THREE

The Decision

After Robert Lansing’s public acknowledgement in December 1916 that the U.S. might enter the Great War, the German high command concluded that American involvement in the war was inevitable. Germany did not worry about America’s puny army, untrained for modern warfare, but feared its industrial might and bountiful food supplies. Great Britain was especially dependent on American provisions, so the Germans determined to knock Britain out of the war before the U.S. could marshal its forces. The high command estimated that a concentrated submarine campaign would take six months to force Britain into submission. Unrestricted submarine warfare would recommence on February 1, 1917. It was a calculated risk, one that ultimately failed.

Perhaps war with the United States was inevitable. The German high command assumed it was. Lansing certainly thought so—and in fact his words had ensured that the Germans would not come to the peace table. Only Wilson was committed to exhausting every peace opportunity before time ran out. He hoped to play a role in mediating an end to the conflict.

German Ambassador Johann von Bernstorff received notice of the submarine campaign’s renewal on January 19 via coded telegram; he was to inform the U.S. government of the campaign on February 1. In the intervening period, he pleaded with Berlin to reconsider. Wilson was ramping up his next peace initiative, making his “peace without victory” speech on January 22. Bernstorff knew that the submarine campaign would mean war with the United States.¹

The German response to Wilson’s peace initiative—unrestricted submarine warfare against England, and by proxy, against the United States—showed contempt for Wilson and made an enemy out of the one person who could have helped stop the war, and just as the Germans were beginning to prevail against the Allies. Ultimately it was the Germans who blundered, alienating the United States and earning a new enemy they could ill afford. They lost their best chance for a negotiated peace. And had the U.S. remained neutral, they may well have won the war.

On the eve before unrestricted submarine warfare resumed, Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg secretly sent Ambassador Bernstorff the list of Germany’s war aims, a condition that the U.S. had requested for future peace negotiations. Bernstorff shared them with Edward House in the hopes of forestalling a war. But the chancellor noted it was too late to halt the submarine campaign. His own political power was nearly irrelevant by early 1917.²

Likewise, Kaiser Wilhelm’s authority was waning. He was erratic, impulsive, and proved an inadequate wartime leader. The German high command had usurped much of his authority. The Kaiser watched impassively as Ludendorff—known as the “silent dictator”—took charge of the economy and war policy. The politicians knew that resuming unrestricted submarine warfare was reckless, but the military saw it only through their need to defeat England.

On Sunday, January 31, Ambassador Bernstorff handed over the message to Secretary of State Robert Lansing that unrestricted submarine warfare would resume the next day. Lansing was probably quietly pleased, as it significantly strengthened the hand of the interventionists. But before Bernstorff dropped by Lansing’s office, he sent a coded message to the captains of German ships interned in American harbors. It was the signal to destroy their engines. Bernstorff knew war was imminent and that the Americans would seize the vessels.

The American press erupted in denunciation at the German submarine declaration. “This is but a proclamation of a new career of crime, more dreadful, more extended, more ruthless, and even more callously lawless than that other in which her naval commanders took such a huge toll of innocent human lives,” avowed the New York Times.³ Many commented that Germany had de facto declared war on the United States. The country’s leading pacifist, William Jennings Bryan, meanwhile praised Wilson’s peace efforts before the American Neutral Conference: “I have faith, not only in the President’s desire to keep us out of war, but in his ability to do so.” Bryan acknowledged that war was now a possibility, but he was willfully ignorant of the shift in public opinion against the Germans.⁴

Edward House jumped on a train in New York bound for Washington on February 1 at the president’s request. The two men met with Lansing to discuss their options. They quickly agreed that severing diplomatic relations with Germany was the proper decision. Lansing ordered his staff to prepare Bernstorff’s passport. Wilson was deeply saddened. “The President said he felt as if the world had suddenly reversed itself; that after going from east to west, it had begun to go from west to east, and that he could not get his balance,” House wrote. The submarine warfare renewal came as quite a shock, though his advisers had been telling him that it was a likely outcome.⁵

The State Department was expecting a renewal of unrestricted submarine warfare, but Wilson was truly surprised by the German announcement. He was fully expecting to launch a serious peace initiative, only to see the Germans take an aggressive posture that threatened the United States. Wilson still hoped for neutrality, and still wishing to avoid war, the logical next step was to arm American merchant ships so they could protect themselves from German U-boats.

The cabinet met on February 2, as Wilson wanted their input on the next steps. “Shall I break off diplomatic relations with Germany?” he asked. David Houston, the secretary of agriculture, recorded that Wilson made a rather surprising statement that getting involved in the war would weaken the white race, in particular against the “yellow race” like the Japanese.⁶ After allaying Wilson’s concerns about the Japanese gaining strength in Asia, Houston gave his recommendation for how to deal with Germany: “Immediately sever diplomatic relations and let come what will. Tell Congress what you have done.”⁷

Wilson followed this advice. The next day, he spoke before a joint session of Congress, announcing that he was severing diplomatic relations with Germany. “I refuse to believe that it is the intention of the German authorities to do in fact what they have warned us they will feel at liberty to do,” Wilson declared. “Only actual overt acts on their part can make me believe it even now,” yet he still had hope for peace. It was not a war declaration. With the phrase “overt acts,” Wilson left it in the hands of the Germans to decide if they wanted a war with the United States. Congress was nearly unanimous in its support of Wilson’s actions. Much of the country still supported peace, though the pacifists were weakening.⁸

The Secret Service immediately assumed control of the Imperial German Embassy in Washington while Ambassador Bernstorff and his staff packed their bags. They sailed for Denmark on February 14. If the German government wished to communicate with the Americans, it would have to do so through the Swiss government.

