America and the First World War

World War I was by many measures the worst war in the history of the world. It certainly was the worst for the fighting men, who for four long years existed in unthinkable conditions of deprivation, fear, discomfort and death. Millions of men lived in trenches and holes in the ground, with only the rarest of opportunities to spend the night in untroubled sleep, in a clean bed, with normal sanitary facilities and decent food. The fighting itself, rather than being long periods of boredom interspersed with short bursts of terror, was more like long periods of intermittent fear interwoven with sustained periods of unspeakable violence. Millions of men died horrible deaths, and many millions of others were wounded physically and mentally and spiritually to depths from which it was almost impossible to recover, Casualties in a single day of fighting often rose to the tens of thousands.

The French, on whose soil the worst of the war was fought, can be said never to have fully recovered from the conflict. They lost half a generation of young men, and memories of that conflict, along with its successor, World War II, are still rooted deeply in the French psyche.

The Germans, Austrians, British, Russians and Italians also suffered grave damage and irreplaceable loss. Comparing relative suffering through comparative statistics is an empty exercise; every nation involved suffered immensely. There were no real victors.

For America the war was relatively brief, and the casualties, while large, could not be compared with those of the other major nations, For America, however, the Great War was a turning point: for the first time American soldiers in significant numbers crossed the Atlantic to fight in a foreign war; for the first time America became deeply embroiled in European affairs; for the first time an American president helped shape the fate of a postwar world. For the first time America was part of the Western family of nations in the fullest sense, and the impact of the two million soldiers who fought in France as well as President Wilson and the diplomats who negotiated the peace treaty in Versailles in 1919 changed the course of American diplomacy forever.

At the center of America's involvement in the first world war was President Woodrow Wilson's inexperience in politics—he had served one two-year term as governor of New Jersey before being elected president. Wilson was in some ways an accidental president in that the Republican Party split in half in 1912 between those loyal to President Taft and the followers of Progressive ex-President Theodore Roosevelt. As the Republicans and Progressives split into two parties, Wilson glided neatly in between.

Election Results of 1912
Candidate	Party	Electoral Votes	Popular Vote
Woodrow Wilson	Democratic	435	6,286,214
Theodore Roosevelt	Progressive	88	4,126,020
William H. Taft	Republican	8	3,483,922
Eugene V. Debs	Socialist	0	897,011

As the chart indicates, although Wilson won a landslide in the electoral College, he won only 42.5% of the popular vote, and was out polled by Roosevelt and Taft combined by 1.3 million votes.

Although the United States was instrumental in bringing the war to a successful conclusion, as the United States was on the side of the Allied powers, who won the war, Wilson’s effort to reshape the world according to his plan to “make the world safe for democracy” was ultimately a failure. Or so it seemed at the time.

It is clear that Woodrow Wilson had a dream, and that he devoted all of his abundant energy and talents and brainpower to achieving that dream. The rest of the world, however, was not ready to see things his way. The Treaty of Versailles was vindictive and harsh, and few historians doubt that it was a direct contributor to the outbreak of World War II. The League of Nations, which Wilson cherished as his dream to achieve worldwide peace and stability, was a failure. Even his own United States refused to join.

But in the longer view Wilsonian democracy did not die. His progressive ideas lived on among his most able sub-cabinet members, including his very capable Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And in the long-term Wilson’s failed League of Nations found new life in the United Nations, which, although it remains a controversial entity whose achievements have been mixed, has, it must be said, kept the world from being an even more violent and dangerous place than it otherwise would have been. Many of those who worked for and with Wilson to achieve his ideals were young men who came of age a generation later, leading the United States through World War II and beyond. All of them, one way or another, were touched by the impact of Woodrow Wilson

Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born in Staunton, Virginia, December 29, 1856, his father a Presbyterian minister. The family moved to Augusta, Georgia when he was two—they lived in the path of Sherman's march to the sea in 1864. Wilson was educated largely at home until 9\he was nine. He spent one year at Davidson, then went on to Princeton graduating in the class of 1879, 38th out of 106 in the class.

He tried studying law at the University of Virginia Law school, but withdrew. He then went to Johns Hopkins University to study politics and history. In 1885 he published “Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics,” which was later accepted as his Ph.D. dissertation, awarded to him in 1886. He is the only U.S. president to have earned a Ph.D. He married in 1885, had 3 daughters, and was a good husband and father.

