Woodrow Wilson and the Unnecessary War

Net Neutrality

In April 1917, Woodrow Wilson officially declared war against Germany after an overwhelming vote from Congress, marking the official American intervention into WWI.

Although the country had been “neutral” on paper, America had been indirectly implicated in the war after a few years of sending economic and military assistance to the Allied countries of France and Britain.

France specifically was in dire need of financial assistance, and many historians believe that the billions in loans given to the French helped the nation stay afloat and avoid collapse.

As America began to indirectly pick a side through financial aid, the American people became more discontented, as most citizens wanted neutrality both militarily and financially, feeling this was a European affair to be left to them.

The Secretary of State at the time, William Jennings Bryan, resigned his post in 1915 in protest of the clear violation of neutrality.

Despite the tactical alliance that America had made with Great Britain and France, the fact that America and Germany had a financial relationship at all was apparently offensive to the British government. Due to this, Britain blockaded Germany, cutting off essentially all US trade with the nation. For the goods that did pass through the blockade, the British attempted to seize those as well, leading to roughly 500,000 Germans starving over the course of the war. In addition, any individual US company that tried to trade with Germany was immediately blacklisted by the British government.

As a response, Germany began unrestricted submarine warfare to starve the British before they themselves starved. Germany declared any waters surrounding Great Britain to be an active war zone.

This is an essential detail, as it explains why the Lusitania was attacked. Not only was the ship in an active war zone, but it carried roughly 170 tons of ammunition and explosives, clearing the way for the possibility of being a military ship.

The British government actually denied the fact that it had ammunition and explosives in the ship for numerous decades until 1982 when the truth finally came out.

The attack on the ship, which killed over 100 Americans, obviously soured US and German relations and became a key talking point of the interventionist argument in the US.

As the American public opinion began to slowly shift against Germany, there were other incentives for Woodrow Wilson and Congress to back the Allied powers: the most powerful banker at the time, J.P. Morgan had made hefty loans to the Entente (Britain, France, and Russia) and had a clear interest in an Allied victory given that any lender’s first motive is to receive his principal back in full in addition to interest payments. Had Morgan decided to provide the Central powers with capital, the American WWI story could look much different.

Wilson War I

Speaking of Wilson, he had kept America out of the war for the first few years and ran on the slogan of “he kept us out of war” in the 1916 election against Charles Evans Hughes. But after his victory, the tone shifted from keeping the nation out of war to “neutrality is no longer feasible nor desirable with autocratic governments” that threatened “the existence of the democratic countries of the world.”

Keep in mind that, while the Lusitania sinking was the spark that began the shift in public opinion, it didn’t immediately push the scales to interventionism and also occurred a year before the election, meaning that Wilson was still not interventionist after the attack.

This idea of constantly going to war in “the name of democracy” is a fad that tragically lives on and arguably started with the Wilson administration.

Of the 50 members that voted against going to war, the most eloquent argument as to why it was unnecessary came from Majority Leader Claude Kitchen, as he proclaimed that “no invasion is threatened, not a foot of our territory is demanded or coveted, no essential honor is required to be sacrificed, [and] no part of our sovereignty is questioned.”

The funniest part about the claim about Germany and its autocratic government is that it technically wasn’t an autocracy. While the German Kaiser had considerably more power than a democratic president, Germany had an elected legislature that wrote laws and determined the government budget, meaning the Kaiser didn’t wield absolute power.

Despite this, Wilson and the rest of the political machine continued to persuade the public that Germans were their enemies and a “unique threat to world peace, hell bent on expansion and world domination.” This was the genesis of the American war propaganda machine and it went into full overdrive.

Before diving any deeper on the details of the war, it’s worth spending some time analyzing why the alliances were formed the way they were.

France held a deep-seated antipathy towards the Germans after the embarrassing loss in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 that included the annexation of Alsace Lorraine by Germany. Because of this, the Third French Republic that was founded that same year was militantly anti-German and desperately wanted their lost territory back.

Russia and Serbia had been previously allied and shared a common disdain for the Austro-Hungarian empire. Austria had Slavs within its borders that Serbia wanted to take back with Russia ready to aid them in this endeavor. It didn’t take long for the official skirmish to begin, as the classic storyline of the Serbian nationalist assassinating the archduke of Austria marked the official beginning of the war.

Upon this, Russia immediately mobilized over 2 million men to assist their ally.

Also, random thought—if historians claim that WWI started with the Serb killing the Austrian archduke, doesn’t that mean that the Allied Powers technically started the war?

Anyways, I digress.

Britain didn’t necessarily have a specific event that triggered a hatred of Germany per se, but the unification of Germany in 1871 and its rapid ascension on the European stage due to their economic and military strength was enough to make the British wary.

Specifically, with regards to the economy, Germany had matched Britain’s coal production and outmatched its rival in iron and steel. Since the days of Napoleon, Britain’s foreign policy goal was essentially to prevent any other country from establishing dominance in Europe and it was willing to do whatever it took.

