Worldmaking (18 page)

At the beginning, there was a remarkable unanimity of approach toward the war across the Wilson administration. As Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt observed, “To my astonishment on reaching the Dept., nobody seemed the least bit excited about the European crisis—Mr. Daniels feeling chiefly very sad that his faith in human nature and civilization and similar idealistic nonsense was receiving such a rude shock. So I started in alone to get things ready and prepare plans for what ought to be done by the Navy end of things.”
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One Democrat, at least, was displaying an appreciation for Alfred Thayer Mahan's teachings.

FDR's second cousin was even less impressed by what he viewed as Wilson's self-righteous detachment. Theodore Roosevelt observed to his friend Rudyard Kipling that Wilson's cowardliness was regrettable but explicable considering that none of his family “fought on either side in the Civil War.” Roosevelt believed that Germany was the aggressor, that the Entente deserved full American support, and that the course of the war threw into sharp relief “the utter folly of the present administration and its pacifist supporters” in promoting Pollyannaish arbitration schemes at the expense of military preparedness. He concluded that Wilson was “a college president with an astute and shifty mind, a hypocritical ability to deceive plain people.”
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Yet Wilson's neutrality policy favored the Entente (or Allied) Powers more than it did Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. To pursue a true neutrality policy would have required the United States to cease all its exports to Europe, which amounted to $900 million annually. The purest application of neutrality was thus entirely unacceptable for the United States, as it would have led to a sharp economic recession. During the period when Wilson curtailed his official duties to grieve, Secretary of State Bryan, in an attempt to define neutrality's “true spirit,” imposed a blanket ban on American loans to all belligerents. This action led the Allied Powers, more dependent than the Central Powers on overseas finance, to swiftly run out of money to purchase American goods, a situation as injurious to American business as it was to Anglo-French military prospects. In October 1914, recognizing the extent of the damage wreaked by this policy, Wilson ordered an amendment that permitted credits—but not public loans financed by the American taxpayer—to be extended to Paris, London, and Moscow. Some $80 million in credits were granted in the six months that followed, and the remaining restrictions on loans were removed a year later. In the spring of 1915, Colonel House, whose pro-British sentiments were firmer than those of his president, conceded that the American national interest was “bound up more or less” in Allied victory.
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Wilson also assisted the Allied cause in tolerating the British naval blockade of Germany, the strategy advocated by Mahan. The blockade prevented all neutral shipping from passing into Northern European ports and significantly curtailed the American export market. Recognizing that American trade with Germany was worth sacrificing for the sake of Anglo-American amity, however, Wilson rejected the confrontational precedent bequeathed by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and declined to challenge the Royal Navy's dominance of the North Atlantic. American acquiescence to a British policy viewed by many as inhumane—starving Germans into submission was the aim, after all—earned Wilson enemies at home, abroad, and even within his own cabinet. William Jennings Bryan, for one, believed that Wilson had shown too much favoritism toward Britain.

The German government realized that an unchallenged blockade presaged its eventual defeat and launched a U-boat campaign around the British Isles on February 15, 1915, to target merchant shipping and hopefully sap London's morale as well as its finances. Germany justified this policy as retaliation against the blockade. Prior to 1915, the submarine had played a minor part in armed conflict; this German deployment opened a new, more ignoble, era in naval warfare. While traditional naval engagements sought to avoid civilian casualties, submarine-launched torpedoes killed innocents without warning. Realizing the threats posed by these developments, the president declared that Germany would be held to “strict accountability” for any attacks that hurt American interests.
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Wilson's response was not stern enough to satisfy Roosevelt (or, indeed, House) but was confrontational enough to worry Bryan. Plotting a middle course between the pugnacity and pacifism of these two men would become increasingly difficult.

In fact, these early Bryan-Wilson disagreements were ossifying to produce two very different visions of how the United States should comport itself in world affairs. As the fighting grew bloodier in Europe, with no apparent end in sight, Wilson began to take a far greater interest in military preparedness, repudiating the Bryanite tradition in Democratic foreign policy that a large standing military threatened the virtue of the republic. Rather than recoiling from the European war with haughty disgust, as Bryan assuredly did, Wilson sensed an opportunity to intervene so as to better serve the interests of the United States and indeed the world. His preference was that his intervention be diplomatic, that he should preside over negotiations to end the war evenhandedly at the conference table. But if American intervention became unavoidable, Wilson realized that defense spending had to rise sharply in anticipation. Step by laborious step, urged on by the Anglophile Colonel House, Wilson was beginning to display a clear preference, expressed discreetly at this stage, for Allied victory. When Theodore Roosevelt impugned the “Wilson-Bryan attitude of trusting to fantastic peace treaties … A milk and water righteousness unbacked by force,” he failed to perceive the way the president and his secretary of state were diverging in outlook.
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The Bryan-Wilson dispute came out into the open on May 7, 1915, when a German U-Boat torpedoed the British cruiser
Lusitania
. This vast luxury liner sank to the bottom of the ocean in eighteen minutes, and twelve hundred civilians perished. The harrowing casualty list included 94 children and, most significantly from Wilson's perspective, 128 Americans. The brutality of the assault was scarcely mitigated by the fact that the
Lusitania
was carrying Allied munitions, as the U-boat captain suspected. Such details lost saliency as the bodies of children washed up on the Irish coast weeks after the sinking. Theodore Roosevelt railed against German “piracy,” demanded an immediate declaration of war, and observed that “as a nation, we have thought very little about foreign affairs; we don't realize that the murder of the thousand men, women, and children on the
Lusitania
is due, solely, to Wilson's abject cowardice and weakness in failing to take energetic action when the
Gulflight
[an American oil tanker] was sunk a few days previously.”
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Roosevelt and other Republicans were sensing an opportunity to land some significant blows on Wilson one year ahead of the general election.

