TWO

Preparedness

Freshly back in the United States after his failed 1915 European peace mission, Edward House counseled President Wilson that the country should prepare to fight as a means to avert war: “If war comes with Germany, it will be because of our unpreparedness and her belief that we are more or less impotent to do her harm.” House suggested what would become known as the “Preparedness” campaign to beef up the country’s armed forces.¹

The American public was split over the war. Pundits such as former president Theodore Roosevelt vowed that the U.S. should assist the Allies against the Germans. He and his friend General Leonard Wood even advocated conscription. The interventionists were challenged by isolationists, pacifists, radicals, socialists, Midwesterners and Southerners, the Germans, and the Irish, all of whom opposed getting involved in the war. Much of public opinion was against intervening in what many viewed as a European conflict. And many were upset at the British blockade that interfered with American global commerce. Secretary of State Robert Lansing observed, “Many more Americans were directly affected by these British practices than were affected by the activities of the German submarines.” Isolationism remained a powerful force in both Democratic and Republican parties.²

The most popular song in the U.S. in 1915 became “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier.” It strongly expressed the pacifism that many Americans embraced. The Woman’s Peace Party, led by Jane Addams, attended the International Congress of Women in April 1915 in The Hague to press for peace. Addams would meet with President Wilson numerous times upon her return and pushed for peace negotiations.

Another leading pacifist was automobile manufacturer Henry Ford, who sailed to Kristiania (now Oslo), Norway with a small peace delegation on December 4 aboard the SS Oscar II, what became known as the “peace ship.” Inspired by the impromptu Christmas cease-fire of 1914, Ford hoped that the soldiers in the trenches would strike against the war and refuse to fight.³ The actual peace mission went nowhere, and Ford returned to the U.S. Edward House dismissed Ford’s peace effort as a stunt, calling it “crude and unimportant.”⁴

President Wilson understood the strong undercurrent of isolationism and pacifism in American society. That said, he also agreed with Edward House’s advice that the country was unprepared for an armed conflict and fairly helpless in the face of adversaries, whether British or German. After the Lusitania sinking, the United States got serious about Preparedness. It was a contentious program, and it took a significant effort for the president to convince Congress to upgrade the nation’s defenses. Preparedness began on December 7 when Wilson spoke before Congress and called for a major increase in military spending.⁵

Once Wilson signaled his support for Preparedness, his fiercest opponents were his fellow Democrats. The party had a strong contingent of pacifists, largely followers of William Jennings Bryan, who publicly fought Wilson on the question of military readiness. The pacifists “organized he largest, most diverse, and most sophisticated peace coalition to that point in U.S. history,” according to historian Michael Kazin. In Congress, the leading peace activists were Democratic House Majority Leader Claude Kitchin from North Carolina, and Republican Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin.⁶

Shortly after President Wilson commenced his Preparedness drive, Edward House returned to Europe at the end of December 1915. He visited first London, then Berlin. The goal for the trip was to discuss a future peace conference and terms that would bring combatants to the table. House quickly learned that the Germans were not in the mood for peace, as they believed they were winning the war. His diplomatic mission did not bring the sides closer to the peace table, but it did help mend the rift with Germany for a time. House quietly let the Allies know that the Wilson administration was essentially coming around to their side, as the president saw German militarism as a threat to the world. If it appeared that the Germans might prevail, the U.S. would be more likely to intervene to prevent such an outcome. But just how Americans would intervene was another question, given their scant army and navy.⁷

American Volunteers

There were some Americans whose ideals would not wait for a declaration of war. While many Americans disliked England, and others disliked Germany, everyone loved France. France was America’s first ally in the War of Independence, and hundreds of young men volunteered to fight for the land of Lafayette. Many of them serving in the French Foreign Legion, the Ambulance Corps, and the Medical Corps. An American poet, Alan Seeger, fought with the French Foreign Legion. He wrote the poem “I Have a Rendezvous with Death,” and in fact was killed at the Somme in 1916.

A number of soldiers in the Foreign Legion eventually transferred to French aviation forces, and lobbied for the creation of an American squadron, an escadrille. The Escadrille américaine was formed in April 1916 as a pursuit squadron, its plane fuselages decorated with an Indian head. The squadron first saw action at Verdun. Many of the squadron’s first volunteers were the college-educated sons of well-to-do families who could afford expensive flying lessons. One of the more prominent leaders was Norman Prince, who helped organize the squadron. Prince died on October 15, 1916, three days after being thrown from a crash that shattered his body. He was awarded the French Legion of Honor. Pilots had a high casualty rate: combat was deadly, aircraft were built of wood and fabric, and if a plane was shot down, there was no parachute for the pilot.

The Germans protested that neutral Americans were fighting for France, so the squadron was renamed the Lafayette Escadrille in November 1916, named after the Marquis de Lafayette, the Revolutionary War hero. Once the U.S. entered the war, the squadron was incorporated into the United States Army Air Corps as the 103rd Pursuit Squadron in February 1918.

The Left Bank of Paris had long been the destination for artists, but it was in the war zone now, and crossing the Atlantic was too dangerous. American artists who might have gone to Paris found another destination much closer: Provincetown, a fishing town at the very tip of Cape Cod that hosted four competing art schools, the most notable under Charles Hawthorne. Socialist and activist writer Mary Heaton Vorse lived in Provincetown and convinced like-minded bohemians from Greenwich Village to flock there in the summer of 1916, prompting the Boston Globe to declare it the “biggest art colony in the world.” Artists like painter Marsden Hartley, poet Harry Kemp, wealthy arts patron and columnist Mabel Dodge, painter and sculptor Maurice Sterne, poet and journalist John Reed, playwright Eugene O’Neill, and poet William Carlos Williams were all found in Provincetown that fateful summer. Eugene O’Neill staged his first play, Bound East for Cardiff, for the Provincetown Players on July 28 in a fish wharf owned by Mary Heaton Vorse. Mabel Dodge, who intensely disliked Vorse, started a brief, doomed affair with John Reed, then ended up marrying Maurice Sterne that year. Reed moved on to the beautiful journalist Louise Bryant. The two moved to Russia in 1917 and witnessed the Bolshevik coup.⁸

Not all of the American idealists went to France. A young American journalist, Wilbur Durborough, with his photographer Irving Ries, visited Germany for seven months in 1915 and took extensive movie footage of the German army. When they returned, they screened a nearly two-hour documentary called On the Firing Line with the Germans, which sympathetically showed the soldiers as well-behaved young men, contrary to Allied propaganda. The film ran in many cities until the threat of war silenced German propaganda. Shot in the days of combustible nitrate film, it is now in the Library of Congress.⁹

Edith and Woodrow

President Wilson remained cool during the trial of 1915, when the American public was outraged at the sinking of the Lusitania and some called for intervention in the war. It may have helped that he had fallen in love with a handsome widow, and she proved more than a passing distraction. Wilson was a man who needed a wife. He was lonely without female companionship.

