The United States of America, at this point in the war 100 years ago today, was neutral,
but we’ve had a bunch of you write in about what was going on in the US at the time, and
how the road to war developed, so that’s what I’m going to talk about today.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to a Great War special episode about the United States before
it joined the war.
The years leading up to 1917, when the US joined the war, were a transformative period
for the nation, and in many ways were when the US became a great power. By 1910, the
US had become the world’s leading industrial power, and by the war we have numbers like
the US possessing 35.5% of the world’s manufacturing capacity, compared to 16% for Germany, and
just under 15% for Britain, and American industry and finance would be important to the war.
Still though, most of America’s population was rural. Also, a large percentage of the
population was either immigrants or the children of immigrants, and they came from all over
the world. The largest number were from the British Isles, including Ireland, but Germans
were the second largest number, so opinion about the war was pretty split when it broke
out. In all, there were 15 million European immigrants in the US, with a million new immigrants
arriving from the whole world each year.
On August 19, 1914, President Woodrow Wilson gave a speech officially declaring the United
States neutral, but Americans eagerly and actively contributed aid and supplies, and
within a year there were over 100 institutions giving some form of humanitarian aid, and
as an example of the scope of some of them, the Belgian relief organization contributed
6 million tons of food.
But who did the Americans support? And how did American neutrality transform over the
years into a declaration of war?
Many immigrant communities had their own newspapers and organizations and used their own languages,
and there was support for both sides, and certainly more for the Central Powers than
one might think today. The German community supported the Central Powers, the Jewish community
did as well since Austria-Hungary was the most tolerant of the warring powers toward
Jews, while Russia was still often hated for it’s anti-Jewish pogroms in 1905. The Irish
to a large extent also supported Germany, both being opposed to British interests.
However, there was also a large anglophile elite and crossed bloodlines: Wilson’s mother
was British while Winston Churchill’s was American, for example.
But the US had historically steered clean of foreign engagements, and the only war with
a European power in generations had been the Spanish-American war of 1898, which had not
been widely supported popularly, and anyhow, the US in 1914 only had an army of 130,000
regulars and 70,000 national guardsmen. General Peyton March pointed out that this was barely
enough to police domestic emergencies.
But America’s role in the early stages of the war was immediate, and not surprisingly
it was economic.
Certainly, selling munitions was profitable. Heck, by October 1914 the British had already
ordered 400,000 rifles. Munitions and war materiel exports would rise from 40 million
dollars in 1914 to 1.29 billion two years later. The US also became the allies’ banker,
and though neutral, would lend over 2 billion dollars to the allies, but only 27 million
to the Central Powers. One US Congressman described America as “the
arch hypocrite among nations... praying for peace... while furnishing the instruments
of murder to one side only.
But why was that, since initially there was a great deal of German sentiment? Why choose
to ally with Britain?
There were several reasons. There was the constitutional and language similarity, of
course. Also, Germany’s trans-Atlantic communications cables had been cut, so American reporters
routed everything through London, and only things favorable to Britain passed the censors.
Parliament had passed the Defense of the Realm Act that gave censors power to scrutinize
every word that went from Britain to America, and German atrocities were hyped. Episodes
such as the rape of Belgium and the execution of Edith Cavell provoked great outrage as
they were reported by the giants of yellow journalism, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph
Hearst.
The Central Powers could not possibly keep up from a PR standpoint, and if those things
were big deals, think how big the sinking of the liners Lusitania and Arabic by German
submarines were to the American public, with the loss of American civilian lives. In fact,
the only media that time and again spoke out against the war and wished to keep America
out of it was the Socialist Press and the German press, and their reach was limited.
To look at the slide to war, you have to look at President Wilson and how his views changed
between 1914 and 1917.
Now, as President, Wilson is also commander in chief of the armed forces, and though it
falls to Congress to declare war, Congress was in session for only three months between
the outbreak of the war and the end of 1915. Yep, three months. The Congress elected in
November 1914 wouldn’t convene till December 1915, so Wilson acted on his own, and he was,
by his own admission, new to foreign policy. He said this when he was elected in 1912,
“it would be an irony of fate if my administration had to deal with foreign problems, for all
my preparation has been in domestic matters.”
His concerns were more moral than strategic, and initially he saw himself as a mediator,
and even in December 1914, he emphasized that the US had never had and never would have
a standing army. Former President Teddy Roosevelt blasted Wilson for “abject cowardice”
and said Wilson “was willing to sacrifice the honor and interest of the country to his
own political advancement.” Roosevelt wrote a book promoting American intervention and
even said the US ran the risk of becoming another Belgium.
But the campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare that resulted in the sinking of the
Lusitania and the Arabic, and Wilson’s friend and personal advisor Edward House, a big influence
on Wilson who urged him to support Britain, and new Secretary of State Robert Lansing
who did the same, began to really change Wilson’s mind about intervention.
In his December 1915 State of the Union address, Wilson presented plans for building up the
armed forces, and in May 1916 passed the National Defense Act, which doubled the army, and the
Naval Appropriations Act aimed to create a world class navy. In early 1916, he had kicked
off his “President’s preparedness campaign” with a series of speeches saying that the
US might well be drawn into the conflict and must prepare for it.
Like it or not, and he didn’t, the Presidential election of 1916 would have the war as its
central issue. Wilson won a narrow victory. As 1917 began, the Germans once again began
a campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare and American citizens died as a result. When
the Russian revolution toppled the Tsar, one of the major contradictions for allied claims
that they were fighting for democracy was removed, but as late as March 19th, Wilson
still felt like this about going to war, “it would mean we should lose our heads and stop
weighing right and wrong... once lead people into this war and they’ll forget there ever
was a thing such as tolerance. To fight you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit
of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fiber of our national life... if there
is any alternative, for God’s sake let’s take it!”
Less than a month later, Woodrow Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war on Germany.
Now this was a brief and general rundown, and I encourage you all to look up the specifics
yourself to get even a clearer idea of what was at play. I’m going to end this episode
with another quote, this one from “the Origins of World War One”: “it is true that great
forces of geopolitics, strategy, culture, and economics shaped the context in which
Wilson made his decision. It is true that the opinions of others... counted in his decision.
Wilson’s decision to intervene was a close, risky thing, a calculation of costs and benefits
and a reflection on the human condition that could easily have taken him in a different
direction. In the end, his decision was the critical factor. He and he alone took the
United States into World War One.”
Today the service of veterans is sometimes forgotten. That's why we are giving a shoutout to
the United States World War 1 Centennial Commission and their important work for the remembrance of Veteran's Day.
Check out the links in the description of this video to find out how you can help your veterans.
We’d like to thank Madeline Johnson for doing the bulk of the research for this special;
thanks Madeline, she also helped us with the Art special. If you’d like to learn more
about the sinking of the Lusitania and the uproar it caused, you can see our episode
about that right here. Don’t forget to like us on Facebook and
follow us on Twitter. See you next time.