AMERICA DECIDES
The presidential campaign of 1916, taken in conjunction with the
increasing tension of European relations, forced Wilson to a further
development of his international ideals and a more definite formulation of
the means by which to attain them. As we have observed, the spring of that
year saw him reject the doctrine of isolation. "We are participants," he
said on the 27th of May, "whether we would or not, in the life of the
world. The interests of all nations are our own also. We are partners with
the rest. What affects mankind is inevitably our affair as well as the
affair of the nations of Europe and of Asia." This recognition of our
interest in world affairs immediately took him considerably beyond the
position he had assumed during the earlier stages of the submarine
controversy. Until the spring of 1916 he had restricted his aims to the
championship of neutral and human rights in time of war. But now he began
to demand something more far-reaching, namely a system that would prevent
unjust war altogether and would protect the rights of all peoples in time
of peace. He insisted, in this same speech of the 27th of May, before the
League to Enforce Peace at Washington, "First that every people has a
right to choose the sovereignty under which they shall live.... Second,
that the small states of the world have a right to enjoy the same respect
for their sovereignty and for their territorial integrity that great and
powerful nations expect and insist upon. And, third, that the world has a
right to be free from every disturbance of its peace that has its origin
in aggression and disregard of the rights of peoples and nations." These
words sum up the gist of his international aims during the three following
years. His later speeches are merely refinement of details.
In order that these ends might be secured it was necessary that some
international system be inaugurated other than that which had permitted
the selfishness of the great powers to produce war in the past. In his
search for a concrete mechanism to realize his ideals and secure them
from violation, Wilson seized upon the essential principles of the
League to Enforce Peace, of which William Howard Taft was president. The
basis of permanent peace, Wilson insisted, could be found only by
substituting international coöperation in place of conflict, through a
mobilization of the public opinion of the world against international
lawbreakers: "an universal association of the nations to maintain the
inviolate security of the highway of the seas for the common and
unhindered use of all the nations of the world, and to prevent any war
begun either contrary to treaty covenants or without warning and full
submission of the causes to the opinion of the world--a virtual guarantee
of territorial integrity and political independence." These were the
principles and methods which formed the keynote of his foreign policy
until the end of the Peace Conference. The first part of the programme,
that which concerned the security of the seas and which originated in the
particular circumstances of 1915, faded from his sight to a large extent;
the second portion, more general in its nature, became of increasing
importance until, as Article X of the League Covenant, it seemed to him
the heart of the entire settlement.
The unselfish nature of his idealism, as well as his continued detachment
from both camps of the belligerents, was obvious. "We have nothing
material of any kind to ask for ourselves," he said, "and are quite aware
that we are in no sense or degree parties to the present quarrel. Our
interest is only in peace and in its future guarantees." But _noblesse
oblige_, and we must serve those who have not had our good fortune. "The
commands of democracy are as imperative as its privileges are wide and
generous. Its compulsion is upon us.... We are not worthy to stand here
unless we ourselves be in deed and truth real democrats and servants of
mankind."
That the United States might be drawn into the conflict evidently seemed
possible to the President, despite pacific whispers that came from
Germany in the spring and summer of 1916. There was a note of
apprehension in his speeches. No one could tell when the extremist
faction in Berlin might gain control and withdraw the _Sussex_ pledge.
The temper of Americans was being tried by continued sinkings, although
the exact circumstances of each case were difficult to determine. The
attacks made by the German U-53 immediately off the American coast and
the deportation of Belgian civilians into Germany made more difficult the
preservation of amicable relations. In view of the possibility of war
Wilson wanted to define the issue exactly. "We have never yet," he said
at Omaha, a peace center, on the 5th of October, "sufficiently formulated
our programme for America with regard to the part she is going to play in
the world, and it is imperative that she should formulate it at once....