In addition, Wilson ordered the seizure of a number of German vessels interned in American ports. These included two auxiliary cruisers in Philadelphia, the SS Kronprinz Wilhelm and SS Prinz Eitel Friedrich, the ocean liner SS Kronprinzessin Cecilie in Boston, and the liner SS Appam in Newport News. Other ships were detained in Panama, and guards were placed on ships in New Orleans. American officials were concerned that the Germans would attempt to sink these ships in American harbors; however, when officials boarded the vessels, they soon discovered that the Germans had sabotaged the engines so that they were dead in the water. Wilson confirmed two days later that the U.S. would continue to protect and respect German property.⁹

The National German-American Alliance (NGAA) issued a statement in support of the president after he severed diplomatic relations. Charles Hexamer, the organization’s president, urged its members to remain loyal to the United States. The NGAA endorsed Wilson’s move against Germany. The organization was collecting money for the German Red Cross, but the board voted to give the money to the American Red Cross instead in a gesture of patriotism.¹⁰

The Washington Post, an anti-Wilson newspaper, denounced Germany’s military actions as violating the Monroe Doctrine. “The attempt by Germany to deny the use of the high seas to neutral nations is essentially an act of war,” the paper declared, though it hoped the country would not have to resort to conflict, nor depend on complicating alliances. “The prime duty of the United States is to protect democracy throughout the New World,” the editorial concluded, falling short of President Wilson’s vision to protect democracy throughout the entire world.¹¹

Theodore Roosevelt stood at the sidelines, stunned as to why Wilson had not acted more decisively. “He is yellow all through in the presence of danger, either physically or morally, and will accept any insult or injury from the hands of a fighting man,” the former president wrote his close friend Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. Roosevelt clearly believed that war was not only imminent, it was preferable. He called the leading pacifist in Congress, Republican Senator Robert La Follette “an unhung traitor, and if the war should come, he ought to be hung.”¹²

On February 3—the same day that Wilson severed relations with Germany—unrestricted submarine warfare claimed its first American victim ship: the SS Housatonic. The submarine U-53 maintained the cruiser rules, stopping the ship to warn it, evacuating the crew, then sinking it. On February 12, the schooner Lyman M. Law was sunk under similar conditions near Sardinia. The German submarine campaign quickly ramped up. In the first month, the Germans sank 252,621 tons of shipping. This more than doubled to 564,497 tons in March. They sank a staggering 860,334 tons in April, far more than the Allies could replace.¹³

Even with severed diplomatic relations, the U.S. and Germany were not at war. American shippers responded to the submarine campaign by ordering their ships to stay in harbor, reducing the risk of being torpedoed. Wilson’s response was “armed neutrality,” a policy to arm merchantmen so they could fight back against an attacking submarine. It was an unsound policy, as submarines could remain submerged, and once a ship fired on a U-boat, the sub could then legitimately sink the ship. Wilson was reluctant to act without Congress’s backing, so the Armed Ship Bill was introduced and debated. Congress took up a massive naval bill to build new ships and submarines. It got to conference committee, but then a filibuster in the Senate halted progress.

Largely unnoticed was another action undertaken by Congress on February 5, just two days after the U.S. severed relations with Germany. Congress overrode President Wilson’s veto for the very first time, turning the Immigration Act into law. White nationalism was ascendant, and the law—underpinned by the flawed belief in eugenics—banned most Asian immigrants as well as morally undesirable conditions and imposed a literacy test.¹⁴

Unrestricted submarine warfare had led to the break in diplomatic relations but did not immediately lead to war. Two months of armed neutrality followed. It would take an existential threat, an “overt act,” as Wilson called it, for the U.S. to declare war. The act was not long in coming.

Mencken’s European Trip

Although his mother was German, H. L. Mencken did not speak the language growing up in Baltimore, nor did he have particular feelings one way or the other about his ancestral homeland. He changed his opinion during the war as he began to notice English propaganda, and he fell in line philosophically with Germans. “I, too, like the leaders of Germany, had grave doubts about democracy. I, too, felt an instinctive antipathy to the whole Puritan scheme of things, with its gross and nauseating hypocrisies, its idiotic theologies, its moral obsessions, its pervasive Philistinism,” he recalled later in life. “I was implacably pro-German.”¹⁵

“When World War I actually started I began forthwith to whoop for the Kaiser, and I kept up that whooping so long as there was any free speech left in the United States,” Mencken recalled. “That period, unhappily, was not prolonged.” After the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, he realized that the U.S. would eventually join the war, and his editors curtailed his pro-German editorials. He made plans to go abroad, “to see something of the German Army in action before it would be too late.”¹⁶

On December 28, 1916, Mencken boarded the Danish ship Oscar II in Hoboken bound for Copenhagen (this was the same “peace ship” that Henry Ford had sailed on his ill-fated mission a year before). Denmark was neutral and thus could sail through the contested seas, though the Royal Navy stopped and inspected neutral vessels. Mencken described the polyglot passengers from around the world, and how everyone hated everyone else. He was much bemused by a Russian general with a giant walrus moustache who could put away copious amounts of food. “While he was gobbling away a steward rushed in with the news that a German submarine was in sight, and we all ran on deck to get a look at it, and make our peace with our Maker,” Mencken wrote. “Somewhat to our disappointment it merely circled round us twice, and then made off politely. When we got back to the dining-room the Walrus was helping himself to the forequarters of the pig, and excavating another quart of stuffing.” The general had probably been in the U.S. to buy munitions for the Russian army.¹⁷

The North Atlantic was a challenging place for a neutral vessel during the Great War. Not only might German U-boats attempt to sink them, but the Royal Navy was suspicious of anyone on board as being a possible spy. The British boarded the Oscar II and briefly detained the ship in Kirkwall, Scotland while they interviewed the passengers and inspected every piece of luggage, searching for German contraband. It took two days to search the ship.¹⁸ Mencken relayed how they intended to search the bags of Glenn Stewart, an American diplomat en route to his post in Vienna. They claimed that Ambassador Walter Hines Page have given the British permission to search diplomatic baggage, even though this was highly irregular. Stewart refused and supposedly produced a pistol. “If you touch my trunk I shall be obliged to shoot you,” Mencken recorded, who was an eyewitness to the confrontation (albeit a rather biased one). The British backed down and sent an admiral to apologize the next day.¹⁹

It took seventeen days for the Oscar II to reach Copenhagen. Once the ship docked, Mencken made his way to Berlin, the German capital. While in Europe, Mencken was to mail his stories to his employer, the Baltimore Sun, but the British blockade and their censorship prevented most of his stories from reaching the U.S. He would not be able to file the articles until he reached Cuba in early March on his return journey.