Wilson was always interested in politics, very ambitious. He was a severe intellectual and an admirer of Robert E. Lee. God was a strong factor in Wilson's life, and he believed in the virtue of the honest citizen. He once said, “The very conception of America is based upon the validity of the judgments of the average man.”

His career was mostly in academia as a professor and football coach at various schools, including Wesleyan, Bryn Mawr, Connecticut. In 1889 his work, “The State,” was published. In 1890 he went to Princeton and became a popular teacher. In 1902 he was the first non-clergyman to become president of Princeton. He instituted many reforms, wrestled with a conservative faculty and put many progressive ideas of education to work.

Wilson often came across as grim, dry, ascetic, and professorial. He got his academic bent from his father's influence, and had a stubborn attitude of moral superiority. Such attitudes complicated Wilson's political life and handicapped him. He had few close friends, but in close circles he could be witty and charming. He was voted most popular member of Princeton faculty four times. According to ray Stannard Baker Wilson possessed “The finest mind in public life.”

In 1910 Wilson was invited to run for governor of New Jersey as a progressive candidate on the Democratic ticket. He resigned from Princeton and was elected. As governor he fought machine politics, built a solid reputation as reformer, although sometimes called “conservative if not reactionary.” In any case New Jersey was a leader in the Progressive movement, and in 1912, after an endorsement by three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, Wilson was nominated by Progressive Democrats on the 46th ballot. After his victory Governor T. R. Marshall of Indiana became his vice president

Wilson was a “transitional figure in the emergence of the new consciousness.” He was stubborn, self-righteous and no shy violet in politics; he had ;earned how to be tough as a college president, and he certainly knew a lot about politics. He was called “ambitious, capable . . . and of a disconcerting ruthlessness.” His biographers suspect he had his eye on White House all along. Physically he was something of a wreck, suffering from frequent headaches, indigestion and so on.

Wilson's wife died in 1914, and he married Edith Galt in 1915 after a whirlwind courtship. When Wilson later became incapacitated from his stroke, Edith Wilson became in the minds of some the first woman acting president of the United States.

Looking back over the history of Nazi Germany, it is hard for Americans today to imagine that early in the last century we might well have gone to war on the side of Germany against England and France, countries we now consider longtime friends.

The background of World War I, covered elsewhere in these pages, was little known to most Americans. Dealing with a huge influx of immigrants, ongoing industrialization, labor disputes and the great reform movement of the Progressive Era, Americans were little interested in foreign affairs, even after the successful Spanish-American War. When World War I broke out in 1914, the attitude of the typical American was probably something on the order of, “There they go again!”—although Europe had been relatively peaceful for the previous century.

President Wilson, consistent with what he perceived to be the national mood about such things, quickly issued a proclamation of neutrality calling for Americans to be neutral not only in their actions, but also in their thoughts, a very difficult task, given that about one-third of all Americans had very close ties to the Old World. As news from the warring nations reached the country, however, Americans found it difficult to ignore the reports of atrocities, the massive slaughters on the battlefields, the terrifying new weapons and the huge personal and social costs of the conflict of a magnitude never before seen. Both sides, the Allies—Great Britain and France—, and the Central Powers—Germany and Austria—began economic warfare that soon affected the United States. Before long American cargoes were being captured, merchant ships diverted, and all the older practices of war such as had drawn us into the conflict in 1812 against Great Britain arose once more.

In 1914-15, however, there was a great difference: a new weapon appeared, the “undersea boat” (U Boot) or submarine. Fragile and not very maneuverable, submarines on the surface of the water were almost defenseless even against armed merchant ships since they could easily be rammed and sunk. Thus the tactics which evolved called for submarines to shoot first and ask questions later; the traditional practice of firing warning shots and threatening the neutral vessel with a boarding party was no longer viable. Soon many ships were sunk, and civilian passengers were lost, including a number of Americans.

The most famous sinking was that of the Lusitania in May 1915. The Germans had placed notices in American newspapers warning them to stay out of the war zone they created around the British Isles. When the Lusitania sailed she was apparently a passenger ship, and her hold contained a large cargo of ammunition bound for Great Britain. Thus when the Lusitania was sunk, although many people were outraged for humanitarian reasons (over 100 souls perished), the United States did not immediately decide to go to war. Soon thereafter, however, President Wilson called upon the Germans to cease unrestricted submarine warfare—that meant to stop sinking without warning ships which might be carrying neutral civilian passengers, and the Germans, not wanting to draw American into the war, consented.