Rear Admiral Cary Grayson was the president’s personal physician. A man with keen listening skills, he became one of the president’s few close personal associates. Grayson had cared for Ellen Wilson on her deathbed, and so he would with Woodrow in his final years. He was deeply devoted to Wilson, and yet remained acutely apolitical, something that the president appreciated. It meant that the two men could play golf together and not talk shop. Grayson’s presence was a welcome relief from the constant correspondence and cabinet secretaries who sought presidential advice. In turn, the president listened to Grayson’s advice regarding his health. Wilson had led a largely sedentary life and was not “naturally vigorous.” He had asthma, stomach ailments, and was partly blind in one eye. He had long suffered from hypertension. Dr. Grayson got the president to take up golf as a form of exercise, and the two men played most Saturday mornings across the Potomac River in Virginia.¹⁰

It was Dr. Grayson who inadvertently introduced Wilson to Edith Bolling Galt. Edith was a forty-three-year-old widow with no children. She had married into the Galt family, which owned a long-running jewelry store in Washington, and the business provided her a decent income after her husband died six years earlier. Edith was worldly and had the expectations of the upper middle class. She was tall and attractive with her jet-black hair, being a proud descendant of Pocahontas, with a fine Virginia lilt to her voice. She was charming, funny, and opinionated. Edith came from a slaveholding family, and though she got along with African-Americans, she always viewed them as subordinate. She was not particularly well educated or well read. She relished fine clothes and the social scene—and valued her independence. She drove her own electric car and was more than capable of taking care of herself. Edith was comfortably single with no intention to get remarried.

Edith was friends with Dr. Grayson and had connections to the White House. One March day she was walking with a friend and dropped by the president’s home. It was a muddy day, and their shoes were covered in mud. And there they bumped into President Wilson, who was just back from playing golf with Dr. Grayson, and who was equally muddy. Edith immediately tut-tutted the president’s clothes. “They were not smart,” she recalled.¹¹

Wilson was impressed with Edith’s beauty, which his friends quickly picked up on. They decided to make a more formal introduction. Edith reluctantly agreed to go on a double date with the president, who was sixteen years her senior. He was immediately smitten. The months of loneliness and purposelessness since Ellen’s death had suddenly found resolution. Wilson needed a new companion.

The president wasted little time. He began writing Edith daily. In early May 1915, he told Edith that he loved her. She was taken aback and thought it far too soon, given that his wife had died only ten months earlier. But Edith gradually came around over the subsequent months, and in September the president proposed—and Edith accepted. The two began to be seen in public together. They attended vaudeville shows at Keith’s Theatre on Saturday nights, went to baseball games together, and often took automobile rides through the city. They made excursions on the presidential yacht, the USS Mayflower. Wilson nicknamed Edith his “little girl.”

Wilson married Edith Galt on December 18, 1915 in her home in Dupont Circle, rather than in a church or the White House. They honeymooned at the Homestead Resort in Hot Springs, Virginia, which they cut short when they returned on January 4 to take up the Preparedness campaign in earnest.

With Woodrow’s marriage to Edith, the president’s attention was drawn to his new wife, and no longer to his friend Edward House. Along with Joe Tumulty, House had opposed Wilson remarrying so early after the death of his first wife. He declined to attend the wedding. Edith initially disliked the Texan, finding him slippery and sycophantic. She told her husband, “It seems to me that it is impossible for two persons always to think alike, and while I like Colonel House immensely, I find him absolutely colorless and a ‘yes, yes’ man.” She later called him a “jellyfish.”¹²

Edith lacked Ellen Wilson’s political instincts, or her depth in understanding issues. She was there to support her husband—and his agenda was her agenda. Edith also disliked the president’s private secretary Joe Tumulty, whom she found brash and garrulous, a coarse Irish Yankee, not at all cultivated and refined. (Unlike House, Tumulty attended the wedding, and kept a piece of the wedding cake as a family heirloom; his grandson donated it to the Woodrow Wilson House in 2013.) Edith quickly sensed that Treasury Secretary William McAdoo would be a problem. The man married to her stepdaughter Nell was ambitious, and rumor had it that he wanted the presidency. Edith eventually came to appreciate Edward House, though she may have been jealous of his friendship with her husband. She came to regard House as a close friend until the Paris Peace Conference. After Wilson’s stroke, she shut House out—but then again, she shut almost everyone out.¹³

The Preparedness Push

In 1914, the U.S. Army had only 92,482 soldiers on active duty, mostly stationed along the former frontier to guard against a Native American threat that had long passed, or in coastal defenses to protect the country from an invading fleet. Significant detachments were in China, Hawaii, guarding the Panama Canal Zone, and in the Philippines, which the U.S. had captured from Spain in 1898. In addition, the National Guard—a state-run militia—had just over 127,000 citizen-soldiers to call upon. These were minuscule numbers that simply would not suffice in the muddy trenches of the Western Front, where countries massed millions of soldiers to fight a war of attrition.¹⁴

Shortly after Woodrow and Edith Wilson returned to Washington from their honeymoon, they set out on a six-day whistle-stop tour of the Midwest on January 29, 1916 to sell the idea of Preparedness. The public was only willing to accept so much. When Secretary of War Lindley Garrison proposed universal military service, increasing the active duty army to a 400,000-man Continental Army, it met much noisy protest from the populist left. Wilson did not fully support this sizable increase, which undercut Garrison, who resigned on February 10.¹⁵

Wilson nominated Newton Baker, the mayor of Cleveland, to replace Garrison. Baker was both young—just forty-four years old—and diminutive in stature, but he proved a quick study as secretary of war. He would become one of the most capable men to serve in the cabinet, an irony given that he was a pacifist. Baker would oversee the Preparedness campaign.

