The Yanks Are Coming! (7 page)

But Wilson owed Bryan for his vigorous campaigning on Wilson's behalf. Wilson lamented at one point, “If I am elected, what in the world am I going to do with W. J. Bryan.”
¹⁵
Since Wilson did not care much for foreign affairs, secretary of state seemed as good a place as any to lodge “the great commoner” who, in the event, spent much of his time advancing Wilson's domestic agenda. As far as Wilson had foreign policy prejudices, Bryan often shared them. Both men were liberal moralists. Both repudiated the “financial imperialism” that had American power backing corporate, banking, or European interests around the world. Both, however, also believed in America as a beacon for democracy, even a tutor to those in the less competent and more chaotic parts of the world; and Wilson, at any rate, took an ambiguous position on imperialism per se, appearing at various times to be both in favor and opposed.
¹⁶
For all Wilson's praise for meritocracy, he and Bryan both wanted to root out well-educated Republicans from the State Department in favor of Democrat political placemen who were frequently as ignorant of foreign affairs as the secretary of state himself. Bryan almost regarded ignorance as a virtue; it made the State Department more democratic.

Wilson's appointments to the Navy and War Departments were, on the surface, no better. His first choice for secretary of war was a Quaker pacifist, Alexander Mitchell Palmer. When Palmer declined—“As a Quaker Secretary, I should consider myself a living illustration
of a horrible incongruity”
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—angling instead to become attorney general (a position he finally won in 1919), Wilson chose Lindley M. Garrison, a New Jersey lawyer with no military experience. Garrison nevertheless fell out with Wilson over issues of military preparedness. The secretary of war wanted mandatory military training and other reforms that were not popular with Wilson or with Congress. When Garrison resigned in 1916, Wilson replaced him with Newton Baker, a lawyer, former mayor, and suspected pacifist. On the day he was appointed, Baker confessed to reporters, “I am an innocent. I do not know anything about this job.”
¹⁸
He was a very Bryan-like appointment.

Baker's opposite number, the secretary of the Navy, was Josephus Daniels, a newspaperman rather than a Navy man (though his father had been a shipbuilder), a Democrat Party cheerleader, and a Bryan-like populist. He was also another near-pacifist and a temperance agitator who encouraged sailors to drink coffee (hence “a cup of Joe”)
¹⁹
rather than rum, and banned alcohol from Navy ships in 1914. An anti–big business populist, he railed against alleged profiteers in private industry and thought the government should have its own steel company to serve the Navy. He also worked, in the democratic style, to reduce officer privileges and improve the lot of the common sailor (aside from denying him a drink).

With Europe engulfed in an all-consuming war, Wilson's cabinet was stocked with men who on the whole would rather have been smashing whiskey barrels than smiting the Hun. At their head, of course, was the liberal, progressive Woodrow Wilson, who had been a college professor, president of Princeton, and governor of New Jersey. Of earnest Presbyterian clerical stock, he was upright, ambitious, determined, and more than a tad self-righteous. He found it hard to see the other chap's point of view and could not easily engage
or get on with people who disagreed with him (as president, he used Colonel House as his emissary to tiresome opponents). While Wilson, a Virginian, played the Southern gentleman with women, he was certainly no Southern bravo happiest with horse and gun. He did not pine for the Lost Cause; he thought the South was better off for having lost the war; and he held no reactionary ardor for states' rights—indeed, he believed in a strong central government.

Most of all, Wilson believed in progress; he was in favor of democracy, meritocratic individualism,
²⁰
and government accountability, which he thought was obscured by America's system of constitutional checks and balances. He much preferred a parliamentary system, or at least a more active executive branch. He proclaimed himself a liberal Jeffersonian in his belief in the people, a conservative Burkean in his disdain for ideology, and a democratic friend of the aspiring classes in his support of government intervention to protect small entrepreneurs from being stifled by corporate business power.

