From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (66 page)

In reality, trade was so important to Europe and the United States itself that whatever Americans did or did not do would have an important impact on the war and the domestic economy. Attempts to trade with one set of belligerents could provoke reprisals from the other; trading with both, as in Jefferson and Madison's day, might result in retaliation from each. A willingness to abandon trade with Europe might have ensured U.S. neutrality, but it would also have entailed unacceptable sacrifices to
a nation still reeling from an economic downturn. The United States could not remain unaffected, nor could it maintain an absolute, impartial neutrality.

Although legally and technically correct, Wilson's neutrality policy favored the Allies. Seeking to establish the "true spirit" of neutrality, Bryan, while the president was absent from Washington mourning the death of his wife, imposed a ban on loans to belligerents on the grounds that money was the worst kind of contraband. The consequences quickly became obvious. The Allies desperately needed to purchase supplies in the United States and soon ran out of cash. Bryan's strict neutrality thus threatened the Allied cause and U.S. commerce. Drawing a sharp distinction between public loans, by which U.S. citizens would finance the war with their savings, and credits that would permit Allied purchases and avoid "the clumsy and impractical method of cash payments," Wilson modified the ruling in October 1914.
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In the next six months, U.S. bankers extended $80 million in credits to the Allies. A year later, the president lifted the ban on loans entirely. Wilson correctly argued that loans to belligerents had never been considered a violation of neutrality. The result, House candidly admitted in the spring of 1915, was that the United States was "bound up more or less" in Allied success.
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Far more difficult to explain, Wilson also acquiesced in Britain's blockade of northern Europe. Employing sea power in a manner sanctioned by its gloried naval tradition, Britain set out to strangle the enemy economically, seeking to keep neutral shipping from entering north European ports and threatening to seize contraband. British officials used precedents set by the Union in the Civil War. Sensitive to history, they also applied the blockade in ways that minimized friction with the United States. In marked contrast to Jefferson and Madison, Wilson acquiesced, an "astonishing concession" of neutral rights, in the words of a sympathetic biographer.
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His position may have reflected his pro-Allied sympathies. More likely, he perceived that, in part because of the British blockade, U.S. trade with Germany was not important enough to make a fuss over. His acquiescence reflected a pragmatic response to a situation he realized the United States could not change. A historian himself, at the start of the war he appears mostly to have feared drifting into conflict with England over neutral rights like his fellow "Princeton man" James Madison a century before.
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He worried that getting drawn into the war might compromise his role as a potential peacemaker. He informed Bryan in March 1915 that arguing with Britain over the blockade would be a "waste of time." The United States should simply assert its position on neutral rights and in "friendly language" inform London that it would be held responsible for violations.
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Acceptance of the blockade tied the United States closer to the Allied cause. It also encouraged British infringements on U.S. neutral rights, leading to major problems in 1916.

