WHY AMERICA WENT TO WAR WITH GERMANY
A STATE of war had been declared April 5, 1917, to exist between the
United States and the Imperial German Government. There is no clearer or
more forceful statement of the reason why we went to war than the
address delivered by President Wilson at Washington on Flag Day, June
14, 1917:
MY FELLOW-CITIZENS: We meet to celebrate Flag Day
because this flag which we honor and under which
we serve is the emblem of our unity, our power,
our thought and purpose as a nation. It has no
other character than that which we give it from
generation to generation. The choices are ours. It
floats in majestic silence above the hosts that
execute those choices, whether in peace or in war.
And yet, though silent, it speaks to us--speaks to
us of the past, of the men and women who went
before us and of the records they wrote upon it.
We celebrate the day of its birth; and from its
birth until now it has witnessed a great history,
has floated on high the symbol of great events, of
a great plan of life worked out by a great people.
We are about to carry it into battle, to lift it
where it will draw the fire of our enemies. We are
about to bid thousands, hundreds of thousands, it
may be millions, of our men, the young, the
strong, the capable men of the nation, to go forth
and die beneath it on fields of blood far
away--for what? For some unaccustomed thing? For
something for which it has never sought the fire
before? American armies were never before sent
across the seas. Why are they sent now? For some
new purpose, for which this great flag has never
been carried before, or for some old, familiar,
heroic purpose for which it has seen men, its own
men, die on every battlefield upon which Americans
have borne arms since the Revolution?
These are questions which must be answered. We are
Americans. We in our turn serve America, and can
serve her with no private purpose. We must use her
flag as she has always used it. We are accountable
at the bar of history and must plead in utter
frankness what purpose it is we seek to serve.
FORCED INTO WAR
It is plain enough how we were forced into the
war. The extraordinary insults and aggressions of
the Imperial German Government left us no
self-respecting choice but to take up arms in
defense of our rights as a free people and of our
honor as a sovereign Government. The military
masters of Germany denied us the right to be
neutral. They filled our unsuspecting communities
with vicious spies and conspirators and sought to
corrupt the opinion of our people in their own
behalf. When they found that they could not do
that, their agents diligently spread sedition
among us and sought to draw our own citizens from
their allegiance--and some of those agents were
men connected with the official embassy of the
German Government itself here in our own capital.
They sought by violence to destroy our industries
and arrest our commerce. They tried to incite
Mexico to take up arms against us and to draw
Japan into a hostile alliance with her--and that,
not by indirection, but by direct suggestion from
the Foreign Office in Berlin. They impudently
denied us the use of the high seas and repeatedly
executed their threat that they would send to
their death any of our people who ventured to
approach the coasts of Europe. And many of our own
people were corrupted. Men began to look upon
their own neighbors with suspicion and to wonder
in their hot resentment and surprise whether there
was any community in which hostile intrigue did
not lurk. What great nation in such circumstances
would not have taken up arms? Much as we had
desired peace, it was denied us, and not of our
own choice. This flag under which we serve would
have been dishonored had we withheld our hand.
But that is only part of the story. We know now as
clearly as we knew before we were ourselves
engaged that we are not the enemies of the German
people and that they are not our enemies. They did
not originate or desire this hideous war or wish
that we should be drawn into it; and we are
vaguely conscious that we are fighting their
cause, as they will some day see it, as well as
our own. They are themselves in the grip of the
same sinister power that has now at last stretched
its ugly talons out and drawn blood from us. The
whole world is at war because the whole world is
in the grip of that power and is trying out the
great battle which shall determine whether it is
to be brought under its mastery or fling itself
free.
