THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (67 page)

In November 1914, two months after the Battle of the Marne had claimed half a million casualties and blunted Germany's drive for a quick victory, House attempted to use the American continents as a model for the resolution of the European conflict. He presented a plan to Wilson by which
North and South American signatories were to (a) guarantee each other's territorial integrity and political independence under republican forms of governance; (b) commit to settling disputes peacefully through mediation; and (c) refrain from subversion or assistance to the enemies of any other signatory state. House was convinced that the outbreak of war in Europe had resulted “primarily from the lack of an organized system of international co-operation,” which was perhaps true in a way: the competing constitutional paradigms of fascism, communism, and parliamentarianism could not coexist in a truly cooperative international security organization, as was later seen in both the League of Nations and the United Nations Security Council.

“It was my idea,” House confided to his diary in December, “to formulate a plan, to be agreed upon by the republics of the two continents, which in itself would serve as a model for the European nations when peace is at last brought about.”
³⁵
House moved quickly, getting agreement in principle from the Argentine, Brazilian, and Chilean ambassadors to Washington. Already, however, he was making plans for an American mediation of the European war, and this forced him to turn over the Pan American negotiations to the State Department. This loss of momentum delayed the conference that was to produce the Pan American pact; without the pact in place, the United States lacked an international forum when Huerta's successor in Mexico was unable to prevent attacks on Texas by the Mexican partisan Pancho Villa. The U.S. intervention to capture Villa effectively killed the pact; no Latin American state could afford to be seen siding with the North Americans. In these circumstances the Chileans, who were least willing to join the U.S. initiative, pressed for further delays, and the American initiative came to nothing. The entire experience foreshadowed not only the substance of the American (as opposed to the European and espe-cially the British) idea of a League of Nations, but also the essentially premature hopes of House and Wilson, dealing as they were with a new international order of states that had not yet resolved the issue of what, precisely, constituted a “republican” form of government, an international order that would always fall back on, and fall out because of, national rivalries and ambitions. The Pan American Pact thus sounded an overture for many of the discordant themes of the Versailles Treaty, to which House and Wilson were to some degree tone-deaf.

When Grey learned that House was proposing an American mediation of the European war on the basis of a system of mutual security guarantees, he cabled through the British ambassador to Washington:

Grey had long been familiar with the idea of a World League of Peace, which had been put forward in various manifestos, editorials, and monographs since the late nineteenth century. In March 1914 he had written that “fear will haunt our gates until we have organized an international system of security and order.”
³⁷
Such a system would commit the great powers to refrain from aggression, reduce armaments, and submit disputes to peaceful arbitration; if any power refused to abide by the results of the arbitral panel and chose to resort to violence instead, “the others would join forces against” that power. The Hague Conventions would be strengthened by providing that those becoming parties would bind themselves to uphold the conventions by force.
³⁸

Grey had in mind an extension, in the twentieth century, of the Congress system initiated by Castlereagh in the early nineteenth century. This system was managed by the great powers, dealt almost exclusively with security issues, and did not differentiate—despite Metternich's earnest efforts to the contrary—among states according to their internal forms of governance. House, by contrast, sought a system that embraced specifically “republican” states on the basis of equality, in which the great powers played a cooperative rather than balancing role. He thought that the most powerful states would realize that their interests were best served by maintaining the system as a whole, even when, on particular issues, that system gave preference to smaller and weaker states that could have been easily overborne by any of the powers acting alone. Thus House's vision more nearly accorded with the constitutional order of the nation-state, which was replacing that of the imperial state-nation and whose legitimacy was based on each state's embodying the principle of service to the nation it was supposed, by the self-determination of its people, to reflect. Neither sort of league could in fact have halted the Long War in its midst: a great power like Germany or Britain (or Russia) saw no reason to acquiesce in the constraint of its sovereignty; and there was as yet no consensus on what precisely constituted the “self-determination” of a nation in choosing its State.

On January 30, 1915, Colonel House sailed for Europe on the
Lusitania
with an offer to mediate the conflict. Two days before, an American merchant ship carrying wheat to England had been torpedoed by a German submarine, the first such attack against American commercial shipping. On February 4, Germany declared the waters around the British Isles a war zone, threatening all shipping that approached Britain.

At this time, both Germany and Britain menaced American shipping. The British, having control of the seas, were able to stop American ships
and board them unlawfully, directing them to British ports if they were thought to contain “contraband,” which included a wide range of nonlethal materials, including foodstuffs. Britain recognized that she could, over the long run, bring famine to Central Europe if she could blockade the ports to which the Germans had access. At the same time, Germany realized that her chief superiority lay in munitions. As a result, the Germans resorted to submarine attacks on all vessels bound for Britain that were thought to be transporting weapons and ammunition bound for the Allies. House's ostensible mission was to work out rules governing the compensation due to American merchants for British seizures. Actually he had been in negotiations for some months with the German and British ambassadors over American mediation of the war. The American proposal was to be based on the evacuation of Belgium by the Germans and a payment of reparations to that state; the French occupation of Lorraine, taken from France by Germany in 1870; and some guarantees against further aggression.

