Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements

by Frank B. Lord; James William Bryan

© Paul Thompson
1918: The President acknowledging greetings at a military review

Meanwhile secret agents had discovered an attempt by the German Foreign Office to enlist Mexican and Japanese support in the prospective war against America by promising annexations in the Southwest and on the Pacific Coast. Publication of this on March 1 converted a good many Americans of the interior who had hitherto been slow to recognize the seriousness of the German danger; and as the submarine campaign continued and no European neutrals followed the American example, the sentiment in favor of declaration of war grew every day.

But for the President this involved considerable logical difficulty. From the first he had striven to maintain "impartiality of thought," or at least of speech. He had said that the war was no concern of America's; it would be the task of long historical research to assign the responsibility for its outbreak; that "with its causes and objects we are not concerned. The obscure foundations from which its tremendous flood has burst forth we are not interested to search for and explore." It was a war which should be ended by a peace without a victory. Whatever meaning the President attached to these statements when he made them, the meaning attached to them by the public was a serious obstacle to the man who was going to have to lead the nation into war. But he solved the dilemma by a change of base which affected the whole political complexion of the war thereafter, which introduced a new and overriding issue—an issue which, addressing Congress on April 2, he introduced to the world in his most famous phrase and the most effective of his speeches. America, he said, had no quarrel with the German people; that people had not made the war. But the Germans were ruled by an autocratic Government which had made neutrality impossible, which had shown itself "the natural foe of liberty." That Government had forced America to take up the sword for the freedom of peoples—of all peoples, even of the German people. America must fight "to make the world safe for democracy." On April 6, 1917, Congress declared war.

America at War, 1917-1918

Once committed to war, the President found behind him a nation more thoroughly united than could ever have been hoped in the dark days of 1915. Again, as in the week after the sinking of the Lusitania, he was the universally trusted leader of the people; and to a considerable extent the unity of the nation at the entrance into war could be traced back to the very policies of delay which had been so sharply criticised. The people who had been on the side of the Allies from the first and who had seen through German pretenses long before were now solidly behind the President, for he had at last come over to their views. But other and important elements which might have been hostile two years before were now convinced of the necessity for fighting the Germans.

And the President's call to a crusade for democracy won the support, permanent or temporary, of many of those liberals who otherwise, in America and the allied countries, were inclined during the whole war to see in the Kaiser and Ludendorff the natural allies of liberalism. There was a feeling of great ideas stirring the world in the Spring of 1917. The Russian revolution had just overthrown the most reactionary and apparently the most firmly established of autocratic Governments, and no one in Western Europe or America doubted that Russia would jump in six months as far as England, France and America had painfully toiled in two centuries, and become and remain a free democracy. If Russia had had a revolution, might not Germany have a revolution, too? Would not the German people, whose injuries at the hands of their own rulers the President had so well pointed out, rise up and overthrow those rulers and bring about a just and lasting peace? Many people in the Spring of 1917 expected exactly that; the millennium was just around the corner.

Moreover, it seemed that perhaps the Allies would win the war in the field before America could get into it. A British offensive in Artois had important initial successes, and Nivelle's bloody failure on the Aisne was for a long time represented to the world as a brilliant victory. War, for America, might involve a little expenditure of money, but hardly any serious effort, according to the view widely current among the population in the Spring of 1917; it was more than anything else an opportunity for the display of commendable moral sentiments, and for enthusiastic acclamations to the famous allied leaders who presently began to come to the United States on special missions. It is hardly too much to say that most of the American people went into this war in the triumphant mood usually reserved for the celebration of victory.

It may some day be regarded as one of the chief merits of the Wilson Administration that it was not affected by this popular delusion. While a large part of the people seemed to expect a cheap and speedy victory by some sort of white magic, the Administration was getting ready to work for victory. And thanks largely to the unity which had been bought by the President's caution in the two previous years, Congress and the people assented to measures of exertion and self-denial such as no man could have expected America to undertake until compelled by bitter experience.

The first step was the dispatch of American naval forces to aid the Allies in the fight against the submarines, which for a few months were to come dangerously near justifying the confidence that had been placed in them. The process of naval reinforcement was slow, and not till 1918 did the American Navy become a really important factor in the anti-submarine campaign; but every destroyer added to the allied forces was of immediate value. The American Treasury was opened for vast credits to the Allies, who by their enormous purchases of war materials in the United States had created the abounding prosperity of 1916, and had pretty nearly exhausted their own finances in doing so. More than that, the Administration began at once to prepare for the organization of a vast army; and faced with this most important duty of the conduct of the war, the President took the advice of the men who knew. The army officers knew that if America were to take a serious part in the war the regular army and the National Guard would not be enough, nor even Garrison's Continental Army which had been rejected in 1916. A big army would be needed, and the right way to raise it was by conscription.