WILSON’S WAR MESSAGE

BRIAN: Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Brian Balogh.

JOANNE: I’m Joanne Freeman.

ED: And I’m Ed Ayers.

JOANNE: If you’re new to the podcast, Ed, Brian, Nathan Connolly, and I are historians. Each week we take a topic in the news and explore that theme across American history.

BRIAN: This week, Ed, Joanne, and I are going to focus in on a specific event. Our story begins on April 2nd, 1917, at around 8:30 in the evening.

President Woodrow Wilson was about to address a joint session of Congress. Now, Wilson was a powerful speaker. But this speech would be one of the biggest challenges of his presidency.

WILL HITCHCOCK: Wilson had stayed up pretty much all night the night before he has to go to Congress to make this momentous speech.

BRIAN: This is historian Will Hitchcock.

WILL HITCHCOCK: And he’s been agonizing about this decision. Congress is packed. They’re in the House of Representatives. It’s absolutely jammed. The Senate is convened with them.

And they know what’s coming. This is in many ways an overdue request– to approve a resolution of war against Germany.

WOODROW WILSON: We have no quarrel with the German people. We have no feelings toward them–

BRIAN: This is an actor from back then reading Wilson’s speech. In the early days of recorded sound, live tapings weren’t all that common.

WOODROW WILSON: It was a war determined upon as wars used to be determined upon.

BRIAN: We know the recording is hard to understand. But what he’s saying is that this war was started as wars always had been– as he put it, for dynasties, for little groups of ambitious men.

WOODROW WILSON: Who were accustomed to use their fellow men as pawns and fools.

BRIAN: In other words, wars waged by kings and tyrants.

But then, President Wilson shifted to America’s role. He said, “it is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance.”

WILL HITCHCOCK: And there was an enormous amount of cheering and applause in the hall after he gave his very moving and powerful war message.

ED: Now, for three years, Americans had been hearing about the bloody conflict in Europe. Millions of soldiers had perished in trench warfare or from poison gas attacks. Air raids targeted civilian populations.

But even knowing this, the House and Senate overwhelmingly voted to go to war against the German Empire. In doing so, America threw himself into what was being called “the Great War”– and what we now know as World War I.

BRIAN: But here’s the thing. Wilson had just won re-election on an anti-war platform. His campaign slogans had been “America First” and “He Kept Us Out of War.”

WILL HITCHCOCK: There’s a wonderful campaign button which I think encapsulates his winning strategy. And it says on it, “war in Europe, peace in America, God bless Wilson.” You can’t top that for PR.

BRIAN: That’s pretty good.

That was in November, just a few months before Wilson’s address to Congress.

WILL HITCHCOCK: But it’s April of 1917, and the world has changed considerably. The situation has changed considerably. And Wilson is finally ready to do something that he is profoundly reluctant to do– lead the country into war.

JOANNE: The United States spent the next 18 months engaged in the Great War. In that short time, over 100,000 American soldiers died.

Yet the war to end all wars has mostly faded from public memory, at least in the United States.

BRIAN: So today, we’re marking the 100th anniversary of America’s entrance into the First World War by taking a closer look at our role in that conflict.

We’ll show how the war transformed American society and helped turn the United States into a global power. We’ll hear some of the songs that sold the war to a skeptical public– and how a socialist leader was thrown in prison for daring to speak out against the war.

ED: Let’s get back to Woodrow Wilson and how he pivoted from being an isolationist president to a wartime leader. Eventually, that fateful decision to enter the war would set the stage for what became known as “the American Century.”

BRIAN: Let’s consider how the war started, back in 1914.

After the assassination of an Austrian archduke, a series of European alliances locked into place on a scale, well, frankly never seen before. On one side were the Central Powers– Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria. Opposing them were the Allies– Britain, France, Russia, and Italy.

WILL HITCHCOCK: And Wilson, like many Americans, says, that’s not our fight. We have no reason to be interested in that conflict. It starts in the Balkans. Where is that? Not many people have any idea. The assassination of an obscure Austrian noble, Archduke Franz Ferdinand– who cares?

So America’s view is, well, that’s not our fight. Too bad. It’s almost like a European Civil War.

BRIAN: But in early 1917–

WILL HITCHCOCK: A big shift, a big change occurs.

BRIAN: Which is?

WILL HITCHCOCK: The Germans begin to sink American shipping.

BRIAN: While the US didn’t have boots on the ground, it did have a big financial stake in the war. That enraged the Germans.

WILL HITCHCOCK: They use submarines to sink all of the ships that are carrying enormous amounts of war materiel to Europe. Now, this is–

BRIAN: And we’re neutral?

WILL HITCHCOCK: And we’re neutral. So this is a big deal. This is an enormous deal. And it’s at the core of why America ended up in the war.

When the war broke out Americans continued happily to trade with all the European countries that were fighting each other. And they said, if you want to buy our clothes, our cotton, our textiles, our ammo, our rifles, we’ll sell them to you. We don’t really care who you are. America’s open for business.