By contrast, Wilson took a firm stand against the U-boat, Germany's answer to the British blockade. In February 1915, Berlin launched a submarine campaign around the British Isles and warned that neutral shipping might be affected. Wilson responded firmly but vaguely by holding the Germans to "strict accountability" for any damage done to Americans. A hint of future crises came in March 1915 when a U.S. citizen was killed in the sinking of the British freighter
Falaba
, an incident Wilson privately denounced as an "unquestionable violation of the just rules of international law with regard to unarmed vessels at sea."
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On May 7, 1915, a U-boat lurking off the southern coast of Ireland sent to the bottom in eighteen minutes the British luxury liner
Lusitania
, taking the lives of twelve hundred civilians, ninety-four of them children (including thirty-five babies), from injuries, hypothermia, and drowning. Bodies of victims floated up on the Irish coast for weeks. One hundred and twenty-eight U.S. citizens died. The sinking of the
Lusitania
had an enormous impact in the United States, becoming one of those signal moments about which people later remember where they were and what they were doing. It stunned the United States out of its complacency and brought the Great War home to its people for the first time. It propelled foreign policy to the forefront of American attention.
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Some U.S. citizens expressed great moral outrage at this "murder on the high seas." Ex-president Theodore Roosevelt condemned German "piracy" and demanded war. After days of hesitation and a careful weighing of the alternatives, Wilson dispatched to Berlin a firm note reasserting the right of Americans to travel on passenger ships, condemning submarine warfare in the name of the "sacred principles of justice and humanity," and warning that further sinkings would be regarded as "deliberately unfriendly."
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Wilson's strong stand derived from a rising fear of Germany and especially from concern for his own and his nation's credibility. Suspicion of Germany had grown steadily in the United States since the turn of the century, especially with regard to its hostile intentions in the Western Hemisphere. German atrocities in neutral Belgium, exaggerated by British propaganda, their crude and shocking efforts to bomb civilians from the air, and rumors, sometimes fed by top Berlin officials, of plans to foment rebellion within the United States provoked fear and anger among Americans, the president included. U-boat warfare further called into question basic German decency. The submarine had not been used extensively or effectively in warfare prior to 1915. This new and seemingly horrible weapon violated traditional rules of naval warfare that spared civilians. It killed innocent people—even neutrals—without warning. Britain could compensate U.S. merchants for property seized or destroyed, but lives taken by submarines could not be restored. Most Americans held to what Wilson called a "double wish." They did not want war, but neither did they want to remain silent in the face of such a brutal assault on human life. Republicans appeared ready to exploit the sinking of the
Lusitania
if the president did not uphold the nation's rights and honor. Wilson also did not want war, but he recognized that to do nothing would sacrifice principles he held dear and seriously damage his stature at home and abroad.
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Wilson's tough line on the
Lusitania
provoked crises in Washington and Berlin. Still committed to a strict neutrality, no matter the cost, Bryan insisted that Americans must be warned against traveling on belligerent ships. Protests against U-boat warfare must be matched by equally firm remonstrances against British violations of U.S. neutral rights. When Wilson rejected his arguments, the secretary resigned as an act of conscience, removing an important dissenting voice from the cabinet. The Germans also claimed that equity required U.S. protests against a blockade that starved European children. They insisted, correctly as it turned out, that the
Lusitania
had been carrying munitions. Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg nevertheless recognized that it was more important to keep the United States out of the war than to use submarines without restriction. When a U-boat sank the British ship
Arabic
in August, killing forty-four, two Americans included, Wilson extracted from Berlin a public pledge to refrain from attacks without warning on passenger vessels and a commitment to arbitrate the
Lusitania
and
Arabic
cases. The president weathered his first crisis with Germany, but only
because of decisions made in Berlin. He perceived that at some future date Germany could force on him a painful choice between upholding U.S. honor and going to war.
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After a respite of nearly a year, Wilson in the spring and summer of 1916 faced neutrality crises with both Germany and Britain. On March 24, 1916, a U-boat torpedoed the British channel packet
Sussex
, killing eighty passengers and injuring four Americans. Following a month's delay, the president and Robert Lansing, Bryan's successor as secretary of state, sternly responded that Germany must stop submarine warfare or the United States would break diplomatic relations, a step generally recognized as preliminary to war. After a brief debate, Berlin again found it expedient to accommodate the United States. Bethmann-Hollweg's
Sussex
pledge of early May promised no further surprise attacks on passenger liners. Wilson won a great victory, but in doing so he further narrowed his choices. Should German leaders decide that use of the U-boat was more important than keeping the United States out of war, he would face the grim choice of submission or breaking relations and possibly war. The United States' neutrality hung on a slender thread.
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In the meantime, tensions with Britain increased sharply. A crisis had been averted the previous year when London after declaring cotton contraband bought enough of the U.S. crop to sustain prices at an acceptable level. Britain's brutal suppression of the Irish Easter Rebellion in the spring of 1916 and especially the execution of its leaders inflamed American opinion, even among many people normally sympathetic to the Allies. In the summer of 1916, the Allies tightened restrictions against neutral ships and seized and opened mail on the high seas. In July, London blacklisted more than eighty U.S. businesses charged with trading with the Central Powers, thereby preventing Allied firms from dealing with them. Wilson privately fumed about Britain's "altogether indefensible" actions, threatened to take as firm a position with London as with Berlin, and denounced the blacklist as the "last straw." Meanwhile, U.S. bankers financed Britain at a level of about $10 million a day. Britain bought more than $83 million of U.S. goods per week, leaving the nation more closely than ever tied to the Allied cause.
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The neutrality crises provoked sweeping reassessments of the most basic principles of U.S. defense and foreign policies. In 1915–16, Americans
heatedly debated the adequacy of their military preparedness, the first time since the 1790s that national security concerns had assumed such prominence in U.S. political discourse.
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Preparedness advocates, many of them eastern Republicans representing the great financial and industrial interests, insisted that America's defenses were inadequate for a new and dangerous age. Claiming that military training would also Americanize new immigrants and toughen the nation's youth, they pushed for expansion of the army and navy. They promoted their cause with parades, books, and scare films such as
Battle Cry for Peace
, which portrayed in the most graphic fashion an invasion of New York City by enemy troops unnamed but easily identifiable as German by their spiked helmets.

