nations sitting down and dividing the spoils of war or, as he termed it, ‘dividing up the bearskin before the bear was killed.’ I asked him if he did not think it proper for the Allies to give these treaties to the president for his confidential information.” Balfour agreed to share them.
Still wary, House asked another question: would it not be best for the United States and Britain to avoid such agreements so that when the peacemaking came they could stand together against the greed of other nations? Agreeable to a fault, Balfour endorsed the idea. But he did not promise that Britain would make peace in the spirit of selflessness advocated by Woodrow Wilson, and he wriggled out of the colonel’s grasp with an extravagant compliment: “I like to confer with you. I like your mind. It is so clear and direct.”
Balfour and House had supper with the Wilsons on April 30. Edith Wilson, who often felt unsure of herself in rarefied company, found Balfour accessible and appreciative. He was also tall, handsome, and sympathetic. Nearly seventy, he was an Eton and Cambridge product who had drifted into government through his family’s connections and wafted all the way up to prime minister, succeeding an uncle who resigned to make way for him. Voted out after four years, Balfour could have left politics, which he did not relish. (He never thought about them in bed, he said. His passions were philosophy, tennis, and golf.) But he stayed on, and when Lloyd George was elected prime minister in 1916, Balfour replaced Sir Edward Grey as foreign secretary. Politicians who agreed on little else agreed that Balfour was a useful man.
Wilson seemed unable to relax and enjoy his guest. “To my mind, he was not at his best because of an apparent eagerness to excel,” House told his diary. The president jabbered away about the value of studying the classics, history, architecture. As planned, the after-dinner talk centered on the shape of the postwar world, and House was distressed to hear Wilson agree with Balfour’s idea of putting the Dardanelles under some kind of international governance as a way of guaranteeing that all nations would have access to the waters linking the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. House observed that such a move might well elicit demands to internationalize the Suez and Panama canals. They got the point, he wrote in his diary, but they insisted that the Dardanelles were different. The colonel noted the tendency of statesmen to regard their own interests as exceptions to the rules they applied to everyone else.
What the colonel did not note, although he had been told of it during his 1915 meetings in Europe, was that the Asian side of the Dardanelles and the city of Constantinople had been promised to Russia. The Ottoman sultan had cast his lot with the kaiser, and the Allies privately agreed that when they finished off the kaiser, they would help themselves to the Ottoman Empire, which included Turkey and most of the modern Middle East. Another of the secret treaties gave Romania a big slice of Hungary, and still another bestowed upon Japan two prizes she had long coveted: a foothold on the Chinese mainland (a swath of Shantung, which was occupied by the Germans under a concession from China) and a sprinkling of German islands in the Pacific. The fifth and last of the secret pacts, signed early in 1917, promised that Alsace-Lorraine would be returned to France and the Polish provinces conquered by the German army would revert to Russia. Wilson and Lansing knew next to nothing of these secret agreements until after the United States committed itself to war.
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The discussions of territorial adjustments had allowed Balfour to take soundings that might prove useful when the fighting ended, but in the spring of 1917 he and his colleagues had more pressing concerns. They had been sent to Washington to gauge the Americans’ readiness for war, channel their surging patriotism toward decisions that would benefit Britain, and above all, secure ships and loans. The British quickly made their way to the Treasury, where they confessed the dire state of their finances. McAdoo would remember the visitors as “war-weary, jangled, nervous.” He had already persuaded Congress to pass the Emergency Loan Act, which put $7 billion at the Treasury’s disposal, $3 billion of it for the Allies. He gave the British mission a check for $200 million, and another $100 million went to the French.
In meetings with Secretary Daniels and his staff, the Royal Navy’s representatives confided that the U-boats were annihilating Britain’s merchant fleet. By the Admiralty’s calculations, Britain would be done for by November unless the U-boats were driven from the seas. Daniels sent six American destroyers speeding across the Atlantic to begin hunting submarines. The British asked for more, and the ranking admiral of the French mission seconded their request. “Ships and ships and then more ships,” Daniels noted in his diary. Dozens were soon on their way. When the British recommended that the interned German ships be repaired and put to work, the administration could report that the project was well under way. The ships had been seized as soon as the United States declared war, the crews were interned, and six of the ninety-one vessels went into service while the British and French were in Washington. The rest would be carrying troops and cargo by the end of the summer.
