With
the onset of war in Europe, hostilities began in the North Atlantic
which eventually provided the context — or rather, pretext — for
America’s participation. Immediately, questions of the rights of
neutrals and belligerents leapt to the fore.
In
1909, an international conference had produced the Declaration of
London, a statement of international law as it applied to war at sea.
Since it was not ratified by all the signatories, the declaration never
came into effect. However, once war started the United States inquired
whether the belligerents were willing to abide by its stipulations. The
Central Powers agreed, providing the entente did the same. The British
agreed, with certain modifications, which effectively negated the
declaration.[1] British
“modifications” included adding a large number of previously “free”
items to the “conditional” contraband list and changing the status of
key raw materials — most important of all, food — to “absolute”
contraband, allegedly because they could be used by the German army.
The
traditional understanding of international law on this point was
expounded a decade and a half earlier by the British prime minister,
Lord Salisbury:
Foodstuffs, with a hostile destination, can be considered contraband of war only if they are supplies for the enemy’s forces. It is not sufficient that they are capable of being so used; it must be shown that this was in fact their destination at the time of the seizure.[2]
That
had also been the historical position of the US government. But in 1914
the British claimed the right to capture food as well as other
previously “conditional contraband” destined not only for hostile but
even for neutral ports, on the pretense that they would
ultimately reach Germany and thus the German army. In reality, the aim
was, as Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty candidly admitted, to
“starve the whole population — men, women, and children, old and young,
wounded and sound — into submission.”[3]
Britain now assumed “practically complete control over all neutral trade,” in “flat violation of international laws.”[4] A
strong protest was prepared by State Department lawyers but never sent.
Instead, Colonel House and Spring-Rice, the British ambassador,
conferred and came up with an alternative. Denying that the new note was
even a “formal protest,” the United States politely requested that
London reconsider its policy. The British expressed their appreciation
for the American viewpoint, and quietly resolved to continue with their
violations.[5]
In
November 1914, the British Admiralty announced, supposedly in response
to the discovery of a German ship unloading mines off the English coast,
that henceforth the whole of the North Sea was a “military area,” or
war zone, which would be mined, and into which neutral ships proceeded
“at their own risk.” The British action was in blatant contravention of
international law — including the Declaration of Paris, of 1856, which
Britain had signed — among other reasons, because it conspicuously
failed to meet the criteria for a legal blockade.[6]
The
British moves meant that American commerce with Germany was effectively
ended, as the United States became the arsenal of the entente. Bound
now by financial as well as sentimental ties to England, much of
American big business worked in one way or another for the Allied cause.
The house of J.P. Morgan, which volunteered itself as coordinator of
supplies for Britain, consulted regularly with the Wilson administration
in its financial operations for the entente. The Wall Street Journal and
other organs of the business elite were noisily pro-British at every
turn, until we were finally brought into the European fray.[7]
The
United States refused to join the Scandinavian neutrals in objecting to
the closing of the North Sea, nor did it send a protest of its own.[8] However,
when, in February, 1915, Germany declared the waters around the British
Isles a war zone, in which enemy merchant ships were liable to be
destroyed, Berlin was put on notice: if any American vessels or American
lives should be lost through U-boat action, Germany would be held to a
“strict accountability.”[9]
In March, a British steamship, Falaba, carrying
munitions and passengers, was torpedoed, resulting in the death of one
American, among others. The ensuing note to Berlin entrenched Wilson’s
preposterous doctrine — that the United States had the right and duty to
protect Americans sailing on ships flying a belligerent flag.
Later, John Bassett Moore, for over 30 years professor of international
law at Columbia, long-time member of the Hague Tribunal, and, after the
war, a judge at the International Court of Justice, stated of this and
of an equally absurd Wilsonian principle:
what most decisively contributed to the involvement of the United States in the war was the assertion of a right to protect belligerent ships on which Americans saw fit to travel and the treatment of armed belligerent merchantmen as peaceful vessels. Both assumptions were contrary to reason and to settled law, and no other professed neutral advanced them.[10]
Wilson had placed America on a direct collision course with Germany.