On the other side, pacifists, social reformers, and southern and midwestern agrarians denounced preparedness as a scheme to fatten the pockets of big business and fasten militarism on the nation. They professed to favor "real defense against real dangers, but not a preposterous 'preparedness' against hypothetical dangers." They warned that the programs being considered would be a giant step toward war.
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Popular songs such as "I Didn't Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier" expressed their sentiments. The divisions were reflected in Congress, where by early 1916 Wilson's proposals for "reasonable" increases in the armed services were mired in controversy.

Fearful that America might be drawn into war and facing reelection, Wilson in 1916 belatedly assumed leadership of a cause he had previously spurned, breaking one of the most difficult legislative logjams of his first term. To build support for his program, he went on a speaking tour of the Northeast and Middle West, seeking to educate the nation to the dangers posed by a world at war. To thunderous ovations, he called for increased military expenditures—even at one point for "incomparably the greatest navy in the world." Returning to Washington, he skillfully steered legislation through a divided Congress. "No man ought to say to any legislative body 'You must take my plan or none at all,' " he proclaimed on one occasion, a striking statement given the stand he would take on the League of Nations in 1919. The National Defense Act of June 1916 increased the regular army to 223,000 over a five-year period. It strengthened the National Guard to 450,000 men and tightened federal controls. A Naval Expansion Act established a three-year construction program including four dreadnought battleships and eight cruisers the first year. Ardent preparedness advocates such as Theodore Roosevelt dismissed Wilson's program as
"flintlock legislation," measures more appropriate for the eighteenth century than for the twentieth. "The United States today becomes the most militaristic naval nation on earth," critics screamed from the other extreme. In fact, Wilson's compromise perfectly suited the national mood and significantly expanded U.S. military power. A remarkably progressive revenue act appeased leftist critics by shifting almost the entire burden to the wealthy with a surtax and estate tax.
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The Great War also sparked a debate over basic foreign policy principles that would rage until World War II and persist in modified form thereafter. Breaking with hallowed tradition, those who came to be called internationalists insisted that the American way of life could be preserved only through active, permanent involvement in world politics. Conservative internationalists such as former president William Howard Taft and senior statesman Elihu Root, mostly Republicans and upper-class men of influence, had long promoted international law and arbitration. In response to the war, they embraced still vague notions of collective security. Generally pro-Allied, they saw defeat of Germany as an essential first step toward a new world order. In June 1915, during the
Lusitania
crisis, Taft announced formation of a League to Enforce Peace to promote the creation of a world parliament, of which the United States would be a member, that would modify international law and use arbitration to resolve disputes. The conservatives also supported a buildup of U.S. military power and its use to protect the nation's vital interests. Progressive internationalists, on the other hand, fervently insisted that peace was essential to ensure advancement of domestic reforms they held dear: better working conditions for labor; social justice legislation; women's rights. Liberal reformers such as social worker Jane Addams and journalist Oswald Garrison Villard vigorously pushed for ending the Great War by negotiation, eliminating the arms race and economic causes of war, compulsory arbitration, the use of sanctions to deter and punish aggression, and establishing a "concert of nations" to replace the balance of power.
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