The French mission had just embarked when General Robert Nivelle, the new commander of the French armies, launched an elaborate attack to blast a wide hole in the German line and end thirty months of stasis on the Western Front. The fighting, which was supposed to be over in two days, dragged on for twelve and the Nivelle Offensive would go down in history as one of the greatest military disasters of all time. The French suffered 187,000 casualties, and the fury of the survivors set off a mutiny that ultimately spread to more than half the army’s infantry divisions at the front. The troops were still willing to defend the line but regarded further offensives as suicidal.
The French delegates to Washington smiled bravely, and thanks largely to the most celebrated member of their party, Marshal Joseph Joffre, they drew enthusiastic crowds wherever they went. Marshal Joffre, hero of the Marne: the newspapers never said one without the other. In the first weeks of the war, he had held the Germans at the Marne, stopping their race to Paris and depriving Germany of the quick victory promised by the kaiser. The reporters who followed him during his stay in the United States rarely mentioned that the hero of the Marne had just been relieved of his command. Frustrated by the long stalemate, the government had replaced him with Nivelle. The end of the offensive marked the end of Nivelle’s command, and France was forced to search for yet another marshal.
Joffre had come to the United States to ask for men, men, and more men—immediately. By 1917, France had lost more than two million soldiers, a figure that included the dead, the permanently maimed, and prisoners of war. The British who came to Washington proposed that 500,000 American recruits be rushed to England for nine weeks of training, after which they would fill out British battalions winnowed by casualties. The British did not rule out an independent American force, but their plan would put Americans at the front long before troops could be trained in the United States. The French War Ministry had conceived a similar plan, but Joffre intuited that the Associate would resist. It was one thing for France and Britain to amalgamate troops from their colonies, but Joffre could not imagine that a world power would allow its citizens to be absorbed “like poor relations in the ranks of some other army and fight under a foreign flag.” He decided to approach the U.S. Army with offers of autonomy as well as training, equipment, and advisors. Joffre was acting on his own authority. His government had asked him only to press for the speedy delivery of “a symbolic American corps, even if very weak” in the interest of raising French morale.
After meetings with the War Department, Joffre sat down with Wilson at the White House. Wilson was at his best, and Joffre understood that he and his British counterpart were competing for American troops. The president opened with a broad question: how should the U.S. Army be used in the war? The old marshal asked for an American division as soon as possible. “When the American flag flies beside the French flag and the English flag, the effect on morale will be considerable,” he said.
Wilson asked how long it would take to prepare the division for combat. Joffre replied that with a month’s training in France, the Americans would be ready to take over one of the quieter sectors at the front. Wilson assumed that Joffre was requesting a division of soldiers already in the army, not a division made up of raw recruits, but he inquired all the same. “Just so,” Joffre said. “The essential thing will be to complete their training by instructing them in the specialties that modern war demands and that we can teach them right behind our front.”
In making their case for sending men to England, the British had told Wilson that French ports were jammed, but when he asked Joffre about the problem, the marshal offered a simple solution: ports farther down the coast, where there was less traffic.
Wilson was pleased to hear that Joffre wanted trained soldiers. The question of sending volunteers had been raised by Theodore Roosevelt, who yearned to go to France at the head of a volunteer division that he had been planning since the attack on the Lusitania. Roosevelt had exchanged several letters with the War Department and had paid a call on Wilson but was still awaiting a decision. Wilson had no intention of giving Roosevelt an opportunity to turn himself into a war hero and a frontrunner for the Republican Party’s next presidential nomination. Now Wilson could take cover behind the hero of the Marne.