The Liberty Bell was trundled out of Philadelphia and sent on a four-month nationwide tour aboard a train known as the Liberty Bell Special in support of Preparedness. Witnessing the public shift toward patriotism, H. L. Mencken penned a snarky letter to novelist Theodore Dreiser in February 1916: “I believe that both of us will be killed by patriots within six months.” Both men were of German descent and opposed the saber rattling. Neither would in fact be killed in the next six months.¹⁶

Meanwhile, the interventionists were hardly standing still. General Leonard Wood established a series of military training camps to train civilians: first at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and Monterey, California in 1913, then Plattsburgh, New York two years later. Plattsburgh had been the site of an army and navy victory against British forces invading from Canada in 1814. Plattsburgh trained the sons of the elite families—often from Harvard and Yale—in soldiering. Participants paid $100 to attend the thirty-five-day training course. Theodore Roosevelt sent three of his sons to Plattsburgh. It would become the model for the army’s basic training.¹⁷

In May 1916, a year after the Lusitania sinking, and after much debate, Congress finally passed legislation expanding the army. It would gradually double the size of the active force by 1921 to nearly a half million soldiers—larger than Garrison’s aborted 400,000-man army plan—while federalizing the National Guard to protect the border with Mexico. Congress formally endorsed the Plattsburgh model for soldier basic training and created the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, or ROTC. Wilson signed the law on June 3. The army bill was contentious, as there was strong distrust against having such a large standing army in peacetime.¹⁸

Advocates for a stronger national defense held Preparedness parades around the country. A huge Citizens’ Preparedness Parade was held in New York City on May 13 with 150,000 people marching. It lasted all day.¹⁹ A month later, 60,000 people marched in a Flag Day parade in the nation’s capital. President Wilson declared a holiday so that federal workers could participate, and he led the parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, marching just behind the Marine Band, attired in a dapper blue blazer and white duck pants, and carrying an American flag. Once he reached the White House, he peeled off to the reviewing stand, where Edith and he watched the rest of the Preparedness parade. One thing conspicuously absent were soldiers in uniform: this was a civilian parade. Thousands of women, including many suffragists, dressed in white. It was a sea of straw hats and waving flags.²⁰

While much of the country came around to support Preparedness, militant anarchists were prepared to throw bombs in protest. On July 22, more than 50,000 people marched for Preparedness in San Francisco. At 2:06 P.M., just a half hour after the parade started, a time bomb inside a suitcase exploded on Steuart Street near the Ferry Building. The explosion ripped through the dense crowd of paraders and watchers, killing ten people and injuring scores. Authorities had in fact been warned of the bombing: anarchists had explicitly warned in a published letter that they would target the parade. Eight days later, another act of terrorism occurred when German saboteurs blew up the Black Tom arsenal in New Jersey.²¹

Wilson proposed to strengthen the army over three years to 670,836 soldiers, a nearly sixfold increase while leaving the National Guard at roughly the same size. The cost was significant: an estimated $182 million annually, in addition to $104 million for equipment over four years to upgrade the army’s capabilities. Meanwhile, the Naval Appropriations Bill of 1916, passed in September, was a major victory for the big navy movement. It funded $315 million to build an entirely new fleet, including ten battleships, sixteen cruisers, fifty destroyers and torpedo boats, as well as numerous submarines and support vessels.²² To pay for Preparedness, Congress doubled income tax rates from seven to fifteen percent, raised corporate taxes, and added an estate tax and a war profits tax in September.²³

Little was done to improve the country’s nascent aviation industry. American aviators trained in an unreliable biplane, the Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny,” that was not suitable for combat. The plane, however, made its way into postage stamp lore in 1918 when one hundred stamps were issued with the plane accidentally printed upside down, the so-called “inverted Jenny” stamp issue. This was the status of American military aviation.

Comedian Will Rogers poked fun at American Preparedness in his vaudeville stand-up routines. “There is some talk of getting a machine gun, if we can borrow one. The one we have now they are using to train our army with in Plattsburgh. If we go to war, we will just about have to go to the trouble of getting another gun.”²⁴ Rogers was not far off the mark. When the war started, the army’s inventory was 285,000 Springfield rifles, 400 light artillery pieces, and 150 heavy guns. The army owned 1,500 machine guns, but of four different models, as the War Department could not decide which to procure.²⁵

William Jennings Bryan had thrown himself into lobbying Congress for the pacifist cause, attempting to thwart the Preparedness plan. He did not succeed. In winning a major increase to the defense budget and tax increases to pay for them, Wilson proved that he was the leader of the Democratic Party, not Bryan.

Submarines and Diplomacy

The diplomatic crisis over Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare campaign lingered on, with diplomatic note after note sent to Germany, followed by counter-notes. An Austrian submarine sank the Italian ocean liner SS Ancona with Americans aboard, six months after the Lusitania sinking. The Germans finally backed off targeting passenger ships in February 1916.

Just as relations with Germany improved, a U-boat torpedoed the passenger ferry SS Sussex in the English Channel on March 24, killing a number of Americans. The Germans had a “genius for always doing the wrong thing in the wrong way and at the wrong time,” complained Secretary of State Robert Lansing.²⁶ The torpedoing of the Sussex violated the Kaiser’s February promise not to target passenger vessels. Much of the cabinet, led by Lansing, wanted to take action—yet the president remained hesitant. Edward House wrote critically in his diary about Wilson’s response to the Sussex crisis: “He does not seem to realize that one of the main points of criticism against him is that he talks boldly, but acts weakly.” Wilson issued an ultimatum threatening to sever diplomatic relations and hinted at war. That got the Germans’ attention.²⁷

Working behind the scenes, Ambassador Bernstorff helped strengthen German Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg’s position against the militarists who wanted to resume unrestricted submarine warfare, a campaign that would end badly for Germany if the U.S. entered the war against them. The chancellor convinced Kaiser Wilhelm of this wisdom. On May 4, the Kaiser ordered his U-boats to halt attacks on merchant and passenger ships without warning. The Germans returned to the old cruiser rules. It was the end of unrestricted submarine warfare—for now. The Germans reserved the right to resume submarine attacks if the freedom of the seas was not restored. A full year after the attack on the Lusitania, Wilson had a major diplomatic victory without resorting to war. The crisis had been averted, and American-German relations greatly improved.

