Among the many friends to welcome Bernstorff at the station were several ladies who, according to reporters, screamed with delight upon his arrival. His circle of adorers was evidently as extensive at home as in America. But the German press greeted the returning Ambassador coolly, and for this the story of the Swedish trunk was responsible. The story came out of London, where, it was said, the Foreign Office was interesting itself in the contents of a trunk full of Swedish diplomatic papers which had been taken off the Frederik VIII, where it had been placed among Count Bernstorff’s luggage by the Swedish Minister in Washington. The implication was that the trunk contained Bernstorff’s most secret papers layered between Swedish documents and locked up under the Swedish seal. On the ground of this alleged violation of neutrality, the British had seized the trunk and were examining it. They let it be known that, before they had taken possession of it, its seals had been broken, somewhere between New York and Halifax, that is, between February 9 and February 16. The dates fitted; the press leaped to the bait. Here was the answer to the question of the hour—how the telegram had been obtained. Some clever American agent must have got at the trunk in New York harbor and extracted the original from among Bernstorff’s papers. The atmosphere of espionage and intrigue already woven about the Frederik VIII added verisimilitude.
A Swedish trunk did, in fact, exist, and the British, remembering how obliging the Swedes had been in the matter of the cable Roundabout, had, in fact, seized it. But the hints about the broken seals were a plant by Admiral Hall to encourage the belief that the telegram had been discovered in America.
Bernstorff was the victim. Together with Eckhardt’s insinuations about careless carbon copies, the Swedish trunk convinced the Kaiser, among others. Although Bernstorff requested an immediate audience, the Kaiser refused to receive him, and despite his arrival from America, with eight years’ experience of that country, at a time when war with America was expected at any moment, the Kaiser delayed seven weeks before consenting to talk to him at all. Later in the war, when Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg fell from office and Bernstorff was mentioned as a possible successor, the Kaiser’s aversion was said to be one factor that eliminated him.
To Zimmermann, not yet entirely off the hook, the appearance of a scapegoat was fortuitous. He had been questioned on March 5 at a secret session of the Reichstag steering committee. After a six-hour debate, and despite some rumblings by the Socialists, the members dutifully and unanimously endorsed his proposal to Mexico and Japan, while expressing “regrets” that it had been revealed. The press, on his behalf, scolded the public for criticizing him. Had they not always complained of German diplomats’ failures to make friends and allies? Here was Herr Zimmermann energetically rounding up allies; certainly he should not be condemned for it. Premature disclosure, though unfortunate, was not his fault but a mean American trick.
Even so, Zimmermann’s position was not a happy one. He still had to face a public debate in the Reichstag, which took place on March 29. He had not taken his own advice to Eckhardt to “burn compromising instructions,” and the critical second telegram remained in his files to be discovered after the war. But he remained sublimely confident that the betrayal of the original one was a fluke and the second one unknown. Carranza, he lied to the Reichstag, would have heard nothing of the alliance up to the present if the United States had not revealed it. How the Americans obtained the dispatch, “which went to America in a special code,” we do not know, he said. That was a misfortune, but to seek allies was natural, and the Americans were “not at all justified in getting so excited about our action.” Nor could his proposal be considered far-fetched, based as it was on ancient feuds between the United States and Mexico and on well-known antagonism between the United States and Japan. “I maintain,” he said stoutly, “that these antagonisms are stronger than those which, despite the war, exist between Germany and Japan” (and who shall say he was wrong? As an Axis designer, Zimmermann was merely ahead of his time). Who better, he asked, could persuade the Japanese to change sides than the Mexicans, who were on good terms with them and of “a like race”? The Reichstag gave him a vote of confidence.
Nevertheless Zimmermann knew success would be his best defense. He continued exerting every effort to turn Mexico into an active ally. “Please state sums necessary to carry out our policy,” he wired Eckhardt on April 13. “Arrangements are being made on this side to transfer considerable sums. If possible include amount required for arms, et cetera.”
Even the lure of those “sums” was not enough to reassure Carranza. The hullabaloo had scared him off. On April 14 it was Eckhardt’s sad duty to telegraph Zimmermann that the President of Mexico had decided to stay neutral. “He says the alliance has been wrecked by premature publication but might become necessary at a later stage.” He promises that, if he is drawn into the war despite his desire to stay neutral, “we can discuss the matter again.”
Zimmermann, planning the coup that would keep America out of Europe, had dreamed of a hero’s welcome for himself when he should bring off a Mexican alliance. Upon Carranza’s refusal, his hopes crashed—the doors of Valhalla banged shut. His career did not long survive the disappointment. Four months later he lost office, along with the Chancellor, and never held it again. He died in 1940 at the age of eighty-one.