BRIAN: It was good for business?

WILL HITCHCOCK: It was enormously good for business. Banks loaned enormous amounts of money to the Europeans. The Europeans then used those dollars to buy stuff on the American market. Everybody was making a killing out of the First World War.

However, Wilson said America was neutral, but the way the trade lined up, it wasn’t so neutral, because the British put a blockade around Germany– which meant that a lot of American products were not going to Germany.

Where were they going? To Britain. And they were going to France. So it looked like America was tilting towards one side.

Well, the Germans had something to say about this, and they decided to launch submarine warfare against all these ships trafficking across the Atlantic.

JOANNE: There were other provocations, too. In 1915, a German U-boat torpedoed the Lusitania, a British passenger ship. More than 1000 passengers drowned, including 128 Americans.

Then, in March of 1917, Americans learned that Germany had tried to persuade Mexico to join the Central Powers. The evidence was uncovered in the infamous Zimmermann telegram.

BRIAN: All of these factors– the Lusitania, the Zimmermann telegram, and then the German submarine attacks on US shipping, set the stage for Wilson’s big speech that April night in 1917.

A tired and anxious president stood before Congress and told lawmakers that he was severing diplomatic relations with Germany. The US was going to war.

Hitchcock says the president’s war message was a watershed in US foreign policy and American history.

WILL HITCHCOCK: We were about to take a position in the world in which we basically said the American system should be transplanted everywhere else. And that was new.

And this goes back to what kind of man Wilson was. He’s an idealist, and he wants to be a reformer. He thinks America is fantastic. He thinks America is– wait for it– exceptional!

If he’d been Teddy Roosevelt, he might have just come in and said, we’re going to go knock those Germans around the ears, because we’re strong and we’re going to show them who’s boss. America is going to be a great power just like all the other great powers.

That’s not how Wilson wanted to pose America’s cause. His argument was, America is a moral nation. We will fight as a moral nation. And we will transform the world through this conflict.

We’re going to war to make the world safe for democracy. We’re going to redraw the map of Europe and rewrite international law in a way that everyone will be thankful for in the future.

And those are the ringing words that were in his war speech to Congress in April of 1917.

BRIAN: Are there any passages of that you’d like to read to us?

WILL HITCHCOCK: “Our motive”– he says in his speech– “our motive will not be revenge or the victorious assertion of the physical might of the nation, but only the vindication of right– of human right– of which we are only a single champion.”

So he wants to take the country to war. He doesn’t want to focus on economic benefits or on territorial benefits, so why does America fight? What are we fighting for?

Human rights– that’s what America is fighting for. Well, this is a very new concept.

BRIAN: What does he mean by that, Will?

WILL HITCHCOCK: He particularly means the rule of law. And I say that because he doesn’t mean what we might think of “human rights” to mean today.

One of the abiding facts about Wilson and his time is that America is far from the perfect nation that he imagines it to be. So when he speaks of human rights, or “human right,” he really means civilization as wealthy elite white people understood that term.

BRIAN: Male?

WILL HITCHCOCK: Male.

America in 1917– let’s put our cards on the table– is a profoundly segregated society. It is one that Wilson himself has done a great deal to segregate. Wilson has no problem, though, sweeping those realities aside and imagining an America that is almost perfect but, ultimately, is also perfectible.

So he pivots, and he says, wait a minute. Maybe the war can be a vehicle through which America can become great and we can transfer our ideals elsewhere.

And it’s an object lesson in what happens to a president– and many other presidents– who begin to see that their power is really quite enormous, and that they are looking for a legacy. And that legacy may not just be at home, but might be all around the world.

BRIAN: And how does the man, the woman on the street– how do they react to this? Are they moved by these, well, frankly, high-flying words, these ideals? I mean, they’re being asked to go fight and die.

WILL HITCHCOCK: It was a darn effective address. American leaders will always search for that moral high ground. The American public rallied to the flag very rapidly, because Wilson was a very effective and persuasive leader, and also because he flipped the switch on a very powerful and very effective propaganda machine.

The American public was instantly told that Germany was a barbaric country, filled with basement-dwelling savages who were uncivilized. That autocracy and monarchy was the worst thing that could ever happen to the world and should be eradicated.

So this was a moment of heightened intense nationalism and hatred towards Germany, and it and it happened more or less at the drop of a hat. It happened so quickly.

And one of the things that Wilson worried about in his agonizing evening before he gave his great speech was what war would do to the American public. That war will unleash inner forces, maybe even inner demons.

And that sounds kind of strange that a president will be thinking about this on the evening of a declaration of war, but that’s precisely what he was worried about. And he was right.

JOANNE: Will Hitchcock is a historian at the University of Virginia.

BRIAN: We’re going to explore Wilson’s fears about the ugliness of war later in the show.