by saying:
There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight. There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.
On two subsequent occasions he voiced sentiments that were truly prophetic, in the light of the crusade’s disillusioning aftermath. Addressing the Senate on January 22, 1917, he pleaded for a “peace without victory”:
Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor’s terms imposed upon the vanquished. It would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand. Only a peace between equals can last, only a peace the very principle of which is equality and a common participation in a common benefit.
And on the very eve of his appeal to Congress for a declaration of war Wilson privately poured out his doubts and fears to Frank Cobb, editor of the New York World. Looking pale and haggard, the President told the editor he had been lying awake for nights, thinking over the whole situation, trying in vain to find an alternative to war. When Cobb observed that Germany had forced his hand, Wilson refused to be consoled. He said:
America’s entrance would mean that we would lose our heads along with the rest and stop weighing right or wrong. It would mean that the majority of the people in this hemisphere would go war-mad, quit thinking and devote their energies to destruction. . . . It means an attempt to reconstruct a peacetime civilization with war standards, and at the end of the war there will be no bystanders with sufficient power to influence the terms. . . . Once lead this people into war and they’ll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance.
For a man to be led by what he considers irresistible necessity to follow a course of action from which he anticipates no constructive results is one of the highest forms of tragedy. It was such a tragedy that brought Wilson sleepless nights before his call to arms on April 2, 1917.
America in 1914 had no political commitments to either group of belligerents. But its foreign-trade interests were immediately and sharply affected. Each side went far beyond previous precedents in trying to cut off enemy supplies with slight regard for neutral rights. The Allies dominated the surface of the seas. They could not establish a close blockade of German ports, the only kind which was legitimate under international law. But they could and did sweep German shipping from the seas. And they stretched the rights of search and seizure and the definition of contraband far beyond previous rules and standards.
The American State Department filed sharp protests against seizures of American cargoes, but received little satisfaction. One reason why the remonstrances received little attention was the extreme Anglophile attitude of the American Ambassador in London, Walter Hines Page. Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Minister, reports that Page, after reading a dispatch contesting the British right to stop contraband going to neutral ports, offered the following postscript:
“I have now read the dispatch, but do not agree with it. Let us consider how it should be answered!”
Sir Edward’s reaction is understandable:
“The comfort, support and encouragement that Page’s presence was to the Secretary for Foreign Affairs may be imagined.”
The purpose of the blockade, according to Winston Churchill, who unconsciously anticipated a slogan of World War II, was to enforce unconditional surrender:
“Germany is like a man throttled by a heavy gag. You know the effect of such a gag. . . . The effort wears out the heart and Germany knows it. This pressure shall not be relaxed until she gives in unconditionally.”
The German reply to the Allied blockade was a new naval weapon, the submarine. These undersea craft soon developed unforeseen power as destroyers of merchant shipping. As a wag remarked: Britannia rules the waves, but Germany waives the rules.
The German Government on February 4, 1915, after vainly protesting against the rigors of the blockade, declared the waters surrounding the British Isles a war zone, in which every enemy merchant ship was liable to destruction. Neutral ships were also warned of danger in entering this zone.
The submarine was a more visible and provocative weapon than the blockade, although Secretary of State Bryan, a staunch pacifist, professed to see little difference between the prize court and the torpedo. Submarine attacks cost lives and created headlines. Cargoes seized by British warships merely became the subject of lawsuits.
A crisis in American-German relations followed the sinking of the British liner Lusitania off the coast of Ireland on May 7, 1915. The ship was carrying munitions and was not convoyed. Over eleven hundred passengers, including 128 American citizens, lost their lives. There was an almost unanimous cry of horror and indignation in the American press. But there were few voices in favor of going to war. There was a strongly phrased note of protest. But tension gradually eased off as there was no repetition of tragedy on the scale of the Lusitania sinking.
The submarine issue came sharply to a head after the British cross-Channel steamer Sussex was torpedoed, with the loss of some American lives, in the spring of 1916. Wilson informed the German Government that, unless it abandoned present methods of submarine warfare against passenger- and freight-carrying ships, “the Government of the United States can have no choice but to sever diplomatic relations with the German Empire altogether.”
Faced with this clear-cut alternative, the German Government yielded. It consented not to sink merchant ships without warning and without taking precautions to save lives. It tried to link this concession with a suggestion that the United States should hold Great Britain responsible for observing international law in the matter of the blockade.
The American Government refused to admit any connection between these two issues. As Germany offered no further comment, the dispute was settled, for the moment, with a diplomatic victory for Wilson. But the danger remained that submarine warfare would be resumed whenever the German Government might feel that its advantages would outweigh the benefits of American neutrality. And the President had now committed the United States to a breach of relations in the event of a renewal of submarine attacks against nonmilitary shipping.
This consideration lent an element of urgency to Wilson’s efforts to find a basis for mediation. In the light of later events there can be little doubt that a negotiated peace on reasonable terms in 1915 or 1916 would have been incomparably the happiest possible ending of the war. Such a peace would probably have saved the fabric of European civilization from the fearful shocks of communism and nazism.
But foresight does not seem to have been the gift of any of the men who occupied the seats of power in the warring countries. Winston Churchill, writing in a sober mood between the two great wars, in both of which he played a leading part, summed up the mood of the belligerent leaders, which he fully shared, in the following eloquent and somber passage:
Governments and individuals conformed to the rhythm of the tragedy, and swayed and staggered forward in helpless violence, slaughtering and squandering on ever-increasing scales, till injuries were wrought to the structure of human society which a century will not efface, and which may conceivably prove fatal to the present civilisation. . . . Victory was to be bought so dear as to be almost indistinguishable from defeat. It was not to give even security to the victors. . . . The most complete victory ever gained in arms has failed to solve the European problem or remove the dangers which produced the war.1
During the years when American mediation was possible, the Germans were clearly ahead on the war map. They had overrun Belgium and northeastern France before the western front sagged down in bloody stalemate. They had crushed Serbia and pushed the Russians far back from the prewar frontier. Rumania’s entrance into the war in 1916 was followed by swift defeat.
On the other hand the blockade was contracting their supplies of food and raw materials. And Germany and its allies faced a coalition of powers with a larger aggregate population and much more extensive natural resources. It would, therefore, have been advantageous for Germany to conclude peace on terms that gave some recognition to its