America at War: From Neutrality to Belligerency

AMERICA AT WAR: FROM NEUTRALITY TO BELLIGERENCY

Outbreak in Europe

World War I began in summer 1914 as a conflict among the five "Big Powers" of Europe: Austria-Hungary, Great Britain, France, Germany, and Russia. In the quarter century leading up to the war the animosities between these powers resulted in a series of entangling alliances. Great Britain and Germany had been locked in an arms race on the seas that fueled their distrust of one another. As early as 1894 Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy had formed the Triple Entente, while the French and Russians had concluded a Dual Alliance; by 1904 the British and French had solidified an alliance of their own. The assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary by a Serbian nationalist on 28 June 1914 at Sarajevo was the spark that lit the tinder, setting in motion a series of hurried diplomatic maneuverings that failed to prevent war. The economic, industrial, and military forces of the warring factions were at first fairly closely matched, ensuring a protracted war that lasted for more than four years and four months and exacted an enormous toll in human lives. Though wartime death statistics are impossible to calculate accurately, conservative estimates place the war dead at more than ten million and the maimed and injured at about twenty million.

THE ZIMMERMANN TELEGRAM

On 23 February 1917 the British relayed to the United States a telegram from German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann to the German minister in Mexico. The telegram read:

We intend to begin on the 1st of February unrestricted submarine warfare. We shall endeavor in spite of this to keep the United States of America neutral. In the event of this not succeeding, we make Mexico a proposal of alliance on the following basis: make war together, make peace together, generous financial support and an understanding on our part that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The settlement in detail is left to you. You will inform the President [of Mexico] of the above most secretly as soon as the outbreak of war with the United States of America is certain and add the suggestion that he should, on his own initiative, invite Japan to immediate adherence and at the same time mediate between Japan and ourselves. Please call the President's attention to the fact that the ruthless employment of our submarines now offers the prospect of compelling England in a few months to make peace.

Though the authenticity of the telegram was not established at the time, the American press was told of its existence, and its contents helped to push the United States closer to war with Germany.

Source:

Thomas G. Paterson and Denois Merrill. eds., Major Problems in American Foreign Relation, Volume II. Since 1914, Lexington, Mass.: Heath, 1993).

The Lusitania Incident

President Wilson's hope that Americans would remain "impartial in thought as well as action" was doomed by the rush of events from 1914 to 1917, and by his own policies. Though the British naval forces were the largest in the world, Germany had countered British naval superiority by enlarging its submarine force. The Wilson administration's insistence on freedom of the seas for nonbelligerents was ignored by both the British and the Germans. The British maintained a blockade of much of Europe, and Germany sought to cut off British supply lines through unrestricted submarine warfare against ships on the high seas. American ambivalence was transformed into indignation against Germany after 7 May 1915, when a German submarine torpedoed the British Cunard liner Lusitania, en route from the United States to Great Britain, without warning off the Irish coast. The liner sank, and 1,198 people, including 128 Americans, lost their lives. President Wilson protested directly to the German government in a series of diplomatic notes demanding "reparation so far as reparation is possible." Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, who favored strict neutrality, believed that Wilson's protest was drawing the United States closer to war with Germany and resigned. Before the Lusitania had sailed, the Imperial German Embassy had published warnings that it would sink all ships in the Atlantic war zone, and it at first claimed that the torpedoing of the Lusitania was justified because the liner was carrying arms to the British. (It was in fact carrying a shipment of rifles and cartridges.) Finally, however, Germany agreed to cease unrestricted submarine warfare, and the Wilson administration was, for a time, appeased.

Mounting Tensions

The British also incurred the anger of the Wilson administration. In their efforts to cut off overseas trade to Germany, the British strengthened their blockade of Europe in spring 1916. On 19 July Britain announced that it was forbidding its citizens to do business with eighty-seven firms in the United States because it believed them to be trading with Germany or its allies. Yet American sympathies were increasingly with the Triple Alliance (Britain, France, and Czarist Russia), and when Germany announced that it would resume unrestricted submarine warfare in the Atlantic on 31 January 1917, it lost much of its remaining support in the United States.

Declaration of War

Tensions heightened on 23 February 1917 when the British gave the United States an intercepted and decoded telegram from German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann to the German minister in Mexico. The telegram proposed an alliance between Germany and Mexico in return for which Germany would return to Mexico the territories it had lost to the United States during the Mexican-American War some seventy years earlier. Americans were outraged. The Zimmermann telegram—coupled with the Germans' subsequent sinking of four U.S. ships, with the loss of fifteen American lives—triggered Wilson to action. On 2 April 1917 President Wilson delivered a war message before a joint session of Congress. The House, by a vote of 373 to 50, and the Senate, by a vote of 82 to 6, chose war, and on 6 April the president signed the official declaration. The German high command had gambled that the United States would not enter the conflict, or that, if it did, its military contribution would be too little, too late. Their calculations proved wrong.

Sources:

Robert H. Ferrell, Woodrow Wilson and World War I, 1917-1921 (New York: Harper & Row, 1985);

David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980);

Barbara Tuchman, The Zimmermann Telegram (New York: Viking, 1958).

THE WOMAN'S PEACE PARTY

The Woman's Peace Party (WPP) was founded in January 1915, with social worker Jane Addams, the founder of Hull House in Chicago, as its first president. Other prominent members included Sophonisba Breckinridge (treasurer), Carrie Chapman Catt, Anna Howard Shaw, and Mrs. Booker T. Washington. Asserting that "the mother half of humanity" needed a voice in world affairs, the WP P political platform called for mediation of the problems among European belligerents, for aims limitations, and for woman suffrage on the grounds that votes for women would bring a quicker peace. The WP P also favored democratic control of foreign policy and removal of the economic causes of war—although the platform was unclear on the meaning of these two demands or how they were to be achieved. The party gained international recognition when Jane Addams presided at the International Congress of Woman held at The Hague, Netherlands, in April 1915. Among the two thousand female participants at the congress, forty-seven (most members of the WPP) were from the United States. During its second year of operation the WPP claimed twenty-five thousand members, but three factions arose within the party as Worfd War I dragged on. The first faction worked for a quick end to the fighting but backed American involvement in the war. The second, behind leaders such as Jane Addams, supported only humanitarian aid. The third, led by militant Crystal Eastman of New York, continued to contest national policy even after the United States declared war on Germany. Once the United States entered the fighting the national leaders of the WP P turned their attention to the postwar world, and at an international conference in Zurich, Switzerland, in May 1919 they helped to found the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.

Sources:

Marie L. Degen, The History of the Woman's Peace Party (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1939);

Barbara J. Steinson, American Women's Activism in World War I (New York: Garland, 1982).