Edward House, whom Wilson had sent to Europe in December 1915, returned to the States in March. He reported to the president about this trip. Wilson approved, and sent an appeal on March 7 for a peace conference. Neither side particularly welcomed Wilson’s mediation offer as long as they believed they could win the war. This was just as the springtime fighting commenced in 1916, a year that would witness cataclysmic but inconsequential battles like Verdun and the Somme, and horrendous casualties on both sides.²⁸

Wilson began to support the idea of a League of Nations in 1916. He and Edward House had long discussed the concept and how to make it work. It was not Wilson’s idea—the league proposal had long fermented with the British and even Theodore Roosevelt, though he later walked away from the idea. William Howard Taft had organized the League to Enforce Peace in 1915 to champion conflict mediation.

With improved German-American relations, President Wilson put forward publicly his ideas for a League of Nations. On May 27, he delivered a major foreign policy address before two thousand members of the League to Enforce Peace at Washington’s New Willard Hotel. He laid out three basic tenets: that all peoples should be able to choose their form of government, that small countries should have equal respect and status as large countries and empires, and that the world had a right for peace and to be free of aggression. The United States stood ready to help mediate a peaceful resolution to the Great War.²⁹

As a goodwill gesture and to demonstrate to Americans that Germany was serious about the freedom of the seas, the Germans dispatched an unusual boat—an unarmed merchant submarine known as the Deutschland—to the United States. It arrived in Baltimore in July 1916 loaded with 750 tons of dyes worth $1 million, in a period when the submarine crisis had been averted and better relations were restored with Germany. The Germans promised more such merchant subs would follow, though none did.³⁰

This was followed by a surprise visit of the U-53 to Newport, Rhode Island, on October 7. After a courtesy meeting with local commanding naval officers, the German submarine cruised into the shipping channel off Nantucket and sank six England-bound vessels the next day. The German captain explicitly followed the cruiser rules, stopping each vessel, inspecting their papers and cargo for contraband that would aid England’s war effort, allowing the crews and passengers to abandon ship, then torpedoing the vessels. By the end of the day the U-53 was out of torpedoes and returning to Germany. No one could complain that the submarine had violated international law. The Germans made it explicit that they were following the rules. They had also sent a strong warning that U-boats could easily operate in American waters.³¹

Just as relations improved with the Germans, things got much worse with the British. A diplomatic crisis brewed over the Royal Navy’s strict blockade of the North Atlantic. The British seized cargo and vessels it suspected were destined for Germany, even if its stated destination was a neutral country like the Netherlands, Spain, or in Scandinavia. Ships were not just stopped and searched, as the cruiser rules recognized; instead, they were directed to a nearby British port for adjudication. Once the ship had docked, British wartime censorship rules now applied, which allowed officials to open mail pouches, read letters, and open packages to ensure no German communications could get through. And British merchantmen flew neutral flags, including the American flag, as a ruse, which was a clear violation of international law.

In July 1916, British authorities blacklisted more than eighty-two American companies and individuals for having done business with Germany. This placed a major strain on Anglo-American relations. It was an unnecessary action, one that needlessly antagonized its key source of finance and munitions. Americans expected to trade with whomever they wanted. As most American cargo was carried in British ships, Democrats in Congress responded by legislating the United States Shipping Board, a law that Wilson signed on September 7, 1916. The U.S. created a state-owned merchant marine to counter British dominance of shipping, and appropriated $50 million dollars to build ships.³²

Even as the European powers bled each other’s armies, the year 1916 provided a pronounced opportunity to mediate peace before the disastrous war turned into a fight to the finish. England was stubbornly committed to the blockade and command of the sea. Germany had plans to bleed France dry at Verdun, while the Allies goaded Romania into entering the war. Wilson was ready to offer mediation; however, this was a presidential election year in the U.S. Wilson understood that his peace effort would have to wait until after the November election.

Allied Arms Purchases—and German Espionage

J. P. Morgan Jr.—known as Jack—had taken over his father’s banking empire after the elder Morgan died in 1913, the same year that the Federal Reserve was created. Morgan was an unapologetic Anglophile, spending half of the year in England. He sided with the Allies once the war began. Not all bankers did, however; many Jewish bankers were of German descent, and they sided with the Germans (an irony probably lost on most as the Second World War approached).

It was not illegal under international law for a neutral power to sell arms to combatants. Combatants would have to buy the arms, take possession of them, and carry them home. Nor was it illegal for an opposing combatant to declare such arms as contraband and destroy them on the open seas under internationally recognized cruiser rules. American neutrality allowed anyone who could reach American shores to trade for arms. That obviously excluded the Germans, whose ships were prevented from crossing the Atlantic, and in this way American neutrality greatly favored England. German Americans demanded an embargo on selling munitions to the Allies, a policy that the Wilson administration would never follow.

The U.S. would not make financial loans to either side. Prodded by Jack Morgan, however, Assistant Secretary of State Robert Lansing lobbied President Wilson to allow banks to extend credit to the Allies in the early days of the war. American farmers and industries needed to sell their surplus products, and if credit had not been extended to European borrowers, American businesses would have faced stiff losses and the economy might have entered a steep recession. These credits were technically not loans, though in fact they allowed the British, French, and Russians to buy vast quantities of armaments and supplies from American companies.

In September 1915, Jack Morgan underwrote an Anglo-French credit for $500 million, one that came with generous underwriting fees. Over the course of the war, J.P. Morgan & Co. alone extended credits of $1.5 billion to the Allies and made considerable profits. In return, the British exempted the House of Morgan from wartime censorship. The Germans received no such credits, and in any case had no way to ship goods to their harbors, given the British blockade.³³

When the war began, the United States was a net debtor, but that reversed as the Allies made billions in purchases to supply their armies. The credits proved a tonic to the American economy, fueling a rapid war boom as industrial production ramped up and crop prices rose. The United States was a giant supplier for the Allies: clothing, food, horses, locomotives, mules, munitions, steel, and more were transported to harbors, where Allied ships eagerly loaded the supplies for their war effort. The American economy effectively reached full employment. Prices rose rapidly in this inflationary environment, and there was much labor unrest as workers demanded greater pay to combat the rising cost of living.