Joffre did Wilson an even greater service. The French mission was billeted at the home of Henry White, a former American ambassador to France, and its visit coincided with the congressional debate over the Selective Service Act. A newspaper poll taken just after the U.S. declaration of war showed formidable opposition in both the House and the Senate. Joffre agreed to be the guest of honor at a series of dinner parties that White hosted for congressmen and senators determined not to draft Americans to serve in foreign armies. With the help of an interpreter, Joffre explained that France wanted the Americans to fight under their own flag, and he endorsed the administration’s conclusion that a draft was the only way to raise an army large enough to win the war that would make the world safe for democracy. In mid-May, when both houses of Congress passed the draft legislation by overwhelming majorities, Joffre was thrilled.
The British did not object to the idea of hurrying an American division to France but assumed that United States would form its principal military partnership with Britain, if only because Americans and Englishmen spoke the same language. But Washington proved to be more concerned with égalité than fraternité. Since the U.S. Navy’s primary partnership would be with Britain, Baker thought it advisable to make France the main partner with the U.S. Army. The United States did not want either ally to have the upper hand.
Wilson privately promised Balfour that there would be one and a half million American soldiers on the Western Front in 1918, but first he would send a division to France. On May 2 the War Department telegraphed General John J. Pershing at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, where he had stayed after bringing the Punitive Expedition home from Mexico in early February. The telegram said that the United States would probably send troops and if it did, “you will be in command of the entire force.”
Pershing had been angling for the job. From the Mexican desert, he filed a successful application for promotion from brigadier to major general, the rank held by the officers sure to be on the War Department’s short list for Europe. Pershing’s chief rival for the European command was likely to be Major General Leonard Wood. A graduate of Harvard Medical School, Wood had joined the army as a surgeon, won a Congressional Medal of Honor during the Indian Wars, and topped off his experience with a celebrated memoir, Chasing Geronimo. As a colonel in the Spanish-American War he commanded a brigade that included Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, then stayed on in Cuba as military governor of Santiago. In 1902 President Roosevelt appointed him to lead the U.S. Army in the Philippines. William Howard Taft’s service as governor general of the Philippines overlapped with Wood’s command, and when Taft became president, he selected Wood as the army’s chief of staff.
And then came Woodrow Wilson. In the spring of 1913, during the crisis with Japan over the Alien Land Law in California, someone in the high reaches of the army or navy leaked word that the navy was sending the fleet to the Pacific in case of war with Japan. The leak appeared to come from Wood’s office, and Wood lost his position as chief of staff. He was given the command of the army’s Eastern Department and banished to the fort on Governors Island in New York Harbor. The War Department approved Wood’s plan to establish officers’ training camps (forerunner of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps), and while Wilson tolerated the camps, he found himself increasingly irritated by Wood’s hawkishness. In January 1917, when the Senate Military Affairs Committee asked Wood to comment on the strength of the nation’s defenses, Wood gave a critique of the War Department so intemperate that he destroyed whatever chance he might have had for a European command.
Baker summoned Pershing to Washington with the idea of sending him and a small staff to France at once. An expeditionary force of about twelve thousand experienced soldiers would follow as soon as it could be assembled, and while they were being trained by the French, Pershing would share his observations and recommendations with the War Department. Wilson approved, and Baker saw Pershing on May 10. As Pershing told the story in his memoir, the secretary had given him only two orders: “one to go to France and the other to come home. In the meantime your authority will be supreme.” In fact, Pershing went off with a six-point set of orders, which he himself had drawn up. The fifth point delineated a sharp boundary between the Associate and the Allies: “you are directed to cooperate with the forces of the other countries . . . but in doing so the underlying idea must be kept in view that the forces of the United States are a separate and distinct component of the combined forces, the identity of which must be preserved.” Both Pershing and Wilson believed that if American troops were folded into the French and British armies, the United States would not get full credit for its contributions on the battlefield.