It is very important that the statesmen of other parts of the world
should understand America.... We are holding off, not because we do not
feel concerned, but because when we exert the force of this nation we
want to know what we are exerting it for." Ten days later at Shadowlawn
he said: "Define the elements, let us know that we are not fighting for
the prevalence of this nation over that, for the ambitions of this group
of nations as compared with the ambitions of that group of nations; let
us once be convinced that we are called in to a great combination to
fight for the rights of mankind and America will unite her force and
spill her blood for the great things which she has always believed in and
followed." He thus gave warning that the United States might have to
fight. He wanted to be certain, however, that it did not fight as so many
other nations have fought, greedily or vindictively, but rather as in a
crusade and for clearly defined ideals.
His reëlection gave to the President an opportunity for bringing before
the world his international aims. He purposed not merely to end the
existing conflict but also to provide a basis for permanent peace and the
security of democracy. During the early summer of 1916 he had received
from Berlin hints that his mediation would not be unacceptable and it is
possible that he planned at that time new efforts to bring the war to a
close. But such a step was bound to be regarded as pro-German and in the
state of opinion immediately after the _Sussex_ crisis would have
produced a storm of American protests. Then the entrance of Rumania into
the war so encouraged the Entente powers that there seemed little chance
of winning French and British acceptance of mediation. The presidential
election further delayed any overt step towards peace negotiations.
Finally the wave of anti-German feeling that swept the United States in
November, on account of Belgian deportations, induced Wilson to hold back
the note which he had already drafted. But it was important not to delay
his pacific efforts over-long, since news came to Washington that unless
Germany could obtain a speedy peace the extremist group in Berlin would
insist upon a resumption of "ruthless" submarine warfare. In these
circumstances, early in December, the President prepared to issue his
note.
But Germany acted more rapidly. Warned of Wilson's purpose the Berlin
Government, on December 12, 1916, proposed negotiations. The occasion
seemed to them propitious. Rumania had gone down to disastrous defeat.
Russia was torn by corruption and popular discontent. On the western
front, if the Germans had failed at Verdun, they were aware of the deep
disappointment of the Allies at the paltry results of the great Somme
drive. German morale at home was weakening; but if the Allies could be
pictured as refusing all terms and determined upon the destruction of
Germany, the people would doubtless agree to the unrestricted use of the
submarine as purely defensive in character, even if it brought to the
Allies the questionable assistance of America. The German note itself
contained no definite terms. But its boastful tone permitted the
interpretation that Germany would consider no peace which did not leave
Central and Southeastern Europe under Teuton domination; the specific
terms later communicated to the American Government in secret, verified
this suspicion. A thinly veiled threat to neutral nations was to be read
between the lines of the German suggestion of negotiations.
Although it was obvious that he would be accused of acting in collusion
with Germany, President Wilson decided not to postpone the peace note
already planned. He looked upon the crisis as serious, for if peace were
not secured at this time the chances of the United States remaining out
of the war were constantly growing less. If he could compel a clear
definition of war aims on both sides, the mutual suspicion of the warring
peoples might be removed; the German people might perceive that the war
was not in reality for them one of defense; or finally the Allies, toward
whom Wilson was being driven by the threats of German extremists, might
define their position in such terms as would justify him before the world
in joining with them in a conflict not waged for selfish national
purposes but for the welfare of humanity. Issued on December 18, 1916,
his note summed up the chief points of his recently developed policy. It
emphasized the interest of the United States in the future peace of the
world, the irreparable injury to civilization that might result from a
further continuance of the existing struggle, the advantages that would
follow an explicit exposure of belligerent purposes, and the possibility
of making "the permanent concord of the nations a hope of the immediate
future, a concert of nations immediately practicable."
As a step towards peace the note was unsuccessful. Germany was evasive.
There was nothing her Government wanted less than the definite exposure
of her purposes that Wilson asked. Her leaders were anxious to begin
negotiations while German armies still held conquered territories as
pawns to be used at the peace table. They would not discuss a League of
Nations until Germany's continental position was secured. The Allies on
the other hand would not make peace with an unbeaten Germany, which
evidently persisted in the hope of dominating weaker nationalities and
said no word of reparations for the acknowledged wrongs committed.
