ONE

The Great War

The Great War began with a wrong turn in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. On June 28, 1914, the driver for the unpopular Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, got lost and was forced to turn around. Austria had annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina five years earlier, a former province of the Ottoman Empire. This riled up Slavic nationalists in neighboring Serbia. The Serbs secretly supported terrorist groups such as the Black Hand Gang to resist Austrian rule. One gang member, an eighteen-year-old student named Gavrilo Princip was eating lunch when he saw the archduke’s automobile turning around. He jumped onto the open car, drew a pistol, and fired point blank at the archduke and his wife, killing them both.

The New York Times covered the assassination on the front page, but the news was hardly earth-shattering for most Americans.¹ Europeans were enjoying the fine summer weather, blissfully unaware that a crisis was about to unfold. Many assumed war was impossible, as many European monarchs were cousins. Most were interconnected thanks to Queen Victoria of England, who had raised a large brood of children who were then married into other royal families. Germany’s ruler, Kaiser Wilhelm II, was a grandson to Victoria. Czar Nicholas II of Russia was his first cousin. King George V of England was cousin to both emperors.

That war was on the horizon was not a total surprise. The continent had long been tense as Balkan states declared their independence from the declining Ottoman Empire, resulting in a series of little wars. Russia stepped up its support of Slavic nationalism in the Balkans and allied with France in 1892, which in turn led Kaiser Wilhelm to believe that Germany was encircled by enemies, a challenge he met by building up his army and fostering a national military obsession known as Prussianism. Future president Herbert Hoover called the Germans the “Spartans of Europe.”²

Germany had only been united as a country since 1871, but it had quickly become the leading economic and political power of Europe. Still, Kaiser Wilhelm felt inherently insecure. “She was menaced on every side,” the Kaiser said. “The bayonets of Europe were directed at her.” The Kaiser was not content just to dominate Europe’s landmass and its economy; he wanted control of the seas as well, and built up a powerful navy at great expense to challenge the Royal Navy. This drew the ire of the British, who had long been a German ally. Europe divided into two armed camps: The French-Russian alliance would become the Triple Entente (more commonly known as the Allies) once England joined; and the Central Powers, composed of Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Italy.³

In spring 1914, American president Woodrow Wilson’s special envoy, Edward House, sailed to Europe on his first private mission to negotiate détente between England and Germany. He was stunned at how militaristic the Germans had become, as he wrote the president from the German capital, Berlin: “The situation is extraordinary. It is militarism run stark mad. Unless some one acting for you can bring about a different understanding there is some day to be an awful cataclysm.” Just two months later, the cataclysm began.⁴

Austria wanted revenge for the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Within three weeks, it delivered an ultimatum to Serbia demanding accountability for the assassination—or there would be war. Rather than counsel Austria to hold back, Kaiser Wilhelm gave his ally a “blank check” to proceed against Serbia. Serbia had its own alliance with Russia, and Russia could not stand by idly while its fellow Slavs were punished. Rejecting the Serbian concessions, Austria declared war on July 28, exactly one month after the archduke’s assassination. Czar Nicholas of Russia ordered his army to mobilize.

In a matter of days, much of Europe found itself at war, falling into the conflict like dominoes. Kaiser Wilhelm asked his cousin Nicholas to cancel the mobilization; when the czar refused, Germany and Russia declared war on each other on August 1. Two days later, France and Germany went to war. On August 3, Germany declared war on Belgium in order to invade France from the north; England in turn declared war against Germany to protect Belgium. Within weeks, the war turned global as Japan declared war against Germany and swiftly seized its Chinese and Pacific colonies. The flailing Ottoman Empire entered the war on the side of the Germans in late October.

As the European powers tripped into war in early August, President Wilson and his family gathered in the White House at the bedside of his wife Ellen. The First Lady was terminally ill with Bright’s Disease, a kidney ailment. She died on August 6, sending Wilson into a deep, inconsolable depression. He was heartbroken. Wilson was a solitary figure with few intimates, but Ellen was one of the few exceptions. She had served as his lifelong confidante. She worked behind the scenes, advising him on key policies, and helped direct his energies toward advancing his career. Ellen eschewed the limelight, spending her time raising their three daughters and attending to private matters.

The death of Ellen put Woodrow in the deepest despair. He had lost his closest adviser and his life partner. But for the crisis unfolding in Europe, Wilson may have shut down completely. It took the friendship of an unusual man to help pull the president back from despair, a man who observed the president’s double burden of a world war and the loss of his wife, “His burdens are heavier than any President’s since Lincoln.” The friend was Edward Mandell House.⁵

House and Wilson first met in 1911 as House sized up Wilson, then the Democratic governor of New Jersey. House was impressed by the governor’s clean record of reform and his outsider status. They soon found themselves as fast friends, and House worked quietly behind the scenes to ensure Wilson got the presidential nomination in 1912, rather than three-time failure William Jennings Bryan. After Wilson’s election win, House helped vet Wilson’s cabinet appointments. Wilson hoped to appoint House to the cabinet, but House declined, preferring to remain a private citizen and presidential adviser, a unique role he carved out for himself and singular in American history.

Like President Wilson, House was a child during the Civil War. Growing up in Houston, Texas, he witnessed the deprivation and destruction from the war. He remembered soldiers returning home and the lawlessness that ensued—the threats of violence, murder, crime, and robbery. It left a lasting impression on House about the evils of war. He was as close to being a pacifist as one could be without actually being a pacifist.⁶

Edward House had inherited land and was successful in his investments, giving him a solid income and the leisure time to pursue his hobby: politics. He became a progressive political rainmaker in Texas. House had never served in the military, but a governor whom House had backed in a crucial election began calling him “Colonel.” The moniker stuck, and henceforward Edward House was known as Colonel House.

House spoke quietly, with a soft Texas drawl, and people had to lean in to hear him, like he was speaking in confidence. He was trim, rather frail, but always nattily attired. He obscured his narrow face and small chin with a large white mustache. In photos, he usually appears with a hat covering his balding head. Journalist George Creel had perhaps the best single description of House: “Soft-spoken, selfless, unassertive, but an epitome of alertness, the colonel was a high-class sponge, with the added beauty of being easy to squeeze.”⁷ He was an excellent source of information, as he could win people’s trust, consult with insiders, sift through facts, and provide shrewd analysis. Humorist Will Rogers cracked a joke about House that was both astute and true: “Lot of men have fought their way into fame and talked their way into fame but Colonel House is the only man that ever just listened himself in.”⁸

The Texas summer was far too hot for House. He maintained a home in Austin and rented a seaside house in New England during the summers. House spent much of the year in New York City, where he kept a small apartment, and frequently traveled to Washington to meet with Wilson, especially when the president needed advice on the wording of a major speech. Wilson was an idealist, while House was a realist who had a far firmer grasp of international affairs than the president. “Mr. House is my second personality,” Wilson remarked. “He is my independent self. His thoughts and mine are one.” House became known as the “silent partner” for being the man behind the scenes, the private citizen who had the president’s ear.⁹

Wilson and House had a mutual belief in peace, and it was the president who sent House to Europe in spring 1914 as his back-channel diplomat to defuse tensions on the continent. The mission proved unsuccessful, and House sailed back to the U.S. on July 21, shortly before the war broke out. This was the first of House’s numerous peace missions to Europe. He conducted diplomacy on a personal level, often person-to-person.

