CHAPTER IV

HOW THE WAR CAME TO THE UNITED STATES

The great war, beginning in 1914, brought to most Americans no idea that our country would ever be more than a watcher of it. That we ourselves would one day become part of it--and one of the greatest parts of it--was something beyond the imagination of most men. America had lived apart from other nations. For, although our government had made treaties with foreign nations, and become part of The Hague Conference, and been drawn to some extent into international politics, we had none of the ambitions which draw nations into ordinary wars. We had no desire for colonies, we had no jealousy of other nations, we had no fear of neighboring governments. In fact, Americans believed that wars were going out of fashion, and that western Europe, any more than ourselves, was not likely to go to war. The coming of the conflict was therefore a shock to us, but not one that brought us to realize that we were likely to take part in it.

When Germany invaded Belgium with no excuse other than that progress through that nation afforded the quickest way to France the people of the United States awoke to their first knowledge of what militarism may mean. Although people of German birth or parentage in America were inclined to accept Germany’s attempted justification of military necessity, the sympathies of most Americans went to Belgium and became one of the important factors in determining the country’s attitude toward the war. For the United States had always stood for principles of justice and humanitarianism. The stories of how Germany treated the civilian population of Belgium, stories which were verified by the later reports of such non-partisan investigators as Brand Whitlock, American minister to Belgium, aroused American sentiment against German military methods.

[Illustration: _Copyright Newspaper Illustrations, Ltd._

Belgium refugees between Malines and Brussels

When Germany invaded Belgium ... the people of the United States awoke to their first knowledge of what militarism may mean]

There were people in the United States who believed that our country should go to war in defense of Belgium, just as we had gone to war to free Cuba from the dominion of Spain when the rule of Spain on that island became cruelly oppressive. But our government, believing that the war was not a parallel instance, since it had not yet violated those fundamental principles of our national life that had been struck at by Spain, refused to consider such action, and the people fell back into consideration of the causes and progress of the war abroad.

It began to be clear, as German forces crossed Belgium and plunged into France, while at the same time German forces swept eastward, that Germany had evolved the definite scheme of world conquest which her later demands and movements have proven. The American people, however, were slow to believe this intention of Germany. Bit by bit only our country began to see that Germany was pushing forward a gigantic plan of territorial aggression, and with all that we heard and some that we believed, we were slow to see how this plan could affect the United States.

Because we had lived apart from the rest of the world we would probably have continued to feel that, terrible as the war which Germany had begun was, it was not our war, and that all we were expected to do was to remain genuinely neutral and to give such assistance as the international law permitted neutral nations to give the wounded and stricken. But Germany would not allow us to remain apart. The ruling class of Prussia, headed by the Kaiser, grown mad with power and the desire for more power, put into operation methods that forced us toward war.

Germany’s progress into this war had, as we have seen, struck blows at those principles for which America had struggled, the principles of individual freedom, of international peace, of the freedom of the seas. For any one of these ideals the republic might have rushed into war; but it was only when the American people came to know that Germany was plotting not only to overthrow the Monroe Doctrine but actually against the American Government here in the United States that we were roused to desire for conflict to uphold our national honor.

“It is plain enough how we were forced into war,” President Wilson declared in his Flag Day Address of June 14, 1917. “The extraordinary insults and aggressions of the Imperial German Government left us no self-respecting choice but to take up arms in defense of our rights as a free people and of our honor as a sovereign government. The military masters of Germany denied us the right to be neutral. They filled our unsuspecting communities with vicious spies and conspirators and sought to corrupt the opinions of our people in their own behalf. When they found that they could not do that, their agents diligently spread sedition amongst us and sought to draw our own citizens from their allegiance; and some of those agents were men connected with the official embassy of the German Government in our own capital.

“They sought by violence to destroy our industries and arrest our commerce. They tried to incite Mexico to take up arms against us and to draw Japan into a hostile alliance with her; and that, not by indirection, but by direct suggestion from the Foreign Office in Berlin. They impudently denied us the use of the high seas and repeatedly executed their threat that they would send to their death any of our people who ventured to approach the coasts of Europe.