While Zimmermann was still trying to draw in Mexico, events in America were hurrying toward the brink. On March 4, Congress, gagged by the Senate filibuster, had gone out of session without passing the Armed Ship Bill. Wilson raged at the American government’s being thus rendered “helpless and contemptible” by “a little band of willful men representing no opinion but their own.” An extra session, required by the Senate’s refusal to vote the appropriation bills, was scheduled to convene on April 16 so that the country would not be left, as Lodge said, “alone with Wilson” for nine months. Until it met again, the President held the helm alone. On March 9, using his executive authority, he gave the order to arm the ships anyway. He did not, however, take any action on an urgent message from Page warning that, failing a United States government loan, Britain could not buy another gun or crate of goods from America.
On March 18 three American ships were sunk without warning by U-boats. On March 19 occurred the most significant event of the war prior to America’s entrance—the preliminary revolution in Russia that overthrew the Czar and established the parliamentary Kerensky government. With the disappearance of the Czar, the black sheep vanished from the democratic herd and the war could now be safely said to be a war to save democracy. On March 20 the President met the Cabinet and heard them unanimously declare for war, even including the pacifist Daniels, who was close to tears. As was his habit, Wilson left the room without declaring himself. That night he must have made up his mind. The next day, March 21, he reconvened Congress for April 2, two weeks earlier than scheduled, to hear a message concerning “grave matters of national policy.”
The night before he spoke the public words that were to mark a chasm in our history, he spoke other words to a friend, Frank Cobb, the liberal editor of the New York World, whom he asked to visit him at the White House. They have the quality of last words, like Sir Walter Raleigh’s poem before his execution. He could see no alternative, Wilson said, although he had tried every way he knew to avoid war. He said that once the American people entered the war, freedom and tolerance and level-headedness would be forgotten. Moreover, a declaration of war would mean “that Germany would be beaten and so badly beaten that there would be a dictated peace, a victorious peace. … At the end of the war there will be no bystanders with sufficient power to influence the terms. There won’t be any peace standards left to work with.” And even at this moment the cry broke from him, “If there is any alternative, for God’s sake, let’s take it!”
But there was none. At eight-thirty next evening he drove up to the Capitol through the rain and went in to face a joint session. “With a profound sense of the solemn and even tragical character of t
he step I am taking,” he advised Congress to “declare the recent course of the Imperial German Government to be in fact nothing less than war against the government and people of the United States,” and to “formally accept the status of belligerent.” Neutrality, he said, is no longer possible or desirable under the menace that lies “in the existence of autocratic governments backed by organized force which is controlled wholly by their will and not by the will of the people.” He dwelt on the submarines as outlaws against the law of nations and on other proofs of the German government’s intention to act against the security of the United States, referring specifically to the Zimmermann telegram. “That it [the German government] means to stir up enemies against us at our very doors, the intercepted note to the German Minister at Mexico is eloquent evidence. We accept this challenge of hostile purpose. …”
Packed into the chamber, the members of both Houses, the Supreme Court, the Cabinet, the diplomatic corps, the press, and the visitors who filled the gallery listened with every nerve. The peroration mounted to the phrases that everyone knows, as the speaker declared that the German government was a “natural foe of liberty,” that “the world must be made safe for democracy,” that “the right is more precious than peace,” that America must fight “for the principles that gave her birth,” that, “God helping her, she can do no other.”
“A roar like a storm” greeted the President’s address, wrote one reporter. Overseas the Allies heard it, in their moment of extremity. England, the fulcrum of the Allies, was bending; France was weakened to the point of exhaustion. Stalemated in the trenches, torpedoed on the seas, emptied of funds, they heard the sound of a huge, fresh, new ally coming to join them with ships and money and goods and men. The sound brought them the promise of victory. To an English historian, R. B. Mowat, the event was “one of the most dramatic in history.”
To Americans it was the beginning of unwilled wedlock to the rest of the world. The question, what brought it about? has been asked ever since. Why did Wilson, who three months earlier had said it would be a “crime against civilization” to lead the United States into war, who cried out for an alternative even on the eve of war, decide at last that “the right is more precious than peace”? His April 2 summary of the nature of the enemy as “the natural foe of liberty” was equally true three months or six months, a year or two years earlier. The man who made the April 2 speech was the same man who wished to settle for peace without victory in January, who refused to believe that the Germans were hostile to us in February. Ambassador Page, writing in his diary, asks the inevitable question, “What made him change his mind? Just when and how did the President come to see the true nature of the Germans?” Was it Germany’s declaration of unrestricted U-boat war on February 1 or was it, Page wondered, the Zimmermann telegram?
Certainly it was not the former, for the President had refused to believe that the Germans meant to do what they declared they would until they should prove it by an “overt act.” This came on March 18, when the three American merchant ships were sunk with heavy loss of life. Within the next three days followed the solemn Cabinet meeting and the President’s summons to Congress, which marks the point when he made up his mind. Would he have decided as he did without the telegram with its earlier revelation of Germany’s overt hostility to America? Only Wilson can answer that, and he never did. One answer has been offered by a man whom the President trusted and made the recipient of all his papers. When Wilson, in the last letter he ever wrote, a week before his death, asked Ray Stannard Baker to write his official biography, he said, “I would rather have your interpretation than that of anyone else I know.” Baker’s judgment of the Zimmermann telegram is that “no single more devastating blow was delivered against Wilson’s resistance to entering the war.”