Newton Baker was the mayor of Cleveland, an industrial city whose population was three-quarters foreign born. When the war began, he warned the chief of police to step up efforts to patrol the multiethnic city, lest ethnic groups engage in a miniature war that reflected the war in Europe. The chief of police knew better: “Most of these people came from Europe to escape the very thing now going on there and their chief emotion will be thankfulness that they have escaped it and are not involved,” he told Baker.¹⁰

Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt, attending the opening of the Cape Cod Canal and a keen observer of international events, wrote his wife Eleanor—“Babs,” as he called her, on August 1, the day that the Germans and Russians declared war. “A complete smash up is inevitable,” he wrote prophetically. “These are history-making days. It will be the greatest war in the world’s history.”¹¹

The New York Stock Exchange plummeted with the war outbreak, and its directors agreed to temporarily close the exchange. This was designed to keep the Allies from repatriating their capital investments in the American economy to fund their war effort. The stock exchange would ultimately remain closed until December 1914.¹²

Frank Cobb, the editor of the liberal New York World, took no sides in the exploding conflict, but framed the war as a fight between autocracy and democracy in one of his best-known editorials, published on August 4. “What was begun hastily as a war of autocracy is not unlikely to end as a war of revolution, with thrones crumbling and dynasties in exile,” he wrote presciently. “This is the twilight of the gods.”¹³

Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm maintained a philosophical belief in destiny, that their hour had arrived to dominate Europe and the world. The empire would either expand to dominance, or it would fall. To the Kaiser’s mind, he was fighting a defensive war: Germany was encircled, and he would rush to attack before the country’s enemies could defeat the fatherland. When the war broke out, the Germans quickly took the offense, invading Belgium, Luxembourg, and France.

Germany developed a two-front war strategy that would allow it to defeat both France and Russia. It would have to strike quickly against France on the Western Front, geographically closer than Russia on the Eastern Front. The German general staff developed the Schlieffen Plan, a right-hook to invade France and knock the country out of the war within six weeks. German armies invaded neutral Belgium—a small country whose sovereignty and territory the European powers had agreed to uphold in the 1839 Treaty of London—to attack France’s exposed left flank. When the British challenged the Germans for violating Belgian neutrality, German chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg asked the British ambassador undiplomatically, “Why should you make war upon us for a scrap of paper?” That scrap of paper brought England into the war against Germany.¹⁴

The Schlieffen Plan was predicated on the Russians mobilizing slowly. In fact, the Russian army moved more swiftly than expected, invading Prussia and upsetting the German invasion timetable in France. The Germans shifted thousands of troops to the Eastern Front to fight the Russians; they surrounded and destroyed the Russian 2nd Army in late August in the Battle of Tannenberg, then demolished the Russian 1st Army in the Battle of Masurian Lakes. The officer who won the victory was a general hastily called back from retirement: Paul von Hindenburg, aided by his chief of staff Erich Ludendorff. These two would become the face of the German war effort.

Meanwhile the German army faced unexpected opposition as it marched across Belgium. The small Belgian army held up the Germans at Liège, upsetting the timetable to invade France. From the German invasion of Belgium came lurid stories of atrocities, such as troops cutting off the hands of Belgian children, most of which were not true, as the German army was disciplined and well behaved. However, the Germans did take hostages and execute civilians when they believed they had been fired on, and burned down many villages in reprisal. At Dinant on August 23, the Germans executed some 674 Belgian civilians. Two days later, the Germans destroyed much of the university town of Louvain and its Renaissance architecture and historic library. They also bombarded Belgium’s main port of Antwerp before capturing it.

The American public watched the war unfold from the sidelines, largely reading about it in newspapers. Many viewed German actions in Belgium as barbaric, and though public opinion was largely neutral, opinion shifted toward the Allies. Journalists were often split over which side to support. William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate, did little to disguise his pro-German views. He refused to run British propaganda in his newspapers and would not print stories of German atrocities in Belgium. Likewise, the British often censored Hearst publications, and his journalists had to find other ways to route their stories from Europe to the U.S. Richard Harding Davis, a famed war correspondent, covered the early part of the war and was incensed at the German destruction of Louvain. “When a mad dog runs amuck in a village it is the duty of every farmer to get his gun and destroy it,” he wrote, clearly siding with the Allies while criticizing American neutrality.¹⁵

Toward the end of the war, American painter George Bellows created a series of gruesome paintings that highlighted alleged German atrocities, including one called The Germans Arrive showing a soldier restraining a terrified, ghostly white Belgian youth who has just had his hands cut off, while the hulking perpetrator looks down at the bloody sword. Bellows never traveled to the war zone; he created the paintings based on what he had heard. Herbert Hoover, who spent much of the war overseeing the Commission for Relief in Belgium, knew that the atrocities were overstated. “There exists a vast literature upon German atrocities in Belgium and France,” he wrote. “It is mostly the literature of propaganda,” much of it created by the British to influence public opinion.¹⁶

Yet many Americans clung to the belief that Germans were barbarians. The German ambassador in Washington, Count Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff, noted the aspect of American culture that dismissed facts in favor of myth: “It is quite incredible what the American public will swallow in the way of lies if they are only repeated often enough and properly served up,” he complained shortly after the war. “It all turns on which side gets the news in first; for the first impression sticks.”¹⁷

Having finally pushed the small Belgian army aside and beaten back a strong French counterattack, the Germans marched south into France, headed directly toward Paris in early September. The further south they marched, the more the Germans exceeded their supply lines, and their soldiers were exhausted. Just as the German army approached the gates of Paris, French General Joseph Joffre counterattacked with the support of the British Expeditionary Force, driving the Germans back in the First Battle of the Marne. The battle saved France from defeat.

The Germans turned their attention to outflanking Paris to the west and capturing the English Channel ports, which was the lifeline for the British army in France. Despite a fierce German offensive, known as the Race to the Sea, the Belgians and British held onto a small corner of southwest Belgium at Ypres. Over the course of the war, the Germans would launch three major offensives against the Ypres salient, including the first use of chlorine gas, but they would never capture the town. This tiny corner of Belgium, known as La Libre Belgique, or Free Belgium, remained free from German occupation. King Albert and Queen Elisabeth of Belgium remained in the salient to give heart to their countrymen. Elisabeth was Bavarian, but her loyalty was to her husband and to Belgium. Albert was educated at Oxford University and had worked on the American railroads as a young man to gain practical experience.

Thousands of American businessmen and tourists were trapped in Europe when the war unexpectedly broke out. They would quickly run out of cash, as banks closed their doors and hoarded cash. President Wilson requested an emergency appropriation from Congress, and on August 6, the cruiser Tennessee sailed for Europe with $8 million in gold.¹⁸

Christian Heurich, who owned Washington, D.C.’s largest brewery, was aboard ship en route to take the cure in Carlsbad, the notable spa resort in what is now the Czech Republic, when news arrived about Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination. He thought little of it and continued with the vacation. After several weeks, however, his wife Amelia (the worrier in the family) became concerned. As the countdown to war began, she penned in her diary, “Great excitement prevailed here. I wanted Christian to pack up right away and leave Carlsbad—but no he wants to finish his cure.”¹⁹ They finally departed on August 2 for Nuremberg—the day after Germany declared war on Russia. They found the city crowded with Americans, all urgently trying to make it home. The Heurichs spent three weeks there, trying to secure passage on a ship. They helped arrange a special train from Munich to Amsterdam, a difficult task, given that trains were prioritized for transporting German soldiers to the front. But when they got to Rotterdam, the Heurichs discovered that their ship was greatly overbooked.