Feeling ran high in England and France because Wilson's note had seemed
to place the belligerents on the same moral plane, in its statement that
the objects on both sides "are virtually the same, as stated in general
terms to their own people and to the world." The statement was verbally
accurate and rang with a certain grim irony which may have touched
Wilson's sense of humor. But the Allies were not in a state of mind to
appreciate such humor. Their official answer, however, was frank, and in
substance accepted the principles of permanent peace propounded by
Wilson. It was evident to most Americans that the main purpose of Germany
was to establish herself as the dominating power of the continent and
possibly of the world; the aim of the Allies, on the other hand, seemed
to be the peace of the world based upon democracy and justice rather than
material force.
The President's attempt thus cleared the air. It made plain to the
majority of Americans that in sympathy, at least, the United States must
be definitely aligned with Great Britain and France. Furthermore the
replies of the belligerents gave to Wilson an opportunity to inform the
world more definitely of the aims of the United States, in case it should
be drawn into the war. This he did in a speech delivered to the Senate on
January 22, 1917. America would play her part in world affairs, he said,
but the other nations must clearly understand the conditions of our
participation. The basis of peace must be the right of each individual
nation to decide its destiny for itself without interference from a
stronger alien power. "I am proposing as it were, that the nations should
with one accord adopt the doctrine of President Monroe as the doctrine of
the world: that no nation should seek to extend its polity over any
other nation or people, but that every people should be left free to
determine its own polity, its own way of development, unhindered,
unthreatened, unafraid, the little along with the great and powerful."
Instead of the old system of alliances there should be a general concert
of powers: "There is no entangling alliance in a concert of powers. When
all unite to act in the same sense and with the same purpose, all act in
the common interest and are free to live their own lives under a common
protection." As the result of such a concert no one power would dominate
the sea or the land; armaments might safely be limited; peace would be
organized by the major force of mankind. As a guarantee of future justice
and tranquillity the terms that settled the present war must be based
upon justice and not be of the sort ordinarily dictated by the victor to
the vanquished. It must be a "peace without victory." Thus while Wilson
warned Germany that her ambitions for continental domination would not be
tolerated, he also warned the Allies that they could not count upon the
United States to help them to crush Germany for their selfish individual
purposes.
This speech, despite the unfortunate phrase, "peace without victory," was
hailed in all liberal circles, amongst the Allies and in the United
States, as a noble charter of the new international order. Wilson had
expressed the hope that he was "speaking for the silent mass of mankind
everywhere who have as yet had no place or opportunity to speak their real
hearts out concerning the death and ruin they see to have come already
upon the persons and the homes they hold most dear." This hope was
doubtless realized. The first reaction in France and England was one of
rather puzzled contempt, if we may judge by the press. But the newspaper
writers soon found that what Wilson said many people had been thinking,
and waiting for some one to say. Hall Caine wrote to the _Public Ledger_,
"Let President Wilson take heart from the first reception of his
remarkable speech. The best opinion here is one of deep feeling and
profound admiration." From that moment Wilson began to approach the
position he was shortly to hold--that of moral leader of the world.
The President had been anxious to make plain his principles, before the
United States became involved in the conflict through the withdrawal of
German submarine pledges, as well as to convince the world that every
honest effort possible had been made to preserve the peace. He was only
just in time. Already the advocates of ruthlessness in Berlin had
persuaded the Kaiser and Bethmann-Hollweg. They recognized that the
resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare meant, in all probability,
the intervention of the United States, but they recked little of the
consequences. On January 16, 1917, the Kaiser telegraphed: "If a break
with America is unavoidable, it cannot be helped; we proceed." The same
day the Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Zimmermann, telegraphed to the
German Minister in Mexico, instructing him to form an alliance with
Mexico in the event of war between Germany and the United States, and to
offer as bribe the States of New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas; he also
suggested the possibility of winning Japan from her allegiance to the
Entente and persuading her to enter this prospective alliance.