The Imperial German government gave Mencken permission for a press trip to the Eastern Front, where the Germans were pushing the Russians back into what is now Lithuania. It was the dead of winter and unimaginably cold. He returned to Berlin the night before the Germans announced the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, and he was there when President Wilson severed diplomatic relations on February 3. For a time he and the other journalists believed they would be arrested, especially after Reuters reported that the U.S. had seized German ships interned in American harbors.²⁰ Mencken applied to the Foreign Office to allow him to depart with Ambassador James Gerard, and while waiting visited the opera. “No sandwiches between the acts. Not even beer,” Mencken complained in his diary. Food shortages were rampant in Germany, with the public often limited to just potatoes and turnips.²¹

The journalists were eventually allowed to travel, which was fortunate: they may well have spent the rest of the war at a German camp. Mencken was luckier than he probably realized. He departed Berlin with Ambassador Gerard. They journeyed to Switzerland, then to Paris together, though neither liked the other (Mencken described the ambassador as “a blatant and very offensive ass”).²² From there, Mencken shivered in unheated trains as he made his way to Spain, then found a ship in La Coruña that would take him to Cuba. It was the first time he was able to make contact with his employer, the Baltimore Sun, in over a month.²³

Mencken landed in Cuba just in time to witness yet another coup on the unstable island. While there he filed his stories from Europe in the form of a travel diary. The Sun printed most of Mencken’s diary in installments in March, but after war was declared on April 6, the paper stopped publishing Mencken’s articles on account of his pro-German views. The Sun’s editors had been sympathetic to the Allies long before the U.S. entered the war, a position at odds with Mencken’s stance.

“When I returned in March, 1917, free speech was completely suspended, and for two years I was pretty well hobbled,” Mencken wrote.²⁴ He published an article profiling Erich Ludendorff, the German quartermaster general who was quietly leading the war effort, in the Atlantic Monthly in June. Though Mencken outlined the general’s military career and bureaucratic skill, the journalist did not get to meet Ludendorff and acknowledged, “He remains, after nearly three years of war, a man of mystery.”²⁵ Yet it certainly provided American readers with a sense of what they were up against: a military junta that had marshaled every aspect of the German economy to win the war.

Silenced by the Baltimore Sun for the foreseeable future, Mencken wrote briefly for the pro-German New York Evening Mail, until the owner was indicted for allegedly using German funds to finance his newspaper. Mencken would not return to the Baltimore Sun until 1920 when war fever had subsided, and then resumed his irascible writings with a vengeance.

The Zimmermann Telegram

For two and a half years, President Wilson had fought to keep the United States out of the Great War. Germany’s resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare was a hostile act that could serve as a cause for war, but Wilson remained reluctant. He continued to seek a way out of the imbroglio. As long as the Germans committed no “overt act,” the U.S. would remain with armed neutrality. The Germans immediately stepped over the line.

The overt act came from a bureaucrat, Arthur Zimmermann. A recent appointee as foreign secretary, Zimmermann was pliable to the German war party. He rubber-stamped their efforts for unrestricted submarine warfare and proposed an idea of his own to tie down the U.S. while Germany knocked England out of the war.

On January 19, Zimmermann sent a coded message to Ambassador Bernstorff. He was instructed to forward it to the German ambassador in Mexico City, who was in turn to deliver the telegram to the Mexican government. With the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, Germany hoped that the United States would remain neutral, but in the event that war broke out, Zimmermann proposed an alliance with Mexico and Japan to prevent American forces from reinforcing the Allies. The telegram promised: “That we shall make war together and together make peace. We shall give general financial support and it is understood that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in New Mexico, Texas and Arizona.” It was to be a defensive arrangement—but the U.S. had to make the first move by declaring war.²⁶

German diplomats hoped that Mexican President Venustiano Carranza would attack the United States on a much larger scale than Pancho Villa’s raid on Columbus in March 1916. Luckily the U.S. had pulled out of Mexico in February 1917. Pancho Villa was still at large, but Wilson had far larger issues to deal with than the Mexican bandit, especially once the president received a copy of the coded telegram.

How the so-called Zimmermann Telegram ended up on President Wilson’s desk was one of the great intelligence coups of the 20th century, and it altered the course of the Great War. The Germans had no direct communications link to the Americas once the British cut the transatlantic cables in 1914, so they worked out an arrangement with the U.S. State Department to relay messages to the German embassy in Washington. The German Foreign Office sent two telegrams, both encoded into the same message, via the American embassy in Berlin. The embassy relayed it to the American embassy in Copenhagen, which in turn relayed it to London. The London embassy then forwarded it to the U.S. State Department, which printed the telegram—still encoded—and handed it to Ambassador Bernstorff. Bernstorff’s staff forwarded it to the German embassy in Mexico City via Western Union.²⁷

The problem was that not only were the British tracking every German telegram, as they had broken the German ciphers, but that they were listening in on American diplomatic communications, which were easily decipherable. Thus they were able to decode the Zimmerman Telegram soon after it was transmitted. Admiral William Hall, the head of the British naval intelligence unit known as Room 40, knew immediately that this document could bring the U.S. into the war, but he had to protect the fact that his men had deciphered it in London, otherwise the Americans would know their communications were compromised. Hall arranged to intercept the German message sent to Mexico City through Western Union, one that used an older code, and used this second copy to cover his tracks.²⁸