Despite these alliances resulting in an unfair 3 vs 5 (Germany, Austria, and Ottoman Empire versus France, Britain, Italy, Russia, and eventually the US), the Central Powers nearly “won” the war.

It quickly became a consensus that the “bad guys” would have won without the US stepping in, with Time Magazine summarizing it perfectly, asserting “Germany would have won WWI had the US army not intervened in France in 1918.”

Once America intervened, the Central Powers had slim chances. Germans quickly realized they couldn’t counter the 2 million American troops set to arrive in the summer of 1918 and launched a final offensive in northern France. With 10,000 American troops arriving daily, the offensive was doomed, and the German imperial government fell that November, ending the war.

In addition to the German regime falling, the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires also dissolved with Turkey succeeding the former empire and the latter empire splitting into two states.

The driving factor for the overthrow of the government was Woodrow Wilson’s insistence that the imperial government was not a legitimate body to engage in peace negotiations with.

While American history portrays Wilson as the leader of leaders in the Treaty of Versaille, other key figures weren’t as fond of his performance in the conference.

John Maynard Keynes, a British economist known as the father of modern macroeconomics, describes Wilson as a “slow minded and bewildered [man] who knew little of Europe.”

Georges Clemenceau, the French Prime Minister at the time, believed he was a “giant ape…concerned only with revenge on Germany.”

Unlike the Napoleonic wars in which the “winners” negotiate terms with the “losers,” the Allies simply imposed severe punishments on Germany that included losing roughly 10% of its population and territory, having its colonies handed over to Britain and France, and its economy and military purposefully crippled.

More specifically, Germany was forced to pay an estimated $33B (roughly $580B in today’s money) of reparations to the Allied forces, leading to hyperinflation that devastated Germany.

The most humiliating of the penalties was admitting full culpability for the war occurring in the War Guilt Clause.

The new League of Nations coalition that formed from the Treaty of Versaille uncoincidentally gave some countries sovereignty and the right to self-determination while restraining it for others, with the most pertinent example being a provision that prevented Austria coalescing with Germany to create one state.

Germany had agreed to the armistice on the grounds of getting a fair peace only to have their country completely ravaged and its soul snatched. This decimation of the German economy and culture would inevitably build up resentment amongst its citizens and directly lead to the ascension of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist Party.

Back in the States, despite a win for the Allied Powers, things were not exactly all rosy and peachy, as the war allowed the government to set questionable precedents whose remnants are still present until today.

The US government had passed the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 that essentially stifled any criticism of the government or war effort. Roughly 2,000 people were prosecuted with many more being forced into silence for fear of conviction.

One can make the argument for the necessity of such laws in a scenario in which US sovereignty is threatened in some way, but to enact such stringent laws in a conflict that, frankly, had nothing to do with US portrays the idea that it was exceedingly unpopular among everyday Americans and this was the government’s way of coercing them to comply with its orders.

Additionally, previous to the war in 1914, the US had a volunteer army of about 130,000 troops. After the declaration of war, Congress passed the Military Service Act in May of 1917 that conscripted millions of men and grew the military to 4.7 million men.

This drastic expansion of the military was seen as the first step to establishing the infamous military industrial complex that is constantly debated.

As one can probably expect, American Germans were not exactly treated virtuously throughout the war.

At the time, Germans were a sizable part of the US population, with German as the second most spoken language and part of the high school curriculum.

As the war droned on, German food, newspapers, schools, and more were ruthlessly attacked. 14 states eventually banned the use of German in schools and about 6,000 Germans were sent to internment camps.

Weird how we never hear about German internment camps…

Although hindsight is always 20/20, it was pretty clear that America should never have entered the war. One surprising historical figure that agrees with this claim is none other than Winston Churchill.

In 1936, Churchill admits in a long excerpt that “America should have minded her own business and stayed out of the World War. If you [America] hadn’t entered the war, the Allies would have made peace with Germany in the spring of 1917. Had we made peace then there would have been no collapse in Russia followed by Communism, no breakdown in Italy followed by Fascism, and Germany would have not signed the Versailles Treaty, which has enthroned Nazism in Germany. If America had stayed out of the war, all these ‘isms’ wouldn’t today be sweeping the continent of Europe and breaking down parliamentary government - and if England had made peace in early 1917, it would have saved over one million British, French, American, and other lives.”

The downstream effects of US intervention in WWI are so profound that these ones listed by Churchill seem to be simply the tip of the iceberg.

Another important externality was the transfer of Palestine from the Ottoman Empire to the British, which would eventually be handed over to Zionists to create the state of Israel.

The implications of this provision are clearly colossal and continues to be relevant until today.

Most importantly, the entrance into the war marked the beginning of the American military machine that always seems to be engaged in an overseas conflicts against the will of the American people.

The establishment has been attempting to convince the people of the Orwellian idea of war being peace and therefore needing to be engaged in perpetual battles against the enemies of “democracy.”

Maybe people could get behind that if we actually lived in a democracy…

Thanks for reading and until next time.

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