While shocked by the loss of life, Wilson still retained hope that his services as an honest broker might yet be deployed in the event of military stalemate in Europe, a prospect that would sink with the
Lusitania
if the United States declared war. And so he dispatched a note to Berlin criticizing submarine warfare as an assault on “sacred principles of justice and humanity” and making clear that further attacks on civilian ships would be perceived by him as “deliberately unfriendly.”
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It is difficult to see how Wilson could have avoided dispatching such a note in the circumstances—and the language deployed was critical but restrained. But William Jennings Bryan decided that his president had been unduly provocative and that his actions would drag the nation inevitably into this infernal war. The secretary of state believed that American citizens should simply desist from traveling on belligerent ships, and that the British naval embargo, though nonlethal to Americans, was a comparable affront to the nation's neutral rights. When Wilson declined to accept this reasoning, Bryan tendered his resignation, removing himself as the primary antiwar voice from the administration. A path to war was becoming discernible.

*   *   *

At the moment when the German torpedoes struck the
Lusitania
, the land war in Europe was stalemated. During the early skirmishes, the German army had driven to within thirty miles of Paris, at which point they were held and then repulsed by a French and British counteroffensive. At France's eastern boundary, each side began digging trenches—in conformance with Dennis Hart Mahan's teachings—two narrow lines 475 miles in length and just a few hundred yards apart, from the North Sea to the mountainous borders of neutral Switzerland. At the beginning of 1915, Germany controlled 19,500 square miles of French and Belgian territory. Twelve months later, after ferocious fighting, the Allies had recaptured just eight.
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It was from these fixed and filthy trenches—primarily efficient in their incubation of disease and vermin—that many of the men who fought on the western front lived and died.

There was little movement in the trench lines from November 1914 to March 1917, just wave after wave of inconclusive assaults that followed a broadly similar pattern. The attacking side was stalled by barbed wire, craters, and bodies, and then mowed down by defending machine gun fire. Then the roles were reversed to the same effect—the former defenders well able to visualize their fate—and battlefield deaths increased in multiples of thousands, then tens of thousands, and then hundreds of thousands. German and French casualties at the Battle of Verdun exceeded those of all Americans during the Civil War. Great Britain suffered four hundred thousand casualties during the inconclusive Somme offensive—some sixty thousand men died or were seriously wounded over the course of one day. The deployment of poison gas by both sides was an additional layer of horror. Wilson captured the nature of this war well when he described it as a “vast, gruesome contest of systematized destruction.”
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The bestiality of the First World War was harrowing, and it is in this context—a cataclysmic human tragedy at the heart of the supposedly most advanced and “civilized” continent on earth—that we must appraise Wilson's authoring of a grand strategy that was similarly unprecedented. Through 1915 and 1916, Wilson devoted more and more of his time to considering how he might deploy American power, which would be embraced for the purity of its intentions, to end the war and prevent the outbreak of future conflicts on a comparable scale. What was required was nothing less than a rewriting of the rules of international engagement. His ultimate aspiration was to fashion a new world system in which geopolitical rivalry was solely commercial (and peaceable) in nature, and in which spheres of influence, alliances of convenience, and rapacious colonial acquisition were consigned to history. The entire balance-of-power system was to be jettisoned in favor of binding international collaboration, policed ultimately by the world's preeminent economic power, which was biased in no particular direction.

His vision was also informed by his belief that democratization was the key to creating a more peaceable world, because democracies are far less likely to resort to war, a belief that was later developed by adherents of Democratic Peace theory.
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As Wilson would later put it: “A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations … Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honour steady to a common end and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow interest of their own.”
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This insight was conditioned by his political science background, which encouraged the unveiling of new behavioral norms. Wilson did not want to simply defeat Germany and its allies. He wanted to reveal new truths about the world and humanity's essentially collaborative nature. Mahan was correct that he had departed from precedent. The president was practicing foreign policy as a science; the world at that time was his laboratory.

Of course, Wilson's Presbyterian Universalism also played a role in shaping his idealistic solution to a conflict straight from the pages of the Old Testament. The president was propagating a radically new foreign-policy doctrine: America's security was intertwined with the maintenance of a peaceable world, and its duty was to confront aggression wherever it threatened the global equilibrium. Observing humanity's best effort yet at creating Armageddon, his visionary response, as expressed in fledgling form in his December 7, 1915, State of the Union address, appears both explicable and justifiable:

Because we demand unmolested development and the undisturbed government of our own lives upon our own principles of right and liberty, we resent, from whatever quarter it may come, the aggression we ourselves will not practice. We insist upon security in prosecuting our self-chosen lines of national development. We do more than that. We demand it also for others. We do not confine our enthusiasm for individual liberty and free national development to the incidents and movements of affairs which affect only ourselves. We feel it wherever there is a people that tries to walk in these difficult paths of independence and right.
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Throughout 1916 Wilson continued to craft his foreign-policy vision and prepare his nation for the worst. At the end of January, the president took a nine-day tour of the Northeast and Midwest in which he delivered eleven speeches emphasizing the importance of military preparedness. At one point Wilson even channeled Mahan, calling for the creation of “incomparably the greatest navy in the world.”
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Pacifists, Jeffersonian idealists, social reformers, and some Progressives were appalled. They suspected that his speeches portended greater profits for big business and the permanent militarization of American society. Wilson's speaking tour, and the preparedness stance he adopted, more or less killed the Bryanite Democratic Party that Mahan had known and reviled. He paved the way for the passage of preparedness legislation through Congress, opposed by Bryanites in both chambers. But the overall balance of votes cast represented a powerful vindication of Wilson's persuasive talents—only two Democrats in the Senate and a quarter of House Democrats voted against their president.