British intelligence was hoping that the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare would draw the Americans into the war on the Allies’ side. Instead, President Wilson held fast to armed neutrality. After several weeks, Hall played his trump card. He delivered a copy of the Zimmermann Telegram to the U.S. Embassy in London with the cover story that it had been retrieved in Mexico. The American ambassador, Walter Hines Page, forwarded the message to Wilson on February 24, who read it the next day. The president was stunned.²⁹

Admiral Hall understood that Ambassador Bernstorff might have some influence in Berlin over the peace effort, and so arranged to have his Europe-bound ship, the SS Frederik VIII, delayed in Halifax for twelve days while the Zimmermann Telegram played out in the States. Bernstorff arrived in Germany too late, and only to find that he had been unfairly scapegoated for leaking the telegram.³⁰

After spending several days authenticating the telegram, the Wilson administration released it to the Associated Press, which published it on March 1. It made the front page of newspapers around the country. The Senate engaged in a fierce debate that day. Isolationists like Robert La Follette and William Stone wanted to know the source of the telegram, correctly sensing that the British were trying to manipulate the U.S. into entering the war, while interventionists like Henry Cabot Lodge saw the note as a provocation. President Wilson refused to tell Congress where he got the telegram, only vouching that it was genuine.

On March 3, Zimmermann confirmed that the telegram was true. He could have denied the telegram, or the German high command might have condemned the message as not reflecting the Kaiser’s thinking, but instead the foreign secretary publicly admitted that he had sent it. Secretary of State Robert Lansing breathed a sigh of relief: if the Germans had denounced the telegram as a fraud, he would have had to provide evidence of where the U.S. got it and how they had deciphered it.³¹

For Mexico, the idea of making war against the United States was a nonstarter. It was still fighting a civil war and was in no shape to wage a military campaign against a much stronger neighbor. Germany had no ability to deliver the southwest United States to Mexico. It was an empty promise. The Carranza administration, seeking to remain friendly with the U.S., denied any role in the telegram, only that it was the recipient of the message and had no intention of acting on it. As Treasury Secretary William McAdoo wrote, “The German note eventually reached the Mexican wastebasket.”³²

The Zimmermann Telegram caused a significant shift in American public opinion. People who had been neutral began calling for war. The telegram largely united the country to the threat Germany posed. The Germans made no apology, nor did they back off from unrestricted submarine warfare. More ships were being sent to the bottom of the Atlantic than ever before, and more Americans were being killed. On March 18, three American merchant marine vessels were torpedoed with high loss of life. German aggression made it nearly inevitable that there would be war with the United States. President Wilson certainly recognized the telegram as an “overt act” and began planning accordingly. The telegram proved a fatal miscalculation for Germany.

Among the swirl of debate and outrage over the Zimmermann Telegram, Wilson was quietly sworn in for his second term on March 4, just minutes after Congress adjourned. It being a Sunday, there were no major festivities: the oath was done quickly with little ceremony. The next day would be the more formal public inaugural celebration. Wilson and his new wife Edith rode in a car to the U.S. Capitol. Security was tighter than any inauguration since the Civil War: special detectives lined Pennsylvania Avenue and soldiers manned machine gun positions along the route. The day was sunny but cold with a gusty west wind, and the president at times held onto his top hat to keep it from blowing away. Some 40,000 people waited outside the Capitol to cheer Wilson and watch the parade—a relatively small crowd. But this was a second inauguration, and the American people already knew their man.³³

Wilson’s second inaugural address made no reference to the Zimmermann Telegram or to the submarine provocation, but clearly the World War was on everyone’s mind. He gave a hint to the struggle ahead: “We may even be drawn on, by circumstances, not by our own purpose or desire, to a more active assertion of our rights as we see them and a more immediate association with the great struggle itself.” The president began preparing the country not just for armed neutrality, but for the possibility of war. “We are provincials no longer. The tragic events of the thirty months of vital turmoil through which we have just passed have made us citizens of the world. There can be no turning back. Our own fortunes as a nation are involved whether we would have it so or not.”³⁴

After the Zimmermann Telegram was published, the House of Representatives quickly passed the Armed Ship Bill allowing merchant ships to protect themselves against U-boats. However, isolationist Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin (a state with a large German population) led a filibuster to prevent the bill from advancing until the Congressional session expired on March 4. President Wilson denounced these senators in no uncertain terms, calling them “a little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own.”³⁵ With Congress adjourned and public opinion on his side, Wilson issued an executive order on March 12 to arm the merchant ships. This was an unusual action, as foreign ports of call are reluctant to allow armed vessels to dock. Merchantmen could now engage in an undeclared war against U-boats to protect themselves. More importantly, American ships would now travel in convoys with naval escorts.³⁶

Between the publication of the Zimmermann Telegram and the war declaration were five tense weeks. The toll of sunk American ships rose. On March 12, the Algonquin became the first American vessel to be sunk without warning under Germany’s unrestricted rules of engagement. On March 16 it was the SS Vigilancia’s turn, followed by the SS City of Memphis on the 17th, and the oiler Illinois on the 18th, all torpedoed without warning. The oil tanker SS Healdton went down on March 21 under uncertain circumstances. On April 1, the armed steamer SS Aztec was sunk, the first such loss since Wilson had authorized merchantmen to arm themselves. There was mounting public pressure on the president to act.

Many factors led to Wilson’s decision to seek a war declaration, not just the Zimmermann Telegram, but also the increasing number of American ships that were being sunk and the rising death toll. The Germans were challenging the very basis for the freedom of the seas. But the president, who had literally done everything to keep the country out of the war, had run out of options. War stared him in the face as the only answer.