The Heurichs had to wait two more weeks for another ocean liner, the SS New Amsterdam, which they boarded on September 12 and sailed for New York City. However, the wealthy family was assigned to an “evil smelling little cabin.” They slept in the passageway, rather than endure the odor. British warships stopped the liner at sea several times, and Royal Navy officers boarded to question the passengers. “I came in for their particular attention as my passport showed plainly that though an American citizen in good standing I was nevertheless a native of the country with which their country was at war,” Heurich recalled. They finally arrived in the U.S. on September 21. Heurich would one day be subjected to the same kind of intense scrutiny at home because he was born in Germany.²⁰

A self-made American mining engineer, Herbert Hoover was living in London when the war began. His thriving private practice came to a crashing halt and he turned to public service in these uncontrollable circumstances. He helped lead relief efforts for Americans trapped in England. When British businesses stopped taking dollars, Hoover’s engineering firm lent its petty cash to help those without resources weather the crisis. He then organized the American Committee to help people get by while they awaited ships back to the states. Hoover was far from charismatic. He was dour, humorless, and pessimistic. He was not personable, yet he was quite capable. The future president was a committed Republican who became one of the accomplished technocrats of the Wilson administration.

A humanitarian crisis soon developed in Belgium with the German occupation, as the country was dependent on food imports. The Germans refused to allow English or French food to be shipped to Belgium, and the Belgians risked starvation. Hoover organized the Commission for Relief in Belgium in September 1914 and leapt into action: “I called a broker and gave an order to buy 10,000 bushels of Chicago wheat futures, as that price was bound to rise rapidly with the war and with any announcement of Belgian buying.”²¹ Hoover thought leading the CRB would be short term, as he assumed the conflict would be short—as did everyone. But no, the war would last more than four years, and the need for food relief would become enormous. Over the course of the war, the CRB supplied five million tons of food to Belgium and northern France, saving nine million people from starvation, at a cost of $928 million.²² The food was routed through Rotterdam in clearly marked ships. Hoover set up an office in Brussels and crossed the English Channel many times to work out diplomatic and supply kinks. The CRB employed a staff of three hundred Americans—all volunteers who worked without pay. The Belgians used the cotton bags that had carried American flour to produce clothing, which was then sold abroad for additional food relief.²³

Hoover traveled to the United States in 1915 when Senator Henry Cabot Lodge attacked Hoover in the press. Lodge insisted that Hoover’s relief efforts were involving the U.S. in a foreign war. President Wilson met with Hoover and warmly supported him, announcing the formation of an advisory committee that would assist Hoover’s efforts. Hoover then paid a visit to Lodge to confront him directly. Though Hoover’s humanitarian efforts were universally acclaimed, and he had the sanction of the president and the ambassadors, the senator insisted that Hoover’s actions would land him in jail for violating American law. Former president Theodore Roosevelt then called Hoover to Oyster Bay for lunch. Roosevelt was a friend of Lodge’s and howled with laughter upon hearing Lodge’s accusations. He reassured Hoover that the senator would no longer be a problem. “I will hold his hand,” Roosevelt promised. Lodge made no more problems for Hoover. This was but a foreshadowing of the trouble that the conservative Lodge would make.²⁴

For his relief efforts in Belgium, King Albert and the Belgian parliament later named Herbert Hoover a Friend of Belgium and Honorary Citizen. The titles even came with a passport—and an invitation to stop by the Belgian embassy in Washington anytime for a drink, which Hoover did frequently during Prohibition in the 1920s.²⁵

Another prominent American, wealthy novelist Edith Wharton, lived in Paris when the war broke out. Rather than flee the war zone, she remained and engaged in relief work, often bringing relief supplies to frontline hospitals. She supported indigent women, raised funds, and founded hostels for refugees. Wharton published The Book of the Homeless in 1916, a compilation of articles and art from leading notables, including an introduction by Theodore Roosevelt, to raise funds for her charitable endeavors. An ardent Francophile, Wharton was appalled by Prussianism. She wrote frequently about the war and the need for America to intervene, claiming that the conflict was a war against civilization.²⁶

Having failed to knock France quickly out of the war, the Germans now had to defend the territory they had captured while fighting a two-front war. A stalemate developed in northern France and Belgium. Both sides dug enormous trench lines to bolster their defenses as the war devolved into a siege. The Western Front stretched more than four hundred miles from the Swiss border to the English Channel. Artillery fire obliterated the landscape for several miles on either side of the front, while machine gun nests dotted the terrain. One machine gun could mercilessly kill hundreds of infantrymen who might attempt a suicidal frontal attack. Both sides settled into a war of attrition.

In December 1914, a New York Times reporter interviewed President Woodrow Wilson, who hoped the deadlock in the war “will show to them the futility of employing force in the attempt to resolve their differences.” Wilson recognized this was a war of attrition, and that it was probably best if no country won, but rather settled their differences “according to the principles of right and justice.” Already one sees how Wilson’s idealism would seek to build a framework for peace.²⁷

Mr. Wilson Goes to Washington

The United States in 1914 numbered about one hundred million people, putting it on par with Europe’s largest countries. The country had grown rapidly since the Civil War five decades before. Once it had fulfilled its Manifest Destiny to settle the continent between the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans, it stretched beyond its borders and shattered Spain in a brief war in 1898, acquiring in the process a small global empire that included the Philippines and Puerto Rico. It opened the Panama Canal in 1914, a strategic asset to support the country’s two-ocean navy. The United States had arrived as a global power, yet few Americans had a global worldview. They were still bound to their parochial regional interests, and still believed that the two vast oceans would protect them, come what may.

The Industrial Revolution had transformed the country in the 19th century, and the decades after the Civil War saw the rise of great business trusts and concentration of wealth among tycoons. The Gilded Age was gilded for a select few. The rich commanded the nation’s wealth, while farmers and the working class struggled to barely get by. It was this widening inequality that in turn led to the Progressive Era (1900–1920), two decades that harnessed the federal government to improve American society.

In Europe, rapid industrialization had witnessed the political rise of socialism. Inspired by the writings of Karl Marx, socialists opposed capitalism and believed that the community or state should control the means of production. It turned the working class into heroes. The Socialist Party of America was cofounded in 1901 by Eugene Debs and Victor Berger, though it remained a political niche in the U.S. The country seemed committed to capitalism, as most industrial workers opted for unionization rather than socialism. That is, they joined forces to collectively negotiate for better wages and working conditions, rather than advocate for state control of industry. Unions had a strong supporter in President Woodrow Wilson.

Wilson was the final president of the Progressive Era. He would serve two distinctly different terms. His first (1913–1917) focused on domestic affairs and produced notable reforms. His second term (1917–1921) focused on foreign policy and leading American forces to victory in the Great War, as the United States could no longer rely on the safety of the oceans for protection. He produced notable reforms that would strengthen America’s hand in the coming war.

