Castles of Steel (136 page)

In the formation of neutral opinion, the different methods of the belligerents in fighting economic war at sea weighed heavily against the Germans. The British blockade infringed on the freedom of the seas, but these incidents, sometimes infuriating, did not put lives at risk or even seriously retard the flow of goods. By contrast, unrestricted U-boat warfare, threatening and sometimes taking neutral ships and neutral lives, challenged the American government either to abandon use of the world’s oceans or take whatever steps were necessary to ensure the safety of American lives and cargoes. Twice, acts by German submarines had forced a crisis. The sinking of
Lusitania
in May 1915 and the sinking of
Sussex
in April 1916 had led each time to prolonged negotiations in which President Wilson attempted to force Germany to acknowledge American rights without invoking the ultimate threat of a war that neither he nor the American people wanted. Both times, Wilson succeeded, and all U-boats operating in the North Sea, the Channel, the eastern Atlantic, and the Mediterranean had been ordered to surface, establish the identity of the ship they had stopped, and allow neutral ships to pass.

In the autumn of 1916, an episode much closer to home caused friction between the British and American governments. At 3:00 on the afternoon of October 7, the new German submarine
U-53,
with four of her ballast tanks altered for carrying fuel, surfaced and anchored in the harbor of Newport, Rhode Island. The captain, Hans Rose, came ashore in his dress uniform to pay his respects to the American admiral commanding a destroyer flotilla based in Newport. Then he mailed a letter to the German ambassador and picked up local newspapers, which listed vessels in port about to sail and named their destinations. Observing protocol, the American admiral returned the visit and came on board to inspect the U-boat and admire its diesel engines. He was followed—with Rose’s permission—by many curious American naval officers, their wives, Newport civilians, reporters, and a photographer. At 5:30 p.m.
,
observing all conventions limiting the stay of belligerent warships in neutral ports, Rose weighed anchor and put to sea. At dawn the next morning,
U-53
lay on the surface in international waters off the Nantucket lightship where she began sinking ships. During the day, Rose stopped, searched, and sank seven merchant vessels: five British, one Dutch, and one Norwegian. All crew members were permitted to leave their ships before they were sunk.

No person was harmed that day and
U-53
’s behavior outside American territorial waters had been conducted according to the rules of cruiser warfare and international law. Still, in Massachusetts and surrounding states, the sinking of merchant vessels so close to home inspired a sense of terrified vulnerability. In Britain, the reaction was official and public fury. Not only were the British appalled by the fact of U-boat activity at that great distance, but they were bitterly critical of the fact that sixteen American destroyers had clustered near the Nantucket lightship, had witnessed the sinkings, and, although picking up passengers and crews from their lifeboats, had done nothing to inhibit the submarine. At one point,
U-53
was so close to an American warship that the submarine had to reverse engines to avoid collision. Later in the day, another destroyer, lying near the abandoned Dutch steamer, was asked by Rose to move away so that he might sink the ship. Obligingly, the destroyer moved and
U-53
fired two torpedoes, sending the ship to the bottom. For the submarine, it was a successful voyage.
U-53
returned to Germany, having covered 7,550 miles without refueling and having stopped only once, for the two and a half hours in Newport. In her wake, she left huge newspaper sales along the Eastern Seaboard, urgent conferences at the State Department, angry cries in the House of Commons, and eventually a soothing speech by Sir Edward Grey, who explained to his countrymen that the American warships had had no legal right to intervene in the belligerent activities of
U-53.

By mid-autumn of 1916, Woodrow Wilson believed that American relations with the Central Powers were becoming more amicable. It was true that the country still generally favored the Allies, but with Germany’s
Sussex
pledge still in force, most Americans wanted simply to let Europeans kill one another however they wished without American participation. Wilson, however, was unwilling to leave it at that. Repelled by the mindless slaughter at Verdun and on the Somme, he made up his mind that it was his duty—his mission—to use his position as the leader of the one great neutral state to persuade the warring powers to call a halt. In September, the Germans and Austrians as well as the British and French were told that the president would launch a mediation effort as soon as he was reelected.