The Anti-German Hysteria

The United States had a German problem. By the U.S. census undertaken in 1910, the country had ninety-two million people. Of these, 2.5 million were born in Germany. The second generation of German-Americans was nearly 5.8 million people. All told, there were eight million German-Americans in the country, making them the largest ethnic group. There were major centers of German culture and population: Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and St. Louis were the best known, but also in Baltimore, Chicago, New York, Pittsburgh, and countless small communities. The risk of war with Germany was rising by early 1917, but no one knew how German-Americans would respond.³⁷

The great wave of German immigrants had come to the U.S. in the 1840s and 1850s after a failed political revolution, concurrent with the potato blight in Ireland that sent millions of impoverished Irish to American shores. The Germans fought for the Union in the Civil War and were model citizens. Another major wave of Germans came in the 1880s, largely farmers who were squeezed out by modernized farming. The Germans were festive, fond of carousing and culture, dancing and drinking in beer gardens—even on Sundays, much to the offense of Sabbatarians. Count von Bernstorff, the German ambassador, recognized that Americans were fond of stereotyping the German-American as a “Beer-Philistine, whom they disdainfully called a ‘Dutchman.’”³⁸

With the great wave of 19th-century immigration also came the idea of dual ethnic identity: people who were both English and American, German and American, or Irish and American. They were pejoratively called “hyphenates.” Hyphenates came under fierce criticism during the Great War for perceived disloyalty to the United States, their fiercest critic being Theodore Roosevelt. “I do not believe in hyphenated Americans,” Roosevelt denounced in a letter. “I do not believe in German-Americans or Irish-Americans; and I believe just as little in English-Americans.”³⁹ Neither German-Americans nor Irish-Americans had a fondness for Great Britain, and so when the war broke out, many of them sided with the Central Powers. Identity politics was at the core of the American divide over the war.

The Germans were criticized—as virtually every immigrant community has been—for not assimilating fast enough into American society. There were so many Germans that they could remain in German-speaking pockets for longer than other immigrant groups could hold out. By the time of the Great War, most German-Americans were second generation and the process of assimilation was well underway.⁴⁰ People like H. L. Mencken maintained pride in their heritage (sometimes in the guise of chauvinism), even as they saw themselves as being fully American. Mencken wrote, “The fact is that my ‘loyalty’ to Germany, as a state or a nation, is absolutely nil.”⁴¹

German-Americans had insisted that the U.S. remain neutral in the war, even to the point of not selling munitions or providing financing to the Allies. But their loyalty was called into question once the Germans resumed unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1917. When the U.S. severed diplomatic relations with Germany, National Guard units were called up to protect vital facilities, factories, and plants against German saboteurs. Troops now guarded the ninety-one German ships interned in American harbors.

The publication of the Zimmermann Telegram on March 1 left the German-American community reeling in disbelief that the telegram was real. Once Foreign Secretary Zimmermann acknowledged that he had in fact sent the message, German-Americans hastened to distance themselves from it. Bernard Ritter, the publisher of the Staats-Zeitung, issued a statement: “Viewed from any angle, Dr. Zimmermann’s instructions to the German Minister in Mexico constitute a mistake so grave that it renders the situation almost hopeless.” George Sylvester Viereck, who published Viereck’s The American Weekly (formerly the Fatherland, but still an arm of German propaganda), cast his suspicion on the British while denouncing former president Theodore Roosevelt for warmongering, and defended the German Foreign Office for making a sound defensive strategy should the United States enter the war. That said, he acknowledged that the two countries would likely part ways, and German-Americans knew where they stood: “We are Americans before we are pro-Germans.”⁴²

A wave of anti-German hysteria swept over the country after the Zimmermann Telegram was released to the public. Every German-American was now viewed with suspicion; any one of them could be a traitor, a saboteur, a seditionist, or a spy. There was the terrifying prospect of a homegrown German army rising up to sabotage American industries, and people feared another incident like the catastrophic Black Tom explosion the summer before. Soon German-Americans would be branded as Huns—or the Boche, as the French called them.

Earlier in the war, German Foreign Secretary Gottlieb von Jagow had supposedly made a threat to the American ambassador, James Gerard, as Josephus Daniels recorded in his diary: “If there is war between Germany and the U.S., you will find there are 500,000 German reservists ready to take up arms for [the] mother country and you will have civil war.” Gerard responded, “I do not know whether there are 500,000 or not. But we have 500,001 lampposts and every man who takes up arms against his country will swing from a lamppost.” As the likelihood of war approached, many feared that this German shadow army actually existed.⁴³

Taking a break from the White House during the crisis, President Wilson and his wife Edith sailed down the Potomac River aboard the presidential yacht Mayflower and into the Chesapeake Bay. They visited Tangier Island, a small island populated by a little fishing village. The Wilsons rowed ashore, only to find the town seemingly deserted. They finally found a man, who confessed that they thought they were a party of “Germans coming to blow up the island.” The townsfolk swarmed out of their homes, once they realized it was the president rather than the Germans, and everyone wanted to shake hands with Wilson.⁴⁴

The Department of Justice fielded a Bureau of Investigation (the predecessor to the FBI), but it was a small unit and unprepared for the great task ahead. With tacit approval of the president’s cabinet, Attorney General Thomas Gregory organized 250,000 volunteer spies to keep an eye on German-Americans and dissenters in March 1917, through an organization known as the American Protective League. They were given badges and ranks. The APL thrived on conspiracy, leaked innuendo, and contributed greatly to the hysteria. Its actions had the whiff of vigilantism. As the war progressed, the APL would turn from rooting out German spies to intimidating and stifling American dissidents to hunting down draft dodgers.