Since the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s, the South had instituted a caste system, with blacks on the bottom row just beneath poor whites. Sharecropping had replaced slavery, leaving blacks in a state of poverty and servitude. Southern whites subjected the black population to terrorism to keep them in check through lynching and Ku Klux Klan intimidation. With Jim Crow laws, whites stripped away black civil rights, in essence depriving blacks of their citizenship and human dignity.

Then came the Great War. Northern industries struggled to find laborers for their factories. They realized a large, inexpensive labor force existed in the country in the millions of poor African-Americans who lived in the South. Industrialists began sending labor agents to recruit black workers for the munitions factories, shipyards, and steel mills. During the decade of the Great War, about 550,000 blacks left the South to work in northern factories. (By 1970, some six million blacks had abandoned the South.) It became known as the Great Migration. Historian Isabel Wilkerson called it a “leaderless revolution,” as people just picked up and moved. These were largely poor, rural blacks who helped tip the balance toward the cities as the country rapidly urbanized. Blacks left the South in waves, a stream of humanity fleeing inhumanity.³⁴ They transplanted jazz from New Orleans to northern cities, turning the musical style into a national movement in a matter of months.

With the start of the war, the Germans realized they had almost no intelligence assets in the United States and quickly had to set them up. Ambassador Bernstorff undoubtedly knew of spying operations and possibly even had his hand in them, but he was careful to leave no documentary trace that could implicate him in violating American neutrality. Instead, two naval officers ran the spy operations: Captain Karl Boy-Ed and Captain Franz von Papen. They were stationed in New York City with its large German population and dozens of German ships and crews interned there. The bored, listless sailors made excellent recruits for espionage missions.³⁵

German saboteurs found ways to strike back against the massive flow of matériel that benefited the Allies. They created time-delayed pipe bombs the size of cigars. These were manufactured on an interned ship in New York harbor, SMS Friedrich der Grosse, then smuggled aboard Allied munitions-carrying ships with the help of Irish stevedores. The explosives detonated when the ships were at sea, crippling the freighters and in some cases even sinking them. The first victim was the SS Phoebus, which mysteriously caught fire at sea.³⁶ Between March and September 1915, there were thirteen explosions on ships at sea that had originated in American ports.³⁷

Kaiser Wilhelm threatened the American ambassador in Berlin, James Gerard, that “he would attend to America when this war was over,” as the supposed neutral Americans were helping the Allies but not the Germans. Gerard did not take the threat too seriously, although it did give President Wilson pause to the threat that German militarism posed to the world.³⁸

On Saturday, July 2, 1915, an explosion rocked the U.S. Capitol. Three sticks of dynamite had blown up in the Senate reception room around midnight. The blast destroyed the adjacent phone booths and shattered a chandelier and mirror, but otherwise caused no extensive damage. No one was injured, though a watchman on the floor below “said he was blown from his chair by the explosion,” according to the New York Times.³⁹

President Wilson and Washington’s four major newspapers received letters signed by an “R. Pearce,” who took responsibility for the bombing. The bomber stressed that his intentions were peaceful, and that he simply wanted the United States to stop selling explosives to Europe. “By the way, don’t put this on the Germans or [William Jennings] Bryan,” he noted. “I am an old fashioned American with a conscience.” The letter was postmarked two hours before the bombing occurred.⁴⁰

The next morning, an intruder named Frank Holt carrying two revolvers and sticks of dynamite entered the Long Island estate of Jack Morgan, who was having breakfast with the British ambassador, Sir Cecil Spring-Rice. Holding Morgan at gunpoint, Holt demanded that Morgan stop financing Allied purchases of American munitions. Morgan lunged at Holt, who shot the financier twice, though the wounds were not fatal. Morgan’s wife and servants subdued Holt until the police arrived to arrest him.⁴¹

The police quickly connected the dynamite to the bombing at the Capitol the night before. And soon they discovered something equally interesting: Frank Holt was an alias for a fugitive, a German-born man named Erich Muenter who had served as a professor at Harvard University. Muenter fled in 1906 after being indicted for murdering his wife. He then worked as a stenographer at a Mexican mine, taught at Polytechnic College in Fort Worth, Texas, remarried in 1910, and finally taught German at Cornell University—all under the alias Frank Holt.

As witnesses from the 1906 murder case were coming to identify him, Muenter leaped to his death in his prison cell in Mineola, New York the night of July 5.⁴² The Secret Service investigated if Muenter had accomplices or foreign help, and the crews of two ocean liners bound for Liverpool searched their ships after Muenter’s last letter to his wife insinuated that there were bombs aboard. No bombs were found aboard those ships, though an explosion tore through the munitions ship SS Minnehaha bound for France on July 7.⁴³

Whether Muenter was connected to German intelligence was unknown, and his suicide would leave that question unanswered. But German espionage was certainly active—and its activities were publicly disclosed even while the public still simmered over the Lusitania sinking. In a tremendous lapse, the German commercial attaché Dr. Heinrich Albert absentmindedly left his briefcase on a New York subway, which an American intelligence officer tailing him immediately picked up. It detailed many German spy operations. Treasury Secretary William McAdoo, who oversaw the Secret Service, described the briefcase as being full of “documentary dynamite.” The Secret Service eventually uncovered that Dr. Albert had received more than $27 million for clandestine operations.⁴⁴

With President Wilson’s approval, Lansing and McAdoo leaked the German espionage papers to the New York World, a newspaper friendly to the Wilson administration, which published them on August 15. The papers documented German attempts to foment labor unrest, acquire newspapers for propaganda purposes, and buy munitions plants. There was more outrage and more bad press for the Germans. Many Americans now wondered if their German neighbors were spies. It threw German-Americans on the defense. Later that year, British intelligence intercepted more papers documenting German espionage in the U.S. and published them. This worked both to embarrass the Germans and to provoke the Americans. New York City police soon rolled up the German cell that placed bombs on ships. The Wilson administration sent captains Boy-Ed and von Papen back to Germany.⁴⁵