On the 31st of January, von Bernstorff threw off the mask. The German
Ambassador informed our Government of the withdrawal of the _Sussex_
pledge. On and after the 1st of February, German submarines would sink on
sight all ships met within a delimited zone around the British Isles and
in the Mediterranean. They would permit the sailing of a few American
steamships, however, provided they followed a certain defined route to
Falmouth and nowhere else, and provided there were marked "on ship's hull
and superstructure three vertical stripes one meter wide, to be painted
alternately white and red. Each mast should show a large flag checkered
white and red, and the stern the American national flag. Care should be
taken that during dark, national flag and painted marks are easily
recognizable from a distance, and that the boats are well lighted
throughout." Other conditions followed. There might sail one steamship a
week "in each direction, with arrival at Falmouth on Sunday and departure
from Falmouth on Wednesday." Furthermore the United States Government
must guarantee "that no contraband (according to the German contraband
list) is carried by those steamships." Such were the orders issued to the
United States. No native American could escape the humor of the
stipulations, which for a moment prevented the national irritation from
swelling into an outburst of deep-seated wrath.
There seems to have been little hesitation on the part of the President.
On April 19, 1916, he had warned Germany that unrestricted submarine
warfare meant a severance of diplomatic relations. Now, on February 3,
1917, addressing both houses of Congress, he announced that those
relations had been broken. Von Bernstorff was given his papers and the
American Ambassador, James W. Gerard, was recalled from Berlin. No other
course of action could have been contemplated in view of the formality of
the President's warning and the definiteness of Germany's defiance.
Despite the protests of scattered pacifists, the country was as nearly a
unit in its approval of Wilson's action as its heterogeneous national
character permitted. All the pent-up emotions of the past two years found
expression in quiet but unmistakable applause at the departure of the
German Ambassador.
The promptitude of the President's dismissal of von Bernstorff did not
conceal the disappointment which he experienced from Germany's revelation
of her true purposes. He seems to have hoped to the end that the German
liberals would succeed in bringing their Government to accept moderate
terms of peace. Even now he expressed the hope that Germany's actions
would not be such as to force the United States into the War: "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.... Only
actual overt acts on their part can make me believe it even now." But
"if American ships and American lives should in fact be sacrificed by
their naval commanders in heedless contravention of the just and
reasonable understandings of international law and the obvious dictates
of humanity, I shall take the liberty of coming again before the Congress
to ask that authority be given me to use any means that may be necessary
for the protection of our seamen and our people in the prosecution of
their peaceful and legitimate errands on the high seas. I can do nothing
less. I take it for granted that all neutral governments will take the
same course." He was careful, moreover, to underline the fact that his
action was dictated always by a consistent desire for peace: "We wish to
serve no selfish ends. We seek merely to stand true alike in thought and
in action to the immemorial principles of our people.... These are the
bases of peace, not war. God grant we may not be challenged to defend
them by acts of willful injustice on the part of the Government of
Germany!"
But Germany proceeded heedlessly. Warned that American intervention would
result only from overt acts, the German Admiralty hastened to commit such
acts. From the 3d of February to the 1st of April, eight American vessels
were sunk by submarines and forty-eight American lives thus lost.
Because of the practical blockade of American ports which followed the
hesitation of American shipping interests to send boats unarmed into the
dangers of the "war zone," President Wilson came again to Congress on the
26th of February to ask authority to arm merchant vessels for purposes of
defense. Again he stressed his unwillingness to enter upon formal warfare
and emphasized the idealistic aspect of the issue: "It is not of material
interests merely that we are thinking. It is, rather, of fundamental
human rights, chief of all the right of life itself. I am thinking not
only of the rights of Americans to go and come about their proper
business by way of the sea, but also of something much deeper, much more
fundamental than that. I am thinking of those rights of humanity without
which there is no civilization.... I cannot imagine any man with American
principles at his heart hesitating to defend these things."