German-Americans quickly found themselves marginalized and under suspicion. Many popular food items were renamed to remove their German association. Frankfurters became hot dogs. Sauerkraut became liberty cabbage. Kaiser rolls became liberty buns. Countless streets with German names were renamed, and even towns were Anglicized. The Germania Life Insurance Company changed its name to the Guardian Life Insurance Company. Orchestras were forbidden from playing music composed by German artists like Beethoven. Schools banished German from being taught. In 1917, there were 522 German-language journals and newspapers being published in the United States; many of these publications folded, under pressure to conform to English. By the end of the war, only twenty-six German-language dailies were still being published.⁴⁵

H. L. Mencken wrote a friend, “The other day the German Hospital in New York was raided by armed police on the ground that some one was signaling Zeppelins from the roof. It turned out that a couple of Low Dutch orderlies were cleaning brass spittoons.”⁴⁶ In Washington, D.C., a fifteen-year-old boy named Daniel Roper tore down and helped destroy a portrait of Kaiser Wilhelm that his German teacher, Miss Siebert, had hung in the classroom. The teacher dismissed the defacement as “an act of a child.” But many people viewed the Kaiser as the enemy now and applauded the vandalism. A year later, a crowd at Baraboo High School in Wisconsin burned a pile of German books.⁴⁷

Even the popular habit of sipping suds in German beer gardens was frowned upon as unpatriotic. Christian Heurich ran the largest brewery in the nation’s capital and witnessed a sharp downturn to his business. As the country debated going into war, he was put in a difficult position, as German-born citizens like him were immediately suspected of disloyalty. An article in the New York Times claimed he had nefarious, even murderous motives. “Reports from Washington, amply confirmed, assert that a native-born German has caused foundations for German cannon to be laid on his farm, so placed that they can destroy the Capitol. Questioned on the matter he makes the excuse that he is installing a fish hatchery.” Heurich’s farm was in Maryland a few miles east of Washington.⁴⁸

The Times, the country’s newspaper of record, had engaged in rumormongering, likely planted by the APL. The concrete foundations that the reporter “amply confirmed” as an artillery battery was actually the family vault that Heurich was building. And it defied logic that somehow the Germans, without an army, would erect an artillery battery to shell the city, but there was a fear that German-Americans would serve as a fifth column in the country.

Heurich fell victim to a rumor that had plagued the country since the war broke out—that German-Americans were planning attacks on the nation’s cities. In November 1914, Edward House recorded a conversation with President Wilson: “He told me there was reason to suspect that the Germans had laid throughout the country foundations for great guns, similar to those they laid in Belgium and France.” Wilson ordered General Leonard Wood, who may have been the source for the rumor, to investigate discretely. This was twenty-eight months before Heurich was accused of supporting an artillery attack on the capital. It was an unfounded fear, yet clearly one that circulated over the years and reached its peak in March 1917.⁴⁹

Heurich wrote disdainfully of the damage done to his reputation. “It was also reported that a wireless station had been established to transmit important news to the enemy,” he wrote. “After the public got tired of hearing and reading about such crimes, the report circulated that I had committed suicide. This ended the entire affair.”⁵⁰ His wife Amelia noted the suicide article in her diary on March 23. Heurich did not end his life—in fact, he would live until 1945, just shy of his 103rd birthday.⁵¹

On March 14, a Department of Justice agent came to Heurich’s Dupont Circle mansion to interview him and Amelia, then told them he would have to search their home. After finding nothing suspicious, he notified them that he would inspect the brewery and the family farm in Maryland, where the foundations for the German artillery battery were supposedly under construction.⁵² The family accompanied the federal agent to the farm two days later. “I think he will feel ashamed of himself!” Amelia penned in her diary, knowing that the family had done nothing wrong.⁵³

Amelia Heurich, who was twenty-seven years younger than her husband, was born in Richmond, Virginia and was the granddaughter of German immigrants. “The people’s minds seemed to be diseased. They do not seem to have any regard for the Truth,” she recorded on March 19.⁵⁴ “All these things were and are brought out by the English,” she penned ten days later. German-Americans like Amelia often believed that England was the source of the propaganda in the hope that the United States would enter the war on her side—an intuition that was in fact true. “They say when a man or country is down then they resort to almost anything in order to gain assistance,” she noted.⁵⁵

On April 3, a federal agent inspected the Heurich brewery again. It was coincidentally the same day that the Senate voted on the war resolution. German-Americans such as Heurich were in a difficult position. “Germany was and is my mother, and I was against the war,” Heurich wrote. “But America is my bride, and if I have to choose between the two, then I must leave my mother and go with my bride. My whole existence is with my bride, America.”⁵⁶ Heurich’s statement was not original; many German-Americans used it, most famously Carl Schurz, the highly influential early immigrant, Civil War veteran, and U.S. Senator who had remarked, “Germania is our mother, and Columbia is our bride.”⁵⁷

As the country teetered on war, prominent German-Americans felt compelled to issue statements that they were loyal to the United States. In Washington, D.C., Germans working in the hospitality industry issued a statement that they stood behind the president in the pending crisis. Christian Heurich, still piqued at his rough treatment in the press and by federal agents, stated that the firebrand rumors of his disloyalty were “beneath his notice.”⁵⁸

Newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst was outspoken in his desire to keep the U.S. out of the war, and so pro-German in his editorials that the Bureau of Investigation scrutinized him for possible treason. Investigators never charged him with a crime;⁵⁹ however, New York City mayor John Purroy Mitchel publicly called Hearst the “spokesman of the Kaiser in this country.”⁶⁰ As the nation teetered toward war, Hearst slightly changed his tack, ordering his editors to “print nothing but pro-American editorials” to downplay his German sympathy. Hearst became intensely unpopular during the war for his criticism of the Allies, but his reputation would recover.⁶¹

The Morning Olympian recognized that war was likely at hand, but counseled caution at blaming German-Americans. “Americans must not forget that this nation with the German people or with the loyal, patriotic American citizens of German extraction . . . The German people are not responsible for the Kaiser and his dupes.”⁶²

German-Americans largely closed ranks behind their adopted home country. They registered for the draft, and many young men served in the armed forces and fought in the trenches against the Kaiser’s army—or in the skies, like Eddie Rickenbacker. But March 1917 only marked the beginning of the anti-German hysteria, which would marginalize and even terrorize German-Americans throughout the war.