On May 7, 1915, came the most famous incident in the North Atlantic war. The British liner Lusitaniawas
sunk, with the loss of 1,195 lives, including 124 Americans, by far the
largest number of American victims of German submarines before our
entry into the war.[11] There
was outrage in the eastern seaboard press and throughout the American
social elite and political class. Wilson was livid. A note was fired off
to Berlin, reiterating the principle of “strict accountability,” and
concluding, ominously, that Germany
will not expect the Government of the United States to omit any word or any act necessary to the performance of its sacred duty of maintaining the rights of the United States and its citizens and of safeguarding their free exercise and enjoyment.[12]
At
this time, the British released the Bryce Report on Belgian atrocities.
A work of raw entente propaganda, though profiting from the name of the
distinguished English writer, the report underscored the true nature of
the unspeakable Hun.[13] Anglophiles
everywhere were enraged. The Republican Party establishment raised the
ante on Wilson, demanding firmer action. The great majority of
Americans, who devoutly wished to avoid war, had no spokesmen within the
leadership of either of the major parties. America was beginning to
reap the benefits of our divinely appointed “bipartisan foreign policy.”
In
their reply to the State Department note, the Germans observed that
submarine warfare was a reprisal for the illegal hunger blockade; that
the Lusitania was carrying munitions of war; that it was
registered as an auxiliary cruiser of the British Navy; that British
merchant ships had been directed to ram or fire upon surfacing U-boats;
and that the Lusitania had been armed.[14]
Wilson’s
secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, tried to reason with the
president: “Germany has a right to prevent contraband going to the
Allies, and a ship carrying contraband should not rely upon passengers
to protect her from attack — it would be like putting women and children
in front of an army.” He reminded Wilson that a proposed American
compromise, whereby Britain would allow food into Germany and the
Germans would abandon submarine attacks on merchant ships, had been
welcomed by Germany but rejected by England. Finally, Bryan blurted out:
“Why be shocked by the drowning of a few people, if there is to be no
objection to starving a nation?”[15] In June, convinced that the administration was headed for war, Bryan resigned.[16]
The
British blockade was taking a heavy toll, and in February 1916, Germany
announced that enemy merchant ships, except passenger liners, would be
treated as auxiliary cruisers, liable to be attacked without warning.
The State Department countered with a declaration that, in the absence
of “conclusive evidence of aggressive purpose” in each individual case,
armed belligerent merchant ships enjoyed all the immunities of peaceful
vessels.[17] Wilson
rejected congressional calls at least to issue a warning to Americans
traveling on armed merchant ships that they did so at their own risk.
During the Mexican civil war, he had cautioned Americans against
traveling in Mexico.[18]But now Wilson stubbornly refused.
Attention shifted to the sea war once more when a French passenger ship, the Sussex, bearing
no flag or markings, was sunk by a U-boat, and several Americans
injured. A harsh American protest elicited the so-called Sussex pledge
from a German government anxious to avoid a break: Germany would cease
attacking without warning enemy merchant ships found in the war zone.
This was made explicitly conditioned, however, on the presumption that
“the Government of the United States will now demand and insist that the
British Government shall forthwith observe the rules of international
law.” In turn, Washington curtly informed the Germans that their own
responsibility was “absolute,” in no way contingent on the conduct of
any other power.[19] As Borchard and Lage commented:
This persistent refusal of President Wilson to see that there was a relation between the British irregularities and the German submarine warfare is probably the crux of the American involvement. The position taken is obviously unsustainable, for it is a neutral’s duty to hold the scales even and to favor neither side.[20]
But in reality, the American leaders were anything but neutral.
Anglophile
does not begin to describe our ambassador to London, Walter Hines Page,
who, in his abject eagerness to please his hosts, displayed all the
qualities of a good English spaniel. Afterwards, Edward Grey wrote of
Page, “From the first he considered that the United States could be
brought into the war early on the side of the Allies if the issue were
rightly presented to it and a great appeal made by the President.”
