University Place

Woodrow Wilson’s Reluctant March to War in Europe

– I’m Kari Borne, I’m from the Office of Continuing Education at UW-Whitewater, and we host the Fairhaven Lecture Series each semester. And again, this semester, we’re focusing on the Great War. And I’m going to introduce today’s speaker. Louis Fucilla is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at UW-Whitewater. His research focuses on the role of public administration in American democracy, with a particular interest in the causes and consequences of trust in government. He is a recent transplant from Bloomington, Indiana, and is enjoying exploring the many wonderful things that life in Wisconsin has to offer. Please welcome Dr. Louis Fucilla.
(audience applauds)

– Hello. Well, I’m honored to be here today. In part, I’ll just give you a little miscellaneous bit of information about Wilson. Wilson is kind of the patron saint of political scientists. He is the only president who has possessed a PhD. He’s the only president who was a university faculty member. And he’s the only president whose writings on public administration, we still read. So when you take a graduate course on public administrations, one of the first things you read is an essay Wilson wrote as a faculty member. So he kind of holds a special place for political scientists in our hearts, cause he’s the only one of us who was ever elected President. And it’ll probably never happen again.
(audience laughs)

So it’s interesting to talk about him and his presidency. And so the central question I’m going to frame for you guys is, What took Wilson so long to decide to enter World War I, or have the Americans enter World War I? And this seems a little analogous because he’s, as I’ll point out, he’s much more willing to use force in other contexts, so we want to unpack, okay, what is his foreign policy and what’s the forces that are delaying his entry, or the United States’ entry, into World War I? So let me just start out by saying Wilson’s presidency is kind of a fluke. That I think under a lot of conditions, we wouldn’t have had a President Wilson.

When we look back at the past successful Democratic presidential candidates, the only Southerner prior to Wilson, or the last Southerner prior to Wilson, to actually win office, is James Polk, and that’s before the Civil War. And then there was a northern Democrat, Grover Cleveland, who does win twice, but this is during a period of Republican dominance of the presidency. So that Wilson wins is pretty notable. Prior to Wilson running, the Democrats had fielded William Jennings Bryan, on 1896, 1900 and 1908. And to secure the nomination to represent the Democratic Party, Wilson has to knock Bryan off in the Convention, which he does. So again, that Wilson is President is pretty notable. When we look why he won, he was running against William Howard Taft, who was up for a second term. Now Taft was the personal, the person picked to succeed Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy Roosevelt became disenfranchised with Taft and decided that he wasn’t a worthy successor, and so Teddy Roosevelt contested the Republican nomination in 1912, splitting the Republican Party, and allowing Wilson to win the Presidency. So things kind of aligned very well for Wilson to actually be President, and I think had Roosevelt not intervened, we might not even be talking about a President Wilson. We might have had a second term of Taft.

So the other thing to get in, and this frames the question that I’m going to answer, is Wilson’s foreign policy. He comes into office, really with not a lot of foreign policy experience, if any at all. I don’t think this was a big thing on his radar. And so he was going to be tested in this regard. But he does formulate this doctrine called Moral Diplomacy. And this is what we might think of, or the kind of nearest analogous equivalent of this, would be the support for democracy among the neo-cons that emerged after the attack in 9/11 and the response in Afghanistan and Iraq. Essentially Wilson believes that we want to spread democracy. And we want to give people rights, we want them to be the democratic decision-makers. And it’s in opposition to this idea of the Monroe doctrine, which was promulgated by John Quincy Adams under the presidency of James Monroe, which was essentially about preventing European powers from colonializing South and Central America and establishing their own corporatist interests that would dominate in those areas. So, Wilson is offering moral diplomacy as this way of fighting against what he thinks of as colonialism. Now here’s where we get into the tricky part of this. Wilson’s ideas about Moral Diplomacy leads him to intervene in the near abroad, so South and Central America, frequently during his first term.

And so first we have an incident in Mexico in 1914, The Tampico Incident. And the sources are a little hazy about this, but some members of the navy apparently were arrested by authorities in Tampico, Mexico. And this was seen as a great affront, and the navy responds. And we send warships down to seize Veracruz, and put pressure on the Mexican leader at this time, who’s not democratically elected, his name is Huerta, to basically capitulate to us. We do have incidents, U.S. Marines do lose, a few of them do die in this action. Many more Mexican soldiers do. But when our interests are at stake, Wilson is willing to send our troops abroad, and have them fight and die.