The War Declaration

Although the United States had been involved in many wars, Congress had only explicitly declared war on three occasions before 1917: against England in 1812, against Mexico in 1846, and against Spain in 1898. The president can argue in support of war, but only Congress can declare war.

After revealing the Zimmermann Telegram to the nation on March 1, President Wilson spent several weeks agonizing over the proper course of action—and if the United States was justified in going to war. He came down with a terrible cold on March 7, one that he likely caught at the inauguration two days earlier. Wilson remained relatively secluded in the White House for ten days while he nursed himself back to health. It gave him time to think and plan.

Wilson had understood that the country was not ready for war in the previous two years, and it was not much better prepared now. He could have declared war in 1915 after the sinking of the Lusitania, but there was little credible force to defend the country, and the president well knew of serious societal divisions about getting involved in the conflict. He could lead, but the people could only move so fast.

The decision for war was never forced on Wilson. It was something he had pondered greatly for long periods of time, even years. The entry of the U.S. into the Great War would be a contentious issue, not a decision reached easily or lightly. Wilson knew there were many dissenters.

If the U.S. entered the war on the side of the Allies, it expected to champion democracy and fight Prussianism. One major obstacle was that not all of the Allies were democracies: Russia was ruled by an autocrat, Czar Nicholas II, who did not tolerate dissent. That obstacle was supposedly swept away on March 19 when the czar was overthrown. Wilson wrongly believed that Russia was on the road to liberalism. In fact, Russia’s experiment in democracy would be short-lived. Nonetheless, the overthrow of the czar made it more palatable to join the Allies.

On March 20, Wilson summoned the cabinet to debate the war question. He posed a number of questions to his cabinet secretaries, and a freewheeling debate followed with Wilson listening to their counsel without expressing his own opinion. He finally asked if the cabinet supported declaring war on Germany. All were in favor except the two doves, Postmaster General Albert Burleson and Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels. Burleson stated that he believed the two countries were already in a state of war, but if Congress did not declare it, the people might force the declaration. The president responded, “I do not care for popular demand. I want to do right, whether popular or not.”⁶³

Daniels then spoke up. (“I had hoped and prayed this cup would pass,” he wrote in his diary that day.) He believed that arming and convoying merchant ships was inadequate and would be dependent on the Royal Navy protecting them, pushing the Americans ever more into the Allied camp. If America wanted to protect its right to the sea, war would be the only option. The consequence of the Allies losing the war could be dire. “If Germany wins, we must be a military nation,” putting the Americans in a permanent state of military preparedness and setting the stage for future conflicts. Daniels reluctantly favored war. With this, the cabinet recommendation was unanimous: the U.S. should declare war on Germany, and the president should summon Congress for a special session to deal with the question.⁶⁴ Wilson ended the meeting with the remark, “I think that there is no doubt as to what your advice is.” The president left the meeting sullen, knowing the decision he had to make.⁶⁵

The next day, Wilson called Congress into special session, summoning it to convene on April 2. The president’s chief political adviser, Edward House, knew Wilson’s mind better than almost anyone. “As far as we are concerned, we are in the war now, even though a formal declaration may not occur until after Congress meets,” he wrote Ambassador Walter Hines Page on March 21.⁶⁶

Wilson asked House to come to Washington to discuss the situation. They met on March 27. “The President asked whether I thought he should ask Congress to declare war, or whether he should say that a state of war exists and ask them for a necessary means to carry it on,” House wrote in his diary. He suggested the latter, and in fact this is what Wilson would do. House then tactfully spoke his mind, pointing out that Wilson was not cut from the cloth to be a wartime president, an assessment that Wilson shared. “I thought he was too refined, too civilized, too intellectual, too cultivated not to see the incongruity and absurdity of war,” House wrote. “It needs a man of coarser fibre and one less a philosopher than the President, to conduct a brutal, vigorous, and successful war.”⁶⁷

The president met with the cabinet on March 30 to present ideas for his upcoming war address. Josephus Daniels recorded in his diary that, “He wished no argument and no feeling in his message, but wishes to present facts, convincing from evidence, justifying position.” Wilson had heard absurd stories whipped up in the press about the Germans. “There’s a German in the cellar!” complained a housekeeper in the White House about a German who tended fires, as if that were grounds to dismiss him. Wilson’s response showed his reluctance to panic, as well as a fundamental assumption that people were good: “I’d rather the blamed place should be blown up than to persecute inoffensive people.”⁶⁸

On April 1, Edward House visited Wilson in the White House. The president read a draft of his war address to House, seeking advice on phrasing and wording. House later asked Wilson how long it took him to draft the war address. Ten hours, the president responded. “I write with difficulty and it takes everything out of me,” he said.⁶⁹

Wilson also asked Frank Cobb from the liberal New York World to visit. Cobb was a staunch supporter of the president’s administration (some called Cobb “Mr. Wilson’s Organ”). Cobb got the message late and did not arrive at the White House until after 1:00 A.M. on April 2. Wilson looked exhausted, having hardly slept the past several days. He pointed to his typewriter and the sheets of paper that were his war declaration speech. He clearly was searching for a way out. “What else can I do?” the president asked. “Is there anything else I can do?”

“I told him his hand had been forced by Germany, that so far as I could see we couldn’t keep out,” Cobb recalled.