With Democratic control of Congress, Wilson took action against the “money trust,” as Congressman Charles Lindbergh (father of the aviator) called it. Bankers like J. P. Morgan had much control over the economy. Likewise, the federal government had had no central bank to oversee financial markets and interest rates since 1833, when Andrew Jackson disbanded the Second Bank of the United States. Southerners in particular were distrustful of a powerful central bank, believing it yielded too much power to the federal government.²⁸

President Wilson successfully defied his Southern base by supporting the Federal Reserve Act in 1913. It created not one central bank but twelve regional banks, along with a governing board. The Federal Reserve’s task was to handle the country’s money supply, keeping currency circulating, rather than having it sit idle in safes. The Federal Reserve set the country’s financial system on a sounder footing. It brought the country many advantages, including establishing the U.S. as a global financial power. The timing for this reform was advantageous, given that it was on the eve of the Great War. The dollar soon became the currency of global trade as the U.S. went from a net importer to a net exporter of goods.²⁹

Wilson also reduced tariffs, which had been a prime source of federal revenue, while also raising income taxes. Historian Steven Weisman called the income tax “one of the most important progressive achievements in the making of modern America.”³⁰ These fiscal measures served to open global markets, stimulate exports, and lower the cost of consumer goods, all while creating a new source of revenue. This rebuffed generations of Republican protectionist orthodoxy. Progressives also sought the income tax to replace alcohol excise taxes, as prohibitionists wanted to ban drinking.

The Department of Labor was created in 1913, and the president appointed William Wilson, a former coal miner and union leader, as the first secretary of labor. For the first time, labor had a voice in the cabinet. The president fought to reduce the working day to eight hours for railroad workers—an accomplishment that would replicate across the economy and in every industry. He also established the National Park Service to administer the growing number of national monuments and parks.

Wilson’s two terms in office saw the ratification of three constitutional amendments: the Seventeenth (giving voters the right to elect U.S. senators, rather than state legislatures); the Eighteenth (banning the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcohol, better known as Prohibition); and the Nineteenth (granting women the right to vote). These were reform amendments. The Seventeenth, ratified during his first term, ensured that no plutocrat could buy their way into the Senate by bribing a state legislature.

An unusual aspect of Wilson’s presidency was the frequency with which he kept Congress informed. He frequently dropped by to deliver a speech or read a statement. He directly lobbied committees for specific bills. He was no stranger in the halls of Congress, a place where he himself had never served—but had studied for years while an academic. He spoke before Congress more than any president before or since. He reinvented the State of the Union Address, discarded over a century earlier by Thomas Jefferson. Wilson did not employ a speechwriter but wrote his own speeches by hand then finalized the draft on his typewriter.

Wilson was an exceptional orator who could address large crowds without microphones or electronic megaphones, as neither existed yet. Mass media like radio had not yet become influential, and political campaigns were about reaching constituents personally, often delivering barnstorming speeches to hundreds of audiences. Wilson could be professorial in his speeches, reasoning with the audience as he influenced them on a course of action; he could also move people to tears, such as his great Memorial Day speech at the Suresnes military cemetery, and on his 1919 barnstorming campaign to ratify the Treaty of Versailles.

Wilson was bookish, literary, and an intellectual. Though he had a doctorate in political science, Wilson actually had little actual political experience beyond the tussle of academia at Princeton University. He had never served as a kingmaker, rainmaker, or ward boss. He was first elected as governor of New Jersey in 1910. Wilson promptly turned on the Democratic political machine that got him elected so he could position himself as a reformer and an outsider. Two years later he ran for the presidency on a domestic reform platform known as the New Freedom. It seemed a long shot. Between the Civil War and 1912, only one Democrat had been elected to the presidency, albeit twice: Grover Cleveland.

In 1912, Wilson had emerged as the winner in a four-way presidential election: he beat Republican president William Howard Taft and former president Theodore Roosevelt, who ran on the populist Progressive Party (better known as the Bull Moose Party) platform, as the Republican party had split between the conservative Taft and the progressive Roosevelt. Another contender, Socialist Eugene Debs, took a distant fourth place. Wilson won by plurality, capturing less than forty-two percent of the popular vote.

Wilson was a serious, scholarly man, at least in public. He had the reputation of a dour Presbyterian. It was to a certain extent a persona. Among biographers’ most frequently used words to describe the man was “dogmatic.” The public never saw his keen sense of humor, or the silly limericks that he enjoyed reciting, or the comical impressions he only shared with very close friends, his wife, and three daughters. After daylight saving time was first introduced in March 1918, a cook was told to have dinner ready for the Wilsons by 7:00 P.M. “By what time—Wilson’s time or Christ’s time?” the cook answered with some irritation, but it made everyone laugh. Wilson overheard the comment. “That is irreverent,” he said. It never bothered him to be the butt of a joke.³¹

Count Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff, German ambassador from 1908 to 1917, was keenly observant of the president. “Mr. Wilson could only tolerate subordinates, and not men with opinions of their own.” This was not exactly true—he had a high regard for a number of men in his cabinet, such as William Jennings Bryan and Josephus Daniels, who maintained strong opinions. Yet his closest adviser was practically a Wilson doppelganger, Edward House, a man devoted to the ideals of peace, but who too often parroted the president. Bernstorff also noted the president’s introverted habits and thoughtful demeanor: “President Wilson, who by inclination and habit is a recluse and a lonely worker, does not like company.” Bernstorff overstated his case about Wilson—the president was privately very warm to his close associates and far from reclusive or lonely, but he was right that the president’s decision-making process involved lengthy time alone to ruminate on a crisis at hand.³²

Wilson would mull over problems for a long time, often retreating to a private room so he could think. “While he would on occasion make momentous decisions quickly and decisively, the habitual character of his mind was deliberative,” wrote Joe Tumulty, the president’s private secretary. “He wanted all the facts and so far as possible the contingencies.” Wilson would also bounce ideas off cabinet members for their opinion. His cabinet was a collaborative team, where there was often much freewheeling debate, not unlike an academic setting. His personality encouraged this sort of push-and-pull. Wilson seldom tried to control the conversation, but let people speak their minds.³³

Though a splendid public speaker, the president did not relish crowds or parties. He preferred the company of his family and close friends—and his own company. Two of his three daughters would have White House weddings, including Eleanor (better known as Nell), who married Treasury Secretary William McAdoo. McAdoo was twice her age and was a widower with six children. Mac and Nell would have two of their own children.

Despite his reputation as an aloof intellectual, Wilson was not a cold person, but neither was he a bossy extrovert like Theodore Roosevelt. “In his daily intercourse with individuals he showed uniform consideration, at times deep tenderness, though he did not have in his possession the little bag of tricks which some politicians use so effectively,” recalled Joe Tumulty. “He did not clap men on their backs, call them by their first names, and profess to each individual he met that of all the men in the world this was the man whom he most yearned to see.”³⁴ This was likewise the assessment of David Houston, Wilson’s secretary of agriculture. “He was weak in the technique of managing and manipulating men, and he had no desire to gain strength in this art,” he wrote. “He relied on the strength of the cause in which he was interested.” Houston added, “Wilson belonged to the aristocracy of brains.”³⁵

Woodrow Wilson was born in Staunton, Virginia in 1856 and witnessed the Civil War as a child. By the time the Great War began, there were still many living Americans who remembered the war’s terrible cost of more than 600,000 dead. Numerous members of Congress had fought in the war, such as Senator Henry du Pont of Delaware, who won a Congressional Medal of Honor at the Battle of Cedar Creek; Wyoming’s Senator Francis Warren, the father-in-law of General John Pershing; and Senator Ben “Pitchfork” Tillman, a Confederate veteran and devout segregationist. The Senate majority leader, Thomas Martin, had been a teenaged Virginia Military Institute cadet who had fought at the Battle of New Market opposite Senator du Pont. On the U.S. Supreme Court sat Chief Justice Edward White, a Confederate veteran, as well as Union Army veteran Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was known as the “great dissenter.” Representative Charles Stedman of North Carolina was the last remaining Civil War veteran to serve in Congress. He died in 1930. One thing was clearly absent from Congress in 1914: there was not a single black congressman or senator, though there were twelve million African-Americans in the country. Blacks were largely disenfranchised, thanks to Jim Crow laws in the South. The highest-ranking black federal official was Emmett Scott, the assistant secretary of war. His boss, former Cleveland mayor Newton Baker, was not a Southerner.