This situation prevailed until after the election of 1916. Prior to that election Woodrow Wilson had pursued his progressive goals and had become an effective leader in domestic issues. In foreign policy, as has been seen in his actions regarding Mexico and South America, he was something of an idealist, and certainly an interventionist. Nevertheless, his lofty attitudes toward the European conflict seemed to sit well with Americans, and in the election campaign of 1916 the slogan that brought Wilson victory was, “He kept us out of war.” While that was technically true, Wilson himself knew that the Germans could drawn us into war at any time, which they did.

The costs of the war, as has been stated elsewhere, were horrendous. Soldiers died by the tens of thousands; millions of bullets and artillery shells were fired; poison gas and barbed wire, the machine gun and heavy artillery made the life of the infantryman a hellish nightmare, as well as the miles of trenches with very poor sanitation another comfort facilities. By 1917 both sides had bled and suffered almost unbearably—it seemed as though the carnage would never and end. Germany finally decided to try one big push. Russia, apparently neutralized by both the ineffectiveness of the Czarist army and by the impending Bolshevik Revolution, was no longer a serious factor in the East. So the German high command decided to focus attention upon the West and planned a huge offensive for 1917 and 1918 to try to end the war once and for all. As part of that plan, they made a decision to resume unrestricted submarine warfare.

When news of that decision reached Washington, Wilson was pushed to his limit, and the situation was exacerbated by the infamous Zimmermann telegram, in which the foreign ministry in Berlin instructed its minister in Mexico to approach the Mexican government and urge them to join Germany in a fight against the United States, in exchange for which they would help Mexico redeem the territory they had lost to the United States as a result of the Mexican War—that is, most of the southwestern United States, including California.

Once having declared war, the United States mobilized four million men and sent two million of them to fight in France. Although the French were desperate because of near mutinies and desertions and wanted to feed the American soldiers into the lines piecemeal, General John J. Pershing, the American commander, insisted that American units fight together under American leaders. Eventually 42 American divisions took part in the contest, entering fighting in significant numbers in the summer of 1918. Although untested, the Americans quickly grasped the tempo of modern warfare and became a significant factor in holding back and eventually repelling the German onslaught. By late September and early October, 1918, the Germans, although still on French soil, were in full retreat, and the end of October the German high command sued for peace based upon Wilson's 14 Points. Thus, although the Americans had participated in the war for only the few final months of the long and terribly bloody four-year conflict, they made a significant contribution to the outcome of the war. It is entirely feasible that the Germans would have won had the Americans stayed out.

When he set out to create arming “to make the world safe for democracy,” Wilson kept his progressive ideals in mind. He worried about Americans’ willingness to accept the war, and he did everything possible to sell the war to the American people. He instituted a draft rather than relying on volunteers, simply because it was more efficient. He created a Committee on Public Information that provided for posters bearing patriotic mottoes, speeches for theaters, and so on. Wilson also called for legislation to prevent dissent and sabotage the Espionage Act, the Trading with the Enemy Act, and the Sedition Act. Civil libertarians have found such measures excessive, but they are typical in time of war. The American people probably supported the war far more willingly that Wilson imagined, perhaps because he had doubted the wisdom of taking America in for so long himself.

In any case, Americans in combat fought fiercely—the Germans called American Marines “Teufelhunden”—“Devildogs”—and American civilians got into the war mood with a vengeance, making life difficult for German-Americans and anyone who seemed less than patriotic.

Despite progress made in American military organization since the time of the Spanish-American war, America was in many ways ill-prepared to enter the First World War. (I have in my possession letters from my father written while he was in training at Plattsburgh, New York, prior to heading to France in 1917. In those letters he reports using makeshift equipment, including make-pretend vehicles and weapons. He wrote to his parents that the only decent weapon they had was the French 75 mm howitzer.) Army-Navy cooperation was not all that it should have been, yet, despite the submarine threat, the Navy transported 2 million American soldiers to Europe without losing a single one of the enemy action.

