What the peace delegation didn’t fully realize was that Wilson, caught in a series of events, was turning from a peace proponent to a wartime president. And that agonizing shift, which took place over just 70 days in 1917, would transform the United States from an isolated, neutral nation to a world power.
“The President’s mood was stern,” recalled Federation member and renowned social worker Jane Addams, “far from the scholar’s detachment.” Earlier that month, Germany had adopted unrestricted submarine warfare: Its U-boats would attack any ship approaching Britain, France, and Italy, including neutral American ships. The peace delegation hoped to bolster Wilson’s diplomatic instincts and to press him to respond without joining the war. William I. Hull, a former student of Wilson’s and a Quaker pacifist, tried to convince Wilson that he, like the presidents who came before him, could protect American shipping through negotiation.
But when Hull suggested that Wilson try to appeal directly to the German people, not their government, Wilson stopped him.
“Dr. Hull,” Wilson said, “if you knew what I know at the present moment, and what you will see reported in tomorrow morning’s newspapers, you would not ask me to attempt further peaceful dealings with the Germans.”
Then Wilson told his visitors about the Zimmermann Telegram.
“U.S. BARES WAR PLOT,” read the Chicago Tribune’s headline the next day, March 1, 1917. “GERMANY SEEKS AN ALLIANCE AGAINST US; ASKS JAPAN AND MEXICO TO JOIN HER,” announced the New York Times. German foreign minister Arthur Zimmermann’s decoded telegram, which Wilson’s administration had leaked to the Associated Press, instructed the German ambassador in Mexico to propose an alliance. If the U.S. declared war over Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare, Zimmermann offered to “make war together” with Mexico in exchange for “generous financial support and an understanding on our part that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona” (ceded under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican-American War nearly 70 years earlier).
Until the dual shocks of unrestricted submarine warfare and the Zimmermann Telegram, Wilson had truly intended to keep the United States out of World War I. But just 70 days later, on April 2, 1917, he asked Congress to declare war on Germany. Wilson’s agonized decision over that period permanently changed America’s relationship with the world: He forsook George Washington's 124-year precedent of American neutrality in European wars. His idealistic justifications for that decision helped launch a century of American military alliances and interventions around the globe.
In his January speech, Wilson had laid out the idealistic international principles that would later guide him after the war. Permanent peace, he argued, required governments built on the consent of the governed, freedom of the seas, arms control and an international League of Peace (which later became the League of Nations). He argued that both sides in the war—the Allies, including England and France, and the Central Powers, including Germany—should accept what he called a “peace without victory.” The alternative, he argued, was a temporary “peace forced upon the loser, a victor’s terms imposed upon the vanquished.” That, Wilson warned, would leave “a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory” and build the peace on “quicksand.”
But nine days later, at 4 p.m. on January 31, the German ambassador in Washington informed the U.S. State Department that his nation would begin unrestricted submarine warfare—which threatened American commerce and lives on the Atlantic Ocean—at midnight. “The President was sad and depressed,” wrote Wilson’s adviser Edward House in his diary the next day. “[He] said he felt as if the world had suddenly reversed itself; that after going from east to west, it had begun to go from west to east and that he could not get his balance.”
Wilson cut off diplomatic relations with Germany, but refused to believe war was inevitable. “We do not desire any hostile conflict with the Imperial German Government,” he told Congress on February 3. “We are the sincere friends of the German people and earnestly desire to remain at peace with the Government which speaks for them. We shall not believe that they are hostile to us unless and until we are obliged to believe it.”
Though most Americans weren’t eager to fight, Wilson’s critics raged at his inaction. “I don’t believe Wilson will go to war unless Germany literally kicks him into it,” former President Theodore Roosevelt, who had failed in his bid to re-take the White House in 1912, wrote to U.S. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge.
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