Slavery was America’s original sin. Even after the institution was stamped out in 1865, the country spent considerable effort pretending the problem no longer existed. Northern whites did not want to compete against black labor and accepted the idea that blacks were racially inferior. President Wilson’s views on race were in line with those of white Northerners, one of not so benign neglect. Southern whites, on the other hand, practiced a more hard-core racism. They carried out violence to intimidate and control African-Americans. They maintained a mythology that the U.S. was a white country, and that blacks needed to remain at the bottom of the ladder, chained to sharecropping and low-wage service jobs. This system ensured that blacks remained slaves in all but name—and that Southern whites still controlled their fate. Commentator H. L. Mencken wrote scathingly of the South: “The southerner, whatever his graces otherwise, is almost destitute of the faculty of sober reflection. He is a sentimentalist, a romanticist, a weeper and arm-waver, and as full of superstitions as the Zulu at his gates.”³⁶

Woodrow Wilson’s cabinet was crowded with Southern Democrats, who formed the basis for the party. They were mostly so-called Bourbons: conservatives who represented the South’s commercial interests, though there was a sprinkling of progressives as well. The Democratic coalition also included working-class Northeasterners, especially the Irish, as well as Midwestern farmers.

Thomas Marshall of Indiana served as Wilson’s running mate in the 1912 election. His ability to garner midwestern Democratic votes for Wilson earned him a place on the ticket as vice president. But he would never be one of Wilson’s confidants or trusted advisers. Instead, he spent most of his time presiding over the Senate, where he could only vote in the event of a tie. Marshall had a talent for puns and storytelling. When a senator was reciting a lengthy catalog of the country’s needs, Marshall famously quipped, “What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar.” Marshall liked to tell a joke about two brothers: “One ran away to sea, the other was elected vice president, and nothing was ever heard of either of them again.”

William Jennings Bryan was the best-known figure in the cabinet. The Nebraskan had run for the presidency three times and was always defeated—the last time in 1908. Bryan ran on the financial platform of “free silver,” a widely disparaged ideology that promoted expanding the money supply based on silver in order to benefit farmers against Wall Street interests. His nickname was the Great Commoner for his fiery populism. He was a committed pacifist—and he was completely unelectable. One historian called him an “inept moralist.”³⁷

A less well-known cabinet member was an unlikely choice for secretary of the navy. Publishing magnate and political kingmaker Josephus Daniels was head of the Democratic National Committee and had convinced Bryan not to run for the presidency in 1912, clearing the field for Woodrow Wilson. It earned Daniels a cabinet position. In fact, Bryan threw his political weight behind Wilson, likewise earning himself the prestigious position as secretary of state.³⁸

Daniels had no military experience, but he turned out to be an effective naval secretary, reforming its antiquated structure and preparing it for the war to come. He quickly scaled up the navy’s capabilities and allowed women to enlist. Daniels oversaw Wilson’s gunboat diplomacy, intervening in Mexico in 1914 and 1916, Haiti in 1915, the Dominican Republic in 1916, and Cuba in 1917. He also had to administer Nicaragua. Daniels would be the rare cabinet secretary who served for Wilson’s two complete terms. His cabinet diaries of Wilson’s presidency provide a rare inside view of the discussions and debates, as well as Wilson’s sense of humor among intimates.

As a Methodist teetotaler, Daniels was perhaps best known for drying up the navy. On June 1, 1914, he issued General Order 99, which banned officers from serving alcohol aboard ship. The navy was now officially dry. Instead of liquor cupboards, ships were to be outfitted with coffee mugs. It was a wildly unpopular move at the time. Sailors began to call a cup of coffee “a cup of Josephus,” which was shortened to today’s “cup of Joe.”³⁹

Like Wilson, Daniels was born shortly before the Civil War. He became emblematic of the New South—a man who made his fortune running newspapers, rather than in agriculture. He was a leading Progressive whose views were borderline socialist, yet an avowed supporter of Jim Crow laws that segregated blacks from whites. He had engineered the Democratic Party sweep of North Carolina in 1898—and with it the wholesale disenfranchisement of African-Americans. To Southern Democrats, the Progressive movement viewed Jim Crow as part of their agenda, as blacks voted Republican.⁴⁰

Daniels chose a young Franklin Delano Roosevelt as his assistant secretary. Roosevelt was an ambitious, urbane New Yorker and cousin to the former president Theodore. Daniels had a knack for identifying men with a political future. He had served as rainmaker for Woodrow Wilson, and now he would mentor Roosevelt, who would one day occupy the Oval Office. Franklin was tall, bespectacled, patrician, and good-looking. Like his cousin Theodore, he always had a toothy smile on his face. He had a habit of lifting his chin when he spoke, giving the impression that he looked down his nose at others. Franklin was an eternal optimist who seldom allowed anyone to see his darker moods, let alone hear him complain.

FDR’s hero was his fifth cousin Theodore Roosevelt, and he would model his own career after Teddy—including serving as governor of New York, assistant secretary of the navy, and eventually becoming president. Both men fathered six children and had notable wives. And while Theodore offered a “square deal” to voters to rid politics of corruption and ensure the working man had a chance, Franklin would offer a New Deal to help the country recover from the Great Depression.

Theodore Roosevelt was a larger-than-life character, an enthusiastic and energetic force of nature who enjoyed the presidency possibly more than any other president. He had bowed out too early from politics in 1909 and desperately wanted back in the game. He was far too young, ambitious, and restless to retire—and he simply loved being at the center of everything. Americans loved Roosevelt for his manliness, his barrel chest, mustache and pince-nez that adorned his face, and that enormous toothy grin. Roosevelt originated the term “lunatic fringe” to describe fanatics. He was a demagogue whose loud voice could outtalk, outshout, and outbully just about anyone. Roosevelt was fond of playing backseat president, and he hoped to occupy the office again one day.⁴¹

Save for perhaps President James Polk, who had seized vast western territories from Mexico in the 1840s, Roosevelt was the leading expansionist in American history. He often publicly called for war, believing it was healthy for the country to test its manhood. He foresaw that the United States would replace Great Britain as the leading global power and would need a two-ocean navy to project that power. Roosevelt was Woodrow Wilson’s greatest political rival and constantly sniped at him. Wilson wisely ignored TR.