Wilson went on a harangue. The war would transform America from a neutral, pacifist country into something else. “It would mean that we should lose our heads along with the rest and stop weighing right and wrong,” he said. “It would mean that a majority of people in this hemisphere would go war-mad, quit thinking and devote their energies to destruction.” He lamented that, “There won’t be any peace standards left to work with. There will be only war standards.” The president feared this would be the end of tolerance, the onset of an age of brutality, and the end of the Constitution. “If there is any alternative, for God’s sake, let’s take it,” Wilson said.⁷⁰

It rained the evening of April 2 in the nation’s capital. The Capitol dome was lit up against the dark sky. About a thousand pacifists protested on the Capitol grounds, but police and soldiers guarding the building kept them at bay. The Emergency Peace Federation had planned a parade to protest the war vote, promising to bring trainloads of pacifists to lobby Congress. An opposing group of war supporters vowed a “pilgrimage of patriotism” to support the war vote. Washington police banned both parades on the grounds of public disorder.⁷¹

Pacifists staged protests at senatorial offices. A Swiss-born former baseball player, Alexander Bannwart, confronted slight, sixty-six-year-old Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. “Anyone who wants to go to war is a coward,” Bannwart shouted at the senator, who got so angry that he punched the protestor in the face. Bannwart swung back at Lodge before being arrested. The man was released after apologizing.⁷²

Inside the Capitol building, the House of Representatives hosted the joint session of Congress. The chamber was filled to capacity with congressmen, senators, Supreme Court justices, cabinet secretaries, and diplomats, while the galleries were packed with observers. Most congressmen and senators carried small American flags or wore them in their lapels. It was a solemn occasion, and a quiet hush ruled over the chamber as the assembly awaited the president.

The presidential motorcade arrived from the White House. At 8:32 P.M., President Wilson was announced in the House of Representatives. The chamber erupted in thunderous cheering as everyone jumped to their feet, and even the Supreme Court justices stood. Wilson made his way through the boisterous crowd and stepped up to the podium. He pulled out his carefully typewritten sheets of paper and began his war address, the most important speech he would deliver in his career. The room fell into a hushed silence as the audience collectively held its breath.

The president began by denouncing German actions since February 1, calling the submarine campaign “warfare against mankind.” It was indiscriminate, sinking neutral as well as British ships, even hospital ships and vessels bound for Belgian relief. Wilson called not for revenge, “but only the vindication of right, or human right, of which we are only a single champion.” He criticized the armed neutrality of the past two months—something that he had promoted—as being ineffective.

The chamber remained quiet for several minutes as Wilson spoke calmly, reading from his speech. However, when president spoke the words, “There is one choice we cannot make, we are incapable of making: We will not choose the path of submission,” Supreme Court Chief Justice Edward White raised his arms and began clapping, which in turn led to a booming, defiant cheer throughout the chamber. Congress would repeatedly interrupt the speech with sustained applause on numerous points.

Wilson then called for Congress to accept that Germany had behaved as a belligerent, and thus it was America’s duty to declare war. The president noted that the country would have to engage in a serious military buildup, and it would be an enormous national effort. Even so, he cautioned against blaming the German people—and tangentially, German-Americans. “We have no quarrel with the German people,” he declared. “We have no feeling toward them but one of sympathy and friendship.” Rather, it was the military junta that ran the German war effort that was Wilson’s target, the autocratic government that was not accountable to its people, and that conspired to turn Mexico against the United States. And then he arrived at the most famous phrase from the speech, perhaps Wilson’s most famous line of his presidency: “The world must be made safe for democracy.” It was not an evangelical call to extend democracy to every country, as it has often been interpreted, but rather a call to defend democratic countries from autocratic ones, and to allow people to choose self-governance. He added an assertion that would place the U.S. squarely at odds with its soon-to-be allies: “We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make.”

Wilson had already extended a fig leaf to the German people. Now he addressed the question of German-Americans, whom he knew had undoubtedly been under a great trial for the past month. “They are, most of them, as true and loyal Americans as if they had never known any other fealty or allegiance.” But he threatened, “If there should be disloyalty, it will be dealt with a firm hand of stern repression” As it turned out, it would not be the German-Americans who would face the worst repression, but rather the most outspoken domestic opponents of the war: the pacifists and the socialists.

Wilson concluded the war address by acknowledging the terrible truth about the war that the United States was about to join. “It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance,” he said. “But the right is more precious than peace.” In calling the nation to arms, Wilson’s ambitious and far-reaching speech foretold American intervention as a catalyst for global peace—a fair peace that would be one once militarism had been defeated and the rule of law restored.

Wilson brought his speech to a close, summoning the sacred duty of the American people. “To such a task we can dedicate ourselves and our fortunes, every thing that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other.” The president concluded his thirty-six-minute address.⁷³

A long silence overtook the room as the words sunk in, followed by a thunderous applause as the members of Congress and people in the galleries rose to their feet. The president made his way to the chamber exit through the phalanx of cheering congressmen and senators, who waved their miniature flags. One exception was Senator Robert La Follette, the shock-topped isolationist, who stood hostilely with his arms crossed, “chewing gum with a sardonic smile,” the New York Times observed.⁷⁴

After the speech, Wilson returned to the White House. He was silent for a long time, lost in thought about the consequences of war. He finally remarked to Joe Tumulty, “My message to-day was a message of death for our young men. How strange it seems to applaud that.” The president put his head down on the table and wept.⁷⁵

The War Address was Woodrow Wilson’s finest speech, one that ranks with Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Franklin Roosevelt’s Infamy Speech. It summoned the nation to war and provided a moral direction to the cause. For a brief moment, the country was nearly unified. The United States was ready to follow Wilson into war. Even in the West, the region most far removed from the German submarine threat, echoed the president’s idealism. “The President has resisted war until he could resist no longer,” the San Francisco Chronicle opined. “There remains but one course for any loyal American to take, and that is to carve out a peace that will be lasting.”⁷⁶

The Senate took up the war resolution on April 4. It passed by a vote of 82 to 6. The debate was more heated in the House of Representatives, which debated the resolution for two more days. Pacifists attempted to amend or derail it. The House finally voted at 3:05 in the morning on April 6, passing the resolution by a vote of 373 to 50. Among the No votes was House Majority Leader Claude Kitchin and Representative Jeannette Rankin of Montana, the first woman to serve in Congress. (Rankin would be the only member of Congress to vote against the war declaration in World War II.) Two-thirds of the no votes were from the Midwest, home to anti-industrialists, farmers, and German-Americans. Wilson signed the resolution just after lunch. America was at war.⁷⁷