“Many of our own people were corrupted. Men began to look upon their own neighbors with suspicion and to wonder in their hot resentment whether there was any community in which hostile intrigue did not lurk. What great nation in such circumstances would not have taken up arms? Much as we desired peace, it was denied us, and not of our own choice. The flag under which we serve would have been dishonored had we withheld our hand.”

The President of the United States stated America’s case against Germany mildly. Evidence of the bad faith of the government of Germany to the government of the United States is piled in the archives of the State Department in Washington. The honest efforts of our government to establish honest relations with them were met by German officials with quibbles, misrepresentations, counter-accusations, and continuing, deliberate delays. German high officials kept us in humiliating waiting while German official agents in this country, protected by the rules of diplomatic immunity from criminal prosecution, used their trust to conspire against our internal peace. Agents of the German Embassy placed spies through the length and breadth of our country. They put their agents at work in Japan and in Latin America while they were professing to be our friends. They bought newspapers and employed speakers for the purpose of rousing distrust of us in those countries. They incited insurrection in Cuba, in Haiti, and in Santo Domingo. They did their best to arouse against us the Danish West Indies. They spread suspicion of us and our motives in South America. They conducted an attack upon the Monroe Doctrine such as no other nation had ever attempted.

For a time the government of the United States tried to take the view that this intrigue, plotting, spying, and insidious warfare was the work of irresponsible agents, not countenanced by the Imperial German Government; but the proof was too strong. The government finally had to request the recall of the Austro-Hungarian ambassador and of the German military and naval attachés, presenting proof of their criminal violations of our hospitality. Their governments offered no reply to us, issued no reprimands to them.

In spite of all this the temper of the American people was that we should keep out of war as long as it was possible to maintain our national honor without war. The President even began the preparation of a communication to the warring nations, asking them to define their war aims, as this would be a step toward peace. Before this note was completed, the German Government sent out a communication, asking the same definition. But the German Government issued this document on the idea that the German armies had triumphed, and incorporated in it a threat to neutral governments. From a thousand sources, official and unofficial, word came to our government that unless the United States used her influence to end the war on the terms dictated by Germany, Germany and her allies would consider themselves free from obligation to respect the rights of neutrals. The Kaiser was frankly ordering the neutral nations of the world to force those Powers which fought him to accept the peace he offered. If they failed to do this, Germany would resume her submarine warfare on neutral commerce with new ruthlessness.

The President, continuing his own purpose, finished his note to both sides, sending it on the 18th of December, 1916. Both sides replied, the Powers who resisted Germany declaring that their principal end in the war was the lasting restoration of peace. Germany and her associates refused to state their terms, and merely proposed a conference--another method of delay. The President, in an address to the Senate on the 22d of January, 1917, outlined the terms of the peace which the United States could honorably join in guaranteeing.

“No peace can last,” he stated, “or ought to last, which does not recognize and accept the principle that governments derive all their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that no right anywhere exists to hand people about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were property....

“I am proposing government by the consent of the governed; that freedom of the seas which in international conference after conference representatives of the United States have urged with the eloquence of those who are the convinced disciples of liberty; and that moderation of armaments which makes of armies and navies a power for order merely, not an instrument of aggression or of selfish violence.”

Six days earlier, on the 16th of January, the German secretary of foreign affairs had secretly despatched a communication to the German minister in Mexico, informing him that Germany intended to repudiate its pledge made to the United States to discontinue submarine warfare on neutral ships, and instructing him to offer to the Mexican Government New Mexico and Arizona if Mexico would join with Japan in attacking the United States.

On the last day of January, 1917, the German ambassador to the United States, Count Bernstorff, brought to the secretary of state a note in which Germany announced her purpose of intensifying her submarine warfare. The German chancellor stated in Germany that the reason that this policy had not been put into force earlier was simply because his government had not been ready to act.

On the 3d of February, 1917, the President announced to both houses of Congress the complete severance of our relations with Germany. Count Bernstorff went to Berlin, and James W. Gerard, American ambassador to Germany, was recalled to this country. Count Bernstorff had begged that no irrevocable decision of war be made until he had the chance to make one final plea for peace to the Kaiser. If he made the plea, he failed. The submarine warfare began again in greater violence. And on the twelfth day of March our government ordered the placing of armed guards on our merchant ships.

With the Sixty-fourth Congress dissolved on the 4th of March, we had come to the door of the greatest war in the history of the world.