“Page’s
advice and suggestion were of the greatest value in warning us when to
be careful or encouraging us when we could safely be firm.” Grey
recalled in particular one incident, when Washington contested the right
of the Royal Navy to stop American shipments to neutral ports. Page
came to him with the message. “‘I am instructed,’ he said, ‘to read this
despatch to you.’ He read and I listened. He then added: ‘I have now
read the despatch, but I do not agree with it; let us consider how it
should be answered.’” Grey, of course, regarded Page’s conduct as “the
highest type of patriotism.”[21]
Page’s
attitude was not out of place among his superiors in Washington. In his
memoirs, Bryan’s successor as Secretary of State, Robert Lansing,
described how, after the Lusitania episode, Britain “continued
her policy of tightening the blockade and closing every possible channel
by which articles could find their way to Germany,” committing ever
more flagrant violations of our neutral rights. In response to State
Department notes questioning these policies, the British never gave the
slightest satisfaction. They knew they didn’t have to. For, as Lansing
confessed:
in dealing with the British Government there was always in my mind the conviction that we would ultimately become an ally of Great Britain and that it would not do, therefore, to let our controversies reach a point where diplomatic correspondence gave place to action.
Once
joining the British, “we would presumably wish to adopt some of the
policies and practices, which the British adopted,” for then we, too,
would be aiming to “destroy the morale of the German people by an
economic isolation, which would cause them to lack the very necessaries
of life.” With astounding candor, Lansing disclosed that the years-long
exchange of notes with Britain had been a sham:
everything was submerged in verbiage. It was done with deliberate purpose. It insured the continuance of the controversies and left the questions unsettled, which was necessary in order to leave this country free to act and even act illegally when it entered the war.[22]
Colonel
House, too, was distinctly unneutral. Breaking with all previous
American practice, as well as with international law, House maintained
that it was the character of the foreign government that must
decide which belligerent a “neutral” United States should favor. When in
September 1914, the Austrian ambassador complained to House about the
British attempt to starve the peoples of Central Europe — “Germany faces
famine if the war continues” — House smugly reported the interview to
Wilson: “He forgot to add that England is not exercising her power in an
objectionable way, for it is controlled by a democracy.”[23]
In
their president, Page, Lansing, and House found a man whose heart beat
as theirs. Wilson confided to his private secretary his deep belief:
“England is fighting our fight and you may well understand that I shall
not, in the present state of the world’s affairs, place obstacles in her
way.… I will not take any action to embarrass England when she is
fighting for her life and the life of the world.”[24]
Meanwhile,
Colonel House had discovered a means to put the impending American
entry into war to good use — by furthering the cause of democracy and
“turning the world into the right paths.” The author of Philip Dru: Administrator revealed his vision to the president who “knew that God had chosen him to do great things.”[25] The
ordeal by fire would be a hard one, but “no matter what sacrifices we
make, the end will justify them.” After this final battle against the
forces of reaction, the United States would join with other democracies
to uphold the peace of the world and freedom on both land and sea,
forever. To Wilson, House spoke words of seduction: “This is the part I
think you are destined to play in this world tragedy, and it is the
noblest part that has ever come to a son of man. This country will
follow you along such a path, no matter what the cost may be.”[26]
As
the British leaders had planned and hoped, the Germans were starving.
On January 31, 1917, Germany announced that the next day it would begin
unrestricted submarine warfare. Wilson was stunned, but it is difficult
to see why. This is what the Germans had been implicitly threatening for
years, if nothing was done to end the illegal British blockade.
The
United States severed diplomatic relations with Berlin. The president
decided that American merchant ships were to be armed and defended by
American sailors, thus placing munitions and other contraband sailing to
Britain under the protection of the US Navy. When 11 senators, headed
by Robert La Follette, filibustered the authorization bill, a livid
Wilson denounced them: “A little group of willful men, representing no
opinion but their own, have rendered the great Government of the United
States helpless and contemptible.” Wilson hesitated to act, however,
well aware that the defiant senators represented far more than just
themselves.
There
were troubling reports — from the standpoint of the war party in
Washington — like that from William Durant, head of General Motors.
Durant telephoned Colonel House, entreating him to stop the rush to war;
he had just returned from the West and met only one man between New
York and California who wanted war.[27] But
opinion began to shift and gave Wilson the opening he needed. A
telegram, sent by Alfred Zimmermann of the German Foreign Office to the
Mexican government, had been intercepted by British intelligence and
forwarded to Washington. Zimmermann proposed a military alliance with
Mexico in case war broke out between the United States and
Germany. Mexico was promised the American Southwest, including Texas.
The telegram was released to the press.
For
the first time backed by popular feeling, Wilson authorized the arming
of American merchant ships. In mid-March, a number of freighters
entering the declared submarine zone were sunk, and the president called
Congress into special session for April 2.