In the presidential campaign, Charles Evans Hughes, the Republican candidate, a moderate former Supreme Court Justice, was supported by the eastern, pro-Allied, interventionist wing of the electorate; Wilson had the support of most southern, midwestern, and western “stay-out-of-the-war” voters. But the election was not decided on Election Day, November 7. Hughes, accumulating early majorities in the East, surged to a lead and on November 8
The New York Times
announced that “Charles E. Hughes Has Apparently Been Elected President.” Theodore Roosevelt, who hated Wilson, happily declared that “the election of Mr. Hughes is a vindication of our national honor.” Then Hughes fell back and for two days the result teetered on the returns from California. It was not until November 22 that a Hughes telegram conceding defeat finally reached Wilson—“It was a little moth-eaten when it got here,” the president observed. In the end, Wilson won California by 3,806 votes. He had a nationwide popular majority of 691,385. He carried only a single northeastern state, New Hampshire, and that by fifty-six votes. In the electoral college the votes split 277 to 254.

The election was a squeaker by most people’s count, but Wilson treated it as a landslide. The president had what he desired: absolute control of American foreign policy. He did not need to listen to Congress, his Cabinet, his own ambassadors, or ambassadors from anywhere else. He was acutely sensitive to public opinion, and only to public opinion. Now, reelected, Wilson was free to take up his mission. The carnage in Europe must be stopped; this could be done only by showing favoritism to neither side. Wilson recognized that “if Germany won, it would change the course of civilization and make the United States a military nation,” but he was also keenly aware of the derision the French and English press had directed at him when early returns had predicted the election of Hughes. Now empowered by the American people to do what he wished, Wilson began tapping out drafts of a peace mediation offer on his typewriter. His goal was a negotiated peace, to be achieved by asking each of the warring powers to submit a statement of its war aims and where it would be willing to compromise in order to make peace. Together, he and they would discover a middle ground.

As the president typed, the belligerents’ ambassadors in Washington bent their ears to pick up what they could of the message coming from his keys. As always, they could learn nothing from Wilson himself, who would not see them, but they could learn much by talking to the little man with a receding chin who was the president’s best friend. Edward House was the one exception to the reclusive president’s rigid policy of excluding everyone from the inner world of his work and thought. House was a wealthy Texan who, in return for his support of one of the state’s governors, had been awarded the honorary title of colonel. Active and influential in Texas politics, he had gravitated toward Wilson in 1911, when the then governor of New Jersey was beginning his run for the Democratic presidential nomination. He worked effectively as an intermediary between Wilson and Bryan and, by the time of Wilson’s election, he could have been appointed to almost any position he wished in the new administration. He asked for none. This was sufficient to make him an object of intense scrutiny by a press determined to fix his place in the political firmament: “He holds no office and never has held any, but he far outweighs Cabinet officers in Washington affairs. . . . He is a figure without parallel in our political history. . . . Colonel House asks nothing for himself. He hates the limelight. . . . House is one of the small wiry men who do a great deal without any noise. He is a ball bearing personality; he moves swiftly but with never a squeak.”

The solution to the riddle of House was that he had made himself the closest friend Woodrow Wilson ever had. The colonel did not even live in Washington—he lived with his wife in Manhattan—but he came to Washington often, and on these visits he always stayed at the White House. At the end of an evening of intimate conversation, Wilson routinely escorted House to his room to ask whether everything was properly laid out. When the president came to New York, he was always a guest in House’s small apartment on Fifty-third Street.

Wilson valued House’s advice above all others’. “Mr. House is my second personality,” the president explained. “He is my independent self. His thoughts and mine are one.” To House himself, he said, “You are the only person in the world with whom I can discuss everything.” When war broke out, Europeans as well as Americans became aware of the mysterious Colonel House, who had no office and carried no title but “personal friend of the President”—which was enough to open every door in Washington, London, and Berlin. “Instead of sending Colonel House abroad,” one journalist suggested, “President Wilson should go to Europe himself to find out just what the people there think of him. Wilson could leave Colonel House here to act as president during his absence.” House became the conduit through which foreign governments and their ambassadors in Washington learned what the American president was thinking.