Yet the sabotage continued. German intelligence staged what was so far the largest act of sabotage on American soil. In the early hours of July 30, 1916, they blew up the enormous munitions depot known as Black Tom Island in Jersey City, New Jersey. The explosion was felt several states away. Windows were shattered in Brooklyn and Manhattan, and the Statue of Liberty was damaged (her upper arm holding the torch was subsequently closed to the public). Some $20 million in munitions destined for British and French armies was destroyed and hundreds of people injured.⁴⁶

Repairs were made to the famous statue that stands guard over New York harbor, which France had given the country in 1886. On December 2, some four months after Black Tom, the Statue of Liberty was lit up with electric lights. President Wilson attended the ceremony from the presidential yacht, the Mayflower. He was given a carpet that showed historic sites from each of the then forty-eight states. Years later, while recovering from his 1919 stroke, Wilson slowly walked across the carpet in his library and remarked to his physician, Cary Grayson: “Doctor, that is not a bad stunt for a lame fellow, to walk over Niagara Falls this morning.”⁴⁷

Trouble in Mexico

While Europe was consumed with the World War, the United States faced trouble with its neighbor to the south, Mexico, albeit on a far smaller scale. Mexico was an unstable but strategically important country. It owned a quarter of the world’s then-known oil reserves and was the principal source of petroleum for the Royal Navy. The Americans needed to keep the country out of unfriendly hands, as the two countries shared a long border.

Mexico was in turmoil. The trouble began in 1911 when Francisco Madero overthrew the country’s dictator, Porfirio Díaz. Madero gathered the support of the military but learned in February 1913—a month before President Wilson was sworn in—that he could not command them. A power-hungry Mexican general, Victoriano Huerta, overthrew Madero and had him shot. Huerta declared himself president.

Civil war broke out as constitutionalists, led by Venustiano Carranza, Francisco “Pancho” Villa, and Emiliano Zapata, rose up to oppose Huerta. In April 1914, upon learning that the Germans were sending a ship loaded with arms for the Huerta administration, American forces violently seized Veracruz, the main Mexican port. President Wilson and Secretary of the Navy Daniels were concerned that Germany would violate the Monroe Doctrine by establishing a naval base in Mexico. Cut off from the outside world and with his regime teetering, Huerta resigned from the presidency in July. Carranza rode into Mexico City to lead the country. The U.S. recognized Carranza’s regime; however, the trouble was far from over.⁴⁸

Huerta eventually made his way to the United States, where he conspired with German intelligence to resume the Mexican conflict. American officials arrested him on charges of sedition, and he died in an El Paso, Texas, prison in January 1916, eighteen months after fleeing Mexico.

Carranza’s deputy was Pancho Villa. Now that Carranza was the Mexican president, Villa revolted against the new regime. He lacked the resources to take on the Mexican government, and his rebellion remained largely in the northern part of the country. Villa was upset at American support for Carranza. In January 1916, his forces stopped a train in Chihuahua and executed seventeen American mining engineers who were aboard.

To draw more attention to his crumbling cause, Pancho Villa took an extraordinary and extreme step: he crossed the border to raid Columbus, New Mexico with nearly five hundred men on March 9, killing eighteen Americans. His ragtag force engaged in a firefight with American soldiers stationed at Camp Furlong, and Villa’s force got the worse end of it, withdrawing to Mexico but earning Villa much desired publicity as a folk hero who fought the Yanquis.⁴⁹

The American response to Villa’s raid was immediate: American soil had been invaded and blood spilled. Villa’s raid on Columbus was coincidentally the first day on the job for Newton Baker, the new secretary of war. The president authorized an incursion into Mexico—without permission from the Mexican government—to apprehend Villa. Baker appointed Major General John Pershing to lead a 4,000-man Punitive Expedition into Mexico on March 15.

The expedition, which peaked at 12,000 men, was wracked by sickness. It skirmished more with the Mexican army than with the Villistas. Lieutenant George Patton, who was a cavalry officer and a 1909 West Point graduate on Pershing’s staff, led raids not on horseback but in automobiles, presaging his future role as a mechanized armor commander. Wilson called up the National Guard to protect the nation’s borders on June 8. By the end of the month, 108,000 guardsmen were patrolling the Mexican border.⁵⁰ Former president Theodore Roosevelt offered to raise a division of volunteers to serve in Mexico under his command.⁵¹

The American incursion into Mexico played into Germany’s hands, which hoped the U.S. would remain tied down. It gave them ideas on how to keep the Americans from providing substantial help in the European war. Historian Barbara Tuchman called the American incursion into Mexico “a prolonged and famous fumble.” Pershing never caught Pancho Villa. The U.S. withdrew from Mexico in February 1917, just in time for a new threat from another direction.⁵²

The War in 1916

Europe entered its third year of war in stalemate. Both sides would attempt to break out of the deadlock, but neither were powerful enough to knock the opponent out of the war. Just as it had tested new lethal weaponry in 1915, the Germans would test the boundaries of civilized warfare in order to win.

The Irish had chafed at British rule for centuries. With German encouragement and support, Irish nationalists planned what was called Easter Rising to liberate their country, and the Germans brought Roger Casement to the Emerald Isle in a U-boat, where he was promptly captured. The British executed Casement for treason and published his diaries, full of stories of homosexual liaisons, to discredit the Irish revolutionary movement. Still, the bloody Easter Rising began in April 1916, diverting England’s attention and beginning a six-year civil war that would lead to Ireland’s independence. Irish-Americans were incensed at British brutality, and England’s crackdown did little to help the Allied cause in America.

With the U-boats temporarily in check, Kaiser Wilhelm decided to use his large surface fleet to challenge the British blockade of the North Sea. The Battle of Jutland took place off the coast of Denmark on May 31, 1916. The naval battle was a draw, but the German High Seas Fleet returned to port and never ventured beyond the Baltic again until after the Armistice. German strategists began rethinking how effective the initial U-boat campaign had been, and shipyards doubled their efforts to build a new generation of U-boats that could greatly expand a renewed submarine campaign in early 1917.

Of the many battles of the Great War, no battle was more powerfully symbolic as the Battle of Verdun in 1916. When the Germans attacked France in 1914, they had pivoted around Verdun to the west, but never took the city. It remained a salient protruding into German lines. Verdun was symbolically important: in 843 C.E., Charlemagne had divided his empire into three parts at Verdun. The chief of the German General Staff, Field Marshal Erich von Falkenhayn, knew the French would do anything to defend the city. He devised a strategy to lure the French army into the cauldron, then pummel it with artillery and inflict mass casualties.