It is certainly open to question whether any of the European powers involved entered these talks in good faith. The Germans were anxious to separate Britain from France and Russia and doubtless hoped that effectively trilateral talks among the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany would cause disquiet and even friction within the Allied group. The British were equally anxious to string the Americans along, presenting themselves as the most reasonable of the belligerents, shaping proposals they knew the Germans could not afford to accept, hoping to entangle the Americans into nonneutral cooperation or, better, belligerency.

Grey seems to have been largely free of this: his proposals for a League of Peace served both as an instrument for forging an Anglo-American entente as well as a sincere lever to encourage U.S. mediation. Upon House's arrival in London, Grey again questioned the American about the possibility of U.S. participation in a “general guaranty for world wide peace.”

House was in London for a month and a half. He grew ever closer to Grey, writing in a memorandum in February, “If every belligerent nation had a Sir Edward Grey at the head of its affairs, there would be no war…”
³⁹
But Grey did not think that House should go on to Berlin. German armies were at that hour attempting a vast envelopment against the Russians. Until the outcome of this maneuver was known, the Germans would not think seriously about peace. At the same time the American ambassador in Berlin was urging House to put forward new peace proposals. A German indemnity was out of the question, he wrote, and the German undersecretary for foreign affairs soon wrote to say that acceptance of American terms would mean the overthrow of the kaiser and the government.
⁴⁰
Nevertheless, House pressed on, first to Paris then to Berlin.

In both capitals he found leaderships committed to wringing substantial territorial concessions from their enemies while insisting that peace guarantees were their ultimate objects. This was not necessarily as disingenuous as it may seem today. In both France and Germany domestic constitutional conflicts between Left and Right gave the state a constant sense of peril. It is altogether possible that sincere statesmen believed that success, the likelihood of which is usually overestimated by persons working to attain it, was the only alternative to a general settlement that no one—at least no one outside the United States—could envision. Indeed, these statesmen were entirely correct in this assessment, as the course of the Long War establishes. Only when the war aim of establishing a single legitimate form of the constitutional order was achieved—an aim that had to be a
war
aim because it could not be gained by negotiation as it implied the delegitimation of some of the negotiating states—could the crisis be finally resolved.

House returned on June 13 after the ruthless sinking of the
Lusitania
by a German submarine on May 7. From this point on, he seems to have regarded American involvement in the war as inevitable, and his various peace moves all began to take on a double-edged character, on the one side asserting a more dominant role vis-à-vis prospective allies regarding peace terms, and on the other maneuvering the German government into a position of contempt before the American public. On May 9 House had sent Wilson a cable, which the president read to his cabinet:

One cannot understand American policy in this period without appreciating that the deliberate determination to have a role in the design of the peace underlay every American decision. At this juncture, Wilson faced two alternatives: he could break relations with Germany on the ground that the submarine attack on an undefended ocean liner was a violation of international law and a crime against civilization itself; or he could demand an official disavowal and an assurance that such attacks would not be repeated. He chose the second course and on May 13 dispatched a diplomatic note to that effect. Wilson, as perhaps House of all most keenly appreciated, faced an uncomprehending public that would not support intervention, whatever view elite opinion might hold. Thus for the next
two years House would search for peace proposals that, though they might conceivably end submarine warfare, probably had their greatest utility in uniting American opinion against the perpetrators of that warfare. While still in London, he had proposed a plan to the British cabinet by which the United Kingdom would lift its blockade if Germany abandoned submarine attacks; he suggested that it would be even better for Great Britain to propose such an initiative, putting Germany in the wrong in the eyes of the American public. The British demurred, and before the cabinet acted, the Germans replied with a refusal to consider the American proposal. House wrote that the Germans were absolutely convinced the United States would not enter the war under any circumstances and that this in his view would, ironically, ensure that an American intervention did ultimately happen. He now determined to return to America to work for that goal.

Bryan saw clearly where Wilson's policy was leading. The diplomatic note of May 13, though too timid for Theodore Roosevelt, who ridiculed it, was too aggressive for the pacifist Bryan, and he immediately resigned as secretary of state. Upon disembarkation in the United States, House was surrounded by reporters at the New York dock wanting to know if he would succeed Bryan. House took the occasion to publicly reject any possibility that he would serve as secretary of state; he rebuffed Wilson's proposal that he come to Washington, and instead retreated to Long Island, and then to the North Shore, where the President came to him on June 24.

On July 25 the American merchant ship
Leelanaw
, carrying flax, was sunk off the coast of Scotland by a German submarine. On August 13, the British passenger ship
Arabic
was sunk with Americans aboard. Wilson asked House's advice, and the latter proposed breaking off diplomatic relations with the Germans. Wilson, however, still hoped to avoid war, and before any more forceful American action was taken, Germany announced it was suspending operations against passenger liners. This was generally viewed in the United States as a triumph for Wilson and for moderation, but House knew the German policy could not hold for long. The submarine was Germany's only effective vessel to interdict the Atlantic sea lanes that her enemies controlled because the German fleet was bottled up in German ports and, except for the Battle of Jutland, played no important role in the war. While international law required belligerent ships to identify themselves in order to search neutral shipping, the lightly armored submarine was too vulnerable on the surface to risk this. Even the pledge to avoid passenger ships would have to be eventually sacrificed if the British stranglehold on German imports of foodstuffs was to be broken.