One vocal person who had a particular dislike of Woodrow Wilson was the literary critic Henry Louis Mencken, or H. L. Mencken, as he was known. Then again, Mencken seemed to dislike every politician. “Wilson was a typical Puritan—of the better sort, perhaps, for he at least toyed with the ambition to appear as a gentleman, but nevertheless a true Puritan,” Mencken wrote, noting that he had a lifelong dislike of Puritans.⁴²

Mencken was a journalist for the Baltimore Sunpapers, but also the editor of a monthly literary magazine known The Smart Set. He was an outlier in his time, a first-rate crank, a freethinker, and a committed atheist. He saw the temperance movement for what it was: a Protestant crusade to cement its moral agenda. Mencken had scathing disregard for religious fundamentalists, attending the John Scopes trial in Tennessee in 1925 and famously dubbing it the “Monkey Trial.” He parted his hair in the middle and pomaded it back, a popular look in the day. He often chomped on a cigar as he punched the keys on his typewriter or held court. As a journalist, Mencken was a staunch defender of freedom of speech, and he described himself as an “extreme libertarian.”⁴³ A second-generation German-American, Mencken was squarely on the side of Germany in the Great War and loudly said so. H. L. Mencken wrote many anti-English articles and editorials for the Baltimore Sun in the first year of the war. This would come back to haunt him in 1917.

The War in 1915

The brief war that everyone expected continued into its second year. Both sides raised the stakes in order to gain an advantage over their enemies. New soldiers were conscripted and flung at enemy lines, even as the stalemate on the Western Front continued. A brief, impromptu cease-fire took hold on Christmas, but then the fighting continued.

With one of the most advanced industrial sectors in the world, Germany deployed unprecedented technology to turn the tide in their favor in spring 1915: dirigibles known as zeppelins for indiscriminate bombing campaigns by air; poison gas to suffocate Allied soldiers, first used at Ypres; and diesel U-boats to wage unrestricted submarine warfare on England. It was the U-boats that would nearly drag the United States into the war.⁴⁴

Both sides sought to use another recent invention to tip the scales in their favor: the airplane, which the Wright Brothers had invented in 1903. Flying technology advanced considerably during the war. Armies first used airplanes for reconnaissance, then developed fighters to shoot down enemy planes, often resulting in exciting plane-to-plane dogfights. Both sides developed bombers to attack the enemy on the front lines, as well as railroads and other military targets. The image of the intrepid scarf-wearing aviator was one of the few romantic notions that emerged from the war. Pilots were knights of the sky.

Germany stood strong against the Allies and captured much of Poland from Russia, but its own allies were weakening. Austria-Hungary was consumed by domestic affairs and growing nationalism within its multiethnic state, which threatened to rip the empire apart, as each group demanded its independence. Germany’s other major ally, the Ottoman Empire, was widely derided as the “sick man of Europe” for its corruption and obvious decline.

Germany provided significant military assistance to help the Ottoman Empire resist the Allies. As the Western Front reached stalemate, the British planned an enormous amphibious landing to capture the Dardanelles—the narrow straits that protected Istanbul—and that would open a supply line to Russia. The Allies had plans for the Ottoman Empire: they wanted to divide most of its territories among themselves and hand Istanbul to the Russians. In April 1915, forces from Australia, Britain, and New Zealand landed on the Gallipoli peninsula and immediately met resistance from the German-supported Turkish army. The Turks occupied the hills above the landing zone and entrenched their lines. When the British forces attacked in frontal assaults, the slaughter was similar to that seen on the Western Front. The British dug in for the stalemate, then finally acknowledged defeat when they evacuated the peninsula in January 1916. First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, who had championed the offensive, was forced to resign, and it nearly ended his political career. The Ottomans won the Battle of Gallipoli, but it was nearly the last gasp of their empire.

Worried that the Christian Armenian minority within the Ottoman Empire would side with the Russians, the Ottomans massacred nearly 1.5 million Armenians in 1915. It was the first genocide of the 20th century. Though the Turks denied the massacres, Theodore Roosevelt countered that, “The Armenian horror is an accomplished fact”—one that he laid at the feet of American pacifism for its unwillingness to get involved.⁴⁵ President Wilson encouraged relief efforts for Armenian refugees. In November 1917, the Armenian-American community presented Wilson with a painting by Hovsep Pushinan. In it a beautiful dark-haired Armenian girl (the artist’s niece) dressed in a bright green costume holds a white flower. He called the painting L’Esperance, or Hope.

Italy switched sides and joined the Allies in 1915, as it had claims on Austrian territory that would give it control of the Adriatic Sea. The Germans retaliated by bringing Bulgaria into the war that fall. The consequences were disastrous to Serbia, as a combined Austro-Hungarian, Bulgarian, and German campaign swept through the country and inflicted massive casualties on the Serbian army. Much of the population fled to the Adriatic coast. The Allies attempted to rescue the Serbs by landing a force at Salonika (officially Thessaloniki) in Greece, but it came too late to help. Germany now had a direct rail link from Berlin to Baghdad through Istanbul. The Germans’ decisive victory in the Balkans led them to believe that they were winning the war and that victory was at hand in 1916.

American Neutrality and the Freedom of the Seas

President George Washington’s Farewell Address in 1796 warned Americans against foreign entanglements, and many held this as gospel, not just policy. At the beginning of the World War, President Wilson pledged that the United States would remain strictly neutral. “We must be impartial in thought as well as in action, must put a curb upon our sentiments as well as upon every transaction that might be construed as a preference of one party to the struggle before another,” he appealed to the citizenry. He understood that much of the American population came from the various countries that were now at war, and that the temptation to cheer on one alliance over another would violate America’s impartiality. Instead, the president offered his services to mediate, though this fell on deaf ears.⁴⁶

Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson’s most significant political rival, echoed these sentiments. “It is certainly eminently desirable that we should remain entirely neutral and nothing but urgent need would warrant breaking our neutrality and taking sides one way or the other,” he declared in Outlook.⁴⁷ He wrote an English friend shortly after the outbreak: “In this country the feeling is overwhelmingly anti-German. It is emphatically in favor of England, France, and Belgium.” TR was off base in his assessment; many Americans were in fact anti-British. He went on to privately lambast Wilson for his efforts to arbitrate the conflict: “In international affairs Wilson is almost as much of a prize jackass as Bryan.”⁴⁸

Watching the events unfold from across the Atlantic, President Wilson naively clung to his belief that America could mediate this conflict. He spoke to the Associated Press in New York on April 20, 1915, an address that became known as the America First speech. “I am not speaking in a selfish spirit when I saw that our whole duty, for the present, at any rate, is summed up in this motto: ‘America first.’ Let us think of America before we think of Europe, in order that we may be Europe’s friend when the day of tested friendship comes.” For the next two years, this would be Wilson’s line as he offered mediation between the combatants.⁴⁹

Wilson was not prepared to give up on peace. He sent his private envoy, Edward House, back to Europe in January 1915. House sailed on the RMS Lusitania to commence the peace mediation effort. He shuttled between capitals that winter and spring, traveling between London, Paris, and Berlin, to reduce the tension. If Great Britain could lower its blockade to allow food to reach Germany, perhaps Germany could call off its submarine campaign, declared that winter. There was much bitter feeling in Germany at the U.S. for selling arms to the Allies. House returned without much success.