The Germans attacked Verdun in February 1916, capturing a number of the forts on its outskirts, then prepared for the French counterattack. The French took the bait as planned. Large numbers of French divisions were pulled from quieter fronts and fed through the meat grinder of German artillery. By the end of the battle, most of the French army had seen the devil’s grounds. The French gradually pushed the Germans back and inflicted unexpectedly high casualties. All told, some 750,000 men were casualties with no decisive outcome for either side. Falkenhayn was relieved of his command, replaced by the men who were considered the face of the German war effort, Paul von Hindenburg and his quartermaster general Erich Ludendorff.

To relieve the pressure on Verdun, the English and French opened an offensive on the Somme River, 170 miles to the northwest on July 1. For seven days, English artillery pounded the German lines, though a high percentage of shells were duds. The bombardment had little impact on the deeply entrenched German bunkers. When British officers blew their whistles and the infantry waves rose out of their trenches to attack, the German machine guns went to work, mowing down the young men. On the first day of the Somme, nearly 20,000 English were killed and more than 38,000 wounded. The Battle of the Somme ended in November, and the English suffered more than 131,000 dead, eclipsing the American casualty list for the entire Great War. For the massive casualties, the Allies had only pushed the Germans back a few miles. Little remains today of the Somme battlefield but for a three-hundred-foot hole known as the Lochnagar Crater; however, the Somme left a national scar on England that left generations questioning the wisdom of war.

The battles of Verdun and the Somme failed to break the stalemate. Neither side was able to break through enemy lines. The only outcome was the massive casualties of young men in the muddy trenches. The landscape of battlefields was virtually obliterated, covered in craters from thousands of artillery shell explosions that left hardly a tree standing. Soldiers remained in the trenches sometimes for weeks before they were relieved. Bunkers became their homes, and sanitation was limited. Rats fed on the corpses and multiplied, while lice infested the men. There was the inescapable stench of putrid, decaying bodies. The stalemate continued on the Western Front in the seesaw war of attrition.

In June, the Russians launched the Brusilov Offensive against the Austro-Hungarians in Galicia, now part of Ukraine. The Austrians had concentrated much of their forces against Italy, leaving their eastern flank weakened. Russian General Aleksei Brusilov attacked along a broad, three-hundred-mile front, using short artillery bombardment and specially trained shock troops to assault Austrian weak points. The offensive was one of the most decisive battles of the Great War, capturing hundreds of thousands of prisoners and forcing the Germans to end the Verdun campaign and transfer numerous divisions east to prevent Austria from collapsing.

With this decisive victory in hand, the Allies goaded Romania into the war in August, promising it could annex Transylvania, home to a large Romanian minority. The hope was that the pressure from the Romanians might knock Austria-Hungary out of the war. It turned out to be a disastrous decision for the Romanians. A combined Austrian-German force under Falkenhayn made quick work of the country, knocking it out of the war in five months and occupying Bucharest. The Germans demanded steep reparations and large quantities of food for their war machine.

Despite the success of the Brusilov Offensive, things had not gone well for Russia. The German army bested it in nearly every battle, casualties were high, and the Russian economy was nearing collapse with food and fuel shortages, rampant inflation, and worker rebellions. The autocratic Czar Nicholas had taken personal command of the army, and with its defeats his popularity plummeted. His wife Alexandra was under the influence of the mystic Rasputin, whom aristocrats assassinated in December 1916. The situation was rapidly unraveling for the ruling Romanov dynasty.

The first of two Russian revolutions occurred in March 1917. Hungry munitions workers staged a massive strike in Petrograd, the Russian capital, and they were soon joined by the army. Czar Nicholas was forced to abdicate, and a left-leaning Provisional Government under Alexander Kerensky took charge. The Russians desperately wanted to remove themselves from the war, but the Allies would only deliver urgently needed assistance if Russia continued to fight. Recognizing that Russia teetered on collapse, the Germans gave it a push in April by allowing communist revolutionaries living in Switzerland, such as Vladimir Lenin, to cross German territory in a special train. Lenin made his way through Sweden and Finland, and was soon in Petrograd. Russia remained in the war for another year, with the disastrous consequence of yet another political coup in November that would unexpectedly reshape world history for much of the 20th century.

Americans misread the March revolution in Russia, believing it a victory for liberal democracy, when Russia was rife with internal conflict between the fragile new government and the Bolsheviks, who were infecting the army with propaganda and soldier committees known as soviets. The Bolsheviks were something entirely new: neither liberal, nor democratic; they were radical Marxists who like Christian missionaries wanted to convert the world to their revolutionary cause. Under Lenin they were absolutely ruthless. Russia went from an autocratic government to a totalitarian state.⁵³

The 1916 Election

The year 1916 was a banner year for Woodrow Wilson. He got labor laws passed, including one that limited child labor. He pushed through an income tax increase to fund the country’s Preparedness campaign, and successfully established the estate tax system to prevent massive amounts of money transferring from one wealthy generation to another, which would have worsened economic inequality. Wilson appointed Louis Brandeis to the U.S. Supreme Court, the first Jew to serve on the highest court. It was a lengthy confirmation battle, taking more than four months. Brandeis was famous for his support of the working class and for criticizing the money trust, which made him unpopular among bankers. “We must make our choice,” Brandeis once remarked. “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”⁵⁴

Wilson sought a second term as president. He was popular, but his liberalism was controversial and the Republican opposition was strong. The question of the Great War lingered over the country, one that split along ethnic rather than partisan lines. Interventionists like Theodore Roosevelt demanded that America enter the war, but they remained a minority. Pacifism was still a pervasive stance, and most Americans wanted to stay out of Europe’s war. Wilson’s opponent was Charles Evans Hughes, a conservative and Supreme Court associate justice who stepped down from the court for the campaign.

