[On June
26th, 1917, the first 14,000 U.S. soldiers arrived in France to join the Allied
effort in The Great War. To commemorate that centennial, this week I’ll be
AmericanStudying the U.S. and WWI—share your thoughts and contexts in comments,
please!]
On two ways to
understand a striking foreign policy reversal.
As I noted in this
post on President Woodrow Wilson’s second term, that term began with one of
the more abrupt and striking presidential policy reversals we’ve ever seen (at
least in the years Before
Trump, as our horrifyingly unprecedented era has changed that historical
metric as it has so many others). Having campaigned for and won reelection in
1916 with the slogan “He kept us out
of war” and on a platform of continued neutrality in the still-unfolding
European and world conflict, Wilson dramatically shifted course almost
immediately thereafter: on February 3rd, a month before his March 5th
second inauguration, he addressed Congress to announce that he was severing
diplomatic ties with Germany; and on April 2nd, less than a
month after that inauguration, he addressed
Congress once again, this time to request that they authorize a War
Resolution (which they did four days later).
By early June, after some conversation with England and France over whether our
troops would initially serve within their units (a concept that
came to be known as amalgamation) or in their own separate units (which is
what Wilson and the military leadership decided to do), those first regiments
of American soldiers set sail for Europe and the Great War.
The question of
how and why this reversal took place—not only in Wilson’s policies, but also in public
opinion, which had been overwhelmingly in favor of neutrality for years but
had likewise shifted by early 1917—is of course a
complex and multi-layered one, but I would highlight two particularly
salient elements here. Ever since the May 1915 sinking of the
British passenger liner Lusitania
(with 128 U.S. citizens on board) by German submarines, American narratives of
the war had positioned Germany as its primary aggressor; beginning in late January
1917, Germany undertook an even more aggressive policy known as “unrestricted
(or total) submarine warfare,” targeting neutral shipping (in an effort to
blockade and starve Britain) and in the process sinking numerous American ships
(five were sunk in March 1917 alone). While these submarine attacks on American
ships were nowhere near as dramatic or visible as the Japanese surprise attack
on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, I would argue that they can and should be
seen as a similar, unofficial but clear, declaration of war against a neutral
adversary; indeed, since the German submarines were targeting non-combatants,
the attacks comprised an even more aggressive
and controversial military policy than Japan’s. It’s difficult to argue
that Wilson and Congress should not, or could not, have responded to such
aggressions.
The submarine attacks
weren’t the only controversial German action in this early 1917 moment,
however, and the other most famous one is significantly more complex. In
mid-January, British intelligence intercepted a telegram from
German foreign minister Arthur Zimmermann to the Mexican government; Zimmermann
promised Mexico that if it joined in a future war against the United
States, Germany would help Mexico recover territory lost to the U.S. after
the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Britain passed the telegram on to the
Wilson administration, which released it to the press in late February to great
public outcry. It’d be entirely possible to read this entire contratemps as
simply (or at least largely) political posturing by the administration to push
both Congress and public opinion toward support for a declaration of war. But
in any case, the focus on and outrage over the Zimmermann telegram reflects the
continued role that hemispheric concerns played in 20th century
American wars; every prior U.S. military conflict had featured central such
concerns, and while the Great War was of course far more tied to Europe than to
the Western Hemisphere, the telegram pushed Americans to recognize the possible
extension of that war to our neighbors and borders. A Southern border in
particular, of course, that had been determined
by one of those prior military conflicts—a dark and complex history to
which both the telegram and the outraged American response linked this new
conflict.
Next Great War
Studying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other WWI stories or contexts you’d highlight?
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