We also see this in, part of these events precipitate the Mexican Revolution. We also see him get involved in this. So Pancho Villa, one of the contenders to lead Mexico after the downfall of Huerta, does stage an attack in New Mexico. Some Americans are hurt and killed. And in response, Wilson authorizes General John Pershing, who will be the Commander of U.S. Forces in World War I to go pursue Pancho Villa down into Mexico. And so for a good period of two years, Pershing is only recalled when the U.S. formally enters World War I. We have Persing leading, it’s a little hard to see, but it’s the Punitive Expedition. Now they don’t catch Pancho Villa. And pretty much after the first month, they just kind of give up, and they’re American troops just sitting in Mexico.

But again, for a prolonged period, two years. Now, that doesn’t sound too bad for us now, I mean I could go to Mexico for a few years and I think I could find enough to occupy my time. But this represents basically imperialist tendencies, right? We’re just sending our troops and we’re going to keep them down there. We also see, under Wilson, we see what’s called the Occupation of Haiti, start, extends beyond Wilson’s presidency, but again, it starts here. That essentially, under the guise of promoting U.S. interests. Wilson sends Marines down to overthrow revolutionaries. And so they’re stationed at a base and here’s a picture of a Marine posing with dead revolutionaries.

So again, this frames the central question. So despite his belief in this Moral Diplomacy, that we should promote people having a voice in the say of their own country, Wilson is really willing to use military force when he deems it necessary. He doesn’t hesitate. Yet, at the outset of World War I, Wilson is exceedingly reluctant, right from the outbreak in June of 1914, to when the U.S. enters the war in April of 2017, we have a period of about two and a half years. So, again, the central question is what explains this reluctance? What’s going on here with Wilson and with the events of the war that are pushing him to delay entry? And so that’s what I’m going to talk about, or focus on. So just to talk about the precipitating event, as everybody knows, the start of proximate cause of this, right? Is the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophia in Sarajevo, which is in Serbia, in June of 1914.

And just a terribly timed trip, he’s actually, there’s one assassination attempt on the man earlier in the day. He manages to get to the City Hall in Sarajevo and then, leaving City Hall, they basically run into the person that ends up assassinating him. It’s almost like he’s sitting across the road in a cafe and he realizes, “Ooh, there’s my target.” And so the poor guy, it was a badly planned trip. So the Archduke, and again, his wife, end up assassinated. And what happens is the system of alliances and agreements that exist in Europe start, I think of it as a string of dominoes. And so here’s just a graph of all these different alliances and how they pull these different countries in different directions. So over this contested area of the Balkans, Russia is aligned with the Serbs and Britain and France are aligned with Russia, and then on the other side, we have Austria and Hungary, Germany and Italy, initially, along with the Ottomans, aligned on the other side. And so these systems of alliances are pulling these major European nations in different directions. And I think in some sense, this cartoon captures the dynamic a bit better. This is from a publication, The Brooklyn Eagle, it’s circa about 1914. The caption was, “If Austria attacks Serbia, Russia will fall upon Austria, Germany upon Russia, and France and England upon Germany.” And this is called “The Chain of Friendship.”

In its essence, it’s really underlies this logic, these complex international agreements which really just means there’s going to be a domino effect. With this tension in this contested area of the Balkans, something happens, and alliances are going to kick in, that’s going to drag Europe into war. Now, notice we’re not in this, because we don’t have these agreements, right? So there’s nothing that is going to pull the U.S. into war like these other major nations in Europe. And so that’s one reason we don’t automatically jump in. And so when this happens, pretty immediately, Wilson issues a message to Congress on neutrality. And this is his attempt to balance out American interest in this regard. So he says, “Every man who really loves America will act and speak in the true spirit of neutrality, which is the spirit of impartiality and fairness and friendliness to all concerned.”

A little later in the speech, he says, “The United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name during these days that are to try men’s souls. We must be impartial in thought as well as action, we must put a curb upon our sentiments, as well as upon every transaction that might be construed as a preference of one party to the struggle before another.” So pretty much right after the assassination attempt, where these nations are being drawn into war, Wilson is saying we got to stay out of it. Let’s not get involved, we have to be fair, we’re going to be a neutral party to this. In part, I think this is driven by Wilson’s desire to play the role of peacemaker. And over this period of time, from the outbreak of hostilities to when the U.S. does enter the war, Wilson is trying to serve that role. He’s offering proposals to the Germans and the Austrian-Hungarians, as well as to the Allies.