Given
his war speech, Woodrow Wilson may be seen as the anti-Washington.
George Washington, in his Farewell Address, advised that “the great rule
of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our
commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection
as possible” (emphasis in original). Wilson was also the anti-John
Quincy Adams. Adams, author of the Monroe Doctrine, declared that the
United States of America “does not go abroad in search of monsters to
destroy.” Discarding this whole tradition, Wilson put forward the vision
of an America that was entangled in countless political connections
with foreign powers and on perpetual patrol for monsters to destroy. Our
purpose in going to war was
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 … [we fight] 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 at last free.[28]
Wilson was answered in the Senate by Robert La Follette, and in the House by the Democratic leader Claude Kitchin, to no avail.[29] In
Congress, near-hysteria reigned, as both chambers approved the
declaration of war by wide margins. The political class and its
associates in the press, the universities, and the pulpits ardently
seconded the plunge into world war and the abandonment of the America
that was. As for the population at large, it acquiesced, as one
historian has remarked, out of general boredom with peace, the habit of
obedience to its rulers, and a highly unrealistic notion of the
consequences of America’s taking up arms.[30]
Three
times in his war message, Wilson referred to the need to fight without
passion or vindictiveness — rather a professor’s idea of what waging war
entailed. The reality for America would be quite different.
Notes
[1] Charles Callan Tansill, America Goes to War (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1963 [1938]),pp. 135–62.
[3] Cited in H.C. Peterson, Propaganda for War: The Campaign against American Neutrality, 1914–1917(Norman,
Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1939),p. 83. As Lord Devlin put
it, the Admiralty’s orders “were clear enough. All food consigned to
Germany through neutral ports was to be captured, and all food consigned
to Rotterdam was to be presumed consigned to Germany.… The British were
determined on the starvation policy, whether or not it was lawful.”
Patrick Devlin, Too Proud to Fight: Woodrow Wilson’s Neutrality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 193, 195.
[4] Edwin Borchard and William Pooter Lage, Neutrality for the United States (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1937), p. 61.
[5] Borchard and Lage, Neutrality, pp.
62–72. The US ambassador in London, Walter Hines Page, was already
showing his colors. In October, he sent a telegram to the State
Department, denouncing any American protests against British
interference with neutral rights. “This is not a war in the sense we
have hitherto used the word. It is a world-clash of systems of
government, a struggle to the extermination of English civilization or
of Prussian military autocracy. Precedents have gone to the scrap heap.”
[6] See Ralph Raico, “The Politics of Hunger: A Review,” in Review of Austrian Economics, vol. 3 (1989), p. 254, and the sources cited. The article is included in the present volume.
[7] Tansill, America Goes to War, pp.
132–33: “The Wall Street Journal was never troubled by a policy of
‘editorial neutrality,’ and as the war progressed it lost no opportunity
to condemn the Central Powers in the most unmeasured terms.”
[9] Robert
M. La Follete, the progressive senator from Wisconsin, scathingly
exposed Wilson’s double standard in a speech on the Senate floor two
days after Wilson’s call for war. It is reprinted in the vital
collection, Murray Polner and Thomas E. Woods, Jr., eds., We Who Dared to Say No to War: American Antiwar Writing from 1812 to Now (New York: Basic Books, 2008), pp. 123–32.
[10] H.C. Peterson, Propaganda for War: The Campaign against American Neutrality, 1914–1917 (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1939),p. 112. Cf. Borchard and Lage, Neutrality, p. 136 (emphasis in original): “there was no precedent or legal warrant for a neutral to protect a belligerent ship
from attack by its enemy because it happened to have on board American
citizens. The exclusive jurisdiction of the country of the vessel’s
flag, to which all on board are subject, is an unchallengeable rule of
law.”
[11] On
the possible involvement of Winston Churchill, First Lord of the
Admiralty, in the genesis of this disaster, see “Rethinking Churchill,”
in the present volume.
[12] Thomas G. Paterson, ed., Major Problems in American Foreign Policy. Documents and Essays, vol. 2, Since 1914, 2nd ed. (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1978), pp. 30–32.
[13] On the fraudulence of the Bryce Report, see Read, Atrocity Propaganda, pp. 201–08; Peterson,Propaganda for War, pp. 51–70; and Knightley, The First Casualty, pp. 83–84, 107.
