John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

House was struck by the grim mood he found. England was settling down to war as a way of life. His kindly friend, Walter Hines Page at the Embassy, was subtly imbued with the war spirit. House, a man extremely sensitive to such influences, no sooner saw Sir Edward Grey than he blurted out to him that he had no intention of pushing the question of peace, not right now, “for in my opinion it could not be brought about before the middle of May or the first of June. I could see the necessity for the Allies to try out their new armies in the spring …”

The Foreign Office was all in a tizzy about how to deal with Mr. Wilson’s confidential colonel. Even the humblest clerk knew that the Foreign Secretary was busy night and day tempting the Italians, the Greeks and the Romanians into the war on the Allied side with promises of hunks of Austrian, Hungarian and Turkish territory, and that the American Secretary of State’s formula for peace on the basis of the status quo ante was thoroughly unwelcome.

Astonished at Colonel House’s sweet reasonableness Sir Edward Grey wrote enthusiastically: “I found combined in him a rare degree of the qualities of wisdom and sympathy. In the stress of war it was at once a relief, a delight, an advantage to be able to talk to him freely … He had a way of saying ‘I know it’ in a tone and manner that carried conviction both of his sympathy with and understanding of what was said to him.”

From London, House travelled to Paris, where he found the French icily preoccupied with their own ideas, and then through Switzerland to Berlin. He arrived in a March snowstorm. The civilians in the German administration were as cordial as before. They pointed out, however, the rising bitterness among the German people against American persistence in selling munitions to the Allies, while acquiescing in the blockade which was starving German women and children. House chummed up the waters by calling for inclusion of freedom of the seas in the eventual peace terms. “I have sown this thought of the Freedom of the Seas very widely since I have been here,” he wrote the President, “and I think I can already see the results … I think I can show England that, in the long run … it is as much to her interest as it is to that of the other nations of the earth.”

Back in Paris, he found the French, as usual, harder to talk to than the British and the Germans. The French politicians were obsessed with the idea that the President was privately pro-German. “I find your purpose badly misunderstood,” House wrote him. For Secretary Bryan whom he made a point of soothing with vague communications, he summed up his mission, “Everybody seems to want peace but nobody is willing to concede enough to get it.”

From Paris he returned to London where he found British ruling circles more warlike than ever. The very word “Peace” was getting a pro-German sound to their ears. Page gave vent to the pervading mood: “Peace talk … is yet mere moonshine — House has been to Berlin from London, thence to Paris, thence back to London again — from Nowhere (as far as peace is concerned) to Nowhere again.”

The colonel remained optimistic. He seems to have taken it for granted that the expedition in preparation against the Dardanelles would knock Turkey out of the war, that the Balkan nations and Italy would come in on the Allied side and that then the Germans would be willing to negotiate. The English politicians he talked to gave him no inkling, if they knew it themselves, of the effectiveness of the U-boat war on shipping. In February and March a hundred and thirty thousand tons of Allied shipping was sunk.

Meanwhile in Washington discussions were going on continuously between the President, Secretary Bryan and Counsellor Lansing on how to preserve American neutrality. They were in agreement on the note to Great Britain protesting against the misuse of the American flag and on the note to Germany declaring that the German Government would be held strictly accountable for damage to American property and loss of American lives from submarines. Bryan was urging the President to use this opportunity to demand that both governments call off their blockades. He had been encouraged by von Bernstorff and by a note from the Foreign Office. He saw cancelling the two blockades as a first step towards inducing the belligerents to accept the Declaration of London.

The Secretary’s hopes received a setback when, in spite of soothing phrases from the Foreign Office, the British in the middle of March announced a total embargo on trade with Germany. This last order in council resulted in an outburst of popular indignation in the United States led by the Hearst press. Powerful lobbies for cotton and copper were aroused. The German propaganda machine was encouraged to step up its agitation for an embargo on the shipment of munitions of war. In this the Irish societies in the east and good Bryan Democrats in the middlewest sympathized vigorously with the German-American bunds. Sentiment against war profits was growing. A steel company operating what was known as The Golden Rule Plant in St. Louis was one of a number of manufacturers to announce that they would sell no war materials whatsoever.

The President wrote House a sharp letter urging him to bring home to Sir Edward Grey the state of sentiment in America. Secretary of the Interior Lane wrote him too: “Notwithstanding all the insults of Germany, he (the President) is determined to endure to the limit … And the English are not behaving very well … We have been very meek and mild under their use of the ocean as a tollroad … You would be interested, I think in hearing some of the discussion around the Cabinet table. There isn’t a man in the Cabinet who has a drop of German blood in his veins, I guess. Two of us were born under the British flag. I have two cousins in the British army and Mrs. Lane has three. The most of us are Scotch in our ancestry, and yet each day we meet we boil over somewhat, at the foolish manner in which England acts. Can it be that she is trying to hamper our trade?… If Congress were in session we would be actively debating an embargo resolution today.” The people had more confidence in than love for the President he went on to say. Then he added: “I am growing more and more in my admiration for Bryan each day. He is too good a Christian to run a naughty world and he doesn’t hate hard enough, but he certainly is a noble and highminded man, and loyal to the President to the last hair.”

Before American indignation had a chance to build up a proper head of steam against the British, the exploits of the U-boats turned the popular fury against the Germans. Although the German U-boat commanders were instructed to spare neutral ships, mistakes were inevitable. On March 28 an American mining engineer named Leon C. Thrasher, bound for a job in South Africa, was drowned when the British liner Falaba was sunk by a German submarine.

The argument over poor Thrasher brought the differences of opinion inside the administration to a boil. Lansing called the sinking “an atrocious act of lawlessness” and wanted vigorous action. Bryan put forth the theory that Americans travelling on belligerent ships in wartime did so at their own risk.

Wilson was of two minds. In every speech he made he was campaigning for “neutrality in thought and deed.” Having convinced even Bryan that the export of arms and ammunition was consistent with neutrality, the President tended to Lansing’s view on the need for a firm protest to Berlin on Thrasher’s death. Bryan was profoundly disturbed.

He wanted every dispute with the belligerents put up for arbitration. “Nearly nine months have passed,” he wrote the President, who preferred mulling over the arguments in writing rather than coping with them during the hasty give and take of cabinet meetings, “… and after the expenditure of ten billion dollars and the sacrifice of several millions of the flower of Europe the war is at a draw. Surely the most sanguinary ought to be satisfied with the slaughter. I submit that it is this nation’s right and duty to make, not a secret, but an open appeal for the acceptance of mediation … As the greatest Christian nation we should act — we cannot avoid the responsibility.”