This is not to say that Wilson wanted neutrality the day before the telegram, and belligerency the day after. The telegram was not the only deciding factor upon the President. It was, rather, the last drop that emptied his cup of neutrality.
There were other factors too, not the least “the wonderful and heartening” overturn in Russia, which, he told Congress, now made that great nation “a fit partner for a League of Honor.” Probably the nearest one can approximate the truth about what moved Wilson is to say that a combination of events brought him to a point where he had no alternative. As Lodge said, he was in the grip of events. As England’s outspoken Lord Chancellor, Lord Birkenhead, said, “The United States were in fact kicked into the war against the strong and almost frenzied efforts of President Wilson.”
The kick that did it, to the people whether or not to the President, was the Zimmermann telegram. It awoke that part of the country that had been undecided or indifferent before. It transformed, Lansing said, the apathy of the Western states into “intense hostility to Germany” and “in one day accomplished a change in sentiment and public opinion that otherwise would have required months to accomplish.” It was not a theory or an issue but an unmistakable gesture that anyone could understand. It was the German boot planted upon our border. To the mass of Americans, who cared little and thought less about Europe, it meant that if they fought they would be fighting to defend America, not merely to extract Europe from its self-made quarrels. It put them in a frame of mind willing to accept Wilson’s statement in April of the necessity of war.
Would they have been ready without the telegram? Probably not. Before it was published, the dominant feeling inspired by the war—always excepting pro-Ally New England—was the stubborn, if inglorious, slogan that elected Wilson four months before—“He kept us out of war.” Afterward, so far as public organs of opinion can reveal it, the mood changed to one of recognition that war could no longer be evaded. Wilson knew this when he drafted his speech for the meeting of Congress on April 2. He knew that what he had to say would be accepted; that, in fact, he no longer had any excuse for not saying it. Until then he could afford to ignore all the goading of the Lodge and Roosevelt forces because he knew the country as a whole was not with them. After the public reaction to the Zimmermann telegram, even that excuse was taken from him. On March 17 the Literary Digest published a résumé of nationwide press comment on the telegram under the heading, “How Zimmermann United the United States.” That was a fair estimate of published opinion, even if it ignored the unswerving La Follettes and Norrises and Villards and that mute opinion which can never be weighed. It left Wilson bereft of the prop of public opinion which had so far sustained his struggle to keep the United States neutral. After the middle of March there was nothing to hold him back.
Had the telegram never been intercepted or never been published, inevitably the Germans would have done something else that would have brought us in eventually. But the time was already late and, had we delayed much longer, the Allies might have been forced to negotiate. To that extent the Zimmermann telegram altered the course of history. But then, as Sir Winston Churchill has remarked, the course of history is always being altered by something or other—if not by a horseshoe nail, then by an intercepted telegram. In itself the Zimmermann telegram was only a pebble on the long road of history. But a pebble can kill a Goliath, and this one killed the American illusion that we could go about our business happily separate from other nations. In world affairs it was a German Minister’s minor plot. In the lives of the American people it was the end of innocence.
Author’s Note
NOTHING IN THIS BOOK has been invented. All persons mentioned are real persons; everything they said or did, as reported in the following pages, is based on documentary (or, in one or two instances, on verbal) evidence, which will be found in the Notes at the end of the book.
To the many who have given me willing help I am deeply grateful. Particularly I wish to express my debt and thanks to Mrs. Julia B. Carroll of the Diplomatic Records Branch, National Archives and Records Service, in Washington, for her indispensable assistance in guiding me through the archival maze and for her warmhearted cooperation in digging up e
vidence in answer to many puzzled queries; to Admiral Sir William James of Churt, Surrey, for his great personal kindness in aiding my Room 40 researches, as well as for his book, The Eyes of the Navy, to which I owe so much; to Commander P. K. Kemp, Admiralty Archivist, Whitehall, for supplying the facts on the cable-cutting voyage of the Telconia; to Mrs. Ruth Hotblack of London, Admiral Hall’s secretary, for her personal reminiscences; to the late Wildon Lloyd of Washington, D.C., for making available to me his researches in the Szek case; to Mr. David C. Mearns, Chief, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress, and to Mr. Howard B. Gotlieb, Librarian of Historical Manuscripts, Yale University Library, for help in locating information from the Wilson and Lansing, and the House papers respectively; to Mr. Boyd C. Shafer of the American Historical Association and Mrs. Agnes F. Peterson of the Hoover Institution and Library, Stanford University, for valuable suggestions as to sources; to the Honorable Amos J. Peaslee for information from his records; to Dr. Paul Sweet, Chief, German Documents Division, Department of State; to Miss Anne Orde, Foreign Office Archives, London; to Mr. Walter Fried of New York for clarification of certain obscurities; to Mr. Alfred Romney and Mr. Henry Sachs of New York for supplementing my inadequate German.