If Wilson lacked experience in foreign affairs, he nevertheless had a great capacity for lecturing the world. After the first shots were fired in Europe and declarations of war were flung between belligerent capitals, Wilson was quick off the mark to declare America's moral superiority and neutrality—in no fewer than ten proclamations in 1914. On 3 August 1914, the very day Germany declared war on France and a day before Britain entered the war, Wilson told reporters, “I want to have the pride of feeling that America, if nobody else, has her self-possession and stands ready with calmness of thought and steadiness of purpose to help the rest of the world.”
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“Self-possession” and “calmness of thought” were so important to Wilson that he reiterated them in January 1915 in his Jackson Day speech to his fellow Democrats, asking, “Do you not think it likely
that the world will sometime turn to America and say, ‘you were right and we were wrong. You kept your head when we lost ours . . . now, in your self-possession, in your coolness, in your strength, may we not turn to you for counsel and assistance?'” Whatever the benefits of Wilson's “coolness” and “strength,” they did not advance the cause of peace; Europe did not think it needed a marriage counselor.

Wilson was not done, however; in that same speech, he set out an even grander, if still nonbelligerent, role for America. “May we not look forward to the time when we shall be called blessed among the nations, because we succored the nations of the world in their time of distress and dismay? I for one pray God that that solemn hour may come. . . . I thank God that those who believe in America, who try to serve her people, are likely to be also what America herself from the first hoped and meant to be—the servant of mankind.”
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This missionary spirit had led Wilson into foreign policy interventions before. Despite his adherence to the anti-imperialist plank of the Democrat Party, Wilson was not opposed to teaching lessons in good government to ignorant, chaotic foreigners. For instance, Wilson was furious when General Victoriana Huerta launched a successful coup in Mexico shortly after Wilson's inauguration. Appalled at Huerta's democratically illegitimate authoritarian rule and suspicious of the business interests that wanted the United States to recognize Huerta, Wilson looked for an excuse to kick the Mexican dictator.

In January 1914, Wilson took the plunge of recognizing Venustiano Carranza's Constitutionalists, who were engaged in an anarchic civil war—among Carranza's commanders were Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata—to oust Huerta. In February, Wilson lifted an arms
embargo on the Constitutionalists, and in April, after the Huerta regime refused to humble itself after arresting—and then releasing—some American sailors, Wilson ordered the U.S. Navy and Marines to occupy Vera Cruz. His policy, he told British diplomat Sir William Tyrrell, was “to teach the South American republics to elect good men!”
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Wilson pulled back from going to war in Mexico—indeed, he was shaken that American servicemen had died as part of his tutorial
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—and eventually the matter was resolved through negotiations mediated by Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, which put a rather humiliating dent in the idea of the United States as tutor to the world. Huerta resigned in July (only to arise again as a would-be conspirator with Germany in 1915),
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Carranza became president (but was no more friendly to the United States than Huerta), and Wilson's lesson about electing good men seemed not to have advanced the democratic cause very much.

If Mexicans were not apt pupils for Wilson's catechism, the American people were a captive audience: they had made him president. With the Great War now consuming Europe, Wilson cast himself as professor in chief, with a sheaf of lecture notes on the theory and practice of neutrality. On 19 August 1914, three days before the British Expeditionary Force arrived in France, Wilson admonished his fellow citizens that neutrality meant more than the U.S. government not favoring any of the belligerent powers. Neutrality was the responsibility of every American who needed to strive to be “impartial in thought as well as in action.” Wilson put special emphasis on “what newspapers and magazines contain, upon what ministers utter in their pulpits, and men proclaim as their opinions on the street.” If any doubted that a president of the United States should be dictating what people thought, said, and wrote, Wilson was quick to offer that such uniform neutrality of conscience and
deed was necessary to make the United States “truly serviceable for the peace of the world.”
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In September 1914, Theodore Roosevelt expressed a different view: “President Wilson has been much applauded by all the professional pacifists because he has announced that our desire for peace must make us secure it for ourselves by a neutrality so strict as to forbid our even whispering a protest against wrong-doing, lest such whispers cause disturbance to our ease and well-being. We pay the penalty for this action—or rather, supine inaction—by forfeiting the right to do anything on behalf of peace for the Belgians at present.”
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To Roosevelt, Belgium was the war's “guiltless” victim; Wilson was America's gutless president. “Wilson,” Roosevelt concluded, “is almost as much of a prize jackass as Bryan.” “The President, unlike Mr. Bryan,” Roosevelt noted, “uses good English and does not say things that are on their face ridiculous. Unfortunately his cleverness of style and his entire refusal to face facts apparently make him believe that he really has dismissed and done away with ugly realities whenever he has uttered some pretty phrase about them.”
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“TOO PROUD TO FIGHT”