THE MASTERS OF GERMANY
The war was begun by the military masters of
Germany, who proved to be also the masters of
Austria-Hungary. These men have never regarded
nations as peoples, men, women, and children of
like blood and frame as themselves, for whom
Governments existed and in whom Governments had
their life. They have regarded them merely as
serviceable organizations which they could by
force or intrigue bend or corrupt to their own
purpose. They have regarded the smaller States, in
particular, and the peoples who could be
overwhelmed by force as their natural tools and
instruments of domination. Their purpose has long
been avowed. The statesmen of other nations, to
whom that purpose was incredible, paid little
attention; regarded what German professors
expounded in their classrooms and German writers
set forth to the world as the goal of German
policy, as rather the dream of minds detached from
practical affairs, as preposterous private
conceptions of German destiny, than as the actual
plans of responsible rulers; but the rulers of
Germany themselves knew all the while what
concrete plans, what well-advanced intrigues lay
back of what the professors and the writers were
saying, and were glad to go forward unmolested,
filling the thrones of Balkan States with German
Princes, putting German officers at the service of
Turkey to drill her armies and make interest with
her Government, developing plans of sedition and
rebellion in India and Egypt, setting their fires
in Persia. The demands made by Austria upon Serbia
were a mere single step in a plan which compassed
Europe and Asia, from Berlin to Bagdad. They hoped
those demands might not arouse Europe, but they
meant to press them whether they did or not, for
they thought themselves ready for the final issue
of arms.
A TOOL OF GERMANY
Their plan was to throw a broad belt of German
military power and political control across the
very center of Europe and beyond the Mediterranean
into the heart of Asia; and Austria-Hungary was
to be as much their tool and pawn as Serbia or
Bulgaria or Turkey or the ponderous States of the
East. Austria-Hungary, indeed, was to become part
of the Central German Empire, absorbed and
dominated by the same forces and influences that
had originally cemented the German States
themselves. The dream had its heart at Berlin. It
could have had a heart nowhere else! It rejected
the idea of solidarity of race entirely. The
choice of peoples played no part in it at all. It
contemplated binding together racial and political
units which could be kept together only by
force--Czechs, Magyars, Croats, Serbs, Rumanians,
Turks, Armenians--the proud States of Bohemia and
Hungary, the stout little commonwealths of the
Balkans, the indomitable Turks, the subtle peoples
of the East. These peoples did not wish to be
united. They ardently desired to direct their own
affairs, would be satisfied only by undisputed
independence. They could be kept quiet only by the
presence of the constant threat of armed men. They
would live under a common power only by sheer
compulsion and await the day of revolution. But
the German military statesmen had reckoned with
all that and were ready to deal with it in their
own way.
THE PRESENT CONDITION
And they have actually carried the greater part of
that amazing plan into execution. Look how things
stand. Austria is at their mercy. It has acted,
not upon its own initiative nor upon the choice of
its own people, but at Berlin's dictation ever
since the war began. Its people now desire peace,
but cannot have it until leave is granted from
Berlin. The so-called Central Powers are in fact
but a single power. Serbia is at its mercy, should
its hands be but for a moment freed; Bulgaria has
consented to its will and Rumania is overrun. The
Turkish armies, which Germans trained, are serving
Germany, certainly not themselves, and the guns of
German warships lying in the harbor at
Constantinople remind Turkish statesmen every day
that they have no choice but to take their orders
from Berlin. From Hamburg to the Persian Gulf the
net is spread.
A FALSE CRY FOR PEACE
Is it not easy to understand the eagerness for
peace that has been manifested from Berlin ever
since the snare was set and sprung? Peace, peace,
peace has been the talk of her Foreign Office now
for a year or more; not peace upon her own
initiative, but upon the initiative of the nations
over which she now deems herself to hold the
advantage. A little of the talk has been public,
but most of it has been private. Through all sorts
of channels it has come to me, and in all sorts of
guises, but never with the terms disclosed which
the German Government would be willing to accept.
That Government has other valuable pawns in its
hands besides those I have mentioned. It still
holds a valuable part of France, though with
slowly relaxing grasp, and practically the whole
of Belgium. Its armies press close upon Russia and
overrun Poland at their will. It cannot go
further; it dare not go back. It wishes to close
its bargain before it is too late, and it has
little left to offer for the pound of flesh it
will demand.
The military masters under whom Germany is
bleeding see very clearly to what point fate has
brought them. If they fall back or are forced back
an inch their power both abroad and at home will
fall to pieces like a house of cards. It is their
power at home they are thinking about now more
than their power abroad. It is that power which is
trembling under their very feet; and deep fear has
entered their hearts. They have but one chance to
perpetuate their military power or even their
controlling political influence. If they can
secure peace now with the immense advantages still
in their hands, which they have up to this point
apparently gained, they will have justified
themselves before the German people; they will
have gained by force what they promised to gain by
it--an immense expansion of German power, an
immense enlargement of German industrial and
commercial opportunities. Their prestige will be
secure, and with their prestige their political
power. If they fail, their people will thrust them
aside; a Government accountable to the people
themselves will be set up in Germany as it has
been in England, in the United States, in France,
and in all the great countries of the modern time
except Germany. If they succeed they are safe and
Germany and the world are undone; if they fail
Germany is saved and the world will be at peace.