One of these ambassadors, Great Britain’s Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, was an extraordinarily poor choice. His friends, made during an earlier tour of diplomatic duty in America, were all Republicans. He wrote to Theodore Roosevelt as “My Dear Theodore,” to Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge as “My Dear Cabot,” and to the reclusive guru Henry Adams as “Uncle Henry.” He was an anti-Semite.

[He advised Adams that he was reading “a little book by a Jew-boy” and complained to Sir Edward Grey of American “Jew bankers who show a strong preference for Germany” as well as of “Jews capturing the principal newspapers and bringing them over as much as they dare to the German side.”]

As a negotiator, Spring-Rice was irritable and shrill; one ardently pro-Allied State Department official said that he always left Spring-Rice “feeling a sympathy for the Germans.” In Woodrow Wilson’s Washington, the ambassador uttered the wrong opinions in the wrong ears. “At one time,” he complained to Colonel House, “this country was composed of pure rock, but now it is composed of mud, sand, and some rock, and no one can predict how it will shift or in what direction.” House easily understood that Roosevelt and Wilson were being compared. On occasion, Spring-Rice had tantrums. “I would be glad if you would not mention Bernstorff’s name in my presence again,” he once hissed at House when the latter mentioned that he had just seen the German ambassador. “I do not want to talk to anyone who has just come from talking to him or to Germans.” An Anglophile himself, House discreetly wrote to Sir Edward Grey at the Foreign Office, suggesting that “Sir Cecil’s nervous temperament sometimes does not lend itself well to the needs of the present moment.” Grey ignored the letter and the ambassador remained.

Despite Spring-Rice’s nastiness, his political analysis was useful to Grey. “There is a strong sense that our sea power is exercised in a way, not so much to injure American commerce and trade, as to hurt American pride and dignity. No one could argue for a moment that our war measures have ruined this country; America has never been so rich. But the facts are that American trade is in a way under British control.” Later he summarized by saying, “Our blockade measures are, not a wound, but a hair shirt.” In Decem-ber 1916, he tried, in a series of letters, to tell Balfour, Grey’s successor at the Foreign Office, about Woodrow Wilson: “The President rarely sees anybody. He practically never sees ambassadors and when he does, exchanges no ideas with them. Mr. Lansing is treated as a clerk who receives orders which he has to obey at once without question.” “I have been in Russia, Berlin, Constantinople and Persia which are all popularly supposed to be autocratic governments. But I have never known any government so autocratic as this. This does not mean that the president acts without consulting the popular will. On the contrary, his belief and practice is that he must not lead the people until he knows which way they want to go.” “Here [in Washington] we regard the White House rather as Vesuvius is regarded in Naples, that is, as a mysterious source of unexpected explosions.” “The president’s great talents and imposing character fit him to play a great part. He feels it and knows it. He is already a mysterious, rather Olympian personage, shrouded in darkness from which issue occasional thunderbolts.

[Wilson, during these critical months, was sometimes “shrouded in darkness” for personal reasons unknown beyond his inner circle. His general health was poor and he suffered frequently from severe headaches. “There would come days,” said Edith Wilson, his wife since December 1915, “when he was incapacitated by blinding headaches that no medicine could relieve. He would give up everything and the only cure seemed to be sleep. We would make the room cool and dark and when at last merciful sleep would come, he would lie for hours in this way, apparently not even breathing. Sometimes this sleep would last five, six, or even eight hours. He would awake refreshed and able at once to take up work and go on with renewed energy.”]

He sees nobody who could be remotely suspected of being his equal.”

Spring-Rice, like Grey, knew that without American credit, food, and munitions, the Allies could not win the war. This flow must not be interrupted; therefore, Woodrow Wilson’s sensitive, prickly nature must be appeased. Given time, the Germans could be counted on to make a mistake, and then events would proceed to an almost certain conclusion. Meanwhile, Britain must wait. “There was one mistake in diplomacy that, if it had been made, would have been fatal to the cause of the Allies,” Grey wrote later. “It was carefully avoided. This cardinal mistake would have been a breach with the United States, not necessarily a rupture, but a state of things which would have provoked American interference with the blockade, or led to an embargo on exports of munitions from the United States.” Spring-Rice’s assignment was to make certain that this mistake was avoided. His task was to be patient.