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Conferring with the Allies got the American war effort off to a good start, but in the rush for ships, troops, and financing, there had been little time to discuss the fallout of the Russian Revolution. On April 10, three weeks after the czar’s abdication, House had learned that the provisional government’s leaders were seriously divided on the question of whether Russia should carry on its fight in the world war, which had produced two million casualties and untold misery and privation on the home front. House’s informants, one from England and the other from France, suggested that the United States send a high-level mission to Russia to deliver the message that if the new government made a separate peace with Germany, it would forfeit the goodwill and financial support of the United States.
The idea of sending a mission to Russia appealed to Wilson on several counts: A sprawling new republic of 200 million citizens would do a great deal to make the world safe for democracy. An official visit by representatives of the world’s most powerful democracy would undoubtedly impress the Russian people. And the visitors could assess the strength of the new government and Russia’s capacity to continue waging the war on the Eastern Front.
McAdoo had the excellent idea that the mission be headed by Elihu Root. Wilson was an intensely partisan president, and the selection of a prominent Republican would assure the Republicans that the administration planned to wage a bipartisan war. Root was also superbly equipped for the assignment—a former senator, secretary of state, and secretary of war as well as a respected authority on international law and a longtime champion of international arbitration.
Root received his presidential summons just after exhorting fellow Republicans to show their patriotism by giving their full support to the president during the war. “We must have no criticism now,” he told the Republican Club of New York City. Root found little to admire in Wilson or his New Freedom, but having publicly made the case for standing with the president, he could hardly refuse a presidential request. “You have no idea how I hate it,” he wrote Taft, “but it is just like our boys going into the war: there can be no question about doing it.”
Root’s companions, selected by Lansing and Wilson, included upstanding representatives of American business and finance, labor, the army, the Socialist Party, and the YMCA. They spent five weeks in Petrograd, listening, encouraging, and cajoling. The Russian leaders got the point: no fight, no loan. Although there was nothing unusual about a loan with strings attached, in this instance the United States was asking the impossible. The provisional government needed broad popular support in order to survive, yet nothing in Russia was more unpopular than the war. The new leaders assured the visiting Americans that Russia would not make a separate peace, but Root was skeptical. The war had gone on much longer than expected, Russia was on the verge of bankruptcy, the railway system had collapsed, and the new government faced the opposition of officials in sympathy with Germany. It was rumored that some of these officials were being paid by the Germans.
Along with dozens of other radicals, Vladimir Lenin, who had been in exile in Switzerland, was returned to Russia in April with German assistance. German soldiers on the Eastern Front began fraternizing with the Russians on the other side of the line, spreading the word that the war was not theirs but the czar’s, and that with the czar gone, there was no point in continuing the fight. The argument for continuing was that a peace with Germany would be temporary and that when Germany launched its next invasion, Russia, having deserted her Allies, would find herself standing alone. Sound as the argument was, it lacked the appeal of immediate peace, and it required a leap of faith. What if the Allies lost the war?
A few weeks after filing their report, Root and three other members of the mission went to Washington to see Wilson. One of them, the mission’s secretary, remembered Wilson as well informed on Russia but ill at ease with Root. The secretary was neither the first nor the last to notice Wilson’s discomfort in the presence of formidable public figures. Wilson had nothing to fear from Root, who at seventy-two was out of politics. Both men were passionate about using international institutions to prevent war. But Wilson had had nothing to fear from Balfour, either. What was it? Envy? Competitiveness? Dread of not measuring up?
House, aware of his friend’s anxiety and of the bewilderment and ill will it caused, had asked Edith Wilson to use her influence with her husband to broaden his political mind and urge him to consult leading Republicans from time to time. But when he told her that Wilson was undiplomatic, she agreed and said that she was even worse. Both of them shrank from cultivating people they did not like.
Wilson had treated Pershing with the same indifference. Pershing was about to lead the largest army in American history into the most deadly war the world had ever seen, yet when he was taken to the White House to meet the president, the president showed almost no curiosity about him. Baker had suggested putting Pershing in charge, Wilson had given his consent, and that was that. Wilson would involve himself in military affairs as needed but preferred to concentrate on the problem that had absorbed him since the beginning of the war: peace.
