John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

The President’s chief adviser, private negotiator, and, particularly since Mrs. Wilson’s death, most intimate friend, was Colonel House. House and Lansing were often at cross purposes, and House and Bryan, although outwardly on terms of backslapping friendship, almost always so. Since Bryan’s mind was fixed on the sonorous generalities, decisions, even on small details, were up to the already overtaxed President.

House’s relation to Wilson was that of a star reporter to his city editor. House did the legwork. In Washington and New York he gloried in a modest omnipresence. He was on fair terms with the sceptical Jusserand, the squarebearded professorial diplomat who represented the French. He was cosy with the German ambassador, dressy Count von Bernstorff. He was even more at home with Sir Cecil Spring Rice, the old Washington hand, whom Sir Edward Grey had sent over to take the place of the prodigious Bryce.

War trade with Europe grew from week to week. After the stunning effects of the first blow wore off American businessmen began to discover that the war was a bonanza. The Europeans had to have American products regardless of cost. Meatpacking and coppermining boomed. The price of wheat rose. War was lamentable but what an opportunity to make money!

The British were devising their own rules of contraband. American shippers had no problem with goods destined to England and France. Exports destined for Germany, mostly through neutral ports, were even more profitable, but neutral ships suffered under detentions, delays, seizures and from the arbitrary behavior of British prize courts.

A stream of protests and complaints found its way to the President’s desk. Woodrow Wilson, like most literate Americans, was prejudiced in favor of the British by the whole course of his education, but he had freedom of the seas in his blood. He smarted personally under the indignities suffered by American shipping. In private he made no bones of his exasperation.

“While we were discussing the seizure of vessels by Great Britain,” House jotted in his diary one day in late August 1914, “he read a page from his history of the American people telling how during Madison’s administration the War of 1812 was started in exactly the same way as this controversy is opening up … The President said: ‘Madison and I are the only two Princeton men that have become President. The circumstances of the War of 1812 now run parallel. I sincerely hope they will not go further.’ ”

House hurried over to the British Embassy with the tale, and added that Lansing was preparing a stiff note of protest.

Spring Rice described the conversation in a somewhat peevish tone to Sir Edward Grey: “I had suspected for some time that something was up among the lawyers in the State Department, but I could extract no hint of what was intended. The only indication was a rather unfriendly atmosphere.” (Spring Rice and Lansing never did get along.) He retailed House’s account of the President’s state of mind. “He then told me he happened to be sitting with the President when a large package was brought in from the State Department. The President was very tired and did not want to look at it; he was told it was to go off by mail the next morning. He read it and to his astonishment it was a sort of ultimatum … which really would have convulsed the world if it had got out … The two men were astonished, the more so as the Secretary of State had been away for some time, tired with his exertions in procuring peace treaties, and was at that moment at a distant watering place with his wife. The President said that the document though signed, could not go at once … The President was very much impressed by the gravity of the question because it touches the pockets and the prejudices of so many of the people. It happens to be just the sort of question which takes the popular fancy and also enlists the monied people as well.”

Spring Rice then passed on Wilson’s remark about the War of 1812. For the ambassador’s benefit House had quoted him as adding, “I hope I shall be wiser.”

Sir Edward Grey professed sympathy and understanding of the President’s position. The Lansing note was sent to London after considerable editing by House and Spring Rice, who put their heads together over it in private. The Foreign Office promised a new Order in Council and at the same time soothed the sensibilities of the southern Democrats — and possibly of Colonel House himself as a Texan — by somewhat illogically allowing cotton, which as an ingredient of most of the explosives in use was certainly a contraband item, to be shipped direct to Germany. During the fall of 1914 and the winter of 1915 a million and threequarters bales of Southern cotton were unloaded at Hamburg and Bremerhaven.

The new Order in Council, in spite of a few conciliatory expressions, laid out a longer list of contraband items than the first one. The State Department grumbled but acquiesced. Freedom of the seas was temporarily shelved.

The controversy between Washington and Westminster would have been carried to greater lengths if the Germans, who all along were showing a characteristic knack for putting themselves in a bad light, had not decided that their safety lay in the submarine.

As soon as it became apparent that the German high seas fleet was no match for the Royal Navy, submarine construction was stepped up to fever pitch. The Germans entered the war with about twenty gasoline-burning coast defense submarines of about five hundred tons each and a few new diesels. The diesel motor immediately proved its superiority. The Germans started building diesel submarines of a thousand to two thousand tons. Many of the Kaiser’s advisers were still unconvinced of their usefulness.

The torpedoing of H.M.S. Pathfinder on September 5 and two weeks later the sinking by a single U-boat of the three old British cruisers, Aboukir, Hogue and Cressy , on patrol off the coast of Holland, with the loss of fourteen hundred trained men, gave a fillip to submarine enthusiasts among German officialdom.

The British answered by a raid on Heligoland Bight which wrecked three light cruisers and a destroyer and cost the Germans a thousand lives and much damage to the fleet. Both sides went to work to increase their minefields. The British declared the whole North Sea a warzone only to be navigated by neutrals on courses laid down by the Admiralty.

By this time Admiral von Tirpitz, who headed the German naval office, was convinced that the use of submarines as commerce destroyers could turn the tables on the British blockade. In November he tipped his hand by crying out in an interview with Karl von Wiegand of the United Press: “America has not raised her voice in protest … against England’s closing of the North Sea to neutral shipping. What will America say if Germany declares submarine war on all the enemy’s merchant ships? England wants to starve us. We can play the same game. We can bottle her up and torpedo every English or allies’ ship which nears any harbor in Great Britain.”

The German fleet was showing dash and bravado, but at sea it was hopelessly outnumbered. Its heavy cruisers brought the war home to the islanders by shelling Scarborough and Hartlepool and killing a hundred or more helpless civilians on England’s North Sea coast. In the South Pacific von Spee seriously mauled a British formation. By December the Royal Navy had manifested its lumbering superiority by knocking off the few German cruisers on the rampage in outoftheway oceans and by sinking, in a battle off the Falkland Islands, von Spee’s dangerous little squadron. In German governing circles the advocates of the U-boat carried the day.

The year 1914 ended in a stalemate slightly favorable to the Allies. Britain cleared the seas and began a leisurely takeover of the German colonies. The Germans had neither been able to master the French in the West nor the Russians in the East.