German ambassador Bernstorff was born in London in 1862, the son of the ambassador to the Court of St. James. English was his first language. Despite his aristocratic lineage, Bernstorff had strong democratic views and a love for politics. He had a keen understanding of American culture and a shrewd eye for shifting public opinion in a liberal democracy. His was a challenging job, having to protect German interests while representing an expanding empire. Bernstorff had to negotiate repeatedly to defuse conflicts. Despite the bombast from American imperialists like Theodore Roosevelt, Bernstorff recognized the undercurrent of pacifism in American society. Americans tended to be sentimental and willing to overlook facts when their emotions were activated.⁵⁰

Vice President Thomas Marshall noted with some comic exaggeration how unpopular Bernstorff was in the nation’s capital, a city that sympathized with the Allies. Everyone attended soirees given by the French ambassador Jean Jules Jusserand, whom Marshall called the “dean of the diplomatic corps.” However, it was difficult to find guests for the German ambassador. “When it came to the dinner to Count von Bernstorff I never knew, until the influenza struck the town, such an epidemic of illness. There were forty-seven prominent persons who were too ill to attend, and it took two weeks to get twenty people who were willing to dine with von Bernstorff.”⁵¹

Edward House frequently met with Bernstorff, as the president asked House to intermediate with the Germans. The two came to know each other quite well and corresponded often. House summed up his impression of the ambassador, “I think better of Bernstorff than most people who know him, and if he is not sincere, he is the most consummate actor I have ever met.”⁵²

Bernstorff also understood that English cultural influence was stronger in America than German culture, and this meant an inherent bias. Despite Wilson’s avowed neutrality, the president was “very much under the sway of English thought and ideals,” Bernstorff noted.⁵³ Indeed, the U.S. had much in common with England: a democratic system of government, language, and trade. The British seized a major advantage in August 1914 when they cut German transatlantic cables, severing direct communication between Germany and the U.S. This meant that news from Europe would likely come from British sources. The Germans had to rely on coded letters and radio transmissions to communicate with their embassies—both of which were susceptible to deciphering. They had two wireless stations in the United States to send long-distance telegrams—one in Sayville, New York, the other in Tuckerton, New Jersey—but these were poor substitutes for undersea cables. Communications with Germany became exceptionally slow, and it could take days or even weeks for a message to get through to Berlin.⁵⁴

Another reason why American neutrality was skewed toward England was because of the country’s dependence upon British trade and investment. England owned fully half of the world’s merchant marine, while the United States had a paltry two percent. There were few alternatives to carry American goods overseas. This also left the U.S. vulnerable to British authorities arbitrarily deciding what goods could be shipped on their vessels, or to which country they could be sent.⁵⁵

But there was also serious hostility directed toward England, particularly after the Royal Navy declared a general blockade of the North Sea—the vast ocean between Norway and Scotland—to cut off German commerce from the world in November 1914. Americans demanded “freedom of the seas” to trade with whomever they wanted, while the Royal Navy acted as an oceanic traffic policeman, sometimes putting up roadblocks to commerce. England could effectively determine whom the U.S. could trade with. This key question had dogged Anglo-American relations since the War of 1812.

By international law, a blockade had to physically close off an enemy’s coastline and block ships from entering or leaving territorial waters, generally considered three miles from the shoreline. Britain was playing with a new rulebook. It insisted on the right to stop, search, and detain any neutral vessel in the quarantined area for carrying German contraband. The U.S. made a feeble protest, which the British ignored. Historian Barbara Tuchman called it a “shadow duel.”⁵⁶

Britain greatly expanded what was considered “contraband.” The traditional list included anything that could support the enemy’s military, including arms and munitions. The British counted anything that could support the German economy, including clothing, food, and raw materials like cotton. This would de facto halt all trade with Germany. On February 9, 1915, the British seized the American steamer SS Wilhelmina, which was bound for Hamburg with its hull full of grain.⁵⁷

At the beginning of the war, German merchant ships and ocean liners at sea feared capture by the British, and so many of them sought refuge in American waters. Soon ninety-one German ships were docked in American and Philippine harbors, while a squadron of Royal Navy cruisers patrolled just outside American waters to keep the German ships bottled up. The vessels included the enormous 54,000-ton transatlantic liner Vaterland, as well as the SS George Washington.⁵⁸

The Royal Navy had effectively closed off the North Sea, and the German high command decided that its High Seas Fleet was not strong enough to challenge the British blockade. The fleet remained bottled up in its main anchorage at Heligoland Island. The Germans also had a number of battle cruisers stationed with its global colonies, and when the war broke out these raided Allied shipping. Most of these commerce raiders were sunk by the end of 1914, so the German navy turned to a much more disruptive weapon: the submarine, or Unterseeboot—better known as the U-boat.

The point of a submarine was not to take the enemy’s ship as a prize or to capture its cargo, as privateers had done in the past, but rather to send it to the bottom of the ocean. It was intended to cut the enemy off from its lifelines. Great Britain was especially vulnerable, as it depended on imports for much of its energy, food, and raw materials.

The Germans responded to the Royal Navy blockade by declaring the waters surrounding the British Isles as a war zone in February 1915. Anything sailing in these waters was liable to be torpedoed and sunk, whether from a belligerent or neutral nation. They called it unrestricted submarine warfare. The German submarine campaign violated international customs, known as the “cruiser rules,” which required ships first to be halted and searched for contraband before being sunk. Raiders were required to ensure the safety of the crew and passengers, but the small U-boats simply did not have room for either. German submarines were given permission to sink on sight. They left thousands of civilians and sailors stranded in the water for the Royal Navy to rescue.⁵⁹

It would be a mighty struggle for Americans to remain impartial in the Great War, given that the country’s trading partners were at war. As President Wilson remarked to Joe Tumulty in August 1914, “We cannot remain isolated in this war, for soon the contagion of it will spread until it reaches our own shores.” The United States had two massive oceans protecting its shores, and it had long maintained a sense of impregnability. German U-boats would challenge the assumption that America was safe from attack.⁶⁰

Both England and Germany threatened the freedom of the seas. British actions did not cost American lives—only commerce, and much or even more was made up by the brisk trade with the Allies during the war. Germany’s submarine warfare, on the other hand, could cost many lives and destroy property. Americans were likely willing to go to war over the German submarines, but not over the British blockade. It was a hypocritical stance, but Ambassador Bernstorff recognized that the U.S. would never confront England over it except at the peace table.⁶¹

Shortly after the Germans announced unrestricted submarine warfare, President Wilson sent them a diplomatic note, warning that there would be consequences from their submarine campaign but stated it in suitably vague terms. He feared that neutral ships might be sunk and citizens from neutral nations might lose their lives. If this happened, the American government would hold the Germans to a “strict accountability.” No one knew what this meant or how the U.S. would respond.⁶²

On March 28, a German U-boat torpedoed the British steamer RMS Falaba with the loss of one American life. On May 1, another submarine attacked the American ship Gulflight, killing two Americans. This was but a foreshadowing of what was to come with unrestricted submarine warfare. German submarines could indiscriminately murder American citizens sailing on the high seas.