If they succeed America will fall within the
menace. We and all the rest of the world must
remain armed, as they will remain, and must make
ready for the next step in their aggression; if
they fail the world may unite for peace and
Germany may be of the union.
Do you not now understand the new intrigue, the
intrigue for peace, and why the masters of Germany
do not hesitate to use any agency that promises to
effect their purpose, the deception of the
nations? Their present particular aim is to
deceive all those who throughout the world stand
for the rights of peoples and the self-government
of nations; for they see what immense strength the
forces of justice and of liberalism are gathering
out of this war.
PROPAGANDA
They are employing liberals in their enterprise.
They are using men, in Germany and without, as
their spokesmen whom they have hitherto despised
and oppressed, using them for their own
destruction--Socialists, the leaders of labor, the
thinkers they have hitherto sought to silence. Let
them once succeed and these men, now their tools,
will be ground to powder beneath the weight of the
great military empire they will have set up; the
revolutionists in Russia will be cut off from all
succor or cooperation in Western Europe and a
counter-revolution fostered and supported; Germany
herself will lose her chance of freedom, and all
Europe will arm for the next, the final, struggle.
The sinister intrigue is being no less actively
conducted in this country than in Russia and in
every country in Europe to which the agents and
dupes of the Imperial German Government can get
access. That Government has many spokesmen here,
in places high and low. They have learned
discretion. They keep within the law. It is
opinion they utter now, not sedition. They
proclaim the liberal purposes of their masters;
declare this a foreign war which can touch America
with no danger to either her lands or her
institutions; set England at the center of the
stage and talk of her ambition to assert economic
dominion throughout the world; appeal to our
ancient tradition of isolation in the politics of
the nations, and seek to undermine the Government
with false professions of loyalty to its
principles.
But they will make no headway. The false betray
themselves always in every accent. It is only
friends and partisans of the German Government
whom we have already identified who utter these
thinly disguised disloyalties. The facts are
patent to all the world, and nowhere are they more
plainly seen than in the United States, where we
are accustomed to deal with facts and not with
sophistries; and the great fact that stands out
above all the rest is that this is a people's war,
a war for freedom and justice and self-government
among all the nations of the world, a war to make
the world safe for the peoples who live upon it
and have made it their own, the German people
themselves included; and that with us rests the
choice to break through all these hypocrisies and
patent cheats and masks of brute force and help
set the world free, or else stand aside and let it
be dominated a long age through by sheer weight of
arms and the arbitrary choices of self-constituted
masters, by the nation which can maintain the
biggest armies and the most irresistible
armaments--a power to which the world has afforded
no parallel and in the face of which political
freedom must wither and perish.
For us there is but one choice. We have made it.
Woe be to the man or group of men that seeks to
stand in our way in this day of high resolution
when every principle we hold dearest is to be
vindicated and made secure for the salvation of
the nations. We are ready to plead at the bar of
history, and our flag shall wear a new luster.
Once more we shall make good with our lives and
fortunes the great faith to which we were born,
and a new glory shall shine in the face of our
people.
The war was now on. All the latent power of the nation of every kind was
to be used in every way to help drive the German menace from the world.
A visit to the new world by Marshal Joffre, Viviani, Lord Asquith and
others helped to accelerate matters. No one will know until the war is
ended just what took place in the councils between these great men of
the old world and the leaders of the new.
Everyone does know, however, the instantaneous activity and enthusiasm
which seized with compelling force upon the people of the United States.
But there must be a military leader. What was more natural than that the
choice should fall upon General John Joseph Pershing? General Funston
had died suddenly at San Antonio, Texas, and there was no one now to
outrank the leader of the punitive expedition into Mexico.
So General Pershing was selected. The man who had feared he was to be
ignored and left forgotten in the jungles of the Philippines was now to
be the Commander of the American Expeditionary Force in France.
Promotion once more had come to the man who had sought first to be
worthy to be promoted.