Unraveling Freedom: The Battle for Democracy on the Homefront During World War I. Ann Bausum

performance. “From the moment that he entered the auditorium up to the time that he passed out into the corridors of the Capitol he was master of the situation,” he observed. “His control of language and of his audience was a marvelous exhibition of his genius as an orator.”

      Even former President Theodore Roosevelt, a fierce political opponent of Wilson’s, visited the White House within days of the speech and told Wilson that his words might “rank…with the great state papers of Washington and Lincoln.” A columnist for the New York Times commented that “the sole defect of this great and noble message is its date.” The writer, like Roosevelt, regretted that Wilson’s call for war had not “swiftly followed the crime of the Lusitania.”

      Presidential contenders. William Jennings Bryan (wearing bow tie, talking with Woodrow Wilson in cap) was a Wilson supporter and former presidential candidate who earned the coveted post of Secretary of State following Wilson’s election in 1912.That election left Democrats in charge of both houses of Congress and the Presidency.

      In fact Wilson had carefully avoided combat after the Lusitania went down. He tried instead to be a peacemaker for Europe and sought to bring harmony and democracy to the world’s citizens. Thus for two years he employed diplomacy and his powers of persuasion to avoid war. For a while he succeeded. Although Germans briefly celebrated the Lusitania’s sinking, the subsequent condemnation of the act as barbaric and criminal forced the Kaiser to scale back his submarine campaign. In the months that followed, Wilson scolded Germany when it occasionally attacked American-related shipping, and Germany responded by once again avoiding American targets. Even as people like Roosevelt urged for military combat to replace verbal combat, plenty of Americans remained reluctant to shed blood for what was essentially seen as a fight between old-world rivals. These citizens helped reelect Wilson in 1916 with the campaign slogan, “He kept us out of war.”

      Posters on both sides of the Atlantic (from Great Britain) urged citizens to support the war effort in memory of victims of the Lusitania.

       WILSON’S ADVISORS HAD MIXED FEELINGS about war. His first Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, had resigned in protest over Wilson’s favoritism toward the British during the early months of the European war. Although some members of his administration counseled against war, others favored the idea. So did an influential acquaintance of Wilson’s named Edward M. House. House, a wealthy Texan, had befriended Wilson during his quick rise to power. In the space of three years Wilson had gone from being the president of Princeton University to serving as governor of New Jersey to winning election, in 1912, as President of the United States. House had become one of Wilson’s closest and most trusted advisors during this transition and, although he had declined an official role in the government, he remained at the President’s service.

      In early 1915 House had actually sailed to England on the Lusitania to serve there as an informal representative of the President. On the day that U-boat 20 sank the Lusitania, he had predicted at an English dinner party: “We shall be at war with Germany within a month.” Although his prediction failed then, House would forecast or promote the idea repeatedly in the months that followed, even as Wilson steadfastly resisted it.

      By 1917, though, the President was running out of diplomatic tricks, and Germany’s military strategists were despairing on the battlefront. In an effort to regain the chance for victory, the Kaiser declared all-out war on the high seas, regardless of international opinion. German officials gambled that their forces would be able to cripple the Allies’ supply lines and defeat their foes before America could declare war, raise an army, train it, and send it into battle. His decision forced Wilson’s call to arms.

       CONGRESS APPROVED A DECLARATION OF WAR WITHIN DAYS OF Wilson’s April 2nd speech. All but 56 of the 511 votes cast by members of the U.S. House and Senate supported the resolution. Thus a nation that had seen its population swell in recent decades by waves of European immigrants now found itself fighting against the ancestral homelands of some of its newest residents. The prospect loomed for major conflicts in loyalty and allegiance given the fact that a third of the U.S. population had claimed birth on foreign soil for themselves or at least one of their parents during the 1910 census. (President Wilson was one of them; his mother had been born in England.) Many Americans maintained sentimental loyalties, if not outright practical ones, to their motherlands. At that time Germany could claim the greatest number of offspring in America: Perhaps as much as a quarter of the entire U.S. population had either immigrated from Germany or descended from German immigrants.

      The hyphens. Americans with hyphenated origins, such as German-Americans, often found their allegiance questioned at the time of World War I…

      The presence of so many Germans and their descendants assured that German foods and beverages, the German language, German-American clubs and music groups, even bilingual schools, all flourished in the United States prior to World War I. During the early years of the war, while the U.S. government remained on the sidelines of the fight, many German-Americans had felt comfortable offering their public support of the German war effort through speeches, published commentary, and fund-raising. Some ethnic groups, such as the Irish, even cheered for Germany because of their own dislike for Germany’s foe, England. Others supported their ancestral homelands.