Various proposals designed to cease hostilities and to negotiate a settlement to the war. And so that he hopes, by staying neutral, he can act as this broker. Now, pretty much no one’s listening to him at this point in time. They hear what he has to say, but they’re going on and doing what they want anyway. And so it’s really not until the conclusion of the war that Wilson is taken more seriously as a peacemaker and that’s some of his legacy, that I think you’ll explore in other talks throughout this series.

So Wilson has this doctrine of neutrality and I think it’s best captured in this cartoon from The Dallas Morning News around the same time when there’s a picture of Wilson and he’s steering clear of the rocks, right? So it’s this image of him piloting a ship and when you look at the rocks, the rocks on one side are war, and the other side is intervention, and in the background is a lighthouse and it’s supposed to be a beacon of justice. Right? So Wilson is trying to steer the ship of state towards justice and avoid entanglements, and these two pretty awful things, right? Foreign intervention and war.

So what ask, okay, why? Why the reasons for neutrality? And I think there are three key points here. The first is, is that we have commercial interest at stake. And this is summed up in this cartoon. So it’s Uncle Sam, and he’s wearing a placard that has both sides and on the front it says, “Peace on Earth, goodwill toward men.” Now, on the back, it says, “War ammunition for sale, orders filled promptly.” At some level, this is America in 1914. That we have access to commodities that the combatants want. We have access to some industrial capacity that could produce military kit that the combatants would want. And there’s some interesting stories that the Allies were actually deeply concerned about making sure that America’s economic interests weren’t harmed by the war. And actually, it looks like Britain gamed our system pretty well. They knew that the Germans really wanted access to American cotton. Apparently because cotton can be used in the production of munitions. Who knew?

And so what they did is the British tried to buy as much southern cotton as they could afford, to deny it going to the Germans and not harm southern cotton farmers. They didn’t want them to be harmed by not having access to their commodities, but they just didn’t want the Germans to have them. Well, that makes sense. Right? But we are kind of playing both sides here because at some very basic level, war is good for business and if we’re neutral, we can serve both sides. And so this is a powerful reason for neutrality. The other one is demographic. Right? We are a nation of immigrants and the stat I was reading is at the start of the war, nearly a third of the U.S. population is either foreign-born or they’re first-generation U.S. citizens. So they would have had a parent that was born abroad. A third of our population.

More than that, when we look at census records, the census prior to that would have been in 1910, fully 8% of the population identifies as having German ancestry. That’s a very significant portion of the population. Even more than that is that there’s a side that Ireland chooses. In essence, Ireland chooses the side that’s anti-British. So they support the Central Powers, including Germany, in the war. And so there’s some pull within the Irish-American community to support any side that’s going to poke Britain in the eye. Right, so we’re a nation that has divided loyalties because of our demographics. And so this is a powerful force promoting neutrality.

The last one is public opinion. And this is harder to quantify because if we go back in time, really we’re before the advent of modern opinion polling. So nowadays, if we want to know what the public thinks, it’s really easy. Pollsters design a survey, they field it, and we can say okay, 60% of Americans believe this, or support the President, or like Congress. And we can do that with pretty good accuracy, but modern polling firms aren’t going to come around for another 20, 30 years.

But how can we tell what the public is thinking? Well, I think we can look at what’s popular in terms of music at the time. And we can also look at what politicians are doing, ’cause politicians are really adept at reading the public, even if they don’t quite have the data we would think. And so one of the bestselling records of 1915 is by the singer, Ed Morton and it’s “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to be a Soldier.”

So this is expressing some kind of popular sentiment. Look, we don’t want to be involved in this. The other one is okay, so how is Wilson going to pitch himself for his 1916 re-election campaign? And this is from the side of a bus going about promoting Wilson. It’s a little hard to see, but this one, the second down from his accomplishments is basically, he keeps us out of war. And there’s other little buttons around this time that says, “Wilson, he keeps us out of war.” So essentially, he’s campaigning. That this is a good thing, this is a reason to vote for me, is that I’ve managed to get us, keep us from being involved in this.

So really I think we can say American public opinion at this time is against going into this fray. We don’t want to be involved. Now, at some level, neutrality is becoming unsustainable. And I think we can even see this, and it’s at some level Wilson’s re-election campaign is somewhat cynical. This is from Punch, which is a London publication around the time, and it’s making fun of Wilson on this regard. And so again, we’ve got Wilson, vote for Wilson, who kept you out of war. Well, it’s Wilson on the telephone and the caption reads, “What’s that? U-Boat blockading New York? Tut tut, very inopportune!”