Wilson made no protest at German atrocities in Belgium. Through privately pro-British and anti-German, he followed his own advice, trying to be neutral in thought, word, and deed, and to convince himself that the war need not touch America—though of course it did, immediately. In terms of trade and finance, the war was a potential boon to the American economy.

At the war's outset, Britain had imposed a partial blockade of Germany. British foreign minister Sir Edward Grey was solicitous of American opinion and tried to fend off French and Russian calls for
a tighter blockade. When cotton, for instance, was added to the list of contraband that could not be shipped to Germany, he had Britain buy American cotton. The partial blockade became a full blockade only after Germany, on 4 February 1915, declared a U-boat war against merchant ships in the waters surrounding Britain and Ireland, a bit of undersea sabre-rattling that even the Wilson administration felt compelled to denounce as an act “unprecedented in naval warfare.” The administration warned that if American lives and ships were lost, “the United States would be constrained to hold the Imperial German Government to a strict accountability.”
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If this was a threat of war, the German government discounted it, given Wilson's manifold protestations in favor of peace, neutrality, coolness, and self-possession.

Nevertheless, American foreign policy seemed to be sliding in an almost inevitable pro-Entente direction, despite America's professed neutrality. At first, at Bryan's urging, Wilson agreed to ban loans to the combatant nations of Europe—a policy driven both by the Democrats' suspicion of Wall Street and by Bryan's denunciations of finance as the grease of war. But the ban soon unraveled, and multimillion-dollar loans joined trade in tying America to Britain and France.

German submarine commanders had been secretly advised to avoid striking American-flagged ships; German torpedoes nevertheless exploded through the hulls of American merchantmen carrying oil and grain. In March 1915, the Germans sank a small British passenger ship, killing an American in the bargain. While Wilson believed the American government was obliged to protect its citizens—and dreaded what that might entail—Bryan believed American citizens were obliged not to drag America into war.

This was especially true with regard to the
Lusitania
. In April 1915, Germany informed the United States that the British luxury liner would be carrying not just passengers from New York to Britain,
but munitions for the British army and more than sixty Canadian soldiers.
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The German government took out an advertisement—approved by Bryan—in the New York newspapers warning Americans not to book passage on the ship.
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Would-be passengers scoffed at the German threat: on the passenger list were such prominent Americans as the millionaire Alfred Vanderbilt. The
Lusitania
was big, fast, and could be outfitted with guns as a precaution (though the guns were never mounted). No one showed fear; no one could imagine that the Germans would, in the event, fire on a luxury passenger ship. But off the coast of Ireland on 7 May 1915, a German U-boat launched a single torpedo that sank the
Lusitania
, killing 1,195 passengers and crew, including 95 children and 124 Americans.

On 10 May, Wilson delivered a speech telling his fellow Americans, “There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight.”
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Such a man Woodrow Wilson assuredly was—though Bryan worried that the increasingly pro-British Colonel House and others in the administration were leading the president astray. The secretary of state purported not to see any difference between German U-boats sinking ships loaded with civilian passengers and Britain maintaining its naval blockade of Germany. Wilson did. He demanded Germany apologize for sinking the
Lusitania
, pay reparations, and “prevent the recurrence of anything so obviously subversive to the principles of warfare.” A month later he added a specific first principle that America would insist upon: “The lives of noncombatants cannot lawfully or rightfully be put in jeopardy by the capture and destruction of an unresisting merchantman.”
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Bryan thought this far too harsh. It would, he warned, goad Germany into war with the United States. Wilson stuck by it, and Bryan resigned, to be replaced by the much more pro-British Robert Lansing. The Germans, less apoplectic than Bryan, agreed to Wilson's demands.