John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

Lansing reported in his diary that Mr. Wilson “cried out, ‘Good Lord,’ several times in the course of its perusal.” His first thought was that it might be a forgery. It was hard for him to swallow having been taken in by fast talking von Bernstorff.

As soon as he was convinced that Zimmermann’s message was genuine, the President decided that the State Department should leak it to the press. The head of the Washington bureau of the Associated Press was sworn to secrecy as to the origin of the text and on March 31 it was spread over the front pages of the nation’s newspapers.

The Zimmermann telegram, which the German foreign office, with characteristic German bluntness, soon admitted to be genuine, proved a great help to President Wilson in his difficulties with Congress over the Armed Ship Bill. It turned La Follette’s filibuster into a futile gesture. “Fought it through to the finish” the old warrior for righteousness wired his wife after the Sixtyfourth Congress disbanded on Inauguration Day. “Feeling here intense. I must take the gaff for a while.”

The Red Man had won.

In his heart Woodrow Wilson still felt as great a loathing for war as the senators he now denounced as “a little group of wilful men representing no opinion but their own.” He had consistently held in check the “preparedness” campaigns that were whooping up the warfever. He even tried to discourage the War College from making plans for some possible eventual campaign in Europe. As late as early January 1917 he was telling House, “This country does not intend to become involved in this war … it would be a crime against civilization for us to go in.”

In his agony of mind in the final hour he got his old friend Frank Cobb up from New York and talked to him through most of the night.

“It would mean,” he told the editor of the New York World , “that we would lose our heads along with the rest and stop weighing right and wrong. It would mean that a majority of people in this hemisphere would go war mad, quit thinking, and devote their energies to destruction … Conformity will be the only virtue. And every man who refuses to conform will have to pay the penalty … Once lead this people into war and they’ll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance … If there is any alternative for God’s sake let’s take it.”

The German authorities were doing their best to make any alternative to war impossible. They lost no time in presenting the American public with overt acts to force the President’s hand. During the month of February the U-boats sank seven hundred eightyone thousand five hundred tons of shipping, including two American ships warned in time to allow the crews to escape. When the Cunard liner Laconia was torpedoed two American women lost their lives.

March 12 the U.S.S. Algonquin went down off the Scilly Islands. On March 19 the news reached Washington of three American steamers torpedoed on a single day. On the Vigilancia fifteen seamen were lost.

The President called a special session of the Sixtyfifth Congress for April 2.

Colonel House arrived the day before on the night train from New York. Reaching the White House in time for breakfast he found the President and Mrs. Wilson up betimes and getting ready to play a little golf. Woodrow Wilson’s night had been sleepless. Again he was complaining of headaches.

While the President and his party were out on the links Colonel House was pestered by cabinet members calling up to ask what the President was going to say in the speech he was planning to deliver as soon as the two houses had finished organizing.

Since Colonel House didn’t know himself, he held them off with noncommittal murmurs. It wasn’t till after lunch that the President got around to going over his manuscript with the confidential colonel. “No address he has yet made pleased me more than this one,” noted House. Though others considered the President unnaturally calm, House noted signs of nervousness as the afternoon dragged on. “Neither of us did anything except kill time until he was called to the Capitol.”

After the usual family dinner the presidential party drove to the Capitol. It was a night of gusty rain with fitful flickering of lightning on the heavy clouds. Secretary Baker had ordered out two troops of cavalry to protect the President. The wet Washington streets were crowded with sightseers come to see him drive by in this hour of emergency. The House galleries were filled early and thousands stood in the occasional splatters of rain, looking up at the dome of the Capitol which was lit by floodlights from below, while the President asked Congress for a joint resolution declaring that a state of war existed between the United States and the Imperial German Government.

Except for La Follette, who stood with his arms crossed and the lines deep and grim about his bulldog jaw, almost every congressman and even the Supreme Court justices wore a little American flag in the lapel.

The President’s entrance was greeted with cheers and handclapping. In tones clearer and cooler even than usual, he described his efforts to keep the peace against Germany’s everincreasing provocations. He described the possible reactions short of war that were left to him. “There is one choice we cannot make, we are incapable of making: we will not choose the path of submission.”

At that moment Chief Justice White dropped the soft felt hat he was holding, raised his arms above his old white head and brought them together with a resounding slap. The rest of the sentence was drowned in shouts, with the Chief Justice holding his arms above his head like a cheer leader.

We would be fighting, the President went on “for the ultimate peace of the world and the liberation of its peoples … The world must be made safe for democracy …” The cheers within the Capitol were echoed by the crowds outside, standing under the dripping trees in the rainy gardens of the Hill.

“To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth … God helping her, she can do no other.”

President Wilson received the greatest acclamation of his career. Even Senator Lodge wrung his hand. When he finally shook himself loose from the handshakes and congratulations of the Capitol lobbies he was driven back to the White House along streets lined with yelling throngs. All down Pennsylvania Avenue they cheered him.

Back in the White House he sat down at the end of the long table in the Cabinet Room. Tumulty, who was the only one with him, remembered his sitting a long while silent and pale.

“Think of what it was they were applauding,” he said at last. “My message today was a message of death for our young men. How strange it seems to applaud that.”

Then he began telling Tumulty that all along he’d seen the futility of neutrality, that he couldn’t move faster than the American people moved. “Our life till this thing is over … will be full of tragedy and heartaches.”

In a broken voice he began to read his secretary clippings from newspaper editorials approving of his course. A letter from the editor of a paper in Springfield, Massachusetts, touched him particularly … “after all the political experience and conflicts of the past few years, I am conscious of a very real yet peculiar feeling of having summered and wintered with you, in spite of the immeasurable and rather awful distance that separates our respective places in the life and work of our time.”

“That man understood me and sympathized,” were the President’s words as Tumulty remembered them. “As he said this, the President drew his handkerchief from his pocket, wiped away great tears that stood in his eyes, and then laying his head on the cabinet table, sobbed as if he had been a child.”