In essence, expressing this idea that you may be cynical here. There’s stuff going on that’s making neutrality less sustainable. And so we can look at that, what’s going on? Well, part of what’s going on is the dynamics of the war. In some sense, we are dragged into war because of choices other actors made. So the biggest one is that Britain starts a naval blockade of Germany.

Now this is good strategy on the part of the British. Why? Well, Germany and the Central Powers, at the outset of war, appear to be the dominant land force. So they’re winning battles. Now, eventually they do slow down, and we get that big stalemate and the front warfare that marks a lot of our recollection of World War I. But at the outset, the Central Powers are winning. And so Britain has got to think, how do we respond to this? And what they hit upon is that look, we may not be the equal on land of the Central Powers, but what we have is naval power. And so we think we can enforce a blockade that’s going to limit Germany’s ability to bring material in to wage the war. And if we can do that, we can slow them down. And so what they do is, off the coast of Germany, or where Germany has access to the Atlantic Ocean, they enact a blockade.

This is military strategy that the British are using to further their own ends. And initially, this blockade raises tensions with the United States, in part because this is bad for U.S. economic interests, or for our companies that are trying to trade. So there are many instances in which the United States is lodging formal complaints with the British about how it’s treating merchantmen ships that are trying to bring cargo in. Now, the British are pretty savvy about this and they generally do a good job. They don’t engage in open warfare. They’re generally not sinking ships, they’re mostly confiscating contraband. But they’re willing to settle claims that the United States make. So they’re holding companies whole for any losses they get. So this is a source of tension, and initially, Wilson and his State Department are frustrated with the British for doing this.

But that starts to change as we see how Germany responds. And what Germany is going to do is they’re going to counter with the move they have left. They don’t have a navy that’s the equal of Britain, so they’re left to respond with using U-Boats, or submarines. And starting in 1950, they begin a campaign to try to erase the British blockade, or to really affect commerce that’s existing between Britain’s colonies, right? So in Australia, New Zealand, that are bring resources in, but also from the United States. And so we see the sinking of boats. Some of these are passenger liners, so two famous incidents are the Falaba, which is sunk in 1915, as well as the much more famous Lusitania, right? And these occur spring and early summer of 1915.

Now, were a lot of American lives lost in these sinkings? No. That total… 129 American lives are lost in these two sinkings. There’s one in the Falaba, and then 128 in the Lusitania. But raise these incidents start to claw at American public opinion. It’s not a great loss of life, but hey, we’re losing some of our own here. This is affecting us. And so Germany, at various points in time, is going to pledge to stop unrestricted submarine warfare. The first being after they sink the passenger liner Arabic in 1915, in the fall of 1915. They stop. The U.S. lodges complaints after these incidents and after this one, the war command in Germany agrees we’re going to stop U-Boat warfare. Until the next time, when here we have a Channel ship, right? So a ship that’s going between England and France. This is the Sussex. The Sussex isn’t sunk, but it’s severely damaged. And again, after this incident happens, the United States complains and Germany agrees to stop U-Boat warfare. We’re going to stop doing what we’re doing. And this lasts for a while.

But what we know is that Germany lets the United States know in late January of 1917 that, look, we’re going to resume unrestricted U-Boat warfare. The war’s not going well for them, or they recognize they’re at this stalemate, and they think this is a way that they can win. So between February and March 1917, German U-Boats, in quick succession, sink four ships. These are British passenger liners, but a lot of them are American merchantmen ships. So these are ships that are transporting cargo and this is really the last straw. That Germany has made these pledges to stop this unrestricted U-Boat warfare and keeps breaking them. And it’s kind of like this is it. Wilson is just unwilling to believe anything the Germans are going to tell them. He’s lost confidence that they want to seek a negotiated settlement to the war. And so, enough’s enough.

There’s another thing that happens in this that also tips the scales. And this is the Zimmermann telegram. And in essence, what it is, it’s an offer, on the part of Germany, to Mexico. And it says look, you join an alliance with us and fight the Allied powers and the United States, and if you do so, and we win, we promise you your old territories back in Texas, New Mexico, and parts of Arizona, right? So we’ll give you back the land you’ve lost to the U.S. if you’re willing to join us. And this was sent Western Union to the consulate in Mexico and they do this right at the start of the time that they’re telling the Americans we’re going to resume unrestricted warfare with the U-Boat, but it’s not until March 3rd of 1917 that the German Foreign Secretary comes out and says look, we did send this.