The Lusitania Sinking

The Germans correctly suspected that the British were transporting munitions from the United States in ocean liners, despite the civilian nature of these vessels. Kaiser Wilhelm authorized his navy to sink Allied shipping in British waters, not just warships. Every type of ship was a target—and if they were carrying passengers from neutral countries (such as the United States), well, that was a risk. The Imperial German Embassy in Washington took out advertisements in major newspapers, warning American citizens of the risk in crossing the Atlantic in British-flagged ocean liners, as they were fair targets for Germany’s submarine campaign. The warning in the New York Times appeared on May 1, the same day that the Cunard Line’s ocean liner RMS Lusitania sailed from New York for Liverpool.⁶³

On May 7, 1915, the Lusitania was steaming unescorted off the southern coast of Ireland when it encountered the submarine U-20. Without warning, the sub fired a single torpedo into the liner’s hull, but soon a second explosion ripped through the ship and it sank in eighteen minutes. The British publicly claimed that two torpedoes had struck the liner, when in fact they knew there had only been one: the civilian ship was indeed carrying munitions, some four million rounds of small arms ammunition, shrapnel artillery shells, and percussion fuses. Fearing that detonating artillery shells had caused the second explosion, they developed a cover story of a second torpedo (investigations later revealed that it had been steam pipes exploding). Two-thirds of the crew and passengers died. Among the 1,198 lives lost were 128 Americans. The Lusitania’s sinking came just three years after the sinking of the RMS Titanic, a precedent that did not go unnoticed.⁶⁴

There was enormous international outrage over the sinking of the Lusitania. In the U.S., the attack made the front page of most newspapers, many of which provided considerable coverage, since there were so many Americans aboard the doomed liner. The New York Times denounced Germany’s policy as “war by assassination,” that the country had gone insane, and was “at war with the whole civilized world.”⁶⁵ The Baltimore Sun was more evenhanded, the editors noting, “We refrain from expressing any opinion in such a serious hour as this as to the effect which the sinking of the Lusitania will have on our relations with Germany.” It noted that the event could only play into the hands of the British, and that Germany’s actions would only build animosity with neutral countries like the United States.⁶⁶

The Europeans had been at war for nearly a year and had experienced catastrophic casualties. Though the number of deaths from the Lusitania sinking was high, that number of people might be killed in just minutes on the Western Front. Yet Americans were not involved in the war, and the sudden death of 128 citizens was shocking. Public opinion swung feverishly against the Germans. Ambassador Bernstorff was in New York on business and found himself mobbed by reporters at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. He escaped out a side door, but reporters followed him to the train station. He refused to make a statement. Back in Washington, he stayed out of sight until the anger ebbed.⁶⁷

“I have spent many sleepless hours thinking about this tragedy,” President Wilson told Joe Tumulty. “It has hung over me like a terrible nightmare. In God’s name, how could any nation calling itself civilized purpose so horrible a thing?”⁶⁸ The Lusitania sinking ended Edward House’s European peace effort. He wrote the president: “America has come to the parting of the ways, when she must determine whether she stands for civilized or uncivilized warfare. We can no longer remain neutral spectators.” House accepted that American entry into the World War was inevitable.⁶⁹

Three days after the Lusitania catastrophe, Wilson spoke to a group of newly naturalized citizens in Philadelphia. The president was still bewildered by the sinking, but he did not see America’s role as having changed. Rather, the U.S. must set the example for peace. “There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight,” he stated. “There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.” That tone-deaf argument—“too proud to fight”—would haunt Wilson for the rest of his presidency. It seemed to invite other nations to bully the United States, while Wilson would only turn the cheek.⁷⁰

Wilson’s Philadelphia statement did not go over well. His political nemesis, Theodore Roosevelt, was livid. He penned an article called “Murder on the High Seas” in which he called the Germans guilty of murder and piracy, and pointed out alleged German atrocities in Belgium, while the U.S. stood by. “In the teeth of these things, we earn as a nation measureless scorn and contempt if we follow the lead of those who exalt peace above righteousness,” Roosevelt wrote in a calculated dig at the president, “if we heed the voices of those feeble folk who bleat to high Heaven that there is peace when there is no peace.” He went on to describe American neutrality as something “which would have excited the emulous admiration of Pontius Pilate—the archetypal neutral of all time.” Although Roosevelt did not call for war, he did call for a cessation of all commerce with Germany while increasing arms shipments to the Allies.⁷¹ A group of peaceniks wrote Roosevelt, offering to buy him a gun and send him alone to Europe to fight for the Allies or for the Germans, his choice. Since he was so eager to get into the war, let him do all of the fighting.⁷²

The Lusitania sinking was a public relations disaster for Germany. The New York Times opined four weeks after the sinking, “Germany never in the world’s time can erase the stain of the Lusitania.”⁷³ Ambassador Bernstorff understood that submarine warfare would likely bring America in on the side of the Allies, and he pleaded with Berlin to end the campaign. Though American neutrality favored England and France, a neutral America was far better than a belligerent America, where it would likely tip the scales against Germany. Bernstorff became a strong defender of Wilson’s policies to keep the U.S. out of the war and to negotiate peace.

On May 13, Wilson communicated that he would hold the Germans to the promised “strict accountability” for waging unrestricted submarine warfare. Rather than sign the diplomatic note that he believed would lead to war, Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan resigned from the Wilson administration. It was a mistake on the pacifist Bryan’s part, as he would no longer be the insider who could counsel the president against war. Bryan had been the dove in the cabinet; the last major antiwar cabinet member remaining was Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels.

Robert Lansing replaced Bryan, and he shared neither Bryan’s nor the president’s commitment to peace, and he would never have the president’s ear. Lansing was an interventionist, believing from the beginning that America would have to go to war on the side of the Allies. Wilson and House would do the real work of American diplomacy going forward. Lansing was relegated to the role of role of adviser for diplomatic notes and international law. Treasury Secretary William McAdoo concluded, that both figuratively and literally, “Lansing was a silent member of the Cabinet.”⁷⁴ Secretary of Agriculture David Houston likewise had a low opinion of Lansing: “He will not be of much assistance than he would have been as an expert in the Department” of State.⁷⁵

In addition to having little trust in his secretary of state, Wilson was not well served by two important ambassadors, Democratic political appointees who had supported the president’s campaign but who had little experience at diplomacy. The American ambassador to England, Walter Hines Page, was an unabashed anglophile and interventionist. Page was such a strong British proponent that he seemed to forget which country he represented. Wilson tuned out his hysterical, long-winded letters. The ambassador to Germany, James Gerard, was no better. He was a New York attorney with close connections to Tammany Hall. Like Page, Wilson ignored Gerard’s recommendations. Instead, he put his faith in Edward House, the prince of back-channel diplomacy.⁷⁶

A series of diplomatic notes over unrestricted submarine warfare passed between Wilson and the German government. Then on August 19, a German submarine torpedoed and sank the SS Arabic, a passenger vessel, killing more Americans and setting off a new crisis. The German high command quietly ordered its U-boats to stop targeting passenger ships. In September, Germany publicly yielded, apologizing for the Arabic incident and offering an indemnity.

The German submarine campaign put Ambassador Bernstorff in a difficult position to justify his government’s policy that he personally opposed. Had Germany wiped the slate clean after the Lusitania tragedy, apologized, and canceled unrestricted submarine warfare, the U.S. and Germany might have jointly addressed the British blockade and the international right to the freedom of the seas.⁷⁷

In the wake of the Lusitania sinking, a group of more than one hundred notable American internationalists gathered at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall on June 17. They elected former president William Howard Taft as their leader and named the organization the League to Enforce Peace. They supported a vision of the United States taking a global role in helping mediate conflicts through an international organization of peace. President Wilson paid close attention. Many of the conceptual ideas for Taft’s league would become fact with the League of Nations after the Great War closed.⁷⁸