[14] Tansill, America Goes to War, p. 323. The German captain of the U-boat that sank the Lusitaniaafterwards
pointed out that British captains of merchant ships had already been
decorated or given bounties for ramming or attempting to ram surfaced
submarines; see also Peterson, Propaganda for War, p. 114.
[15] William Jennings Bryan and Mary Baird Bryan, The Memoirs of William Jennings Bryan (Philadelphia: John C. Winston, 1925), pp. 397–99; Tansill, America Goes to War, pp. 258–59.
[16] To
my mind, Bryan’s antiwar position and principled resignation more than
make up for his views on evolution, despite H. L. Mencken’s attempted
demolition of Bryan in a well-known essay.
[17] Edwin Borchard and William Pooter Lage, Neutrality for the United States (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1937),pp. 122–24. John Bassett
Moore was scathing in his denunciation of Wilson’s new doctrine, that an
armed merchant ship enjoyed all the rights of an unarmed one. Citing
precedents going back to Supreme Court Justice John Marshall, Moore
stated that: “By the position actually taken, the United States was
committed, while professing to be a neutral, to maintain a belligerent
position.” Alex Mathews Arnett, Claude Kitchin and the Wilson War Policies (New York: Russell and Russell, 1971 [1937]), pp. 157–58.
[18] In
fact, during the Mexican conflict, Wilson had prohibited outright the
shipment of arms to Mexico. As late as August, 1913, he declared: “I
shall follow the best practice of nations in this matter of neutrality
by forbidding the exportation of arms or munitions of war of any kind
from the United States to any part of the Republic of Mexico.” Tansill, America Goes to War, p. 64.
[21] Edward Grey, Viscount Grey of Fallodon, Twenty-Five Years. 1892–1916 (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1925), pp. 101–02, 108–11.
[23] Charles Seymour, ed., The Intimate Papers of Colonel House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1926), vol. 1, p. 323.
[24] Joseph P. Tumulty, Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him (New
York: Doubleday, Page, 1921), p. 231. Proofs such as these that our
leaders had shamelessly lied in their protestations of neutrality were
published in the 1920s and ’30s. This explains the passion of the
anti-war movement before the Second World War much better than the
imaginary “Nazi sympathies” or “anti-Semitism” nowadays invoked by
ignorant interventionist writers. As Susan A. Brewer writes in Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq (New
York: Oxford University Press 2009), p. 280, “The Committee on Public
Information presented the war as a noble crusade fought for democracy
against demonized Germans. Such a portrayal was overturned by
unfulfilled war aims overseas, the abuse of civil liberties at home, and
revelations of false atrocity propaganda. In the years that followed
Americans expressed distrust of government propaganda and military
intervention in what they considered to be other people’s wars.” This
helps account for the appearance from time to time of debunking works of
popular revisionism by authors infuriated by the facts they discovered,
such as C. Hartley Grattan, Why We Fought (Indianapolis: Bobbs–Merrill, 1969 [1929]); Walter Millis, Road to War: America 1914–1917 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935); and later Charles L. Mee, Jr., The End of Order: Versailles 1919 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1980); and Walter Karp’s invaluable, The Politics of War: The Story of Two Wars which Altered Forever the Political Life of the American Republic (1890–1920) (New York: Harper and Row, 1979).
[25] Walter A. McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World since 1776(Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997),p. 127.
[28] The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, January 24-April 6, 1917, Arthur S. Link, ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), vol. 41, pp. 525–27.
[29] See Robert M. La Follette, “Speech on the Declaration of War against Germany,” in Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr., ed., Voices in Dissent: An Anthology of Individualist Thought in the United States (New York: Citadel Press, 1964), pp. 211–22; and Arnett, Claude Kitchin, pp. 227–35.
[30] Otis L. Graham, Jr., The Great Campaigns: Reform and War in America, 1900–1928 (Malabar, Fla.: Robert E. Krieger, 1987), p. 89.
Ralph Raico, Professor Emeritus in European history at Buffalo State College is a senior fellow
of the Mises Institute. He is a specialist on the history of liberty,
the liberal tradition in Europe, and the relationship between war and
the rise of the state. He is the author of The Place of Religion in the Liberal Philosophy of Constant, Tocqueville, and Lord Acton. You can study the history of civilization under his guidance here: MP3-CD and Audio Tape. Send him mail.
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