Blinded by prejudice and tradition, a handful of Senators, twelve
"willful men," as Wilson described them, blocked, through a filibuster,
the resolution granting the power requested by the President. But the
storm of popular obloquy which covered them proved that the nation as a
whole was determined to support him in the defense of American rights.
The country was stirred to the depths. The publication of the plans of
Germany for involving the United States in war with Mexico and Japan came
merely as added stimulus. So also of the story of the cruelties heaped by
the Germans on the American prisoners of the _Yarrowdale_. There was so
much of justice in the cause that passion was notable by its absence.
When finally on the 17th of March news came of the torpedoing of the
_Vigilancia_ without warning, America was prepared and calmly eager for
the President's demand that Congress recognize the existence of a state
of war.
The demand was made by Wilson in an extraordinary joint session of
Congress, held on the 2d of April. In this, possibly his greatest speech,
he was careful not to blur the idealistic principles which, since the
spring of 1916, he had been formulating. War existed because Germany by
its actions had thrust upon the United States the status of belligerent.
But the American people must meet the challenge with their purpose
clearly before them. "We must put excited feeling away. Our motive will
not be revenge or the victorious assertion of the physical might of the
nation, but only the vindication of right, of human right, of which we
are only a single champion.... The wrongs against which we now array
ourselves are no common wrongs; they cut to the very roots of human
life." He went on to define the objects of the war more specifically,
referring to his earlier addresses: "Our object now, as then, is to
vindicate the principles of peace and justice in the life of the world as
against selfish and autocratic power and to set up amongst the really
free and self-governed peoples of the world such a concert of purpose and
action as will henceforth ensure the observance of those principles."
Democracy must be the soul of the new international order: "A steadfast
concert for peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of
democratic nations. No autocratic government could be trusted to keep
faith within it or observe its covenants.... Only free peoples can hold
their purpose and their honor steady to a common end and prefer the
interests of mankind to any narrow interest of their own." Because the
existing German Government was clearly at odds with all such ideals, "We
are glad, now that we see the facts with no veil of false pretense about
them, to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world and for the
liberation of its peoples, the German people included: for the rights of
nations great and small and the privilege of men everywhere to choose
their way of life and of obedience. The world must be made safe for
democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of
political liberty."
Wilson thus imagined the war as a crusade, the sort of crusade for
American ideals which Clay and Webster once imagined. He was in truth
originating nothing, but rather resuscitating the generous dreams which
had once inspired those statesmen. In conclusion, he reiterated his love
of peace. "But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight
for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts,--for
democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice
in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations,
for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as
shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at
last free." At the moment of the declaration of war Wilson was still the
man of peace, and the war upon which the nation was embarking was, in his
mind, a war to ensure peace. To such a task of peace and liberation, he
concluded in a peroration reminiscent of Lincoln and Luther, "we can
dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and
everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day
has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for
the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she
has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other."
How many Americans caught the real significance of Wilson's thought with
all its consequences is doubtful. The country certainly looked upon the
war as a crusade. But there was in the national emotion much that did not
accord with the ideals of Wilson. The people hated Germany for the
sinking of the _Lusitania_ and all the other submarine outrages, for her
crimes in Belgium, for the plots and explosions in this country, for the
Zimmermann note, and finally for her direct and insulting defiance of
American rights. They recognized that the Allies were fighting for
civilization; they sympathized with the democracies of Europe, of which,
since the Russian revolution of March, the Allied camp was composed, and
they wanted to help them. They feared for America's safety in the future,
if Germany won the war. Most Americans entered the struggle, therefore,
with a sober gladness, based partly on emotional, partly on quixotic, and
partly on selfish grounds. But nearly all fought rather to beat Germany
than to secure a new international order. Hence it was that after Germany
was beaten, Wilson was destined to discover that his idealistic preaching
had not fully penetrated, and that he had failed to educate his country,
as completely as he believed, to the ideal of a partnership of democratic
and peace-loving peoples as the essential condition of a new and safe
world.