The United States was a nation of huge industrial power. For example, there were as many miles of railroads in United States as in most of the rest of the world combined. The United States mobilization effort that followed America's entry into the war was stupendous. A War Industries Board was created under the direction of Bernard Baruch, and although the United States government left the ownership and direct management of industrial affairs in private hands, it oversaw the efforts of American industry and oriented them toward the war effort. In coordinating the mobilization effort the government also took control of communication and transportation, including railroads, telephone and telegraph. While not totally abandoning the traditional American practice of laissez-faire, the government nevertheless took far more control of American business than it ever had done in peacetime.

A serious matter facing the allies was the supply of food. At the time the United States entered the war, Great Britain was perilously close to running out of food for its civilian population while desperately trying to keep its troops supplied. The administration of American food production was turned over to Herbert Hoover, and his task was monumental. As an accomplished engineer and superb manager, Hoover managed to increase American food production enormously, increasing the amount of bread, meats and other commodities by large amounts. The American people were encouraged to voluntarily support Hoover's food program by observing wheatless Mondays, meatless Tuesdays, porkless Thursdays, and so on. People were also asked to plant victory gardens and reduce their use of electric power. The need for more food also furthered the cause of prohibition as crops were diverted from the production of alcohol to the production of bread. Hoover's program to prevent starvation in Belgium was later recognized for its humanitarian contribution.

Tthe government also went out of its way to try to control public opinion. A committee on public information was created under the leadership of Chairman George Creel. Artists were mobilized to design posters, and 75,000 amateur and professional speakers were organized as “four-minute men” to encourage the public to buy war bonds, support the draft and help with food production programs. They spoke in churches, movie houses, and other gatherings in an attempt to mobilize support for the war. German-Americans bore the brunt of much of the public opinion mobilization effort, as anything German became out of bounds. Even violinist Fritz Kreisler was booed when he appeared on the concert stage, and German-American clubs had to change their names. People who spoke German stopped using it in the streets for fear of reprisals. One German American citizen was stripped naked, wrapped in an American flag, and lynched in St. Louis, Missouri. Finally, a Sedition Act was passed in 1918 that made it illegal to “write or print any disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive language intended to cause contempt scorn or disrepute regarding the government of the United States." Many who protested the war were jailed, a direct slap against America's traditional position of freedom of speech. Labor leader Eugène Debs was jailed for a speech in which he questioned whether America's war effort was in the best interests of American workers. The freedoms for which President Woodrow Wilson professed to be fighting were in fact jeopardized on the home front, but since this was America's first involvement in a major European war, the American people acquiesced in many of these measures.

When the Germans surrendered, President made a fateful decision—he himself would go to Versailles to help write the terms of peace. (He had earlier declared it unthinkable that America should have no role in that great enterprise.) He wanted a “peace without victory,” a generous peace, but the allied leaders who had suffered so fearfully would have none of it. Wilson’s goals, outlined in his Fourteen Points, called for a lasting peace based on national self-determination among the nations and a League of Nations, and that was partially realized. Wilson was unable, however, to prevent the victors from saddling Germany with enormous reparations and restrictions which in retrospect can be called at best unfair.

Wilson took no Senators with him to Paris, nor any Republican leaders, a serious flaw in his desire to achieve his goals, as the United States Senate was controlled by the Republican Party. Thus while Wilson was in Europe for the best part of six months, having been greeted by the European people as a conquering hero, if not a modern Messiah, Republican leaders in the Senate fretted and stewed and awaited his return with bated breath.

When Wilson presented the treaty of Versailles to the Senate, they balked. Wilson was tired and in poor health from his exertions in Europe, and was in no mood to compromise. Neither was Senate later Henry Cabot Lodge. It soon became apparent that Wilson would not accept the treaty with the reservations which the Senate proposed, and the Senate would not ratify the treaty as presented to them, and thus a standoff existed. Wilson decided, unwisely as it turned out, to take his show on the road. He set off on a train trip around United States designed to take his case to the American people in the hope that they would pressure the Senators to accept this treaty without reservations. While on the trip, Wilson became ill and was rushed back to Washington, where he suffered a serious stroke. For weeks Wilson was unable to conduct his business, and for several months, his wife, Edith Galt Wilson, became for all practical purposes the acting president of the United States. She controlled access to her husband, told him what to read and what to sign, and delivered all communications to and from the ailing President.

In the end, the United States never ratified the treaty of Versailles and concluded a separate peace with Germany in 1921.