Now, we had this helpful translation that was brought to our attention by the British, right? They want to make sure that we know what’s going on. But when Germany acknowledges this, this is the other straw that breaks the camel’s back. You’re messing with us at home now, right? It’s one thing that you’re sinking ships abroad, but look, you’re threatening our territorial integrity. And that just proves too much. And so what we have in early April 1917 is we have Wilson go and directly address Congress. And this is fairly notable in that presidents of this time don’t usually go and talk directly to Congress. Now, nowadays, we have the State of the Union that occurs pretty much every year, but this is fairly novel. And what Wilson is doing is asking them to declare war. It’s gone too far.

And so what he’s outlining, this is just a very little bit of his message, is that the justification for it is on the grounds of the attack on shipping. When he’s justifying why we need to respond, it’s that you’re hitting us where it hurts. And not just us, but you’ve been doing this to other nations, right? And so he’s reframing this argument from one that’s purely you’re messing with our economic interests to this broader issue about human rights. “Our motive will not be revenge, or the victorious assertion of the physical might of the nation, but only the vindication of right, of human right, of which we are only a single champion.”

And in this, he includes messages that were really not at war with the people of Germany, but were at war with its government. And so it’s this idea that really it’s the German government that has just gone too far and we need to go to war. So he makes this speech on the 2nd, and by the 6th, the United States Congress has voted to enter the war. Now, there’s an interesting little Wisconsin spin to this. In the Senate, there are six senators who vote against going to war. And Robert La Follette is one of them. So one of Wisconsin’s senators is unwilling to give the President the authority to go to war. And in part, I think you can look at it that, right, in Wisconsin, we have a population that has a large German ancestry. So I’m sure he felt cross-pressured in that regard to not engage in war. So there’s their own Wisconsin part of this history. I’m just going to leave you some of the, I think, big takeaways here. And then we can open it up for questions.

So the first, I think, is that Wilson and the U.S. are very reluctant to get into the war. Essentially, we have a two-and-a-half-year period where we’re trying everything we can to not get involved in this. And we see public opinion go from very staunchly “let’s stay out of this, let’s be removed from this conflict in Europe,” to “okay, it’s in our interests to go and do this” So it takes us a while and I think we kind of do this kicking and screaming, but we end up going to war.

The other thing is that this really marks the beginning of the U.S. as a world power. If we had avoided participating in World War I, I don’t think we would have gotten to be known as a world power. Now if you look at it, the Allied commanders, the French and the British, don’t think much of American soldiers during World War I. That essentially, we’re used as cannon fodder while their more hardened troops that have been fighting much longer and have more experience in this are the ones that are doing more of the heavy lifting. We’re kind of the reserve forces, the cheap manpower. But what that gives us, is it gives us a chip at the table. Our participation is definitive in the sense that it tips the balance of the war and allows the Allied powers to win. And because of that, we’re given a seat at the table when it comes to negotiating the peace treaty in Versailles. And again, Wilson had been trying to play peacemaker since the outset of the war in 1914, and he’s not taken seriously. He’s taken much more seriously in 1917. And the U.S. is looked at as a great power going forward. Again, we wouldn’t have had we sat this one out. So really this is the beginning of the U.S. as a world power.

The last one is more a theme that I think something that resonates with us today is that this idea of America as a force in the world. I think it’s something that we continuously come back to. And that is a central point in American politics. So we were exceedingly isolationist in 1914, we engaged with the world in World War I, but notice as soon as it was over, we wanted to go back to being isolationist again.

Now, that lack of engagement may have contributed to the conditions that led to World War II, when, again, America was called on and assumed leadership in the world. And this idea that America would play a role in world affairs, the post-war consensus lasted, or was enduring for a very long time. But I would put it to you that this last presidential election, we addressed this question again. What would America’s role in the world be?

Do we want to be a world leader or are we more willing to focus on our own affairs, right? In that we want to disengage a bit from the world. And so that was an issue, and I think we’re still working through the implications of how we’ve decided that question again. But if we can learn anything from World War I and our entry into it, is that sometimes the world has a funny way of dragging us in. That we may wish to choose to focus on our own affairs, but things happen in the international community. And so sometimes America gets pulled into stuff in which it otherwise might not choose to. And so that’s something we also have to think about, given the current state of the world. So that’s it for my presentation, but I’m really excited to hear your thoughts and answer any questions you may have.

– Thank you.
– Thank you.
(audience applauds)