The 1916 presidential campaign was considered the first modern election, and Wilson ran an operation that tapped into new forms of mass media, opposition research, and targeted advertising, including short ads in movie theaters. Many of Wilson’s proxies used the slogan: “He kept us out of war,” a powerful message that echoed strongly with the public, though Wilson’s campaign did not actually use it, knowing that war was a possibility. Vice President Thomas Marshall went so far as to say, “Nobody is able to trace to him any statement of that kind.” Wilson’s campaign kept his opponent Hughes on edge over the question of entering the war, a question that Hughes was eager to dodge.⁵⁵

Edith Wilson thought that her husband’s defeat was likely in 1916 and began making postelection plans. “What a delightful pessimist you are!” Woodrow told her. “One must never court defeat. If it comes, accept it like a soldier; but don’t anticipate it, for that destroys your fighting spirit.”⁵⁶ On Election Day, the couple traveled to New Jersey, Wilson’s home state, to vote. Suffrage was not yet legal in the Garden State, so she remained in the car while her husband voted in his Princeton precinct. Once the Nineteenth Amendment passed, she was able to vote just one time in a presidential election: 1920. She and her husband mailed in their ballots that year as New Jersey residents. She never got to vote in a presidential election again, as she became a resident of Washington, D.C. again once they left the White House.⁵⁷

Woodrow Wilson won the 1916 presidential election by a narrow margin. He narrowly took the popular vote, and the Electoral College vote was 277 to 254. Wilson won the South, West, and crucially, Ohio. But Wilson had also won an actual majority of the vote, unlike in 1912, when he won on a plurality. Democrats lost some seats in the House of Representatives, though they maintained a twelve-seat majority in the Senate. Wilson was the first Democratic president to win consecutive terms since Andrew Jackson. He had a narrow mandate to continue as president.

Wilson had in fact kept the country out of the deadly World War that had raged for more than two years. With his reelection, the president could now turn his attention to mediating peace between the combatants, whom he believed surely realized that this war was not winnable.

Mediating Peace

President Wilson had long signaled that he would lead a new peace initiative to end the Great War. He sought to be the mediator who would bring the world back from the brink of disaster. But mediation, peace, and war were a complicated dance involving multiple partners and competing agendas. Wilson planned for the peace campaign to begin in December, shortly after the presidential election, but then caught a terrible cold, further delaying his initiative.

The Germans finally grew tired of waiting for Wilson. With the recent victory over Romania in hand, they were in a stronger position than the Allies and believed they were winning the war. The Germans preempted Wilson’s expected mediation effort with a peace offer of their own on December 12, 1916. Germany undermined Wilson’s peace effort by offering a disingenuous olive branch with an arrogant list of demands. The Allies rejected it out of hand.⁵⁸

On December 18, Wilson began his long-awaited diplomatic initiative, offering to mediate peace with the belligerents. Each side was to declare its war aims, and the U.S. would then help them negotiate a middle course that would be acceptable to all. Wilson fixated on the belligerents’ war aims but without understanding why they were fighting. The note was received coolly.

Secretary of State Robert Lansing irreparably damaged Wilson’s mediation effort by issuing a statement explaining Wilson’s peace initiative in the context that both sides were stepping on American rights. “I mean by that that we are drawing nearer the verge of war ourselves,” an assertion that many interpreted as meaning that the U.S. would enter the war if this diplomatic initiative failed. The stock market immediately plunged, though soon recovered. The secretary backpedaled later the same day by saying that the U.S. intended to remain neutral.⁵⁹

Lansing was a hawk who viewed the German government as autocratic and believed that the U.S. would eventually enter the war on the side of the Allies. He later called the president’s peace efforts a “useless waste of time.”⁶⁰ The Central Powers refused to state their war aims as Wilson requested, believing that it would weaken them at the negotiating table. Meanwhile the Allies submitted their war aims in January 1917, demanding that Germany accept blame for the war, pay reparations, and restitute Alsace-Lorraine to France. The Germans considered this a nonstarter.⁶¹

The president was frustrated but undaunted. He consulted with Edward House, his private adviser, who was equally displeased as Lansing with Wilson’s botched peace initiative. House warned that war might be inevitable and that it would be wise to make preparations. “There will be no war,” the president countered. “This country does not intend to become involved in this war. We are the only one of the great white nations that is free from war today, and it would be a crime against civilization for us to go in.”⁶²

Wilson renewed his peace overture in January 1917, this time without Lansing’s help, and in fact, very much kept secret from him. Wilson never fully trusted Lansing’s counsel and excluded Lansing for obvious reasons. Instead, the president enlisted his wife Edith and Edward House for their advice. House asked Wilson if he would show the draft peace proposal to the secretary of state. No, he responded, but he would before releasing it. “He thought Lansing was not in sympathy with his purpose to keep out of war,” House recorded in his diary.⁶³

On January 22, Wilson addressed the Senate to commence his new peace plan, giving a speech that was one of the most memorable of his presidency. He restated his position, one that he had advocated since the beginning of the war: The United States was prepared to help mediate a reasonable and just peace, one that would ensure no one side could win over another. It was to be a “peace without victory.” He went on to explain how “Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor’s terms imposed upon the vanquished,” one that would leave “a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand. Only a peace between equals can last.” These were prophetic words. Wilson laid out concrete aims: an independent Poland, freedom of the seas, limited naval armaments, and an end to military alliances. The U.S. would help resolve conflicts through a League of Peace.⁶⁴

Republicans widely criticized Wilson’s peace plan. His perennial political opponent, Theodore Roosevelt, called the president’s words “the idlest and most empty of all empty words.” His searing response went on to refute Wilson’s plan point-by-point.⁶⁵ A week later, after Wilson stated that he was against conscription, Roosevelt took up the charge again. “Peace without victory is the natural ideal of the man who is too proud to fight,” he wrote, cleverly rehashing Wilson’s 1915 statement after the Lusitania sinking.”⁶⁶ The New York Times took to Wilson’s defense, calling Roosevelt the “Regressive of Oyster Bay.”⁶⁷

Both the Allies and Central Powers were desperate for Wilson’s peace plan, but neither could admit it. They had gone too far. Neither side would back down and were committed to fighting the total war to the end, an end that was nowhere in sight. Wilson’s “peace without victory” speech was all for naught. The Allies wanted nothing but victory and wondered how they could get the Americans to join them, rather than to arbitrate a peace settlement. Meanwhile the Germans were preparing to escalate the conflict to knock England out of the war by renewing unrestricted submarine warfare. They did this knowing full well that the United States would likely enter the war on the Allies’ side.